Curiosity is a liability -- not an asset -- for many adults.
“Good eggs” get hired and promoted, whereas curious people -- the people who ruffle feathers by asking too many questions -- are labeled “distractions” that take the focus away from the task at hand.
This is a tragedy.
Curiosity is the core of all creativity -- the drive to do something better, to experiment, to tinker, to create. Whether you’re a chief marketing officer or the most junior person on a team, you need curiosity to thrive or you’ll go on autopilot. Unfortunately, too many workplaces stifle curiosity because it’s perceived as problem-causing. But as Ben Horowitz says, if you want success, “Build a culture that rewards -- not punishes -- people for getting problems into the open where they can be solved.”
In short, cultivate curiosity.
The Core Of Curiosity
Curiosity is a strong desire to know or learn something, and it’s important for any professional because it’s required to both improve your skills and figure out how to fix things that don’t work. Without curiosity, you get people doing the same things the same way because “that’s how we’ve always done it.”
This is stagnation and it’s dangerous to your business. It means you never improve your products or services, never figure out how to work more efficiently, never explore new opportunities. It means your competitors can jump light years ahead and shut you out entirely.
But with the spark of curiosity, you have people coming together, fueled by creativity and purpose, elevating their work and each other in an atmosphere of inspiration. So how do you promote this type of behavior? It starts with fostering an environment in which curiosity is encouraged, where the value of asking good questions is recognized and identifying problems is praised rather than stifled. And it starts with you.
Five Tips For Staying Curious
If you’ve been feeling uninspired lately, jumpstart your curiosity with these five tips.
1. Read.
Read about people who do what you do, whether it’s art, business or whatever. Find out how they became great at what they do and how they continue to stay at the top of their game. See what you can learn from them. The best part of this is that you can accumulate their wisdom without experiencing their failure. (And even their failures are their own lessons sometimes.)
2. Slow down and take your time.
I have the tendency to work quickly and break things. This is great in some scenarios but horrible in others. In the last year or so, I’ve started to schedule blocks of time to simply think about solutions. I don’t always write “thinking time” on my calendar, but the intention is to preserve some of my creative energy and use my curiosity to look at problems from new angles and mentally play out multiple potential solutions.
While this kind of thinking may be easier for some people than it is for others, this is something we should all aspire to make time for. We live in a very interesting time, with multiple distractions and commonplace instant gratification. Spending time doing nothing but thinking is important, especially when it comes to creative problem-solving. You don’t want to always default to your first idea or immediate reaction when a new problem slides across your desk.
3. Practice asking “why?” and other good questions.
Although the source is unknown, someone once said, “Knowledge is having the right answer. Intelligence is asking the right question.”
Make a habit of understanding why you’re doing something before you do it and ensure your boss and team do the same. Always practice asking people clarifying questions. One of the beautiful and challenging things about language is that our words often have multiple meanings.
Make it a regular practice to ask clarifying questions if you ever have the slightest inkling that you and someone you’re communicating with aren’t seeing eye to eye, for whatever reason. I do this with my business partners and people I work closely with all the time. It’s really amazing how often our collaboration improves after we spend a bit of time digging into what someone truly means when they say something.
4. Practice saying less.
According to Epictetus, “We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.”
Whether it’s in work meetings, on phone calls or just in your interactions with others, do yourself a favor and prioritize listening to other perspectives instead of sharing your own. This will create new ways of looking at and thinking about things. Not only will this give you a new perspective but it should lead to additional questions that you will want to seek answers to.
5. Hang out with a child.
Our son just hit the one-year mark, and he’s now walking around, getting into every cupboard and closet and generally making a mess pretty much all day, every day. And when he’s not making a mess, he’s staring and pointing at everything from pictures of our dog to planes flying overhead, watching our every move to try to learn from us.
There’s probably nothing more refreshing to me personally than just watching a child do his or her own thing, then reflecting on the fact that we were all that curious before we became jaded and cynical adults.
It’s a reminder that we have a choice: choose to be curious or to not be curious. The more you foster your own curiosity, the more you can demonstrate it and encourage it in the people around you.
In the words of Albert Einstein, “The important thing is not to stop questioning … Never lose a holy curiosity.”
