“Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker.”
— Stanley Kubrick
Kubrick, quoted in 'Stanley Kubrick at Look Magazine' by Philippe Mather (2013), p. 46. Said about education, drawn from his own experience of failing school while teaching himself everything that mattered.
I graduated high school with a 67 average. Every teacher wrote me off. I could not get into a single college. By any official measure, I was going nowhere. But I was never bored, because I had found things I actually wanted to understand: chess, photography, film, light. I did not study them out of fear of failure. I studied them because I could not stop. At 16 I was selling photos to a national magazine. At 28 I had a film in wide release. Nobody gave me a grade for any of it. The moment you find what genuinely pulls you, the work stops feeling like work and starts feeling like the only thing worth doing. That is not motivation. That is hunger. Find yours, and nothing can scare you into stopping.