DISQUS

VMaryAbraham · 9 months ago

Louis:

According to Johnson O'Connor and the Strengthsfinder/Gallup data, there are people who are born wired to crave new ideas and new information. It sounds like you're a member of that lucky group. I'm not sure this can be induced in others to the same degree. However, we should as a society try to instill a basic love of learning in children. That ought to be the whole point of early education.

- Mary

Anne Bouey · 9 months ago

"It's the same type of frustrations I am sure parents feel when their kids don't get interested in school, or in studying to improve when you know they have the potential." Although you can't force intellectual curiosity in someone, I'm confident that you are already encouraging it in Matthew and Sarah and providing them with many opportunities to develop it even now.

Louis Gray · 9 months ago

Anne, at this point, all I know is that Sarah and Matthew think the iPhone (with its leather case) is the most awesome thing to chew and suck on. They also dig the TiVo remote and reaching for the laptop whenever possible. And during reading time, Sarah would rather grab the book so I have to keep it at a full arm's length.

j1m · 9 months ago

A: Provide positive feedback when you see it.

Anne Bouey · 9 months ago

LG, they are just using all their senses to exercise their curiosity. Keep it up!

Dave Hodson · 9 months ago

God knows George Bush's Dad tried - it never did take

rk · 9 months ago

Curiosity is about finding the truth - Who, what and why. It is not something you are born, it is some thing that is nurtured as a culture. Arrogance and Rules on thinking forces boundaries. Facts and inventions are a facet of curiosity but ultimate curiosity is knowing your self - Atma. i.e you reached nirvana.

P.S Phoenician to Greek, Egyptian don't have alphabets they are pictographs - It is Indians who invented language -i.e Alphabets and grammar. Check your Wikipedia - your encyclopedia does not have gigabytes.

nicefishfilms · 9 months ago

Louis,

I'm reminded of Bill Hicks explaining his U.F.O. tour - "I'm appearing in small towns doubting my own existence."

Your "curiosity" has led me to many wonderful Universes of Discovery.

I, for one, enjoy your insatiable appetite for knowledge.

There is a reason you are considered an - "aLister"

Thank you for your hunger.

Bon Appétit,

A Listener

Chris Kenton · 9 months ago

No doubt there's a component of Nature to it, but I think there's also a significant part that Nurturing plays. My wife is a librarian, and was passionate about reading aloud to my son even back when she was pregnant. Hardly a day has not gone by that we haven't read aloud before going to bed, or a week without bringing home a stack of books from the library. My son's now in second grade and reads more than I do. Saturday mornings, instead of turning on cartoons, which is what I grew up with, he curls up on the couch with Tintin or non-fiction books about his favorite subject, theTitanic.

I think you can instill a passion for curiosity. But I think you have to start young, I think you have to model it, and you have to be willing to support what your children are naturally interested in.

Debra · 9 months ago

Well if it only comes from Mom and Dad a lot of people like me would have ended up less like me and more like Mom and Dad. I read everything while I never saw either of my parents ever read more than the local newspaper.

Shawn K · 9 months ago

That's one of the things I love about you, you're an information junkie, just like me. I was often bored in school, as I'd always read ahead, then sit there as the teacher covered the 'new' material and answered questions.

It bugs me that people don't strive to know all they can about their chosen field of work, as I try to learn all I can about mine, theirs, and their best friend's. Keep the info coming, I'm anxious to absorb it.

Maggie · 9 months ago

Like you I am an absolute fanatic information gatherer and like you I get sooooo frustrated when my teachers tells me that I am on another planet, so I totally relate to this post!

In my experience, people only get curious when it involves...
a) some kind of scandel or celebrity
b) a direct impact on their very existance
c) something that they can practically use (here and now)

So to teach curiosity maybe we need to hook onto these three, but that then brings another question:
How do you encourage enduring curiosity?

Brandon · 9 months ago

I've slowly managed to coax that curiosity in a good friend of mine, but it's taken a couple of years of sending strong ignorance isn't cool vibes his way to play against his ego.

Brandon · 9 months ago

guess I was apeaking to Maggie's criterion B and a little of C

TalkDebbie · 9 months ago

Louis - thank you for a wonderful post. One of the core values at our firm is curiosity. I'm always shocked that people choose to make a career in our industry and lack what I think is a fundamental component of marketing - curiosity. How can I know an employee will go the extra mile if they don't have it? I can't teach it. It's inborn. So I try my best during the interview process to ferret it out, measure it and see if they have enough to succeed.

Ricky Peterson · 9 months ago

Beside looking for news, internet also make us to earn more money. As we know, there is thousand people make they website or blog and dedicated their blog with some ads.


Ricky

hanni · 9 months ago

wow.. this is an issue which i really really thought about a lot lately. i'm far away from having children, but i see all kind of younger people all around me who totally lack that curiosity component which i deem absolutely necessary, no matter what you're doing in your life.

i'm now 30, and i often think about all the possibilities i'd have had if i had all those tools available today at my disposal back when i was 20. but now i barely see any people of that age using for instance rss; my life quality would totally drop without that! they're playing stupid games on facebook, writing birthday wall posts and - at least something! - producing some status updates. and when they're not on fb, they're watching youtube or are chatting on msn.. no thirst for anything new! no curiousity!

then everyone makes jokes about me having far too much spare time because of my high level of activity on different channels; difficult to make them understand that it's only my high efficiency when it comes up to gathering and disseminating information.. i explain to them that i'm totally addicted to information, that i've no problem to "connect" the different information channels, to "think connected".. different to explain..

ps: i'm living in austria, things might almost certainly be a little bit different here compared to the states..

julian · 7 months ago

hanni
i am 25, and have a great thirst for information from all channels. I consider myself a generalist as opposed to a specialist. this is difficult due to being in medical school, where i could excel if it wasn't for my curiosity of other things. but my question for you is this. what are the tools or things available that you wish you would have done when you were 20, so that i can do it now"? thanks

Mia D · 9 months ago

Great post, Louis!
Nurturing intellectual curiosity is probably easier in children than adults. Children are like sponges and it helps to expose them to a wide variety of ideas and thoughts. That being said, how much of it is nature vs. nurture is highly debatable. I like to think both play a role.
As far as folks who come to you for blog picks, I have to confess I am one of them. Twitter, Friendfeed, and other social tools have made it easy for us to be consumers of a wide variety of information. However, they've also overwhelmed us and made us more lazy because so much information comes to us, rather than us having to go out and seek it.
I tend to surround myself with folks (online and offline) who are voracious consumers of information and I rely on them to filter out the noise. That doesn't mean I don't seek out content myself using Google Reader or other tools, but given there's so much information out there, it helps to have additional filters in the form of recommendations from credible folks like yourself.

Adam Bossy · 9 months ago

Touche on the comment about the Baseball Encyclopedia. As a kid, I pored over this thing tirelessly. I would literally sit on the floor of my living room during the summer and simply study it. I would randomly ponder over random facts at inopportune times, like, "how many hits did Ty Cobb have his rookie year and how did that compare to his other seasons?"

To answer your question, I think that intellectual curiosity is spawned from knowing that knowledge is power, and the thirst for power hence leads to curiousity, albeit in indirect ways.

Stuart Miniman · 9 months ago

Great article - some people just can't get excited about anything. This has great applicability that not everyone will be agog about social media and also as a parent I look to encourage those places where there is curiosity.