Well, if you had had a couple years' worth of graduate-level math and physics courses, you would be an intellectual demigod. The introductory sequences in analysis / algebra / geometry / mechanics / electrodynamics / relativity are a distillation of what the best minds in history spent the past 500 years figuring out. When I have no other motivation to study these topics, I just remember that Newton, Euler, Gauss, et al. would have /killed/ to get a look at my textbook :-)
(Hopefully you'd remember the proofs!)