My mom used to tell me that she read books to me while she was pregnant with me. I've had a life long fascination with aviation as a result. Caveat - by aviation I mean warbirds; anything else is just a bus with wings, and not very interesting to me.
I built all of the Monogram kits and many of the Revell kits in the late 60s through mid 70s because that was what was available in stores like Bottom Dollar, Target, Sears, Montgomery Wards, and various grocery stores. I might have built a ship or two during those years. I also built many of the Aurora monster/dinosaur kits because, like warbirds, I have always had an interest in dinosaurs and monster movies.
Then along came Star Wars, and I largely switched away from aircraft to sci-fi starships. I remember building all the MPC kits from the first two Star Wars movies, plus all the kits released from Battlestar Galactica, Alien (just the MPC creature figure), Buck Rogers in the Twenty-Fifth Century, The Black Hole, and Star Trek the Motion Picture. I even developed an interest in installing lighting into these models.
By the time Return of the Jedi came out, I was half way through high school and had been losing interest in modeling. I was more interested in girls and sports and making movies with my 8mm movie camera. Then came college and my earliest jobs. In those years I was aware of this desire to build something. I even remember a recurring dream of being in a store like a Sam's or CostCo (this was before either of those existed, at least in SE Texas), and coming across a row with shelves fully stocked with airplane kits. Those on the bottom shelf were always big ones, kits that would have been larger than 1/24 and were of huge subjects. Weird dream that I had a number of times. Always ended up waking up before I brought anything home. But I guess that was planting a seed in me, and one day in 1995 I came home from a KMart with a bunch of kits. They were all WWII aviation plus one helicopter, an Apache I think. I had returned to my first love.
In the years since then I have tried to build occasionally outside my primary interest. The USS Lexington I built barely counts toward this since it is loaded with a bunch of Wildcats, Devastators and Dauntlesses. I also have a USS Texas to build some day. I built a couple of Monogram car kits, a couple of Tamiya tanks, The Avengers, an Alien, a Creature From the Black Lagoon, etc that have kept me interested and given me some variation from the masking for canopies, assembling bombs, and a few other monotonous requirements of building WWII aircraft.
In short, I build what I love.