I have a wide range of interests and enjoy exploring new subjects. I am convinced that you can never learn enough as long as you are interested. I am an advocate of lifelong learning and think that we humans are missing something if we stop developing at a certain age. I think it is much more exciting to keep immersing yourself in new subject areas. I believe that academic degrees are not a necessity for mastering a particular topic - it is much more the inner drive and our own curiosity that brings us closer to our goals.
I think it is great when I improve things for the better and help others. My reward is when someone achieves their own goal thanks to my help. For this reason, I actively support the open source and open hardware movement, as without the freely available work of others, we would not be where we are today as a human race. Without people who made their work freely available, there would be no Internet as we know it today. And without idealistic developers, there would be no website here to look at.