A Curious Mind (21 page)

Curiosity is wonderfully refreshing. You cannot use it up. In fact, the more curious you are today—about something specific, or in general—the more likely you are to be curious in the future. With one exception: curiosity hasn't inspired much curiosity about itself. We're curious about all kinds of things, except the concept of curiosity.

And finally, we live at a moment in time that should be a “golden age of curiosity.” As individuals, we have access to more information more quickly than anyone has ever had before. Some places are taking advantage of this in big ways—companies in Silicon Valley are a vivid and instructive example. The energy and creativity of entrepreneurs comes from asking questions—questions like “What's next?” and “Why can't we do it
this
way?”

And yet, curiosity remains wildly undervalued today. In the structured settings where we could be teaching people how to harness the power of curiosity—schools, universities, workplaces—it often isn't encouraged. At best, it gets lip service. In many of those settings, curiosity isn't even a topic.

But just as each of us can start using our own curiosity the moment we decide to, we can help create that golden age of
curiosity in the wider culture. We can do it in some simple ways, by answering every question our own children ask, and by helping them find the answers when we don't know them. We can do it, within our own power, at work in a whole range of small but invaluable ways: by asking questions ourselves; by treating questions from our colleagues with respect and seriousness; by welcoming questions from our customers and clients; by seeing those questions as opportunities, not interruptions. The point isn't to start asking a bunch of questions, rat-a-tat, like a prosecutor. The point is to gradually shift the culture—of your family, of your workplace—so we're making it safe to be curious. That's how we unleash a blossoming of curiosity, and all the benefits that come with it.

•  •  •

ROBERT HOOKE WAS A
brilliant seventeenth-century English scientist who helped usher in the era of scientific inquiry—moving society away from religious explanations of how the world worked toward a scientific understanding.

Hooke was a contemporary and fierce rival of Isaac Newton; some have compared Hooke's range of interests and skills to Leonardo da Vinci. Hooke contributed discoveries, advances, and lasting insights to physics, architecture, astronomy, paleontology, and biology. He lived from 1635 to 1703, but although he's been dead three hundred years, he contributed to the engineering of modern clocks, microscopes, and cars. It was
Hooke, peering through a microscope at a razor-thin slice of the bark of a cork tree, who first used the word “cell” to describe the basic unit of biology he saw in the viewfinder.
³

This range of expertise is astonishing today, in an era when so many people, even scientists, are so specialized. The kinds of discoveries and insights made by someone like Hooke are thrilling. But what is really humbling is that scientists like Hooke didn't just revolutionize how we understand the world—from the motions of the planets to the biology of our own bodies. They had to
be
revolutionaries. They were fighting contempt, mockery, and two thousand years of power structure that not only set strict limits on how each member of society could operate, but also what it was okay to ask questions about.

As the scholar of curiosity Barbara Benedict explained when we talked to her, “One of the things that made the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century scientists really extraordinary is that they asked questions that hadn't been asked before.”

Hooke, she pointed out, “looked at his own urine under the microscope. That was hugely transgressive. No one had ever thought to look at urine as a subject of scientific examination.”

Benedict is a literary scholar—she's the Charles A. Dana professor of English Literature at Trinity College in Connecticut—and she became captivated by curiosity because she kept coming across the word, and the idea, while studying eighteenth-century literature. “I came across the word ‘curious' so often in every text, I got a little irritated,” Benedict said. “What does it
mean when you call someone ‘the curious reader'? Is that a compliment or not?”

Benedict was so intrigued by the attitudes about curiosity she kept bumping into that she wrote a cultural history of curiosity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, titled simply,
Curiosity
.

In fact, says Benedict, before the Renaissance, official power, the kind of power that kings and queens had, along with the organization of society, and the limits on what you could ask questions about were all the same thing. They were interwoven.

Powerful people controlled information as well as armies. Rulers controlled the story.

In that setting, curiosity was a sin. It was a transgression. It was “an outlaw impulse,” as Benedict described it in her book.
⁴
Curiosity, including scientific curiosity, was a challenge to the power structure of society—starting with the monarch himself. It was a challenge to two millennia of “wisdom”—“I'm the king because God said I should be the king. You are a serf because God said you should be a serf”—that culminated in the American Revolution.

Curiosity—asking questions—isn't just a way of understanding the world. It's a way of changing it. The people in charge have always known that, going all the way back to the Old Testament, and the myths of Greece and Rome.

In some places, curiosity is considered almost as dangerous today as it was in 1649. The Chinese government censors the
entire Internet for a nation of 1.4 billion people, almost half of whom are online.
⁵

And everywhere, curiosity retains a little aura of challenge and impertinence.

Consider what happens when you ask someone a question.

They might respond, “That's a good question.”

Or they might respond, “That's a curious question.”

Often, the person who says, “That's a good question” has the answer ready—it's a good question, in part, because the person knows the answer. They may also genuinely think you've asked a good question—a question that has caused them to have a fresh thought.

The person who says, “That's a curious question,” on the other hand, is feeling challenged. They either don't have an answer at hand, or they feel the question itself is somehow a challenge to their authority.

So why hasn't the Internet done more to usher in a wider golden age of curiosity?

I do think the questions we ask by typing them into an Internet search engine are a kind of curiosity. You can search the question, “Which is faster, a bee or a car?” and find a couple of helpful discussions.

But the Internet runs the risk, as Barbara Benedict puts it, of being turned into a more comprehensive version of the pope. It's simply a big version of “the machine with all the answers.”

Yes, sometimes you simply need to know the GDP of the Ukraine or how many ounces are in a pint. We've always had
great reference books for things like that—the
World Almanac
used to be a definitive source.

Those are facts.

But here's the really important question: does having all of human knowledge available in the palm of our hands make us more curious, or less curious?

When you read about the speed of bees flying, does that inspire you to learn more about the aerodynamics of bees—or does it do the opposite, does it satisfy you enough so you go back to Instagram?

It was Karl Marx who called religion “the opium of the masses.”
⁶
He meant that religion was designed to provide enough answers that people stopped asking questions.

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—just like there were two things Robert Hooke couldn't find in the Bible or in the decrees of King Charles I:

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.

•  •  •

IN THE COURSE OF
a business meeting, people in the movie business will often say, “That's good enough.”

They'll say, “That script is good enough.” “That actor is good enough.” “That director is good enough.”

When someone says to me, “That's good enough,” it never is. It means exactly the opposite. It means the person, or the script,
isn't
good enough.

I'm sure the same thing happens in every line of work.

It's such an odd expression, that means exactly the opposite of what the words themselves mean. It's a way of saying, We're going to settle here. Mediocrity will do just fine.

I'm not interested in “good enough.”

I think part of my reservoir of determination comes from all those decades of curiosity conversations with people who themselves didn't settle for “good enough.” Their experiences, their accomplishments, are a reminder that you cannot live by curiosity alone. To have a satisfying life (and to make valuable use of curiosity), you also have to have discipline and determination. You have to apply your own imagination to what you learn. Most important, you have to treat the people around you with respect and with grace, and curiosity can help you do that.

For me, the most valuable kind of curiosity is the kind where there isn't a specific question I'm trying to get the answer to. The most valuable kind of curiosity is the truly open-hearted question—whether to a Nobel laureate or the person sitting next to you at a wedding.

And I've come to realize over time that you archive curiosity—that is, you archive the results of your curiosity, you save up the insights and the energy it gives you.

There are a couple of ways of thinking about the kind of open-ended curiosity I've been so determined to pursue since I was in my twenties. Those conversations are like a mutual fund—a long-term investment in dozens of different people, personalities, specialties, themes. Some of them will be interesting at the moment we're having the conversation, but not afterward. Some of them aren't even interesting while we're doing them. And some of them will pay off hugely in the long term—because the conversation will spark a broad interest, and a deeper exploration, by me; or because the conversation will get tucked away, and a decade later an idea or an opportunity or a script will come along and I'll understand it completely, because of a conversation I had years before.

But just like with the stock market, you don't know in advance which conversations will perform, and which won't. So you just keep doing them—you invest a little bit of effort across a wide range of time, space, and people, confident that it's the right thing to do.

I also think of the conversations as an artist might. Artists are always watching for ideas, for points of view, for artifacts that might be helpful. An artist walking along the beach might find a dramatic piece of driftwood, eroded in an interesting way. The driftwood doesn't fit into any project the artist is working on right now; it's just compelling on its own. The smart artist takes the driftwood home, displays it on a shelf, and in a month or in a decade, the artist looks up, notices the driftwood again—and turns it into art.

I don't have any idea where good ideas come from, but I do know this:

The more I know about the world—the more I understand about how the world works, the more people I know, the more perspectives I have—the more likely it is that I'll have a good idea. The more likely it is that I'll understand a good idea when I hear it. The less likely I'll agree that something is “good enough.”

When you know more, you can do more.

Curiosity is a state of mind. More specifically, it's the state of having an open mind. Curiosity is a kind of receptivity.

And best of all, there is no trick to curiosity.

You just have to ask one good question a day, and listen to the answer.

Curiosity is a more exciting way to live in the world. It is, truly, the secret to living a bigger life.

As part of the work to write
A Curious Mind,
I did something I had never done before: assembled in one place as comprehensive a list as possible of the people I've had curiosity conversations with over the last thirty years. (Actually, some of the staff at Imagine did most of the work to create the list—for which I'm incredibly thankful.)

Looking through the list of people I've had the chance to talk to is, for me, like turning the pages of a photo album. Just like a single snapshot sometimes does, a name can trigger a wave of memories: where I was when I met that person, what we talked about, what they were wearing, even someone's posture, attitude, or facial expression.

Reading through the list over and over as we worked on the book, I was struck by two things. First, an incredible sense of gratitude that so many people agreed to sit and talk to me, to give me a sense of their world, when there wasn't anything tangible to be gained. All these years later, I wish I could call each of
these people up and say thank you, again, for what they added to my life. Each person was an adventure—even if we were just sitting on the couches in my office—a journey well beyond the confines and routines of my own life. The breadth of experience and personality and accomplishment on the list is inspiring.

And second, although
A Curious Mind
is populated with stories from the conversations, we had so many more we didn't include that it seemed like it would be fun to offer a wider selection. What follows is a sampler—bonus material, we might call it here in Hollywood—from some of the curiosity conversations that have stayed with me.