Curiosity and Curation
Today I’d like to pick up where I left off in my previous post, and look deeper into curiosity, a personal quality that is believed to be an essential workplace skill nowadays (and, to that I agree). Actually, the article that I suggested for further reading, in the post, offers some sensible high-level advice on “how to become a more curious person”. Focus on asking better questions, for one. And, here’s an excerpt that resonates most with me:
Keep in mind, it matters far less what a child (or any person) is curious about than that she is curious, period. Perhaps one day it’s mermaids, the next it’s music, and the next it’s metaphysics, math, or meteorology. The crucial skill is to be able to identify what fascinates you, follow it through, and nurture your curiosity over time. This is how we will make new discoveries and create new solutions. — source
And, the reason the excerpt resonates with me is simple: this is me to a T. In fact, having typed the heading of the post — “curiosity and curation” — I noted how the word roots look similar, and couldn’t withstand the urge to check on the etymology of those words. To open up my “writing kitchen” to you a little, I’ve been able to find some astounding clues and connections simply by tracing the etymology of words in my work as an author and researcher. Turns out, both “curious” and “curation” stem from the Latin root cura (in fact, “cure” stems from that root, too), and cura has the general meaning of “care”.
And, how all of that is relevant to curiosity at workplace? Here’s something that I wrote in Better The Devil That You Don’t Know:
What does exploring the unknown has to do with learning at a tech company, one might ask? To be honest, I’m not very comfortable linking back to the word “tech”, as I write about Learning. Any modifying limiter applied to this word looks like a misnomer. Yet, in all obviousness, learning has become infested with modifying limiters. If we work at a tech company, we are supposed to be eager to learn more and more of such and such disciplines; and the AI gear forces us to break our interests into narrower and narrower clusters. Many of us have been there: eager to expand our thinking, we enthusiastically pick our interests at a news app, or at a publishing platform, only to find out later… that we are short on fresh air. In an attempt to fix, we’d then go and rehash those preferred interests, and…. narrow them even more. This time, we reason, I’ve done a good job, so surely those fine-tuned AI algorithms will bring some interesting new information to my screen. Sorry to say that, but — from my experience — it’d hardly be true…. The thing is, AI often stands for “things we know through and through”, and it’s perfect at making us stick with what we were, rather than challenge us to what we can become. There’s only so much you can bite from clustered chunks of content feeds, and they would hardly satisfy this deep inner longing to learn & to explore.
To recap, the sources of information that we rely on these days, have been mostly ill-suited to the job of expanding our horizons and for looking at things from new perspectives. The irony of the situation is that the soulless AI “content” feeds (and, the word “content” is soo out of tune with me that I cringe any time I read it or hear it) include pieces of, well, “content” that tell how important it is to be creative, innovative, etc. And, lately one such “content feed” has brought it to my attention that… human curation is quietly coming back into fashion. This was about Disney+ and Netflix. As a side note, ain’t it funny, how the word “quietly” is currently being used by the media. If someone does something game-changing, but without touting it, that’s when they use the quietly word.
Back to “curiosity and curation”. Since it turned out that both those words are about “care”, this connection has built into the following in my mind: while AI cares little about humans because it’s just AI, humans are blessed with the ability to care for other humans by picking the pieces to read which might be of interest to the others (here’s how they define “curation”, if you want to take a look). And, as another side note, the relation of “curiosity” and “care” comes through another semantics, as in “I’m careful, and I exercise caution, hence I’m curious” (I just don’t want to go overly deep into the details of this verbal connection right now, although it certainly is worth of an exploration of its own).
… and, based on all of that, here’s what I’m about to do. I’ll share with you some of the reads that I find interesting — and which satisfy my curiosity, or validate my own observations about some phenomena— and I will say a few words on why I picked those pieces, and what I like about them, and… I’ll give credit to people who brought those pieces to my radar, so to speak :).
Actually, some of you might recall how in the mid-late 2000s, before the advent of AI-based information feeds, people would publish collections of links to the articles which were of interest to them. Such collections of links are called “digests”. Usually, digests come along with a few notes from the person who puts them together, in which they say what they like or don’t like in particular about that very article (or agree-disagree with). Unfortunately, the more into early -mid-late 2010’s, the lesser have people been vocal about the reasons why they share something with the others. We just shoot links in social media.
Sometimes, it might become a fun game, to be guessing as to why this person wants to share an article (if you know them in person, for instance, or if you know what their current agenda at work or in life is). Mostly, though, I wish we could reinstate the practice of publishing digests, because… if someone is not yet ready to write a complete piece, putting together a digest with a few notes would be much easier! Besides, wouldn’t this digest writing exercise be helpful for creativity, curiosity, innovation, the culture of learning, and what not?
So, there goes. A selection of articles that I’ve found of interest lately, and I thought that they might be of interest to you, too!
- React vs. Respond The credit for sharing this article with me goes to.. Robert Kalweit! He says, it’s one of his all-time favorites, and I can see how the insight communicated in this short piece can become a life-changer. Besides, the read validates some of my earlier observations, which I previously shared in Are You Dumb?. If only we’ve trained ourselves to stop and take time to respond and to re-frame our thinking before reacting, this world would be a much better place.
- Too Much Crystallized Thinking Lowers Fluid Intelligence. I’ve referenced this piece as further reading to one of my articles, as far as I recall, and it ranks high in my “go-to-for-inspiration-and-support” list. The thing is, I’m acutely attuned to imbalances of any kind, and I see how some imbalances in our approach to learning and cognition, both for kids and for grown-ups, backfire in a big way, and… this article just soothes my soul :) In factual speak, the article argues — and I agree — that what people learn in indirect way gives them the skills and knowledge that are not always as easily and efficiently obtainable in a straightforward “by rote” learning.
- How Music Helps You Lead. This one is a continuation to 2), as it says how learning music, in particular, helps people become leaders. Which reminds me that I’ve yet to come up with the finale for my “Becoming a Leader” series :) Seriously, I urge everyone to consider arranging music lessons for their kids (unless the kid has no musical hearing at all). This is something that they’d be thankful to you later in life. Of course, anyone can study music at any age, but it’s a little bit different for adults, and… it just would take me too long to explain why, so maybe I’d do that another time :) And, here’s an excerpt from this fairly short piece:
These days, most people enroll themselves in courses after courses to learn about leadership. They read so many books on this topic and try to apply them in their daily lives. There is also another group of people who feel that experience will give them the necessary skills to be good leaders.Whilst there are many things we do in life to cultivate great leadership qualities, I found that over time, music is one of the greatest tools to actually instill leadership qualities from a very young age.
4. All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technical people. One of the teammates has actually shared this piece in a Slack channel. Thank you, Joakim :) Sorry, I wasn’t able to find a public profile to link your name to, except this one :) Caution: the read is a paid Medium piece, so if you haven’t bought Medium’s subscription, it will eat 1 of your 3 free articles per month. Medium says it’s a 13 min read, and the insights that resonate with me most are these ones:
Before you can make things better, you have to stop making them worse
and
To go left, turn right
The latter one, of course, resonates with me because it goes about sensing and levelling the imbalances of any kind. And, of course, “Thinking is also work”, which is a top highlight in the article, makes my thumb go up, too :)
5. Against office dogs. Here I am, in action, sensing — and maybe levelling? — a yet another imbalance. Some of you might have been displeased by the very title of the read, but … I’ve honed in on a certain imbalance in all of that “pets in the office” media speak, and I just want to present another viewpoint. Here’s an excerpt from the article:
I know I’m not the only person to feel this way. The problem is, most people who don’t want dogs in the office are afraid to voice their objections. They’re scared of being labeled a dog-hater or of being ostracized by coworkers. And unfortunately, they may have some good reason to be fearful. In some companies, people are segregated from the rest of the team if they voice their trepidations about dogs.
It doesn’t help that there’s a swathe of articles and studies claiming dogs in the office make workers happier and decrease stress levels. I beg to differ.
6. The “10,000-hour rule” was debunked again. That’s a relief. And, yes, I beg to differ, too. As I saw this 10,000-hour rule maxim touted and popularized — I guess it was in the late 00’s/early 10’s — I’ve developed an inner protest to this statement which, to me, looked as the one denying the right to be different from the others. Thing is, I’ve struggled a lot with my own being different from most people, in my life (I’ll spare you details for now). That’s why, any time I sense how someone assumes that all people should have similar interests, likes, dislikes, ways of living, or, well, similar pets…. a dragon awakes in me. I want to go and to fight anyone who defaults our uniqueness as human beings to some cliched standards. In fact, I’ve written on that before in The Tricks of Us vs. Them.
… and, that would be it for now. I know I might have hit you with a lot to read/to digest :) And, if I don’t say it explicitly, here’s what I imply any time I publish an article: you can do it, too! And, your Q-Blog needs you :)
Related:
Better The Devil That You Don’t Know
