Personal Narrative: Planet Earth

Overwhelmed by tears as I went down to pick up my mangled RC car, I noticed a green piece of metal. Something

I had never seen before that had been contained within its plastic compartment. An intricate puzzle of resistors,

capacitors, and circuits that changed the way I viewed my toys, and how I played and thought. I thought, "What

was this mysterious green metal item?" I asked my parents, who responded, "That's its brain, Zach. It's called a

circuit board, and it makes the car go." This was the most earth-shattering information I had ever heard at that

point in my life. I thought I was the brain. I thought I had the power to move the object by willing it to do so.

Suddenly, everything had a brain and a function. I would ask questions until

my parents could not bear it anymore.
I wanted to know how objects were able to do the tasks given to them. They would tell me, "You sure do want to
know everything, don't you Zach?" While this could be seen as an expression of irritation, unfortunately for them, I
took it as meaning, "Ask more questions." I would take apart all of my toys and put them back together.

My own

curiosity had become my greatest weapon on the path of knowledge. I would watch the Discovery Channel on TV

and feed my urge to know and understand. My conversations with other kids in elementary school were

sometimes awkward; I did not know what all the kids' TV shows were because I spent my time watching How It's

Made or History Channel documentaries. My grandfather had gifted me the documentary titled Planet Earth, which

revealed the wild earth around us, and I had made my entire family watch it with me for the subsequent month.

Today, my curiosity has pushed me to pursue ideas that I would not have before. When I was thirteen years old, I

watched an episode of the Mythbusters and witnessed them create a hoverboard from a surfboard, plastic and a

leaf blower. For that entire year, I saved up every penny I had in order to create what they had made on the

show. When Christmas had come, the only present I wanted from my parents was a leaf blower. I could not

describe the joy I had that morning when I unwrapped it and immediately ran to the garage to finish my design.

Unfortunately, the design failed to glide across the ground and I was back to the drawing board for my

next
experiment. This was a hard tribulation to overcome, but this mistake pushed me to learn more about engineering
products more effectively so that it would not happen again.
The curiosity of a child is a powerful force. As the author of Brave New World, Aldous Huxley put it, "Children are
remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and
ruthlessness of their vision." Curiosity helped me decide to pursue an education, and to learn all that I can so that
maybe I can apply it, use it, and adapt to an ever-changing society. It seems that the simple things can be the
most powerful. A broken RC car is a useless object to most, but a broken RC car sparked a change in my life.
Before that RC car broke in my backyard, I was your average student who thought school was a place to be with
friends. Since the incident, that simple spark of curiosity had changed my own perspective completely. I was
driven to become smarter and not only to apply my newfound knowledge but to understand why things were as
they were. I had unleashed my own curiosity upon the world and it had given me the tools to keep pushing myself
further than I could have ever dreamed.