CAR & DRIVER’S JOHN PEARLEY HUFFMAN: Enthusiasm Matters, and Mine is for Cars and Magazines.

Of all the things that could have grabbed my enthusiasm, I’m at a loss as to why it was cars and car magazines. Or why Bill Gates was obsessed with writing code, Michael Jordan spent more time in the gym than anyone else, Wynton Marsalis could spend all those hours practicing the trumpet, and Quentin Tarantino would train himself by watching every movie ever made. Why do we love what we love?

Adam Alter, an associate professor of marketing at the NYU Stern School of Business and the author of the books Irresistible and Drunk Tank Pink, has some ideas. “A huge part of this is accidental,” he wrote in an email. “Malcolm Gladwell has written about this in Outliers where he explores why so many tech titans, like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, were born within a few years of one another. He suggests they happened to be born at a time when they had access to large-stack computers at universities and so had time to develop competencies that ultimately made them billionaires. Born five years earlier or later, they may have explored very different pursuits.”

There is a “moment in time” aspect to all this. If nothing else, my early years are saturated with advertising for cars at a time when being unapologetically in love with cars was an okay thing. Plus, I was six when Mattel introduced Hot Wheels cars with a massive marketing blitz aimed right at me in 1968. And that was a prepubescent gateway drug for car nuttery if there ever was one.

Heh, Indeed. Read the whole the thing.™