Curiosity is worth 25 extra IQ points – at least!
Kevin Kelly
The meaning of the quote
Researchers analysed data from more than 200,000 students across dozens of studies to find out what predicts academic performance. They discovered that intelligence mattered, as did effort, but curiosity mattered too. Its effect on performance was roughly as strong as intelligence itself.
That’s the idea behind this quote. Kelly isn’t handing out literal IQ points. He’s making a point about what curiosity does for you day to day. A curious person asks 1 more question, opens the manual nobody else bothers to read and chases an answer that wasn’t even required. None of that shows up on an IQ test. It shows up in what a person learns, builds and notices over a lifetime.
Physicist Richard Feynman tells a story about this in his book Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! As a teenager, he fixed radios for cash around his neighbourhood, including ones other repairmen gave up on. He’d listen to the broken radio, think through what the crackle or silence meant and only then open it up.
He was diagnosing before he was repairing.
You can see the same pattern in Kelly’s own life. He never finished college, yet built a career on reading, experimenting and following questions wherever they led.
Curiosity isn’t something you either have or don’t. It shows up in what you do when you don’t know something. A kid who takes apart a radio wasn’t born knowing how transistors work. He was willing to find out.
Try this
- Follow 1 question.
Pick something you’ve wondered about but never bothered to investigate. Spend 15 minutes finding the answer. Do this once a week. - Ask 1 more question.
Next time someone explains something you don’t fully understand, don’t nod along. Ask 1 more question and see where the answer takes you.
Stop treating “I don’t know” as embarrassing.
Treat it as an invitation to find out.
About the author
In 1979, Kevin Kelly spent a night at the site in Jerusalem traditionally believed to be where Jesus was crucified and walked away with an unusual experiment. He decided to live the next 6 months as if they were his last, giving away nearly everything he owned and trying to treat each day accordingly. When the 6 months ended, he began calling the rest of his life his “bonus round.” He later told the story on the podcast This American Life.
Kelly had already taken an unconventional path before that. He left the University of Rhode Island after 1 year and spent much of the 1970s travelling through Asia with a camera and very little money to live on.
He took roughly 40,000 photographs on that trip, but he couldn’t afford to develop the film as he travelled. So he froze the undeveloped rolls in his mother’s freezer until he could afford to process them, years after he’d actually taken the pictures. Some of those photographs later became his book Asia Grace.
He went on to edit Whole Earth Review through the late 1980s, then co-founded Wired in 1993 and served as its executive editor for 7 years. The magazine won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence twice, in 1994 and 1997, the first time that award had gone to a brand-new publication.
Kelly also wrote several bestselling books, including Out of Control, What Technology Wants and The Inevitable. Keanu Reeves reportedly asked everyone working on The Matrix to read Out of Control before filming started, because its ideas shaped the philosophy behind the movie. Steven Spielberg later brought Kelly in to help think through the future technology in Minority Report.
The quote at the top of this article comes from his book Excellent Advice for Living. Kelly started writing it on his 68th birthday, not as a book for readers but as letters of advice to his own adult children, before it grew into more than 450 short lessons.
Resources
- Excellent Advice for Living (Book)
- How technology evolves (YouTube)
- The hungry mind (Paper)
- New Beginnings (Podcast)
- Cool Tools (Website)
- Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Book)
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