I'm not super big on ESR myself, but somehow this[1] appeared in front of me when I was 11 or 12 and I sincerely believe that, had it not, I wouldn't have been as fascinated by open source software development as early as I did and for as long as I have. In retrospect I really don't agree with all of it, but a lot of its main ideas continue to ring true for me and I still find it an enjoyable read after all this time. Generally, I've found that I really like essays about hacker culture (like the Lisp Curse essay, which I won't link here) as opposed to career-advice or technical-lesson blog posts. When I'm getting a friend into software I try to urge them to check such essays out as they illustrate a kind of fun and exciting, intrinsically motivated culture that's seemingly detached from the image of corporate software engineering in most people's minds.

[1] http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html