One of the books that sparked my interest in psychology when I was a kid was Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman.

It was my sister’s book, but I’m not sure if she ever finished reading it. Perhaps she saw how interested I was in it, that she let me have it.

And I would read it quite often. The way I was reading it was typical of a kid my age. I wouldn’t start at the beginning, and read sequentially, chapter by chapter. No, I’d open the book to a random page, and read for as long as my interest held.

We had many books in the house with wide variety of topics: history, technology, biology, encyclopedias, dictionaries. I was fascinated by all the incredible things I would learn every time I’d peek in one of them.

Back then, I didn’t even know what psychology was. I knew nothing about the brain, or that there was a science that studied thoughts, emotions and human relationships.

When my sister told me about Emotional Intelligence, a whole new world opened up to me.

I’ve always been very friendly and extraverted as a kid, and maybe it was my caring about other people that translated into the insatiable interest in the science of human mind and behavior.

In the next post, I’ll talk about the the main points of the book, discussing the concept of emotional intelligence and why it matters to me, maybe even more than ever.