10 at 10: The Surprising Childhoods of Ten Remarkable People
10 at 10 THE SURPRISING CHILDHOODS OF TEN REMARKABLE PEOPLE CARLYN BECCIA Carolrhoda Books Minneapolis
INTRODUCTION It's not easy being ten There are things to learn rules to follow teachers to impress friends to make bullies to avoid and your body is about to get weird on you Ten is an important year because you have survived what psychologists call the formative years That's just a fancy way of saying your personality has started to take shape But you are not done Think of yourself as a lump of clay In the next ten years your personality will squish and squash in ways that may surprise you and everyone around you It will get molded and formed before it hardens into something magnificent Take for example Albert Einstein At the age of ten did Einstein know he would someday come up with the theory of relativity Hardly At ten he was your typical smart kid with a lot of questions rolling around his head and an attitude that annoyed most of his teachers How about Louis Armstrong If you could peer into a magic looking glass and see his life at ten you would likely not have predicted that he would become a world class jazz musician Then 6
there is ten year old Audrey Hepburn who barely made it out of war torn Holland alive and Frida Kahlo who had polio as a kid and went on to create art that would speak to people across the world Bruce Lee spent his tenth year fighting on rooftops getting terrible grades and tormenting his teachers After his formative years he matured and started to see things differently He then began filling up notebooks with his life philosophies Later he wrote All knowledge ultimately means self knowledge What Bruce meant is that knowing yourself is the most important step in gaining outside knowledge You can't begin to understand others until you understand yourself This is called self awareness None of the people in this book knew what path they were on at the age of ten They were all ordinary kids with everyday hopes and fears And it's really hard to be ourselves when we don't fully know ourselves yet That's why we look to role models to figure it out They are our brave guides who light our path I hope the following stories of courage and perseverance will inspire you 7
