The Power of Curiosity
I have always been a curious person. I'm the kid that took toys apart to see how they worked (and was sometimes able to put them back together again, too!) I was the kid that enjoyed reading the WorldBook Encyclopedia because, well, just because. Learning about different stuff fascinated me. Even as a very small child I was curious. My mother used to tell the story of the time when I was maybe 3 or 4 years old and came in crying because my eyes were filled with sand. I had apparently held a toy over my head and looked up as the sand fell out because I wanted to see what it looked like from that angle.
And that curiosity persists within me today. My wife becomes exasperated with me because I tend to bounce around to different ideas, interests, and activities. Today I'm learning a new programming language, tomorrow I'm studying Spanish, then next day I'm reading some philosophical treatise. Or business. Or economics. Or ... Or ... Or. Did I say I like to learn stuff?
Most recently I've read two books that have at least provided some consolation that perhaps my natural inclination toward epistemic meandering is neither uncommon nor bad for me. Mario Livio, an astrophysicist and author of several books on mathematics and physics, wrote the book Why? What Makes Us Curious. In it Livio shares with the reader how many well-known figures such as Leonardo Da Vinci, Richard Feynman, and a host of others had wide ranging interests and who often became fascinated by some topic only to drop it once their curiosity had been sated, or the specific question they sought to answer had been answered.
Ian Leslie, an author and journalist, took a similar approach to curiosity in his book, Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It. Now, having read the book I think the title is a bit hyperbolic, but he does make a number of valid points regarding the importance of curiosity in learning and how what is learned leads to ever more curiosity.
For me, both of these books surface a set of ideas that I've had floating around in my mind for a number of years. The idea that we should focus on one thing is exactly the wrong approach. In the book Freakonomics, author and economist Steven Levitt told the story of how, when he was being considered for a faculty position, some of those on the committee questioned his program of research. Typically, an program of research is focused on a single topic area. This was not the case for Levitt. That is, in his research he was not developing a body of knowledge within a limited field of study but was, instead, researching and writing more broadly. He argued that everything is, in some way, connected and that he, therefore, was well within his rights to explore them. Bottom line: he as curious and he acted on that curiosity.
Curiosity Leads to New Discoveries
What Levitt did was to take an immense curiosity, accumulate knowledge of broad fields and find connections between them. Levitt exemplified the concepts that both Livio and Leslie described. Curiosity prompts us to question and to explore. Those actions, in turn, add to our knowledge base. Our brain, then, takes that information and begins to build connections. In this way new knowledge is created and new understandings are achieved. Without that broad knowledge base, it is nearly impossible to see connections that lead to know understandings and insights.
Businesses want to exploit new ideas but create environments that, ultimately, work against that very desire. Many employers either actively, or out of ignorance, create environments that stifle -- and sometimes actively discourage -- the very thing they claim the want.
I'll write more about that in my next post.