I was catching up on reading blogs and such and ran across this post from Bruce Schneier over at Wired titled "Inside the Twisted Mind of the Security Professional".
The premise of this so aptly titled post is that security professional's just think differently, and that this difference is a trait that might just be innate in certain individuals; I have to agree.
I got into electronics (including computers) as a child as a means to figure out how they worked, it started by taking them apart and putting them back together; though in many cases I ended up with extra parts most of the time they went back together just fine 
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I quickly learned that this was mostly a mechanical exercise, and that no amount of assembly and re-assembly would really tech me how these things worked; so I started looking at the software.
The interest in software was really again trying to understand how these magnificent boxes worked, I recall looking at the files that made up programs trying to understand their role and ultimately realizing for me to really understand how things worked I had to be able to re-produce approximations of them and so I taught my-self to program (Basic, Pascal, C, and c64 and x86 assembly).
Once I mastered the basics I came back to looking at these programs, trying to understand them and utilizing the basic understanding of computer architecture and programming I had amassed, from there I started trying to see how I could bypass the copy protections on games; it's really this that got me into computer security.
Here there was this commercial software developed by a mass of professionals designed to prevent me, a punk kid from doing something and I was able to by-pass it; I recall how proud I was of myself at first but this quickly lapsed as I realized problems like this were impassable, I was 10.
My friend Josh and I started fumbling around on bulletin boards across the nation, It remember going into a chat room with Josh and some guy offered us a step-by-step guide of sorts to log in and control phone switches as a means to make free international calls; he had written this guide based on a manual he stolen out of the back of a telephone operators truck, the inside cover of the manual included the default password for this switch.
I remember this guy telling us how he went about it, and how amazed he was when he found that most of the switches out there were based on this same system and no one changed the default password; this guy was not much older than us, maybe 15 or 16 but again clearly pleased with how he was able to figure this all out.
For me this was the beginning of understanding social and computer networking, and the beginning of me seeing myself as a "hacker".
As a "hacker", I prided my myself in my common sense and the lack of common sense in others; every where I went I was looking for flaws, things that other people missed.
I remember when we moved to our new house, my mom called the power and phone companies to have our service transferred, I listened to her side of the phone call and she never had to give them any private information; I was amazed. Several months later some kid picked on me at school so I called the phone and power company to have their service disconnected, it worked.
This view on life has continued to this day, I have of course grown up and no longer use my insights for evil (at least intentionally) but I thank my lucky stars I see the world the way I do.
As for this view of life being innate in some, as I said. I believe it is; however I also believe it can be learned though I don't know if it can be taught. As a "hacker" when I watch movies I look for the mistakes, the things that were of such a small detail that they were missed by the production staff, when I got married I started to share these findings with my wife who was always surprised I noticed such things.
However at one point in our marriage she started finding these flaws before I did and when we discuss strategy on issues she also now finds angles I may have missed; she tells me that this is something she has learned from me, all I can say is I certainly didn't mean to teach it as now she can use it against me 