Immersion in boredom is a universal in biographies of exceptional people.

Many of them were completely kept apart from other children, and by being alone and overdosing on boredom, they were overcome by an obsession arising from within, inducing interest and ideas in the area that would eventually give them fame.

Mozart made compositions on his own, his first piece at the age of five.

Pascal wrote Euclid's proofs after self-teaching math in his spare time.

Alan Turing self-taught a lot of mathematics and derived inverse tangent functions at fifteen before encountering calculus.

Maxwell grew up in isolation in Glenlair, and spent his first 10 years reading novels with his mother, discussing farm improvements with his father, and exploring the fields and the woods.

They were left with a lot of free time to freely explore the interest that arose in the environment they were cultivated in (fascinating guests, libraries, machines bought and disassembled and labs at home).

Unlike children today, they had little access to technology, and were often bored.

The intellectual obsession that grew into their life's work grew out of this boredom.