I loved to hear stories from periodically listening to my parents and their visitors.  They had a lot of visitors because they were quite successful people.  Hearing about how people had done extraordinary things, gone to extraordinary places. I was particularly excited about the idea of science, discovering new things.  My parents used to talk, as I have done to my children, about the excitement of being the first to know something, that you know later will become known to millions of people through publication, the first to see something and to understand something.  Those sort of concepts certainly excited me.