Curiosity is the start

Curiosity is the start of a journey to a greater understanding and the joy of discovery.

The Mind Map Journal

The meaning of the quote

As a young law clerk at Warner Bros., long before he produced Apollo 13 or A Beautiful Mind, Brian Grazer had no real reason to talk to any of the executives whose offices he delivered documents to. He made one up anyway, lingering at their doors with a question about their job or their industry, whatever had caught his attention that day. Those short, unpaid detours turned into a 40-year habit he called curiosity conversations, and he used them to sit down with Nobel laureates, spies, musicians and Fidel Castro.

Grazer stumbled into exactly what this quote describes. The reward comes after the curiosity, not before it. Understanding and discovery are places you arrive, not places you start from, and you only get there because a question pulled you forward first.

Scientific American reported on research showing that curiosity switches on the brain’s reward circuits, the same regions that light up for food or money. People also remember information better when a question interests them personally. In one of the studies behind that reporting, people picked up extra details that had nothing to do with the question they were chasing, almost as a byproduct of paying closer attention while they searched for the answer.

That is the joy of discovery the quote points to. It rarely shows up on command. It shows up as a side effect of chasing one small question far enough to find an answer, then noticing two more questions waiting behind it.

The same idea holds between people, not just facts. In her talk How Curiosity Will Save Us, Mónica Guzmán argues that trading assumptions for real questions is often the fastest way to actually understand someone standing in front of you, disagreement included.

Grazer’s version of this ran on strangers and camera crews. He later wrote about it in A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life. Most people’s version is smaller: a Wikipedia rabbit hole at midnight, a kid taking apart a remote control to see what’s inside, a question in a meeting nobody else thought to ask. The scale doesn’t matter. What matters is following the question instead of talking yourself out of it.

Try this

Pick one question you’ve been putting off, something you’ve wondered about but never looked up, and spend 20 minutes chasing it today.

Don’t aim for mastery. Aim for the small jolt of finding out, then notice what new question it hands you.

Resources

• A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life (Book)
• Curiosity Is A Superpower with Brian Grazer (Podcast)
• How Curiosity Will Save Us (Video)
• How the Science of Curiosity Boosts Learning (Article)