Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It

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Curious is a book that defines the place of curiosity in our lives today. Where it comes from, why we have it, what we do with it, while making the case for why we need to resurrect it. Oh, the guilt will never go away, and ten years have passed since then. But I haven't learned anything from it either. The other day, while I was reading this book and taking notes, my 10-year-old daughter came in and asked me something. My horrible answer:

To some, questions like these feel challenging, even more so if you don’t know the answers. Rather than answering them, the adult simply asserts his own authority to brush them aside. Curiosity can make us adults feel a little inadequate or impatient—that’s the experience of the parent who doesn’t know why the sky is blue, the experience of the teacher trying to get through the day’s lesson without being derailed. But then he began his long focus on baby studies. Many of the studies themselves were fine, even enjoyable, but by the time he got to attachment theory, I felt like, "Come on already." At that point, I was still feeling relatively positive. That was until his anti tech rhetoric ruined the entire book for me. I still enjoy that he wrote about curiosity, and I would certainly read another book about curiosity from a different author, but it's unlikely I would ever read another book by this author. For a trait with so much potential power, curiosity itself seems uncomplicated. Psychologists define curiosity as “wanting to know.” That’s it. And that definition squares with our own commonsense feeling. “Wanting to know,” of course, means seeking out the information. Curiosity starts out as an impulse, an urge, but it pops out into the world as something more active, more searching: a question. Turn puzzles into mysteries. Mystery vs puzzle. A puzzle haa a clear solution but mystery can sustain long term curiosity. Just as curiosity had gotten me the job, it also transformed the job itself into something wonderful.Whoever you are and whatever start you get in life, knowing stuff makes the world more abundant with possibility and gleams of light more likely to illuminate the darkness. It opens the universe a little.” p.193 Barbara Benedict is a professor at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and a scholar of the eighteenth century who spent years studying the attitude about curiosity during that period, as scientific inquiry sought to overtake religion as the way we understand the world. One day Brandon Tartikoff was walking by. He was the president of NBC television, in the process of reviving the network with shows like Hill Street Blues and Cheers and Miami Vice. At thirty-two, he was already one of the most powerful people in show business. In a world where inequalities in access to information are being leveled, a new divide is emerging - between the curious and the incurious. “The internet is making smart people smarter and dumb people dumber.” All you have to do is look to the Bible to see. The first story in the Bible after the story of creation, the first story that involves people, is about curiosity. The story of Adam, Eve, the serpent, and the tree does not end well for the curious.

I hope to accomplish three things in this book: I want to wake you up to the value and power of curiosity; I want to show you all the ways I use it, in the hopes that that will inspire you to test it out in your daily life; and I want to start a conversation in the wider world about why such an important quality is so little valued, taught, and cultivated today. Curiosity is the spark that starts a flirtation—in a bar, at a party, across the lecture hall in Economics 101. And curiosity ultimately nourishes that romance, and all our best human relationships—marriages, friendships, the bond between parents and children. The curiosity to ask a simple question—“How was your day?” or “How are you feeling?”—to listen to the answer, and to ask the next question. The serpent replies with what is surely the most heedless bravado in history—unafraid of the knowledge of good and evil, or of God. He says to Eve, “You will not certainly die. For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” 9As a literary phenomenon, it has a negative connotation, starting with Eve, who could not resist the temptation to know more, and was punished with the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, or Pandora, who opened a box full of evil, with only hope left to cope with it all.