I didn't even know about Rich Hickey talks and "Simple made easy" when I decided to start learning Clojure. I came to conclusion that I needed to learn a Lisp after learning Emacs and dubbing in writing small elisp functions. I had no idea and was really surprised when I found out how awesome Lisp can be, so I looked at the current state of Lisp at the time. And then after learning a bit of Clojure and Clojurescript and seeing things people were building with it, I quit my job. I really wanted to use Clojure full-time. Never in my life I ever before have had this urge to learn a language and build things with it.