Insatiable curiosity..................

What made him special was his insatiable curiosity about inventions.  He began to read every new patent issued.  "You read everything - that's part of the job," he said.  "You accumulate all this trivia, and you hope that someday maybe a millionth of it will be useful."
-as written about Jack Kilby (who won a Nobel Prize in physics in 2000) in Walter Isaacson's The Innovators:  How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution