Curiosity
The fascinating thing about curiosity is that it’s a dynamic emotion that begins in a position of ignorance, but isn’t content with a lack of knowledge. Curiosity is the hunger to see what hasn’t been seen, to know what has been unknown.
Feeling curious means being willing to try to understand what’s happening in unfamiliar places with people who have other perspectives.
The threshold of curiosity is what’s sufficient to move us into action, to get to work, to struggle, to suffer enough to satisfy the of interest that has been awakened within us.
Full Transcript
Jonathan Cook: Welcome to Stories of Emotional Granularity, a podcast about the experience of emotion, told from the human perspective. My name is Jonathan Cook. I’m an independent research consultant who specializes in listening to the ways that people talk about their feelings. That’s not the only way to study emotion, but I think it’s an important approach. There’s a great deal to say about the power of listening to people, and you’ll hear themes of that later in this episode, and throughout the many upcoming episodes of this podcast.
Is it too much for me to ask you to have patience? Sometimes, just by conspicuously delaying the revelation of a piece of information, we can provoke the emotion that’s the subject of the podcast this week. This episode focuses on the emotion of curiosity.
You may wonder at me describing curiosity as an emotion. After all, curiosity is associated with the pursuit of knowledge. It’s a characteristic of intellectual people who are practiced in the application of rational thought.
Rationality, however, is distinct from curiosity. Rationality is a set of cognitive tools, but curiosity is the emotion that motivates the application of rationality. We don’t solve problems just when it’s practical to do so. We also solve problems when our curiosity is aroused. Most people have an innate interest in unusual ideas or puzzling circumstances. The drive to learn more about such things is the emotion of curiosity.
The fascinating thing about curiosity is that it’s a dynamic emotion that begins in a position of ignorance, but isn’t content with a lack of knowledge. Curiosity is the hunger to see what hasn’t been seen, to know what has been unknown.
In order to understand more about some of the ways that curiosity works in our favor, I want to introduce you to Dr. Michelle Maidenberg. Dr. Maidenberg is a psychotherapist, but she’s much more than just that.
Michelle Maidenberg: I'm a private practitioner in Harrison, New York, which is part of Westchester County. I do CBT, which is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, which is ACT, which is a more mindfulness-based CBT. I also do something called EMDR, which is Eye Movements Desensitization Reprocessing. It's typically known for trauma, but I use it for all different kinds of things, stuckness and all different kinds of things. Then I use a lot of mindfulness and polyvagal theory in my practice too. It really depends on the person I'm working with, you know, what type of treatment that I specifically use. I also have a nonprofit which is called Thru My Eyes, and it offers free, clinically-guided videotaping for chronically medically ill individuals who want to leave a video legacy for their children and loved ones. I do that as well, and then I teach a graduate course at NYU, a mindfulness-based graduate course. I also have authored two books. The first book is Free Your Child from Overeating, and it's 53 Mind Body Strategies for Lifelong Health. Then my most recent book, which was just published, is called Ace Your Life: Unleash Your Best Self and Live the Life You Want.
Jonathan Cook: As you can hear, Dr. Maidenberg has achieved quite a bit. You haven’t heard all of her accomplishments, either.
Michelle Maidenberg: I have a blog on Psychology Today. I write articles on a variety of different topics, from self-help to mindfulness to parenting to advocacy work that I do. I mean, it really runs the gamut. Just this past week, for example, I wrote an article on youth suicidality and fentanyl poisoning because I just had just so many clients reaching out, both that are directly affected and indirectly affected by these, you know, particular challenges. Then I have a YouTube channel where I offer weekly free guided meditations.
Jonathan Cook: As I listen to Dr. Maidenberg, I find myself wondering where she finds the energy to do it all. It’s not a simple matter of physics, with calories and oxygen fueling her mind to a high capacity. She exhibits a kind of resolve, an emotional drive that moves her work forward.
It would be an unfair simplification to attribute Dr. Maidenberg’s success to any single motivation. However, curiosity is clearly one factor that contributes to her professional activity. As luck would have it, curiosity is also one of the subjects of Dr. Maidenberg’s work.
Michelle Maidenberg: A lot of the premise of my book is around curiosity. I think that if we lived perpetually in a state of curiosity, our interactions with others would be substantially different. We'd ask a lot of questions rather than assuming and judging. So, I really love to embody curiosity. I think it's like a wonderful way to live in general. I always talk about that, like when people have judgments, you know, to really say, “Hmm, yeah, that's one way of looking at it. But, you know, how else can I see this?” Ask yourself that question, or if you're having, you know, a thought or feeling about something or somebody else, is to really be curious about it and curiosity leads to reflection. It leads to acknowledgment, it leads to reflection. It leads to, eventually, compassion, you know, really being self-compassionate and then hopefully empowering yourself to take action on behalf of your dignity and integrity.
I'm a big fan of curiosity. If you see somebody behaving in a certain way, right, our first prompt is to judge them and or negatively evaluate them. So, I always say, you know, ask a question like, “What prompted you to react that way?” or “Where was that coming from for you?” or “Why do you think you feel that way or whatever it is?” Because it really gets to a deeper space with somebody. You know, when you pose questions and it's trying to understand them at their core. You know who they are, what they're all about, what's meaningful to them. And those things are so critical because human beings are just fascinating. You know, and when you take things on the surface, you miss out on such deep connection.
Jonathan Cook: The drive of curiosity isn’t just a matter of data collection. It’s an appetite for meaning. When we’re feeling curious, we want to know about our place in the larger scheme of things. In this sense, curiosity is connected to our hunger for human connection. We can form better relationships with other people when we are willing to consider how things seem from their points of view. When we come to see the way other people feel, we also get a lay of the land for ourselves.
Dr. Maidenberg contrasts curiosity with the impulse to pass judgments. Judgment finds clarity from the available facts, but does so in a way that distances us from the people around us.
Michelle Maidenberg: Like my daughter, for example, she's fourteen, right? She said something to me that I felt was, you know, sort of not exactly respectful. And she's generally a very respectful kid, like most of the time, like, you know, I would say majority of the time. So, you know, my first gut reaction was like, oh, my goodness, how did you say that, and, you know, to like obviously punish her or whatever the case was.
Then I took a step back and I said, hmm, like, where did that come from? You know, what was that for her and why did that come up and, you know, what's going on for her. Of course, I corrected the behavior and expressed how I felt about the behavior, which was fine. But then, I really took a moment and I said, “I think that this is something we need to talk about. Do you feel like this is a good time? Could you be open and curious and flexible like right now?” And she said, “No.” You know, she was kind of frustrated and whatever. So, I said, “Well, okay, that's fine. But, I really want to be curious about this. I really want to understand what you were thinking or why you felt that way. I'm open to hearing anything that you have to express.”
You know, we did kind of circle back to each other and wow, I heard things that I completely missed the mark and I didn't know was going on going through her mind. If I didn't ask the question and I wasn't curious about it, I never would have gotten to that level, that kind of deep level of understanding of her needs and her thoughts if I didn’t have that followup conversation with her.
I was thinking, why did this affect my nervous system in the way that it did? Like, what is happening? My heart rate is speeding up. I'm feeling tense. Like, I feel like this sense of like, you know, anger and rage in my body, you know? And then I had to take a step back and I had to say, “What is going on for me? Like, why? Why is my shield up?” Add then I realized, “Oh. You know what it is? I’m feeling rejected right now.”
I was feeling rejected, which made me sad and disappointed and angry and frustrated. Right. And then I automatically went to a protective space, which was very fear. Right. Oh, my goodness. My daughter doesn't respect me. Oh, my goodness. She's going to do this again or whatever it was. I need to make sure that I correct this so that it doesn't happen again or that I'm not a good parent, you know, whatever goes through our minds. And then when I was able to recognize that all those fears were coming up, based on the rejection I felt, then I was able to attune to her so that I could have a connection with her. Guess what? It's a lot more likely that she doesn't repeat the behavior if I attune to her than if I misunderstand her.
Jonathan Cook: Dr. Maidenberg has had professional training, and yet, her initial judgments still often miss the mark. That’s no special failing of hers. Human beings are complex, and difficult to understand. Often, we even struggle to understand ourselves. That can feel unsettling, especially when our relationships seem to be crumbling.
It’s striking to me that in Dr. Maidenberg’s curious moment with her daughter, the two of them were equals. There’s something within the feeling of curiosity that asks us to put our education, our accomplishments, our status, and our skills aside, and to be present to what the moment can teach. There’s no such thing as arrogant curiosity. A curious person is not like Sherlock Holmes, eager to show off the clever ability to be one step ahead of everybody else.
There is a courage within curiosity. It’s a courage to resist the temptation to commit to the easy judgments we make about other people when we’re feeling hurt or frightened. The courage of curiosity is to avoid immediately retreating into the safe and familiar haunts and habits, and instead attempt to learn something new about the world, about other people, about ourselves.
Curiosity has the power to provoke dramatic changes of perspective. Such was the case with Dr. Melissa Green.
Melissa Green: I am a clinical psychologist. I've been working in the mental health field for 25 years. This year is my 25th year, which seems unbelievable. I've worked in various subfields of psychology, so I started out as a school psychologist doing testing for special education, consideration for children who were having difficulties in the classroom. And I did that for about eight years in different places. And then I went to work with the military. So, I did a lot of combat trauma therapy. I worked on a military installation for about five years. And after that, I went into forensics. I worked in a psychiatric hospital, and my primary role was doing competency to stand trial evaluations for people who have been arrested and charged with a crime but were deemed mentally incompetent to proceed with through the legal system so they would come to the hospital for treatment, and then I would evaluate them afterwards and often testified to their competency in courts. But more recently, I've been focusing my work on brain health, healthy aging, dementia, caregiver support.
Jonathan Cook: Sometimes, emotion is defined metaphorically as an impetus to motion, a psychological drive that shifts people from abstract thinking into action. In Dr. Green’s case, the emotion of curiosity has literally has moved her all around the world, from the small town in Georgia where she grew up to the nation’s capital, to England, to Hawaii, and beyond.
Melissa Green: There's a sub-area of psychology called positive psychology that really focuses on helping people to flourish and bloom and become more engaged in life, not just how psychology traditionally has focused on psychopathology and, you know, dealing with problems and getting people back to their baseline. But it's focusing on helping people to go beyond their baseline. The research talks about identifying what they call character strengths. And my top character strength is curiosity. So that's what resonated with me when I when I saw that. And there's an assessment that you can do online that will help you identify. So, there are twenty-four character strengths and you can take this assessment and it will it will rank them, and there's a brief one that I think that would be your top five. But the first time I took this quiz maybe was 2017. And since then, curiosity has been in my top five, and I did it again back in November, and it was the top it was my top strength. And so in positive psychology, they say that you really should use those character strengths to build on your relationships, just to have more meaningful relationships and encounters with people to build on your career.
I'm from a small town in Georgia, and I went to college in Washington, D.C. I'd never been there before and only, you know, read things about it. And I just knew that that's where I needed to go. I had a cousin who was there who was a couple of years older than me, and my circle, my family, I should say, was not really the type of family that ventured out much beyond our community from a small town. So that I think that was the first time that my curiosity was piqued and I felt like I really had to just go and explore.
It gave me that confidence to be able to continue to just go out and explore the world, which is something that I kind of had the desire to, but it wasn't fed from my family.
When I was in college, my brother was, I have a lot of older siblings and my brother was in the Air Force and he was he was stationed in in England while I was in college. He invited me to come stay there over the summer after my sophomore year. So, me, never leaving the country before knowing I was going to have to fly there by myself. I was like, Yeah, sign me up. So, I did it. I spent 14 weeks, I believe, in England with my brother and his wife and their kids. And again, it opened my world up to new experiences, new people, and I've just been curious since then.
I've had these experiences that have been or these opportunities, rather, that have been presented to me, and usually when that happens, I just feel compelled to respond or to act on it. And I'm not I wouldn't even describe myself as an impulsive person. I'm very detail oriented. So, even though I said yes to these things, I really thought about the pros and cons and any issues that might come up.
Jonathan Cook: Curiosity feeds on itself. Dr. Green’s curiosity began with places, but as she began to move through the world, she became curious about the people and cultures she encountered through her travels.
Melissa Green: I'm very curious about different cultures and I feel like as a psychologist, in order to be a good psychologist, you have to be able to suspend your judgment. I mean, we all judge to some degree when you're working with someone. The more that you know about different people's experiences, different cultures, people from different geographic location, the easier it is for you to have empathy and compassion for the person and really try to understand things from their perspective, even if you don't agree, because you don't have to agree. But it is my job to try to understand how people have come to the place that they are from their perspective as much as I can. I think traveling and living in different places forces you to be more flexible in your thinking and more flexible in your approach to life.
Jonathan Cook: Dr. Green’s curiosity encouraged her to cultivate empathy with different kinds of people. Feeling curious means being willing to try to understand what’s happening in unfamiliar places with people who have other perspectives. Inherent in curiosity is a willingness to entertain the idea that there are other ways to experience the world than the habits of one’s own community of origin.
Adam Baruh shows us another aspect of the power of curiosity. Like Dr. Maidenberg, Adam is a professional with a good deal of expertise. He isn’t a psychologist, though. He’s a specialist in providing NetSuite solutions.
Adam Baruh: I'm Adam Baruh. I'm kind of a serial entrepreneur. For the last six years, I've been running a consulting agency called SuiteCentric, which is a NetSuite solution provider and implementer. My career over the last seventeen years has really been kind of focused around the NetSuite platform. Then in 2021, kind of following a very kind of personal self-awareness, discovery kind of that was dealing with a lot of anxiety and some mental health issues, and just running my company and the stress and anxiety behind that, I kind of had a journey of self-discovery and got into, out of that kind of manifested a podcast that I started hosting called The Change, which is about servant leadership and mental health in business.
Jonathan Cook: I’ve got to be honest with you about this: I have no idea what a NetSuite solution is. I don’t even know what a NetSuite problem is. Adam does, though, and he’s managed to put together a career dealing with these sorts of things. He’s an intelligent guy.
That doesn’t mean that Adam doesn’t have problems. He’s a human being, leading a complex life, and straightforward professional functioning hasn’t been enough. We’ll meet Adam again in other episodes, and learn more about his specific struggles then. For now, it’s enough to say that Adam has struggled with anxiety and other mental health issues. For a long while, he worked to get things done by pushing his feelings off to the side. In recent years, however, Adam has taken a different approach, choosing to examine his negative experiences to see what they might have to teach him. Adam has learned to be curious about himself.
Adam Baruh: I'm more just now curious. I have a curiosity that I don't think was there before, to say, "Huh, that's interesting." This is really interesting that I'm going through this. What's the lesson there? How? Why did these kind of somewhat crappy experiences keep looping in my life? Well, it's probably because I haven't learned the lesson yet. So, let's find out what the lesson is, and hopefully now kind of get ahead of this with at least a perspective of like, all right, thank you for the lesson, as crappy as it was, but I'm now here to be the student and learn and share and help others through what I'm learning.
Jonathan Cook: To a person focused on efficiency and productivity, Adam’s introspection might seem like a waste of time and a drag on his business. All the spreadsheets and calendars and project management apps in the world, however, can’t keep a person on task when they’re feeling miserable. So, Adam took the time to ask himself why he was so miserable. It took a lot of effort and time, but considering his own problems with a curious mindset, Adam discovered some ways to deal with his emotional barriers, and has learned more about how to manage himself in a sustainable, healthy way. In the end, he brings a better version of himself to his business because of the effort.
People aren’t simple machines that only need energy and routine maintenance to keep functioning. We are organisms with strange and subtle minds, and we rarely arrive at a destination by the shortest possible route. We are distractable, in part because our curiosity draws us to pay attention to subjects even when we don’t know exactly how we’re going to use what we learn. Adam’s career path illustrates this curious approach to life.
Adam Baruh: I learned a lot of great skills in the National Park Service job that I had, which was the absolute best job I've ever had, because I was studying geographic information systems at San Francisco State in my degree program. Then, I was able to apply that in my role as a biological science technician with the Park Service doing maps. I worked in this office where the people that I worked with were removing all this non-native plant vegetation in the Marin headlands. It was all about restoring habitat for the endangered California monarch butterfly. So ultimately, you know, I brought that GIS skill set that I was learning in college into this job. Then doing all these computer related skills and database type of stuff, which literally I attribute to the work I'm doing today in ecommerce and in my NetSuite work and in software development in general. It was going back to that experience in the National Park Service, getting my feet wet with learning databases and geography and how geographic information related to data and stuff like that. So, it all lines up.
Jonathan Cook: Looking back, Adam can say that his career all lines up, but if a person had to design a professional path to becoming a consultant in ecommerce, it’s unlikely they would take a job with the National Park Service contributing to efforts to remove non-native invasive species along the California coast. Adam’s goal at the time wasn’t to work with geographic information databases, but he was curious, and interested in learning new skills. Curiosity often yields indirect rewards in this way. Because a curious mind is a flexible mind, open to unexpected discoveries, curiosity often leads people in the direction of solutions to problems they had not even considered.
I learned about another unconventional career path in conversation with Kristen Donnelly, who studied anthropology and sociology, and began her professional life as a social worker, but now leads a network of family-owned companies.
Kristen Donnelly: My name is Kristen, and I live outside of Philadelphia with my husband and our piles of books and lots of video game consoles. The animating feature of my life is to help people understand themselves and others better, to learn to ask more questions, to make less assumptions, which I firmly believe based on personal experience, academic research and gut reactions will lead to a more cohesive society. I make my living through being a second-generation business co-owner. My brother and I took over our father's network of companies that he built, and we took it over a couple of years ago. The mission statement of my family is to impact lives and create holistic wealth. I do that through a division of the company called Abbey Research, where we train and provide resources around helping people ask more questions and make less assumptions in within their organizations.
Jonathan Cook: Kristen could choose to concentrate on the narrow, specific management tasks that are required for her to run her family’s network of businesses. If she took that approach, however, Kristen might have a difficult time adapting to unforeseen challenges. Instead, she chooses the path of open curiosity, surrounding herself with piles of books, learning how to ask more questions.
Kristen Donnelly: I don't think I have an operational definition of curiosity. We probably should get one. In my mind, it's just asking: What if?
I still see myself fundamentally as a social worker, and what social work taught me is that there's always questions behind the answers. Being then a researcher, I have two other research degrees in anthropology and sociology, and they taught me that the best questions are the smallest ones that lead to more questions. So, research projects can't be like giant, amorphous, like, I want to study everything. The best research questions are what will this society of people look like from this date to this date, and then that leads to, okay, why did this person do this, and why did this person do this?
Essentially, academia is formalized curiosity. Curiosity is the driving force of everything, and good business. Honestly, it's the thing that not enough people talk about in corporations and business. Curiosity is the driving force. So, if you cultivate your curiosity about people, you will automatically ask better questions.
Looking at the numbers and saying, “Man, there's a real dip with this customer. Do we know why,” that's curiosity. That's curiosity. I don't know a single business person that goes through their day without asking at least one curious question. You have to.
Jonathan Cook: Again and again, Kristen focuses on the language of curiosity. A curious mind doesn’t make statements. A curious mind asks questions.
A question is the voice of curiosity, because a question begins with the admission of ignorance. A question is the opposite of a point of data or an exclamation of definite knowledge. A question is a wandering path with a destination that no one can be sure of. A question is a quest of discovery, a quest that may transform the person who follows where it leads.
Kristen observes that asking curious questions is essential for people working in business. A curious question is the opening gambit in a larger project to adapt a business to changing circumstances. Curious questions don’t simply pop into existence out of nowhere, however.
Where do curious questions come from, then? Chesline Pierre-Paul, also known as Ches, has one idea about this. They propose that curiosity emerges in the confluence of diverse cultures.
Ches was born in Canada, but their parents had come to Canada from Haiti as political refugees. Ches had a cultural background unlike that of many of their peers, but they encountered that difference as a kind of doorway through which they could explore their curiosity. Embracing diversity has become a personal and professional signature for Ches, something that they express in the possibility contained in the word “paradox”.
Chesline Pierre-Paul: I see myself as somebody who bridges a lot of spaces that have the potential for great impact, but historically, because of different systemic reasons, they don't come together. I help them debunk those limitations and misconceptions. I do it under the umbrella of justice, equity, diversity and inclusion. That's my work. That's why I do consulting. But that to me is just one version of the paradox that I embrace. So, I feel like that word paradox represents me very well, what I do, what I stand for, and how I choose to enforce possibilities in spaces where, you know, we're told it's impossible or it cannot be done.
Jonathan Cook:
Ches works as a consultant in diversity, equity, and inclusion for corporate clients. They suggest that curiosity is kindled from encounters with difference. After all, there could be nothing to be curious about, nothing to question, if every place and every person were the same.
Chesline Pierre-Paul: I feel that it started with my curiosity, but also the way that I was raised. I come from a very highly political family, and as I was telling you before, my parents are political refugees. They're activists and they have their own journey. Right? That led me to be here, and it's interesting to see how even before my parents were able to share some of their story with me, the way that they raised me, it already conditioned me for it. So, when I was a young teen, I ended up working with Amnesty International and they helped a lot of political prisoners. It's only after that when I became a young adult that my parents sat me down and told me that's actually how they got into the country. So even before I knew it, I lived it because of how they raised me. It opened up a lot of connections in my mind, right?
So oftentimes, by virtue of being a minority in dominant spaces where we’re not represented, you learn how to navigate different ecosystems. I'm born here in a French-speaking country. That's not initially the language that I grew up with. So French was my second language. So, I was already in that space where you navigate culture languages, right? So, you make connections growing up. And then I decided to put myself to English school when I went to college because I felt that I needed to explore more. So for me, my pathway to doing the work that I do started always with curiosity and also always having that instinct towards basically being one of the only few in many classrooms that I was in, the only visible minority, the only this, the only that.
It felt like there's so much potential and innovation happening and all those communities, but they're not talking to each other. Part of that is because literally they don't speak the same languages. But even when they talk about the same topic, they come at it from a very different perspective. So, for me, language helped me have access to more rooms, and then it became very apparent to me that it was a pattern there that is not incidental. Then in specific Spanish speaking conferences, we only cover certain elements, singles for Italian singles for everybody else. So me having access to that, what do I do with that information? I'm not just going to sit on it. So, my curiosity led me then to hosting events and reaching out to people from those different linguistic communities and sharing the, you know, what I've learned about other events and conferences. So that's where my cross-cultural awareness started helping me develop a business mindset and vision. There is an opportunity to create true business opportunities out of being a polyglot.
Jonathan Cook: Chess makes a strong case that diversity isn’t just something that businesses have to come to terms with. Diversity is an engine of business growth that drives curiosity, thereby enabling the identification of economic opportunities.
Bhavik Joshi is another person who brings curiosity to the business world, both in his capacity as a creative individual and in his role working at a firm named Curiosity.
Bhavik Joshi: My name is Bhavik. I am currently the vice president of strategy at an ad agency called Curiosity in Cincinnati, Ohio. I have been doing some version of human understanding and human centered brand building for about nineteen, twenty years of my life. The first six years were on the client side, and I was a brand manager. Since then, since I've moved to the US, it has all been on the agency side, or as I like to call it, the dark side, just to give myself some thrills. But yeah, it's been a great adventure. One of the things I love, which I think you know, something that we might touch upon today, is this idea of working on different challenges, different categories, different brands, trying to appeal to completely different consumer cohorts. I think that's the exciting part of being on the agency side that no two days feel like the same.
I was as intrigued as you were, you know, when I found out about this agency. It's been in Cincinnati for a while. One of the things that is appealing about it is this aspect of questioning everything, and that's an integral part of our five values. Questioning everything can sometimes feel like nagging, right? But what it really is based on is this idea of getting to the root of the matter, getting to try and get to the root of the problem, as I said, right, not to take the challenges at face value, but to also keep asking questions until you feel like you have looked at the problem for from multiple different angles and have found perhaps the most interesting way to go at it.
Jonathan Cook: Once again, the idea of questions emerges. Bhavik describes a question as a tool for looking. Ask different questions, and soon you’ll see things from multiple angles. Review the work of the Curiosity agency, and you’ll quickly come across this dictum: Question the unquestionable.
Questioning sounds easy to do, until you begin to encounter its consequences. A curious mind quickly comes across tests of courage that require letting go of attachment to old ideas before new ideas are fully within grasp. Bhavik describes this process as like soaring in empty space between two vines.
I think there is a difficulty associated in that experience and feeling which I really like. From having done this for a number of years, I realized that the species of strategists, truly good problem-solving creative brand strategists, also really love that degree of difficulty in that moment. It kind of feels like letting go of like one vine of knowledge and leaping towards another, and that midair moment when you don't know if you're going to make it or not. It's thrilling. It's exhilarating. It's also scary, but I think there's something in there where if you kind of relish that moment of, oh, this is a new space that we haven't been in before. This is also calling us to do something differently that we haven't done before. There's some difficulty in that, as I mentioned, but I think it's a forward momentum difficulty. It kind of makes you want to do things differently or take a different path, you know, kind of contort your body in a way like a cat, that you make it to that next vine.
Jonathan Cook: When the call of curiosity is followed, comfort is left behind. Bhavik warns that the way is difficult, requiring us to contort ourselves in a frightening process, putting ourselves at risk, doing something that hasn’t been done before. Curiosity calls upon us to do the opposite of what’s predictable, to abandon the formulas of the path of least resistance.
Bhavik Joshi: Every single challenge that a client presents us, every project, every brand comes with that temptation. You know, there is the temptation of someone must have done this before, right? Or, you know, I think I've sold a similar challenge in the past for another brand in another category. This is kind of sort of the formula that we adopted for it, not that there is a formula, but this is kind of the way we solved it. Perhaps we can apply that here. I think that temptation is always there. Within the constraints of time and budgets and everything, I'm sure it's also easy to want to reach for those closer vines, as you put them. I think it inhibits growth. I think one of the most important aspects of being a creative brand strategist is I often say it's not about connecting the dots. It's about seeing interesting shapes in the spaces between the dots and if you perhaps only chose those path of least resistance or the parts that were closer to you, the closer vines, what you're preventing yourself from doing is seeing those interesting shapes.
Jonathan Cook: As Bhavik warns, it is tempting to merely to study what’s been already been done, and just repeat that, as if we’re computer routines, working on autopilot. This safe, predictable approach is missing the thrill of sailing through midair. If we aren’t willing to contort ourselves like cats, we’ll never attain the flexibility of cats. Yes, folk wisdom also warns us that curiosity killed the cat, but who wants to live forever? The curious mind isn’t necessarily reckless, but it concerns itself less about risks than the comfortable mind.
Bhavik Joshi: Resisting difficult things just because they are difficult is detrimental to our growth in knowledge and thinking and anything as well. You know, if we only did the easy things, if we only did the things that were convenient to us and only accessed those avenues of knowledge and information, I believe it would be detrimental to our growth, our learning, our consciousness, our experiences as well.
I think there are a couple of things that work in the favor of the already curious. One is I think there's there is a way of looking at the world that requires you to form, or requires you to make sense of it by running it through other lenses of knowledge. So, metaphors and analogies, punch lines of jokes that you've heard before, dramatic movie scenes, when you start to look at all this information that this world and life gives us and take it beyond the rational and add some dramatic analysis to it based on your lived experiences and the books you consume and the music you listen to and things like that, the world becomes more interesting.
In general, I would say being a curious individual is a full contact sport. It requires you to put your body, mind, heart and soul on the line. It requires you to stand in front of majestic things and ponder your insignificance and ponder what it means to be in this perspective of deep time.
Jonathan Cook: You may have heard of the phrase “idle curiosity”. That’s not what Bhavik Joshi is talking about. He’s talking about a feeling that drives growth but does so by putting itself on the line.
The defining characteristic of curiosity isn’t merely interest. Curiosity is an itch that needs to be scratched. It is drawn toward mysteries and paradoxes. The threshold of curiosity is what’s sufficient to move us into action, to get to work, to struggle, to suffer enough to satisfy the of interest that has been awakened within us.
Idle curiosity is failed curiosity.
Bhavik Joshi: I wonder if in our pursuit of painless, seamless, frictionless information, almost like timeless, by which I don't mean enduring, but I mean, that doesn't take time, you can quickly find it, if it gives us the false assurance, maybe, and perhaps I should put false in parentheses, but the assurance that what I found in this manner is perhaps truer or just as true as what I would have found if I had gone through the path that perhaps involved a little more hard work, a little more pain, a little more digging, maybe a little more time. I think when we start doing this at such a massive scale, when everybody starts doing it at such a massive scale, it's easy to say that the lived experience that we're having right now of standing in front of a problem and thinking about it is not an important aspect of problem solving. Only the pursuit of answers is the important aspect. I think the advantage that that lived experience can bring is to lend a human reality of experiences to that midair feeling, which I think is important and leads to interesting answers.
I think all of those actions of jumping into a painful problem and still solving it and trying to merge on the other side, and sometimes you don't. Sometimes you have to come back out and go back in again with a new set of weapons and armory, but I feel like there is there's growth there. I think you learn more. You learn more about your strengths and your skills, and you learn more about the context of the problem. You learn more about the people that you're solving that problem for as well. I think that's the neglected power of pain. I think that it could it could really grow you. It could grow your knowledge in that sense.
Jonathan Cook: Pain, fear, loss, and defeat are just a few of the possible consequences of curiosity. Yet, Bhavik warns us that without taking these risks, we surrender the potential for growth. Friction can wear us down, but without friction, we can’t move forward.
What if it didn’t have to be that way? What if someone came along and offered to fetch all the solutions for you, so that you didn’t have to bother with venturing down a long path of discovery, muddling through a creative process, confronting troubling questions, encountering different places and people, and putting your comfort at risk?
Would you accept the offer?
In next week’s full episode, we will consider the inspiring emotion of yugen. That’s going to be fun.
In between now and then, however, there are some important issues we need to talk about. We live in special times, in which new technologies threaten the survival of curiosity as we know it, in which the very existence of our emotional lives is being called into question.
A few days from now, I’ll be releasing a bonus episode about the consequences of ChatGPT for the emotion of curiosity. It’s an extension of the ideas people have brought up in this episode, given the time and space they merit.
Until then, thanks for listening in.