Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It

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There are two types of curiosity: diversive and epistemic. There are actually three types of curiosity with the third being empathetic, but the author barely gives empathetic curiosity airtime. I never meet anyone with a movie in mind (although in recent years, it’s clear that some people met with me because they thought that maybe I would do a movie about them or their work). The goal for me is to learn something.

Curiosity is risky, but natural selection still favored those ancestors of ours who dared to explore questions such as "What is beyond that forest?" or "What's behind that mountain?" This is a really cool observation.A final devil’s advocate question – whether we’re looking at the cosmos or the Higgs Boson, isn’t curiosity-driven science too much of an expensive distraction from the really valuable, life-changing science? In an encounter like that, we’d categorize the salesperson as either “good” or “bad.” A bad salesperson might aggressively try to sell us something we didn’t want or understand, or would simply show us the TVs for sale, indifferently parroting the list of features on the card mounted beneath each. But the key ingredient in either case is curiosity—about the customer, and about the products.

When I started writing again, I worried I would “run out” of ideas. At first, the ideas came fast — writing after a long break unleashed a torrent of pent-up ideas. I had accumulated years of lived experience to write about. But as I continued, I started worrying my creativity would dry up at some point. The second I finished a piece I was proud of I would think, what if I can’t do that again? I met with Jonas Salk, the scientist and physician who cured polio, a man who was a childhood hero of mine. It took me more than a year to get an audience with him. I wasn’t interested in the scientific method Salk used to figure out how to develop the polio vaccine. I wanted to know what it was like to help millions of people avoid a crippling disease that shadowed the childhoods of everyone when I was growing up. And he worked in a different era. He was renowned, admired, successful—but he received no financial windfall. He cured what was then the worst disease afflicting the world, and he never made a dime from that. Can you imagine that happening today? I wanted to understand the mind-set that turns a cure like that loose in the world.My message was clear: I worked at a real place, I only wanted five minutes on the schedule, I did not want a job. And I was polite. Okay, I might win the medal for bad parenting, but in theory, I think I am aware of how to do it better, and this book is a concise summary of a common sense approach to stimulation of curiosity. I went to see F. Lee Bailey. Bailey was the most famous criminal trial attorney in the country at that point, having been the lawyer for Sam Sheppard and Patty Hearst. I also realized that curiosity had saved my ass that Thursday afternoon. I’ve been curious as long as I can remember. As a boy, I peppered my mother and my grandmother with questions, some of which they could answer, some of which they couldn’t.

Sitting there in his office, I could clearly understand that the movie business was built on ideas—a steady stream of captivating ideas, new ideas every day. And it was suddenly clear to me that curiosity was the way to uncover ideas, it was the way to spark them. I would use these moments to get a sense of them, sometimes to get a bit of career advice. I never asked for a job. I never asked for anything, in fact. The parable could not be blunter: curiosity causes suffering. Indeed, the story’s moral is aimed directly at the audience: whatever your current misery, reader, it was caused by Adam, Eve, the serpent, and their rebellious curiosity.We can argue that curiosity is a trait which leads to a richer, more fulfilling life, but nevertheless, different strokes for different folks; some people are intellectuals, some are brawn, some leaders, some artists- people have innately different approaches to fulfillment and there's a myriad of ways that individuals are inspired to function and serve in society. Not everyone is going to have curiosity at the center of their lives, though we wish they all could share in the fun. I worked myself up the ladder. Talking to one person in the movie business suggested a half dozen more people I could talk to. Each success gave me the confidence to try for the next person. It turned out I really could talk to almost anyone in the business. The Adam and Eve story, she says, is a warning. “?‘You are a serf because God said you should be a serf. I’m a king because God said I should be a king. Don’t ask any questions about that.’ Stories like Adam and Eve,” Benedict says, “reflect the need of cultures and civilizations to maintain the status quo. ‘Things are the way they are because that’s the right way.’ That attitude is popular among rulers and those who control information.” And it has been from the Garden of Eden to the Obama administration. By the time I was a young man, curiosity was part of the way I approached the world every day. My kind of curiosity hasn’t changed much since I eavesdropped on those guys at my apartment complex. It hasn’t actually changed that much since I was an antsy twelve-year-old boy. When I was working just down the hall from him, Calley was forty-four or forty-five years old, at the height of his power, and already a legend—intelligent, eccentric, Machiavellian. Warner Bros. in those days was making a movie a month, 13 and Calley was always thinking a hundred moves ahead. A handful of people loved him, a slightly larger group admired him, and a lot of people feared him.

We were very clearly reminded of that at the beginning of the era of quantum theory, where there were very small inconsistencies between what experiments told us and what theory told us ought to happen. It would have been tempting to disregard that, and say there’s just some little detail wrong, but because scientists at the turn of the century worried away at those little inconsistencies, we opened up a completely new way of understanding the world. I felt that rare sensation of believing that this book was written TO me, as it touched on themes very near and dear to me (i.e.- “daydreaming”). For it to be effective, curiosity has to be harnessed to at least two other key traits. First, the ability to pay attention to the answers to your questions—you have to actually absorb whatever it is you’re being curious about. We all know people who ask really good questions, who seem engaged and energized when they’re talking and asking those questions, but who zone out the moment it’s time for you to answer.

I wanted to understand the distinction between a lawyer’s belief system and what he or she was good at. What was Bailey’s purpose in life, and how did that mesh with his talents? Thorndike himself is quite intolerant of these magicians, and sees what they were saying as crazy and completely unsupportable. But nevertheless this was an early effort to try to be sympathetic to what in previous times had just seemed like pure superstition – the idea that there were magical forces. I called the number and asked for Peter Knecht. An assistant in his office answered, and I said to her, “I’m going to USC law school in the fall, and I’d like to meet with Mr. Knecht about the law clerk job that’s open.” For me, the curiosity conversations are just the most obvious, the most visible example of my own curiosity. They are a kind of discipline, like the exercise routine, because you don’t get to talk to busy, interesting people unless you put steady effort into persuading them to see you.