Curiosity is the Father of Invention

I often wonder, how people of my age know so much more and how do they talk about random stuff? While growing up together, I knew more and now they know more. What changed? And how are they different from me?

After a little pondering I realized, they are more curious as compared to me. I knew more at an early stage in life because at that time, knowledge is fed to you by your education systems and whoever has better concentration and grasping power has more knowledge. I am not at all trying to say that I am smarter than most of them. The point is, as you grow older, and your formal education is over, your learning is very much dependent on your curiosity level. So whoever is more curious by nature, will question more and learn more.

Secondly, I observed curious people make the best leaders because they develop deep understanding of anything or everything. They go after a problem and try to understand history, science and maths about that. And by doing that, they develop passions. Curious people do whatever it takes to learn and understand about stuff and they explore and take risks. As a result, often they cast good visions and proven to be the best leaders in the industry.

So, then the next question comes to my mind is “Why someone is more/less curious as compared to others?”

After doing some non-curious research, I found that there are 2 reasons behind curiosity development:

• Its genetic and depends on what kind of hormones empowers you — New experience has driven dopamine or familiarity/security driven serotonin. These are dependent on your primary pathways in the brain. Former people are more curious as compared to rest.
• The second factor is your early experiences in life-related to exploration or curiosity. As a child, you were encouraged or punished for new experiences or asking many questions.

So looks like your curiosity level is very much not in your hand and is a combination of your parents and their parenting style. So are you doomed for life or you can still do something?

There is nothing in the world you can’t do anything about. So here are ways to improve your curiosity level.

1. Don’t assume things: Assuming things always stops you from asking more questions. It makes you unhabitual of asking questions as well.
2. Don’t get biased: Getting biased leaves you with a couple of options like right/wrong or interesting/boring. And you never try to see the boring or wrong side of it and leave 50% of the stuff unknown because of this.
3. Break monotony or get out of comfort zone: Monotonous life leads you to become very habitual and non-observing. So break your monotony and do something different for a while and this will help you to improve your curiosity.
4. See it for yourself: This is a motto of the royal society of London which basically means that take no-one’s words and challenge conventional wisdom.
5. Expose yourself to new things: Read new books, learn new skills, explore new places and talk to new people. This will help you to build curiosity more as you will see new things and of course won’t have pre-knowledge of everything since you are not curious by default.
6. A happy brain is more curious: the Sad brain is not able to capture rational things and doesn’t have curiosity. Instead, sad brain curses things. So stay happy.
7. Stay around curious/stupid people: Encourage people to ask more and more questions to you which makes you think more.
8. Reflect more: Reflect on your experiences more. Take time out just to think. It will help you to understand and streamline thoughts and build questions like what if? why? and why not?

If you think your ship has sailed now and there is no point putting so much effort. Fine! At least try to make your kids curious. Then here is what we should do to nurture the curiosity of our next generation:

• Create an interesting environment around: Kids in their starting couple of months just gaze around and later too they spend a lot of time in gazing and by default they are curious about their surroundings. So, create an interesting environment around them.
• Answer questions in a clear and interesting way: Don’t discourage kids to ask questions. I know sometimes they irritate you by so many questions, but believe me — not asking questions could be more dangerous. So take a deep breath, and think about how can you make the answer more beautiful and understandable for the kid.
• Help them to understand more: Take them to nature walk and explain any natural phenomena to them. Make them wonder why stuff happens and how they happen eg. why rains happen etc. Similarly, take them to the library, museums etc.
• Make them think: Thinking is basic foundation o curiosity. Ask your kid’s more open-ended & subjective questions like what do you want to do now? how was school etc? which will make them think more deeply. Give them open-ended stuff to play as well. Could be as simple as like sand/lego to build stuff or pencils and paper to draw something.
• Encourage them to explore: Encourage them to play more and different games. Encourage them to have diversity in life. Encourage them to learn new things, talk to people and visit different places.
• Let them lead: Sometimes just do activities what your kids want to do in the moments. This will help you to understand what do they like. If it takes, dance with them, sing along, become an object of the game they want to play or play basketball. Let them flow freely at the moment.
• Show enthusiasm: Parents are first teacher of kids. Showing some enthusiasm about learning new stuff will encourage them to learn about new things. Show excitement when any member of family learns anything new including yourself. This will create a culture of learning around.

Stay Happy, Stay thoughtful, Stay Curious.