I just read this yesterday in Conversations with Walter Murch, a well-known film editor. Not exactly the same, but I do get the sense that Tao still feels the same way about math:
As I've gone through life, I've found that your chances for happiness are increased if you wind up doing something that is a reflection of what you loved most when you were somewhere between nine and eleven years old.
Interviewer: Yes—something that had and still has the feeling of a hobby, a curiosity.
M: At that age, you know enough of the world to have opinions about things, but you're not old enough yet to be overly in by the crowd or by what other people are doing or what you thinkyou “should” be doing. If what you do later on ties into that reservoir in some way, then you are nurturing some essential part of yourself. It's certainly been true in my case. I'm doing now, at fifty-eight, almost exactly what most excited me when I was eleven.
As I've gone through life, I've found that your chances for happiness are increased if you wind up doing something that is a reflection of what you loved most when you were somewhere between nine and eleven years old.
Interviewer: Yes—something that had and still has the feeling of a hobby, a curiosity.
M: At that age, you know enough of the world to have opinions about things, but you're not old enough yet to be overly in by the crowd or by what other people are doing or what you thinkyou “should” be doing. If what you do later on ties into that reservoir in some way, then you are nurturing some essential part of yourself. It's certainly been true in my case. I'm doing now, at fifty-eight, almost exactly what most excited me when I was eleven.