In 1935, Eleanor Roosevelt published an article in The Saturday Evening Post titled “In Defense of Curiosity.” In describing the benefits of being curious, she wrote:
I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift should be curiosity.
I love this sentiment. The idea that gifting children curiosity confers transformative value also speaks to the life-long advantages. The curious mind moves past generalizations and headlines. Are you interested in people and places and how things work? The travel writer Rick Steves, in his journeys, emphasizes this approach of traveling and meeting others to understand their views and to learn. It’s a lifestyle and a passion.
Curious Colleagues
Stay curious is our first value at Forisk, my forest research firm. We explicitly look for it during interviews when hiring. Curiosity is fundamental to our mission of figuring out how things work to help clients. As the late anthropologist, and author of Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston said, “Research is formalized curiosity.”
When truly curious, you spend less time wanting to prove how smart you are or feeling defensive when someone asks a hard question or challenges an idea. Rather, it becomes an opportunity to learn and listen and ask questions of your own. Simple questions and basic curiosity open the mind, which connects the dots based on what you feed it.
Cultivating Curiosity
Curiosity, when lacking, can be cultivated. In a 2009 Psychology Today interview, author and psychiatrist Dr. Irvin Yalom said,
When people don’t have any curiosity about themselves that is always a bad sign. I keep trying to figure out ways to induce curiosity, even if it’s by saying to [patients]: “how come I’m so much more curious about you than you are about yourself?”
As a curious person, I want to see situations through the eyes of people who know more than I do, and you can only do that by getting out of the office and talking to folks. When visiting mills, I talk to security guards and look in the wood pile and accept invitations to see how the equipment works. At logging expos, I climb into the machines and ask other guys, “hey, what do you look at when you’re thinking of buying new equipment?”
Satisfying Curiosity
Curiosity motivates me to read and write books. In this way, I write books for curious people, starting with myself. As the scientist and two-time Nobel Prize recipient Linus Pauling said, “Satisfaction of one’s curiosity is one of the greatest sources of happiness in life.” Indeed.
My thanks to Cole and Mikayla at MORE creative agency for their curiosity about my work and their support when redesigning this website. Thank you, guys!