There’s an amazing thing that happens when you start using the right dictionary. Knowing that it’s there for you, you start looking up more words, including words you already know. And you develop an affection for even those, the plainest most everyday words, because you see them treated with the same respect awarded to the rare ones, the high-sounding ones.
Which is to say you get a feeling about English that Calvin once got with his pet tiger on a day of fresh-fallen snow: “It’s a magical world, Hobbes. Let’s go exploring!”
Maybe what the real world of technology needs more than anything else are citizens with a sense of humility – the humility of Kepler or Newton, who studied the universe but knew they were not asked to run it.
He was without doubt the most inquisitive human I have ever met. His insatiable curiosity was not limited or distracted by his knowledge or expertise, nor was it casual or passive. It was ferocious, energetic and restless. His curiosity was practiced with intention and rigor.
Many of us have an innate predisposition to be curious. I believe that after a traditional education, or working in an environment with many people, curiosity is a decision requiring intent and discipline.
In larger groups our conversations gravitate towards the tangible, the measurable. It is more comfortable, far easier and more socially acceptable talking about what is known. Being curious and exploring tentative ideas were far more important to Steve than being socially acceptable.
Our curiosity begs that we learn. And for Steve, wanting to learn was far more important than wanting to be right.
Joyous Exploration. This is the prototype of curiosity—the recognition and desire to seek out new knowledge and information, and the subsequent joy of learning and growing.
Deprivation Sensitivity. This dimension has a distinct emotional tone, with anxiety and tension being more prominent than joy—pondering abstract or complex ideas, trying to solve problems, and seeking to reduce gaps in knowledge.
Stress Tolerance. This dimension is about the willingness to embrace the doubt, confusion, anxiety, and other forms of distress that arise from exploring new, unexpected, complex, mysterious, or obscure events.
Social Curiosity. Wanting to know what other people are thinking and doing by observing, talking, or listening in to conversations.
Thrill Seeking. The willingness to take physical, social, and financial risks to acquire varied, complex, and intense experiences.
The method is perhaps best summarized by Mike Monteiro: “The secret to being good at anything is to approach it like a curious idiot, rather than a know-it-all genius.”
The “curious idiot” approach can serve you well if you can quiet your ego long enough to perform it.
A curious idiot is unafraid to ask stupid questions. Every stupid question you ask takes a teeny, tiny act of courage. Sometimes you have to muster the will to push the words out of your lips.
The story goes that the painter Al Held said, “Conceptual art is just pointing at things,” so John Baldessari decided to take him literally, and commissioned a bunch of amateur painters to paint realistic paintings of hands pointing at things.
As I wrote in Steal Like An Artist,
“Step 1: Wonder at something.
Step 2: Invite others to wonder with you.”
I’d say that that huh is the foundational block of curiosity. To get good at the huh is to get good at both paying attention and nurturing compassion; if you don’t notice, you can’t give a shit. But the huh is only half the equation. You gotta go huh, alright — the “alright,” the follow-up, the openness to what comes next is where the cascade lives. It’s the sometimes-sardonic, sometimes-optimistic engine driving the next huh and so on and so forth.
Form comes from wonder. Wonder stems from our ‘in touchness’ with how we were made. One senses that nature records the process of what it makes, so that in what it makes there is also the records of how it was made. In touch with this record we are in wonder. This wonder gives rise to knowledge. But knowledge is related to other knowledge and this relation gives a sense of order, a sense of how they inter-relate in a harmony that makes all things exist. From knowledge to sense of order we then wink at wonder and say How am I doing, wonder?