20. CURIOSITY — Part Two

Brian Grazer is a Hollywood producer. His movies include Splash, Apollo 13, and A Beautiful Mind. He wrote a book entitled A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life. It was reading this book that made me aware of what an important clue curiosity is to finding liberating truth and being a new creation that we are ordained to be. In this post and the next, I will highlight some of Grazer’s insights.

“More than intelligence or persistence or connections, curiosity has allowed me to live the life I wanted. Curiosity is what gives energy and insight to everything else I do. … For me, curiosity infuses everything with a sense of possibility. Curiosity has, quite literally, been the key to my success, and also the key to my happiness.”

“There’s a spectrum of curiosity, like there’s a spectrum of colors of light. Curiosity comes in different shades and different intensities for different purposes. The technique is the same — asking questions — regardless of the subject, but the mission, the motivation, and the tone vary. The curiosity of a detective trying to solve a murder is very different from the curiosity of an architect trying to get the floor plan right for a family’s house.”

“Many of the best things that have happened in my life are the result of curiosity. And curiosity has occasionally gotten me in trouble. But even when curiosity has gotten me in trouble, it has been interesting trouble.”

“Every person who types a query into Google’s search engine and presses ENTER is curious about something — and that happens 4 million times a minute, every minute of every day. … We need to be careful, individually, that the Internet doesn’t anesthetize us instead of inspire us. There are two things you can’t find on the Internet. … You can’t search for the answer to questions that haven’t been asked yet. And you can’t Google a new idea. The Internet can only tell us what we already know.”

“If you’re at a boring business dinner, curiosity can save you. If you’re bored with your career, curiosity can rescue you. If you’re feeling uncreative or unmotivated, curiosity can be the cure. It can help you use anger or frustration constructively. It can give you courage. Curiosity can add zest to your life, and it can take you way beyond zest — it can enrich your whole sense of security, confidence, and well-being.”

“Curiosity isn’t just a great tool for improving your own life and happiness, your ability to win a great job or a great spouse. It is the key to the things we say we value most in the modern world: independence, self-determination, self-government, self-improvement. Curiosity is the path to freedom itself.”

“The classroom should be a vineyard of questions, a place to cultivate them, to learn both how to ask them and how to chase down the answers. Some classrooms are.”

“The ability to ask any question embodies two things: the freedom to go chase the answer, and the ability to challenge authority, to ask, ‘How come you’re in charge?’ Curiosity is itself a form of power, and also a form of courage.

“For it to be effective, curiosity has to be harnessed to at least two other key traits. First, the ability to pay attention to the answers to your questions — you have to actually absorb whatever it is you’re being curious about. We all know people who ask really good questions, who seem engaged and energized when they’re talking and asking those questions, but who zone out the moment it’s time for you to answer. The second trait is the willingness to act.”

“WE ARE ALL TRAPPED in our own way of thinking, trapped in our own way of relating to people. We get so used to seeing the world our way that we come to think that the world is the way we see it. … One of the most important ways I use curiosity every day is to see the world through other people’s eyes, to see the world in ways I might otherwise miss. It’s totally refreshing to be reminded, over and over, how different the world looks to other people.”

“As soon as I realized the power of curiosity to make my work life better, I consciously worked on making curiosity part of my routine. I turned it into a discipline. And then I made it a habit.”

Q: What steps are you likely to take to make curiosity a more important habit for you?