… When it came to solving the problem of creating a physical structure to support him and his assistants, however, Michelangelo had to rely on his own ingenuity. When he realized that scaffoldings built up from the floor would be both hugely expensive and dangerously unstable, he started to wonder how else he could get his crew up near the ceiling in a way that was reasonably stable and safe. In following his curiosity, he ended up designing an innovative scaffolding structure that consisted of a moveable platform resting on brackets inserted into purpose-made holes in the walls, holes that could be filled in after the work was completed…
CHAPTER 6
Endless Curiosity: Not Just Kid Stuff
Oh Sure, Curiosity…
Curiosity is one of those things—like being strategic or listening—that we talk about a lot, and that we all pretty much say is a good thing… but beyond that, we don’t really agree on what it means or how to do it. I’ve often heard executives say, “I’m deeply curious,” but then when I observe their behavior, I realize that they think “being curious” means either wanting to know every detail of the things they’re responsible for (which, sadly, generally means that person is micromanaging) or having a deep interest in a couple of things (antique cars, say, or designer footwear).
What people rarely mean, when they say they’re curious, is I’m so fascinated by how things work and what might be possible that I’m completely willing to do what it takes to find out more and become more skilled. And that, to me, is true curiosity: a deep and abiding need to understand and master.
What I’ve come to see is that even though we give lip service to curiosity, we most often don’t act curious. In fact, by the time we get to be adults, there’s quite a bit of implicit social pressure not to be curious… at least in public. I was just talking to someone the other day about a meeting he had been in the day before, where a colleague was talking about her part of the business, a segment that was new to him. He told me that he really wanted to ask her a couple of questions to find out more, but that he didn’t, because, in his words, he “didn’t want to look dumb.”
So even though we say curiosity is good, we’re taught to behave as though it’s not. And that’s a big problem for us, when it comes to learning new things and thriving in this ever-changing world.
It’s Wired In
Even though we’re largely socialized out of our curiosity by the time we get to be adults, all functional human beings are born curious. We all come into the world fully equipped with that deep need to understand and master. In fact, John Medina, who I referenced earlier and who has done fascinating exploration into the human brain and its capacity to learn, has this to say, in his book Brain Rules, about curiosity in babies and little children:
Let’s look under the hood of an infant’s mind, at the engine that drives its thinking processes and the motivating fuel that keeps its intellect running. This fuel consists of a clear, high-octane, unquenchable need to know [italics mine]. Babies are born with a deep desire to understand the world around them and an incessant curiosity that compels them to aggressively explore it. This need for explanation is so powerfully stitched into their experience that some scientists describe it as a drive, just as hunger and thirst and sex are drives.1
I love this premise so much, that curiosity is a drive in babies just as hunger and thirst are drives for them. It perfectly captures the importance of curiosity to our success as individuals and as a species. Think about it: drives are impulses wired into our very being, beneath the level of conscious choice, because they are key to our survival. If a baby doesn’t eat, it dies; if it doesn’t drink, it dies. I propose that if a baby isn’t curious, it dies, too. Maybe not as quickly, but over time: if a baby doesn’t care about figuring out how to move, walk, talk, eat, connect to others, manipulate objects—all skills and knowledge acquired through curiosity—that child will fail to thrive. Throughout our history as humans, the more curious a baby or toddler, the more quickly that little person could learn the skills that would make her a full and contributing member of the tribe.
If you’ve ever spent much time around babies and small children, you’ve seen what I’m talking about. Their relentless curiosity is what carries them from total dependence on others at birth to an amazing level of function and independence by the time they’ve reached school age. If you’ve watched an eighteen-month-old spend twenty minutes wanting to play the same simple game over and over (building a block tower and knocking it down, for instance)—and getting better and better at it each time—or experienced a three-year-old’s endless barrage of “Why…?” and “What if…?” and “How…?” questions, you’ve seen endless curiosity at work.
So, How Do We Get It Back?
Where do we fall off the curiosity path? And—more important to our discussion here—how can we reengage that endless curiosity that we all had as children and apply it to becoming world-class learners?
If you’ll forgive me an analogy, think of curiosity as a fire that burns merrily when we’re young. Then, as we get older, it dies down, partly because we don’t need it quite so much as when we were babies (or haven’t, in previous eras) and partly because society’s authority figures—rulers, teachers, parents, and bosses—have largely discouraged it as inefficient and/or insubordinate. But I’ve found that, for almost everyone, the fire of curiosity hasn’t gone out completely, and can be restoked. Here’s how it works.
To re-become endlessly curious:
Find your own curiosity “sparks”
Fan the flames with self-talk and action
Feed the fire of curiosity daily
Find your own curiosity “sparks.” Almost everyone has things (or even one thing) in their life about which they are truly curious. Those are the places to look for your unextinguished sparks of curiosity. For most of us, hobbies are a great place to start looking for those sparks. Much-loved hobbies are the perfect medium for the expression of curiosity: endeavors that we enjoy so much that we spend time and energy exploring them even though we’re not getting paid, and where we don’t worry (as much) about whether others will “think we’re dumb” if we demonstrate our lack of knowledge. When it comes to our hobbies, we are curious. We want to know more, understand more deeply, get better, and find out how things work and why. A little later in this chapter, we’ll work on finding your own curiosity “sparks” and getting better acquainted with them, so you can transfer those sparks to other areas of learning.
Fan the flames with self-talk and action. This second step of reclaiming your childhood curiosity relies first on doing something we’ve already started to explore: recognizing and managing your self-talk. You’ll uncover the messages you’re sending yourself that impede your curiosity and replace them with self-talk that supports your curiosity. Then you’ll learn how to follow up that revised, more curious self-talk with action designed to satisfy your curiosity. By building curious self-talk and action into areas that you want and need to “understand and master,” you can turbocharge your learning dramatically.
Feed the fire of curiosity daily. In this final part of reengaging your childhood need to know, you’ll focus on making curiosity something you can draw on every day in order to survive and thrive in a world that’s changing faster than we ever thought possible. Making curiosity a daily habit (rather than something occasional that’s limited to certain hobbies or topics) is a huge step toward future-proofing yourself: being curious opens you up, makes you resilient and hopeful, and sends you toward the new rather than away from it. It’s the ideal response to today’s world.
How Endless Curiosity Looks
When I first started working with Deborah Turness, she had been the president of NBC News for less than a year. As I prepared for our initial meeting, I realized that it would be hard to imagine a job with a higher degree of being-thrown-into-the-deep-end of the learning pool than hers. As if being the first woman to run a news network in the U.S. after having spent most of her career in the U.K. and Europe weren’t enough, she’d been tasked with envisioning and leading a successful path to the future for NBC News, a respected and long-successful business (home of The Today Show, NBC Nightly News, and Meet the Press), in the midst of seismic change. In news—even more quickly than in other parts of the evolving media landscape—consumers are rapidly shifting to digital real-time consumption, and every television news outlet is hard-pressed to figure out how to transform its business models to keep up with consumers’ preferences while still making a profit.
My main impressions of Deborah, in that first meeting, were of real intelligence, huge energy, and endless curiosity. She was considering engaging me as her executive coach, and she was fascinated by the process. She had worked with a coach in the U.K., and she wanted to know how our approach was different from and similar to what she had experienced, what we would work on, and how we’d stay connected. She asked me lots of questions. And they weren’t standard ticking-off-the-boxes questions either. They were questions like, “How do you know if someone is taking best advantage of the coaching?”—curiosity-based questions that would help her understand and master. And she really listened to my responses. When people ask a question out of curiosity, I find they’re usually very interested in the answer. For someone like me, who sees curiosity as a necessary driver of real learning, it seemed like an auspicious beginning to our relationship.
Over the months, as we started to work together, I saw Deborah’s curiosity applied to every aspect of her job. It made her extremely easy to coach, because when she didn’t understand something or know how to do something, she almost always demonstrated that childlike drive to know: she wasn’t afraid to ask questions, either with me or with her folks, like “Why did that happen?” or “How could that work better?” or “I wonder if we could…?” And, equally important, she took action to find the answers to her questions.
For example, at one point Deborah asked herself, How can we help all our journalists get better at operating in this less TV-centric news world? (“How can we…?” is a great curiosity-based question—we’ll talk more about that later in the chapter.) And then she pursued her curious self-talk by asking that question of others, and by starting to experiment with possible answers. One important change that arose from asking that question: Deborah hired a senior person to be the SVP of editorial for all of NBC News, a job that hadn’t previously existed. Part of this person’s job was to bring the journalists together to learn from one another and to find out what works in this new media landscape, while assuring that they maintain journalistic integrity and have the resources and support they need to succeed.
I’ve also seen Deborah’s curiosity help her weather a variety of crises and reverses, all of them played out very much on the public stage, given the scrutiny to which network news is subjected in the U.S. For example, when she and her boss realized that a very high-profile new hire was operating in ways that were bad for the business, they had to decide—and decide quickly—whether to let the person go. Before making the decision, Deborah quietly gathered information about this executive from a number of people she trusted. And I noticed that she did it with curiosity rather than to support a preexisting assumption: that is, she wasn’t trying to build a case against the person, but rather was genuinely trying to find out what had happened and the impact it had had, so that she could make the best decision.
I’ve noticed another benefit of her curiosity. When she arrived, many of the folks at NBC News, while smart and well intentioned, had been doing things a certain way for a long time, and didn’t seem curious about possible alternatives. Many of them, in fact, spent more energy focusing on why the status quo was important rather than on how it might need to change. I’ve seen that, in many cases, Deborah’s curiosity has ignited theirs—more and more people on her wider team are starting to ask, “Why not…?” and “What if…?” and “How can we…?” And that bodes well for the future of the business.
Find Your Curiosity “Sparks”
Before we go on, let me say this: you may already be curious. You may approach every new situation with a bias toward discovering more, understanding more deeply, and figuring out new and better ways of operating in that situation. You may already be insatiably curious about everything that crosses your path. If so, congratulations. If not, let’s help you reclaim your birthright of endless curiosity.
I noted earlier that nearly all of us have something that we’re curious about in our lives. And I observed that we often lavish our most ardent curiosity on our hobbies. For instance, a woman whose hobby is ballroom dancing might take classes at night, participate in competitions, and watch YouTube videos of world-class dancers. She might also read books about the history of ballroom dancing, compare dancing shoes online to find out which are considered better and why, engage in discussion about which styles of dancing are more elegant or more dashing, and talk to people who are highly skilled in order to learn how they practice and what they’ve done to overcome obstacles to improvement. In other words, she would explore ballroom dancing in as many ways as are available to her, in order to understand and master; she is deeply curious about ballroom dancing.
By identifying those sparks of curiosity that still burn in your own life, you can ignite your curiosity in other areas. That is, by observing what you say to yourself and how you act when you’re feeling curious, you can begin to create those same thoughts and actions in other areas where you want to get more curious. Let’s explore.
There you have it. Now that you know what your own curiosity looks and feels like, you can begin to transfer those “sparks” to new areas about which you may not now feel curious and start to fan the flames of curiosity in order to ignite your learning in those areas.
Fan the Flames of Self-Talk and Action
I don’t actually know if toddlers have self-talk. I suspect they just immediately say whatever is in their heads; it’s not until we get older that we talk to ourselves about things before or instead of speaking them aloud. In large part, this results from the socialization process most of us go through on the way to adulthood: we learn that it’s not socially acceptable to say to someone, “You’re skinny and you have a funny nose,” as we might have done when we were four—and so we make that comment to ourselves, mentally.
In addition to all the things we think and decide not to say out loud, our adult self-talk is also composed of admonitions and beliefs about ourselves and the world that we’ve acquired along the way, from parents, teachers, friends, and—these days—the media. Once you start to recognize and manage your self-talk, as we discussed in the previous chapter, you may begin to notice some of this. For example, in my twenties, when I started to become aware of my own self-talk, I noticed myself thinking both helpful and unhelpful things that got passed on to me from others, like “Beautiful women are dumb—don’t be beautiful, be smart” (courtesy of my mom, unfortunately), “You can be anything you want to be” (a wonderful contribution from my dad), and “If you talk all the time, you won’t find out anything new” (from a wise and acerbic professor at college).
Bringing your self-talk to your conscious awareness, as we explored in the last chapter, allows you to sort the wheat from the chaff: to recognize and retain the self-talk that serves and supports you, and discard or rethink the rest.
That’s what I’m encouraging you to do now with the “self-talk of curiosity.” When you reflected, above, on your self-talk about the topic where you’re curious, you may have surfaced thoughts like:
How does that work?
I wonder if I could do that?
Why does that happen?
How can I find out more?
Why isn’t that like this?
I wonder what would happen if I tried this?
You may notice a pattern here: I realized in observing good learners over the years, and working on my own skills as a learner, that curious self-talk most often begins with “Why…?” “How…?” or “I wonder…?” The need to understand and master is almost always the driving impulse behind those three sentence starters.
In our work at Proteus, we’ve also noticed (in ourselves and our clients) what we’ve come to call “anti-curiosity self-talk.” That tends to sound like:
That’s boring.
Who cares?
I already knew that.
That doesn’t matter.
That’s silly.
Whatever, dude.
The pattern here, as you may have noticed, is disinterest and dismissal.
As you might already have guessed, your first task in the “fanning the flames” part of reigniting your curiosity is to shift your self-talk from anti-curious to curious in the areas where you want (or need) to learn.
Let’s go back to our friend Ron, the librarian from the “Aspiration” chapter who doesn’t want to learn to digitize library materials. We’ll assume that he has overcome his lack of aspiration by seeing the benefits of learning this new part of his job and envisioning a future where he’s experiencing those benefits. Let’s also assume that he’s gotten much more neutrally self-aware: he knows he’s not comfortable with computers and is worried about whether he’ll be able to learn the necessary skills—but he also knows that he’s deeply knowledgeable about the library and its collection, and very committed to its ongoing success. And he’s an organized thinker. In other words, he’s clear about his strengths and weaknesses in this new (to him) area of learning.
Now we’ll help him reignite his curiosity and apply it to this topic. Ron, it turns out, is reading this book along with you (what a useful coincidence!). He’s just done the activity focusing on the topic about which he’s curious. For him, that’s French wines, specifically the wines of the Rhone Valley. Ron is absolutely fascinated by this topic, and, in fact, he and his wife have even bought a share in a Rhone Valley vineyard. He reads books about wine, gets the feeds of a number of wine blogs, eats at restaurants based on their wine lists, and loves having in-depth conversations with sommeliers and restaurant owners about various vintages. His curiosity about this topic is insatiable. When he reflected on his self-talk regarding wine, he realized that it consisted of questions like, Why is that vineyard able to produce such wonderful results year after year? and How can I continue to improve my palate? and I wonder if our vineyard’s owners are considering alternatives to cork?
Then he surfaced what he was saying to himself about the digitization efforts at the library, and realized that it was, indeed, anti-curiosity self-talk, focused primarily on disinterest and dismissal: This just isn’t interesting to me and I don’t think this is that important were two of his more unhelpful pieces of self-talk.
So Ron did exactly what I’m about to encourage you to do: he revised his anti-curiosity self-talk about digitization, using his own curious self-talk about wine as a starting point. He revised the two anti-curious statements above to: I wonder if I could make this more interesting for myself? and Why does my boss think this is such a big deal?
Those might seem like small movements along the path to curiosity—after all, he’s only getting curious about whether this topic might be worth being curious about—but that’s okay. Remember, when you rethink your self-talk, it’s critical that the new self-talk be believable by you—and for Ron to go in one jump from This just isn’t interesting to me to I’m fascinated—how does this all work? is probably not realistic. When you’re trying to go from spark to bonfire, it can take a little while and some effort to build the blaze.
With Ron’s example before you, why don’t you take a shot at getting curious about something you want or need to learn.
Congratulations—you’ve just transferred your spark of curiosity from one area to another. Now let’s help it burn brighter.
Following Self-Talk with Action
When you’re genuinely curious about something, the “How,” “Why,” and “I wonder” questions you’re asking yourself demand answers. And you automatically take action to find those answers.
A couple of years ago, I decided I wanted learn how to spin yarn. I was doing a lot of knitting, and when I bought some beautiful yarn at a shop in Asheville, North Carolina, the owner told me that it had been handspun and hand dyed by a local woman. How cool that would be, I thought. Eventually I bought a spinning wheel, but it sat gathering dust in my living room for more than a year. Finally, I realized that my aspiration was insufficient. (I had fallen into the trap of confusing mild interest with actual aspiration.) So I ate my own dog food and went through the exercise of identifying the benefits to me of learning to spin and envisioning a future where I would be reaping those benefits. It went something like this: It would be so gratifying to start with fleece and end up with a garment. So much opportunity for creativity! Such fun to be able to give gifts that are completely handmade. Then I did some neutral self-awareness building: I have good fine motor coordination and I’m pretty relentless about overcoming obstacles, but I’m also impatient, and I (still) don’t like being bad at things.
Armed with aspiration and some self-awareness, I started to get curious. I wonder if I could learn this from YouTube? I thought to myself—and followed that curious self-talk by opening my computer, going to YouTube, and searching for “learning to spin yarn.” After many videos and numerous failed attempts to do what I saw, I found myself asking another curiosity-based question—Why isn’t this working? The action that followed was simple reflection, followed by the realization that I probably needed a live teacher to show me what I was doing wrong. I mentioned it to my husband, who got me spinning lessons as a Christmas present. Voilà—I’m now a clumsy novice spinner, getting better with each attempt. (I did notice that my first lesson was much less painful than it would have been without a conscious acceptance on my part of the inevitability of being bad first, but more on that in the next chapter.)
You may have noticed that the actions that followed my curious self-talk were simple efforts designed to answer the questions raised. It’s a natural progression: you think, How…? or Why…? or I wonder…? and you want to answer the question. We’re built to follow that progression: it’s how we’ve made every human advance in skill or knowledge, from learning how to build a fire to making the latest discoveries in gene therapy. The main thing that gets in the way of that progression from curious self-talk to curious action is a resurgence of anti-curious self-talk. For example, when I wasn’t able to learn spinning from watching YouTube videos, and I asked Why isn’t this working? (good, simple, curiosity-based self-talk), my self-talk response could have been, Oh, who cares? I’ve got more important things to think about. Classic disinterest and dismissal, which would have immediately squelched my impulse to figure out why the YouTube approach wasn’t working and what to do about it.
Remember when we focused on managing your self-talk in the last chapter, and I shared with you the self-talk model of recognize, record, rethink, and repeat? This is the point in reengaging your curiosity where the “repeat” step is going to come in very handy. As adults, most of us have developed a fairly strong habit of talking ourselves out of following up on our curiosity. I’m sure you’ve done it yourself: you feel curious about something, and instead of doing something to satisfy that curiosity, you tell yourself it’s not important or that you don’t really want to know or that you’ll look dumb—you revert to old, curiosity-killing self-talk.
When this happens, there are two simple things you can do to set yourself back on the path of curiosity and learning. First, simply go back to your original curious self-talk. In my case, that would have meant saying to myself, No, I really do want to know why this isn’t working. (It’s quite liberating to realize that you can “talk back” to your own unhelpful self-talk, and that you don’t have to believe the unhelpful things your inner voice tells you.)
Second, choose follow-up actions that are easy for you. For example, in my case, I’m constantly on the Internet, looking for answers to questions or finding out how to do things, so that’s always an easy first action for me to take in order to follow my curiosity. For someone else, asking a friend might be an easier and more natural first action. And for another person, just trying something out might be the easiest thing to do first.
I’ve noticed, for instance, with my client and coachee Deborah, that her first action following curiosity is often to pull some people together, bounce her question off of them, get their responses, and go from there. She’s very people-oriented and collaborative, so those next steps are natural for her.
Now that you’ve got some tools for turning your newly minted curious self-talk into action, let’s put them to use.
Feed the Fire of Curiosity Daily
If you start applying the tools we’ve been talking about—revising your self-talk from anti-curious to curious and taking action to pursue your curiosity—you’ll find that a powerful shift begins to occur inside you. The momentum toward being largely incurious, which for most of us increases throughout our lives, will slow and begin to reverse. More and more often, you’ll be sitting in a meeting, riding on the subway, or reading a book and find yourself thinking, Huh. I wonder if…? or Why does that…? or How can I…? That’s your natural curiosity reawakening, reigniting.
I’m assuming, since you’ve read this far, that you want that to happen, that you’re seeing your curiosity as an asset and you want to unleash it even further. If so, there’s one simple thing you can do to turbocharge your curiosity: create your own personal “curiosity match” and use it every day.
You know how a match works: it’s the simplest and most reliable way to start a fire. A curiosity match is a piece of self-talk that works for you to simply and reliably spark your curiosity. Once you’ve identified your own curiosity match, you can apply it whenever and wherever you like.
Michelangelo had a curiosity match—I talked about it in chapter 3. It was “I am still learning”—Ancora imparo in Italian. His biographers tell us that he said it often: as a response to compliments, when approaching a new problem, or in asking others for their knowledge or insight. What a wonderful spark for curiosity! My own curiosity match is, I’d love to know more about that. That works for me: it’s accurate (I mostly do want to know more about things), it encourages me to get as curious as I’d like, and it leads directly to great curiosity-based self-talk and action.
Like all good self-talk, your curiosity match has to be something that’s true for you. And it has to be something that will support further curiosity. The easiest way to craft a curiosity match for yourself is to notice something positive that you’re already saying to yourself about being curious, and apply it more broadly. Before we leave this ANEW skill, let’s build you a really good match that will help reignite your endless curiosity daily.
There you have it: a first draft of your very own, custom-built curiosity match. I encourage you to try it out over the next week or two as you run into topics and skills that are new to you, or in areas where you have lots to learn.
And if it doesn’t work—that is, if it doesn’t spark your curiosity in these areas—build another “match” and try that one. You’re a novice in this area of consciously developing your curiosity, so it’s inevitable that you won’t be great at the beginning. Nobody (with the possible exception of Mozart) starts out being an expert at anything he or she hasn’t done before.
Even though that’s true, and even though we all understand rationally that there’s no possible way to be good at something you’re just starting to learn, our discomfort with being novices is, nonetheless, nearly universal. And that discomfort is the final barrier to becoming a world-class learner. Remember the guy I talked about earlier, who didn’t ask questions in a meeting because he didn’t want to look dumb? Being willing to “look dumb”—to make mistakes, to be clumsy, to not know—is the final frontier in becoming a master of mastery, and that’s where we’re going next.