“I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.”
~ Albert Einstein
Curiosity is a beautiful thing. It can make the seemingly dullest things fascinating.
Sand Is Bland? Of Course Not!
We’ve all experienced sand. It’s everywhere. But something as plain and common as sand is pretty interesting when you look into it. Here are a few sand facts from Discover magazine.
- Most sand is made of silica; it comes from quartz crystals that have broken down to about their smallest possible size.
- Sand is used to make concrete.
- If you melt sand (at 3090 degrees Fahrenheit) into a liquid, it becomes glass.
- There is an illegal sand market and a sand mafia.
A sand mafia, guys. Sand is cool.
The next time you go to the beach, you can pick up a handful of sand and think, “this is basically glass in a million pieces” or “this stuff is so coveted that there’s a black market and mafia around it.”
But without curiosity, sand is bland, ordinary stuff.
When looking at this singular example, you might not think you’re missing much by not considering the wonders of sand. But when you extrapolate this concept over your entire life, you get two very different possible results.
Without curiosity, the world is dull. When you wake up in the morning, you think you know what to expect. Therefore, the only interesting things that happen are negative surprises. Everything around you is familiar and uninteresting. The spark of wonder you once had is dead.
With curiosity, the world is vibrant and endless. The simplest things fascinate you. The more you learn, the more you realize what you don’t know. Curiosity and wonder are multiplicative. The further you go down the rabbit hole of curiosity, the more interesting it gets.
The Hallmark of Curiosity
Having a general curiosity about the world opens up a lot of fun learning possibilities. and if you want to be more curious, all it takes is one action—ask yourself and others more questions!
How Curiosity Gave Us the Internet
It’s hard to think of life before the internet. I was born in the mid 80s, so I basically grew up with the internet. The world wide web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990. But as history.com puts it,
“It is impossible to credit the invention of the internet to a single person. The internet was the work of dozens of pioneering scientists, programmers and engineers who each developed new features and technologies that eventually merged to become the “information superhighway” we know today.”
People asked “what if?” in a number of fields to create the incredible technology we enjoy today. And that’s what curiosity does. It doesn’t accept what it sees, it wonders what it can’t yet see. If you described the modern internet to a random person in the year 1700, they would probably lasso you. There was no way to conceive of the internet. They didn’t even have electricity!
Curious people ask why and why not.
Why must screens be flat and rigid?
Why not see if we can visit and inhabit another planet?
Grandiose visions like these are only the most visible part of the incredible gift of curiosity.
I’ve been asking a lot of questions in the habit formation world. Why do we have to have only one target? Why do we have to choose between big and small goals instead of utilizing both? These questions lead to my new book, Elastic Habits, and several inventions.
But beyond that, I had to ask why not. I didn’t know anything about design and production, but why couldn’t I learn? I did. I didn’t know anything about selling and shipping and keeping inventory, so I learned that too. My curiosity opened up a new and fascinating new business opportunity. Being curious has really helped me out, and I’m looking for ways it can improve my life in other areas.
With curiosity, you can discover new hobbies, interests, inventions, and ideas. Without curiosity, what you see is all you get, and that’s not very exciting. So be curious, and watch your world get brighter.