On the Importance of Following Your Curiosity

You only learn if you’re deeply engaged.

And you’re only deeply engaged if you follow your curiosity.

Don’t judge where it might lead you.

Don’t listen to other people who are trying to tell you what you “should” be curious about because it’s “useful”.

A comic book that you deeply engage with and intensively consume will teach you infinitely more than a philosophy book that you read half-assedly.

That’s why following your curiosity is so much more important than what you actually end up being curious about.

When Steve Jobs dropped out of college, he rolled in for a calligraphy class.

He gave himself permission to learn something “useless”, motivated by pure fascination.

He learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces.

About varying the amount of space between different letter combinations.

About what makes great typography great.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application.

But ten years later, when they were designing the first Macintosh, it all came back together.

They designed it all into the Mac.

It was the first computer with beautiful typography.

If Steve Jobs would’ve never followed his curiosity and dropped into that single course in college, the Mac probably would’ve never been the massive success that it turned out to be.

Of course, he could’ve never possibly planned for this.

You can never connect the dots looking forward.

You can only listen to your heart, follow your curiosity and trust that the dots will somehow connect in the future.