Curiosity
Wanting to know how something works, enough to go and find out.
The behaviour, in one line: I regularly dig into how things work and explore new tools or topics just to understand them.
Take the back off a radio and you find out things the front panel could never tell you, including which parts actually matter. Curiosity is the willingness to take the back off. What it costs you is looking ignorant for a while.
A beginner asks what a thing is and what it could do. An expert often knows mainly what it cannot do, because that is what experience is made of. In a field that rebuilds itself every few years, the pull to open something up and look inside is what keeps your picture of it current. The cost of admission is being visibly ignorant for the ten minutes that takes.
| What it is | What it isn’t |
|---|---|
| Wanting to know how it works | Wanting to know whether it works |
| Comfortable not knowing yet | Needing to have an answer |
| Opening the thing up | Reading the summary of the thing |
| Mistakes as information | Mistakes as verdicts |
What it looks like. A tool you did not choose lands in your stack. Instead of finding the one command you need and leaving, you spend twenty minutes working out what it is for. Six weeks later you are the person who knows why it behaves oddly under load.
- Anything genuinely new. New tools arrive with no body of practice around them. The people who work them out first are the ones who opened them before there was a guide to read.
- The system nobody understands any more. Every organisation has one. It stays that way because each person learned the two commands they needed and stopped there.
- Work that is quietly drying up. Noticing the ground has moved means looking at things that are not yet your job. That looking has to come from somewhere.
- Ask how something works one level below where you would normally stop. The layer you skip is usually the one that explains the layer above it.
- Open the new tool and press things before you read anything about it. You build a rough map, and the manual then has something to correct.
- Spend an hour a week on something with no obvious use, and do not make it justify itself.
- Say “I do not know yet” rather than “I cannot”. The two sentences send you to different places.
- Break it into parts
Three parts: asking one level deeper than is comfortable, playing before reading the manual, and following a tangent on purpose.
- The part that carries it
The extra layer of “how does this actually work?”, past where you would normally stop. Most of what compounds is in that layer.
- The order to learn it in
- Practise the extra question on things you already half understand, where being wrong costs nothing.
- Move to unfamiliar tools, and open them before you read about them.
- Then schedule tangents with no purpose, and let them run without justifying them.
- Put something at stake
Commit to showing your team, at every Monday standup for a month, one thing you did not understand a week ago.
- Compress it
Ask one level deeper. Play before you read. Spend an hour a week on something with no use.
- The smallest useful dose
One deeper question a day, and one deliberate hour of no-purpose exploration a week.
- Anchor it to something you know
A child taking the back off a radio. No goal, no fear of breaking it, and a far better model of radios by dinnertime.
“I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.”
— Albert Einstein
The interactive version is in the course. The diagram, the simulation and the four-question check for Curiosity run in the free course, where your progress across all 24 skills is kept.
Open Curiosity in the course →
Not sure where you stand? Take the twelve-minute self-assessment, or see the 30-day course that turns these skills into a roadmap.