Ask me anything about squirrels. If this prompt leaves you feeling empty, the diagnosis is simple. You are not squirrel curious. What if I told you that squirrels lose a quarter of the food they bury? To other slippery-pawed squirrels who spy on them. And that to deal with this criminal underbelly, upstanding squirrels pretend to bury nuts. It’s called: deceptive caching. What would you want to know next? Does every squirrel have a thieving period or are some just born bad? Does deceptive caching work? How can a squirrel tell they’re being spied on? Squirrel curiosity ignited!
This teaches us an interesting fact about curiosity: you can not be curious about a subject you know nothing about. The birth of American forensics? Pickleball? Squirrels? To ignite your curiosity on any of these subjects, you need an introduction to the subject first. This is why we google weird subjects while watching Netflix. Is Cillian Murphy married? (Sadly, happily so.) This is why we know more about Messi during the World Cup. (Married? Yes, to his childhood sweetheart, sigh.) Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it’s a celebrated virtue. Especially when it comes to ideas and innovation. Because curiosity leads to brilliant questions that lead to breakthrough ideas, there’s not an innovative culture in the world that doesn’t want their people to be more curious. But we’re totally ignorant about how to get there.
What is curiosity?
To know how to foster curiosity, we first need to know exactly what it is. (Brené Brown has done it again and given us a wonderful definition.) Curiosity is the gap between what we know and what we want to know. Put simply, it’s the gap between two states. To foster curiosity, you need to broaden this gap. If we know too little, there is no desire to know more. There is no gap.
The flip side is if we think we know too much, there is no desire to know more. There is no gap.
We’ve already learned that you can’t be curious about something you know nothing about. But we also can’t be curious if we know too much. This is known as the curse of expertise. As our knowledge increases, our confidence increases faster—so we always think we know more than we do. Nassim Taleb elaborates on this beautifully in The Black Swan: “The problem with experts is that they do not know what they do not know. Lack of knowledge and delusion about the quality of your knowledge come together—the same process that makes you know less also makes you more satisfied with your knowledge.”
To ignite curiosity, you need to diagnose which you are suffering from. Too little information to spark curiosity? Or too much confidence to ask new questions? Too little information? Kick-start the process with some new information. Create the gap. Too much confidence? Reboot the process by challenging your assumptions. Create the gap.
The very last tip to supercharge your curiosity…?
…I’ll save that one for next time.
Source: Dare to Lead
Source: The Black Swan