Did you go to college?

It's easier if you really love it, and I've loved it since I was a kid.  I first stumbled upon academic philosophy books kind of by accident when I was eleven years old.  I got excited when I discovered that stuff, because I realized that it was basically how I was already thinking about things--that sort of analysis, critical thought, etc.  I just didn't know until then that it was a "thing" that had a name.  So then I started to read tons of philosophy at that point.

I was also heavily into music already--I started taking private music lessons right after I turned six, and a few years later I was taking private music lessons on two instruments at the same time. 

So when I went to university, I had some conflict over whether I should major in music or philosophy (or something more practical that I also enjoyed, mainly a few different fields in the sciences--astronomy/astrophysics, archaeology and a "national park ranger track" (geology, forestry, biology, environmental sciences, etc.) were my top choices for that).  I'd already had a lot of success with music going all the way back to elementary school--lots of opportunities, awards, and I was even allowed to get ahead of things a bit by taking music classes at a local college in conjunction with my last two years of high school), so I decided to do music first.  But I kept up my interest in philosophy just as much, as well as the sciences that I'm most interested in, and I focused my electives on those fields.  So when I finally went back to do graduate degrees in philosophy, too, it wasn't that difficult for me.  It just required a bit of extra work at first--some extra classes, etc.--to meet all of the formal prerequisites.  To me it always seemed like fun, though, because that was the sort of stuff I liked doing anyway.