Chapter One

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Curiosity

Welcome to Earth

In what can only be described as a miracle (given the odds), you were born! Do you realize what has to happen for you to be born and the chances you came out as you? The odds of you being born as you may be as much as 1 in 400 trillion.4 Welcome to Earth!

You were born with no cape, no lasso of truth, not even a heart-shaped herb from Wakanda. While you were pretty much naked, you did have one thing going for you: you were born wildly curious. From the moment you showed up, there you were, studying shapes, sounds, movements, colors, and textures. You explored both verbal and nonverbal language. You approached the world constantly testing a hypothesis that your little brain had concocted—“I can eat this block. I can ride this dog. I can touch this paint.” You were the head of Research and Development for You, Inc.

Theorists and empiricists have worked hard to understand childhood curiosity and have come up with a variety of ways to define it. Studies in the field use terms like incongruity theory, ambiguity aversion, effectance motivation, and ocular lust, to name a few.

Susan Engel, author of The Hungry Mind and a leading international authority on curiosity in children, says it best, “I would suggest that curiosity is simply the urge to know more.”5

As an infant, your curiosity superpower is, well, in its infancy. You have not reached your full superpower as an infant because your language skills are of little help in your pursuit of knowledge. You’re simply Tony Stark or Bruce Wayne before they suit up.

It is when we become toddlers and are able to ask questions that our curiosity superpower reaches its zenith. It is questions, and how we structure and deliver them, that demonstrate true curiosity.

In 2007, researchers logging questions asked by children aged fourteen months to five years found they asked an average of 107 questions an hour. One child asked three questions a minute at his peak. That’s Hulk-level curiosity.6

In their free exploration, children can pose delightful questions:

• If I have two eyes, how come I can only see one thing at a time?
• How did the first people make tools when there were no tools?
• Why don’t spiders get stuck in their own webs?
• What if bees could talk?

Children are not inhibited by adult mental and emotional baggage (feeling shame, fearing embarrassment, feigning confidence). Children are not told nonsense like, “Fake it ’til you make it” or “Hold your questions until the end.” If they are raised in a healthy environment, their curiosity and questions are rewarded. However, almost imperceptibly, their curiosity superpower is under attack.

Thomas Szasz, a Hungarian-American academic, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst, makes it clear: “Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one’s self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily.”7

Curiosity’s Kryptonite

The attack on curiosity is not a direct blow. It’s a combination of the stories we tell, the emphasis society places on knowing, and the impact of technology—and, of course, we can always blame our parents.

Many of us are familiar with the story from Genesis of Adam and Eve and their fall from grace. God created paradise but with one critical catch: “Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” (Gen. 2:16–17 New King James Version). As we know, the serpent argues with Eve that God is withholding something of value. Both Eve and Adam end up partaking of the fruit.

One obvious villain in this piece is the serpent. Biblical scholars tell us the story is about obedience to the Lord and the consequences of defiance. Other scholars make humanity’s “greed” the culprit: we were in paradise yet went after the one thing we could not have. I would argue the unseen villain is curiosity: “When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it.” (Gen. 3:6 New International Version).

There are many lessons from the Adam and Eve story, but it is hard to see how one of them cannot be that curiosity and wis­dom are devilish pursuits. Saint Augustine himself said that “God fashioned hell for the inquisitive.”

A familiar saying goes that “curiosity killed the cat.” And sadly, the injunction against curiosity builds from there, particularly for pre-K girls. Time and again, like Sleeping Beauty or Goldilocks, a young girl’s curiosity places her in peril. Then at age five, kids are swept off to school to get an education, where they learn that being well-behaved is more prized than being Dora the Explorer. The clear lesson is “mind your own business; keep your head down.”

Educators’ preference for well-behaved students is understandable: they consider it necessary to the environment for learning. Couple this with lesson plans directed toward a clearly defined, often-narrow end point, and you have a country of classrooms that discourage off-topic curiosity.

In The Hungry Mind, Engel and her research team discovered that questioning drops like a stone once children start school. They found that the youngest children in an American suburban elementary school asked only between two and five questions in a two-hour period. Worse, as they grew older, the children gave up asking questions altogether. There were two-hour stretches in fifth grade (year six) in which ten- and eleven-year-olds asked their teacher not a single question.8

Learning, therefore, is not defined as an adventure; it’s not even a search. It’s a finite game: learn this, now go learn that, and don’t ask anything along the way, just take in what you’re told. Learning devolves to a means serving an end. The end is grades; the means are the “right” answers.

Society rewards this emphasis on knowing. We are told that knowledge is power. Expressions such as, “Don’t ask a question if you don’t know the answer” pass for wisdom.

Meanwhile, back inside the home, two sources of kryptonite are hidden in plain sight. Parents tend not to question in service of curiosity but rather to get the behavior they want. All over the world, parents offer questions like:

• Are you sure you want to hang out with those kids?
• Don’t you think you should be doing your homework?
• Have you considered wearing a jacket?

Statements hidden in questions teach that questions are about getting the answers we want. Questions aren’t used in service of curiosity but rather for thinly veiled advocacy and manipulation. (We also get to pick up a little about passive-aggressive behavior, but that’s for another book.)

Also, paradoxically, technology curses curiosity. On its face, it would appear technology is a boon to inquiry. It offers access to so much available information with relatively little effort. To paraphrase a famous children’s book, “Oh, the keys we can click and the things we will learn!” Not so fast.

First, we have outsourced our curiosity to search engines. Search engines are extremely forgiving of poorly asked questions. A couple of words loosely thrown together can deliver us the answer we seek. What’s the problem? This gradually weakens our ability to ask good questions, which are curiosity’s muscles.

Thanks to technology, we also begin to think we are smarter than we are because once we find information, we tell ourselves, “I knew that.” Believing we know stuff that we, in fact, do not know depresses curiosity.

Finally, technology thrives on identifying and then marketing, or, more accurately, pandering, to our existing beliefs. One tragedy of the adult human condition is that we would rather form an opinion and then reinforce it than consider other views and—“Holy cow, Batman!”—perhaps change our own perspective.

Incurious in a VUCA World

We are now adults in the working world—a highly volatile, uncertain, complex, challenging, and ambiguous one in which the future belongs to the learners. Just when we need our five-year-old childlike curiosity the most, its heart is barely beating.

If we get a job that requires us to influence others (sales, consulting, or any influence role), we might become only quasi-curious because our curiosity about the other person is limited to achieving our goals. Everything is tied to driving an outcome, so we reduce our questions to a series of transactions instead of building true understanding. Remember, our education makes curiosity a means to an end.

We are told to be really good at something. A common saying warns against being “a jack of all trades, master of none.” The implication is that a range of knowledge is of little value. Spe­cial­ized expertise, we are told, should be our goal. But is this true for the majority of us?

In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell suggests the 10,000-hour rule: practice something for 10,000 hours, become...