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| Seek and you will find: why curiosity is key to personal and national success | Seek and you will find: why curiosity is key to personal and national success |
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| A user of the popular question-and-answer website Quora recently asked how to become a billionaire. The question received a fascinating answer from an authoritative source: Justine Musk, former wife of Elon Musk, the serial entrepreneur, inventor, engineer – and billionaire. Ms Musk advised the questioner to stop thinking about money and instead to get “deeply, intensely curious” about the world. | A user of the popular question-and-answer website Quora recently asked how to become a billionaire. The question received a fascinating answer from an authoritative source: Justine Musk, former wife of Elon Musk, the serial entrepreneur, inventor, engineer – and billionaire. Ms Musk advised the questioner to stop thinking about money and instead to get “deeply, intensely curious” about the world. |
| Perhaps she was on to something: the incurious face a dim future. Wages for routine, intellectually undemanding work are falling as software takes more and more tasks away from humans. Even in professions such as accountancy and law, there are fewer jobs available to those who prefer to think only along straight lines. | Perhaps she was on to something: the incurious face a dim future. Wages for routine, intellectually undemanding work are falling as software takes more and more tasks away from humans. Even in professions such as accountancy and law, there are fewer jobs available to those who prefer to think only along straight lines. |
| At the same time, across the developed world, an increasing share of income is going to those with advanced educations. The most reliable predictor of educational achievement is, according to the psychologist Sophie von Stumm, of Goldsmiths, University of London, “a hungry mind”. | At the same time, across the developed world, an increasing share of income is going to those with advanced educations. The most reliable predictor of educational achievement is, according to the psychologist Sophie von Stumm, of Goldsmiths, University of London, “a hungry mind”. |
| Twenty-first-century economies are rewarding those with an unquenchable desire to learn, question and solve – and punishing those who don’t. It’s no longer enough to be competent or smart: computers are both, but no computer can yet be said to be curious. Today, it’s not just what you know that counts – it’s how much you want to know. | |
| Curiosity is a wellspring of innovation. Only last month, George Osborne defined productivity as the key long-term problem for the UK economy. Although the British are talented spenders, we’re just not making enough things people want to buy. Britain needs to nurture the kind of world-beating businesses that America is so good at generating. Even the Labour party’s leadership candidates have been discussing how to encourage the next Steve Jobs. | Curiosity is a wellspring of innovation. Only last month, George Osborne defined productivity as the key long-term problem for the UK economy. Although the British are talented spenders, we’re just not making enough things people want to buy. Britain needs to nurture the kind of world-beating businesses that America is so good at generating. Even the Labour party’s leadership candidates have been discussing how to encourage the next Steve Jobs. |
| But how to do so? We often discuss entrepreneurs and inventors as men, or women, of action. But the most successful ones tend to be intellectually voracious, too, even if the information they gather isn’t necessarily found in academic textbooks. Jobs was a merely competent technician. What made him exceptional, other than his will to succeed, was his curiosity. He was interested in everything: the Bauhaus design movement, eastern philosophy, the history of technology. He put all this into the creation of Apple. A tutor recalled his “very inquiring mind… he refused to accept automatically received truths and he wanted to examine everything himself”. | But how to do so? We often discuss entrepreneurs and inventors as men, or women, of action. But the most successful ones tend to be intellectually voracious, too, even if the information they gather isn’t necessarily found in academic textbooks. Jobs was a merely competent technician. What made him exceptional, other than his will to succeed, was his curiosity. He was interested in everything: the Bauhaus design movement, eastern philosophy, the history of technology. He put all this into the creation of Apple. A tutor recalled his “very inquiring mind… he refused to accept automatically received truths and he wanted to examine everything himself”. |
| Jobs’s curiosity paid off in unexpected ways. At university, he took a course in calligraphy for no other reason than that it interested him. This prompted him to pay close attention to the fonts used on the first Macs, which in turn ensured the presence of classical fonts on every home computer made since. | Jobs’s curiosity paid off in unexpected ways. At university, he took a course in calligraphy for no other reason than that it interested him. This prompted him to pay close attention to the fonts used on the first Macs, which in turn ensured the presence of classical fonts on every home computer made since. |
| When Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, was a child, his mother discovered him trying to take his crib apart with a screwdriver. As a teenager, he started a summer camp for intellectually inquisitive children called the Dream Institute, at which children read great novels, studied black holes and wrote computer programs. | When Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, was a child, his mother discovered him trying to take his crib apart with a screwdriver. As a teenager, he started a summer camp for intellectually inquisitive children called the Dream Institute, at which children read great novels, studied black holes and wrote computer programs. |
| Musk, Jobs, and Bezos are exceptional examples of the power of curiosity. But the same principle applies to everyone. Greater rewards are going to the intellectually curious as industries become more complex, competitive and knowledge-intensive. Take football. Top managers are no longer there just to pick the team or give a rousing half-time talk. They are required to be polymaths, fluent in tactics, business, physiotherapy and psychology. Asked why so many of today’s most successful managers had playing careers that were truncated through injury or simply because they weren’t good enough, José Mourinho, himself an example, replied: “More time to study.” | Musk, Jobs, and Bezos are exceptional examples of the power of curiosity. But the same principle applies to everyone. Greater rewards are going to the intellectually curious as industries become more complex, competitive and knowledge-intensive. Take football. Top managers are no longer there just to pick the team or give a rousing half-time talk. They are required to be polymaths, fluent in tactics, business, physiotherapy and psychology. Asked why so many of today’s most successful managers had playing careers that were truncated through injury or simply because they weren’t good enough, José Mourinho, himself an example, replied: “More time to study.” |
| What’s true of football is even more true of industries that already relied on brains. The trend towards greater complexity is evident in advertising, law, finance and technology. Employers are looking for people with a fierce drive to understand and a storehouse of knowledge that spans many disciplines and topics. The old question – is it better to be a specialist or a generalist? – now has a definitive answer: both. Curious people are self-starters. Psychologists measure curiosity using a scale called Need for Cognition (NFC). If you’re low in NFC, you avoid mental effort when you can, relying on learned routines and habits to get you through the day. If you’re high in NFC you’re more likely to read books, enjoy crossword puzzles and read articles like this one. You get a kick out of thinking. | What’s true of football is even more true of industries that already relied on brains. The trend towards greater complexity is evident in advertising, law, finance and technology. Employers are looking for people with a fierce drive to understand and a storehouse of knowledge that spans many disciplines and topics. The old question – is it better to be a specialist or a generalist? – now has a definitive answer: both. Curious people are self-starters. Psychologists measure curiosity using a scale called Need for Cognition (NFC). If you’re low in NFC, you avoid mental effort when you can, relying on learned routines and habits to get you through the day. If you’re high in NFC you’re more likely to read books, enjoy crossword puzzles and read articles like this one. You get a kick out of thinking. |
| Curious people are good at solving difficult problems for their employers because they’re really solving them for themselves. However, despite its rising value, we are not very good at cultivating curiosity. Our education systems are increasingly focused on preparing students for specific jobs. To teach someone to be an engineer or a lawyer, however, is not the same as teaching them to be a curious learner. So we find ourselves stuck in a self-defeating cycle. We ask schools to focus on preparing students for the world of work, rather than on inspiring them, and we end up with uninspired students and mediocre professionals. At the same time, many companies value efficiency so highly that they forget to allow their employees to explore new ideas and ways of working, of the kind that might just lead to profitable breakthroughs. The internet has a paradoxical effect. On the one hand, it’s the most powerful tool for intellectual curiosity ever invented. On the other, it provides a stream of easy answers that can degrade our ability to ask meaningful questions. Those who use it to gather knowledge and explore questions in depth will thrive. Those who substitute it for a genuine spirit of inquiry will not and neither will those who spend so much time playing games or looking at pictures of kittens that they forget to read books (in a reversal of the cliche, it may be that cats are killing curiosity). | |
| As societies and as individuals, we urgently need to recognise the value of intellectual curiosity. But we are in danger of creating a curiosity divide that feeds into our existing social and economic inequalities; as the writer Kevin Drum put it: “The internet is making smart people smarter and dumb people dumber.” It would be a tragedy if intellectual curiosity were to become the preserve of an ever-narrowing cognitive elite. This isn’t just a problem for an economy – it’s a problem for our souls. The true beauty of learning stuff, even apparently useless stuff, is that it reminds us that we are part of a project that is far greater than ourselves, one that has been under way for as long as humans have been sharing knowledge. And if we stop asking good questions we’re merely accepting someone else’s answers. As Vladimir Nabokov said: “Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.” | As societies and as individuals, we urgently need to recognise the value of intellectual curiosity. But we are in danger of creating a curiosity divide that feeds into our existing social and economic inequalities; as the writer Kevin Drum put it: “The internet is making smart people smarter and dumb people dumber.” It would be a tragedy if intellectual curiosity were to become the preserve of an ever-narrowing cognitive elite. This isn’t just a problem for an economy – it’s a problem for our souls. The true beauty of learning stuff, even apparently useless stuff, is that it reminds us that we are part of a project that is far greater than ourselves, one that has been under way for as long as humans have been sharing knowledge. And if we stop asking good questions we’re merely accepting someone else’s answers. As Vladimir Nabokov said: “Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.” |
| Ian Leslie is the author of Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It | Ian Leslie is the author of Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It |
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