What If I Were Curious?

“Hey Mom and Dad, What if I walked like this?” That was one of a thousand “what if” questions our oldest daughter, Juliana, asked us while she was growing up. She asked that one in a crowded department store and followed the the question with a demonstration of the kind of walk she was talking about. She took several long, lunging steps where her trailing knee almost touched the floor. It looked really silly. How do you answer a question like that?

Our youngest son, Jordan, was also quite the questioner. One particular trip into San Francisco comes to mind. My parents were visiting from Minnesota that week and we decided to take a trip into the city for the day. The whole family had maxed out the minivan for the hour or so drive in. From his car seat in the back, Jordan almost immediately started lobbing questions to all the adults. “Mom, what …?” “Mom, who …?” “Dad, when …” “Grandpa, why …?” The vast majority of the questions went to “Mom.” It became funny at one point and we started keeping score of who was asked more questions. I don’t remember what the score was, but Suzi definitely won!

The Law of Curiosity

Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it made the millionaire. I don’t know if that’s an actual quote from someone else and I don’t know if being a millionaire is your goal, but the fact is that growth is stimulated by curiosity.

Albert Einstein said, “I have no special talent. I’m only passionately curious.”

Walt Disney said, “Curiosity keeps us moving forward, exploring, experimenting, opening new doors.”

Eleanor Roosevelt said, “I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity.”

How does that work? Why did that happen? What if I did this instead? How many other ways could I try to get to that result? Curiosity is the key to ingenuity and creativity. Nothing new was ever attempted or accomplished without curiosity. In the most watched TED talk of all time, Sir Ken Robinson argues that schools kill creativity. I’m not trying to indict our educational system, but I do think we lose when we focus more on finding the right answers than we do on asking the right questions.

How to Cultivate Curiosity

Do you want to know how to be more curious? Are you wondering how to regain that childhood wonder that sparks so many questions? There’s the first key.

The first step in cultivating curiosity is to adopt a beginners mindset. A beginner’s mindset is not at age thing, it’s an attitude thing. Jordan on the way to San Francisco was displaying a beginner’s mindset. A beginner’s mindset cares more about learning than about reputation. A beginner’s mindset is not influenced by set rules or by conventional wisdom. A beginner’s mindset starts with a question, not an answer.

The second step in cultivating curiosity is very practical. It’s to learn something new every day. When was the last time you learned something for the first time? How about today?

The third step is to make failure your friend. Thomas Edison said, “I’ve not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that don’t work. Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” We often learn more from our failures than from our successes.

The fourth step is to stop looking for THE right answer. There are two fallacies to the “one right answer” people. Fallacy number one, there is always more than one solution to a problem. To buy into the only one right answer is to stop the search for more and better ones. Fallacy number two, the “best” answer can always become better. Keep your options open.

Here’s another way to think about it. We’ve all heard the saying, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” right? Most people stop there. Curious people, people who grow, wonder, “If it ain’t broke … how could it be better?” or, “If it ain’t broke … what’s likely to break it in the future?”

What are you curious about?