I believe I am intelligent and an individualist (conceit!). Long before I heard of Rand I had a sense of the arbitrary nature of people around me, their unwillingness to question, their haste to jump the the conclusion that knowledge on certain matters is not possible and their attitude that self abasement is "good". My first exposure to Rand was the Donahue interview on youtube. I couldn't get over the fact that a person can have such conviction and lucidity about a broad range of important topics and express herself so courageously. Of course, being a woman, this made her even more impressive as in most if not all cultures, feminity seems to be characterized by meekness. At first it didn't matter what was being said, just that something was being said. I then went on to listen to The Virtue of Selfishness audiobook and was hooked with the ideas themselves! I've read much more since then, including Atlas, Fountainhead, Capitalism, New Intellectual, Anthem, Objectivist Epistemology. Thanks for the warm welcomes so far.