‘The closer you look at anything, the more interesting it gets. But nobody tells you this.’ (Location 99)
society that values order above all else will seek to suppress curiosity. But a society that believes in progress, innovation and creativity will cultivate it, recognising that the enquiring minds of its people constitute its most valuable asset. (Location 121)
Employers are looking for people who can do more than follow procedures competently or respond to requests; who have a strong intrinsic desire to learn, solve problems and ask penetrating questions. (Location 142)
Need for cognition, or NFC, is a scientific measure of intellectual curiosity. (Location 151)
If you allow yourself to become incurious, your life will be drained of colour, interest and pleasure. (Location 193)
more disciplined and effortful type of curiosity is called epistemic curiosity, and it is the chief subject of this book.* (Location 210)
Diversive curiosity might make you wonder what a person does for a living; empathic curiosity makes you wonder why they do it. (Location 222)
The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care much. They are incurious. Incuriosity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is. Stephen Fry (Location 243)
The true beauty of learning stuff, including apparently useless stuff, is that it takes us out of ourselves, reminds us that we are part of a far greater project, one that has been underway for at least as long as human beings have been talking to each other. (Location 245)
Self-preservation is our most deep-rooted instinct. But curiosity is powerful enough to override it. (Location 303)
In our digital world, diversive curiosity is constantly stimulated by ever-present streams of texts, emails, tweets, reminders and news alerts that stimulate our hunger for novelty. In the process, our capacity for the slow, difficult and frustrating process of gathering knowledge may be deteriorating. (Location 332)
Epistemic curiosity represents the deepening of a simple seeking of newness into a directed attempt to build understanding. It’s what happens when diversive curiosity grows up. (Location 387)
The reassuring presence of something we know is good for us gives us pleasure. But so does the promise of what lies beyond, the information we don’t yet know.* (Location 431)
Diversive curiosity makes us want to know what lies on the other side of the mountain; epistemic curiosity arms us with the knowledge we need to survive when we get there. (Location 452)
‘No creature spends more time dependent on others for its very existence than a human baby, and no creature takes on the burden of that dependence so long and so readily as a human adult.’ (Location 520)
First, you have to know that you don’t know – to conceive of your own ignorance. Second, you have to be able to imagine different, competing possibilities; when a child asks whether ghosts are real or made-up, she is already imagining alternative explanations. Third, you have to understand that you can learn from other people. (Location 642)
Not being satisfied is what makes curiosity so satisfying. (Location 684)
In 1954, while at the University of Aberdeen, he published a paper that first made the seminal distinction between diversive and epistemic curiosity. (Location 705)
Children and adults who are dismissed as incurious may be suffering from a different problem – a lack of basic information about the subject at hand. (Location 738)
The intensity of our curiosity is affected by whether we think the information that we’re missing is likely to provide insight. After all, not all information is equal – sometimes, new information adds only a little to existing information; other times, it will throw light on an entire problem. (Location 749)
Daniel Kahneman puts it like this: ‘Our comforting conviction the world makes sense rests on secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.’ (Location 773)
Children who grow up in environments of profound physical or emotional uncertainty often seem to be incurious at school, but it’s because they can’t afford to concentrate on anything other than survival. (Location 776)
In Susan Engel’s summary of the study’s findings, ‘insecure children are less likely to make physical and psychological expeditions to gather information.’ Curiosity is underwritten by love. (Location 809)
‘Anyone who chose to exercise his brain and powers of observation could learn something new about almost any subject’. All you had to do was ask someone where to look. (Location 1094)
George Eliot proposed that, ‘the greatest benefit we owe the artist, whether painter, poet or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies.’ (Location 1131)
Only fiction has the power to cross the mental barricades, to make strangers intelligible to each other, because it moves people’s hearts as well as engaging their minds. (Location 1137)
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, (Location 1138)
Note: Find and read this novel
But curiosity is in peril again, this time for very different reasons than in the medieval era. The problem today is rooted in an abundance, rather than a scarcity, of information, and of ease rather than difficulty of access to it. We are in danger of losing our taste for intellectual exploration, just as curiosity ought to be entering its greatest moment since Franklin flew his kite. (Location 1168)
Louis Pasteur remarked that ‘in the field of observation, chance favours only the prepared mind.’ (Location 1228)
It’s not that the internet doesn’t have the potential to open our minds to new information, other people and other worlds. It’s that, all too often, this potential lies untapped. In the future, the people who are better at exploiting it will find themselves at an increasing advantage. (Location 1289)
It’s now recognised that the attitude students take towards the learning process, and the habits they practise, have a bigger impact on how well they do at school than previously accounted for. (Location 1305)
The trait that has gained most attention from researchers is ‘conscientiousness’ and its related qualities: persistence, self-discipline, and what the psychologist Angela Duckworth termed ‘grit’ – the ability to deal with failure, overcome setbacks and focus on long-term goals. (Location 1309)
People who are genuinely interested in what they’re learning about tend to work harder at understanding it. (Location 1330)
Mothers who asked more questions of their children had children who asked more questions of them. Question-asking, it turned out, is contagious. (Location 1458)
Unequal Childhoods. (Location 1499)
Note: Check the book
Modern workplaces and institutions – even education institutions – place a premium on assertive, confident individuals in command of powerful linguistic and reasoning abilities. (Location 1513)
Leading with Questions, (Location 1551)
Note: Check the book
‘There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say there are things that, we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know, we don’t know.’ (Location 1559)
The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen (Location 1599)
No, if nature has given the child this plasticity of brain which fits him to receive every kind of impression, it was not that you should imprint on it the names and dates of kings, the jargon of heraldry, the globe and geography, all those words without present meaning or future use for the child, which flood of words overwhelms his sad and barren childhood. (Location 1681)
Children need to gain enough information to be conscious of their own information gaps, and sometimes that requires firm direction. Without it, we condemn them to be forever uninterested in their own ignorance. (Location 1751)
We romanticise the curiosity of children because we love their innocence. But creativity doesn’t happen in a void. Successful innovators and artists amass vast stores of knowledge, which they can then draw on unthinkingly. Having mastered the rules of their domain, they can concentrate on rewriting them. They mix and remix ideas and themes, making new analogies and spotting unusual patterns, until a creative breakthrough is achieved. (Location 1769)
As Steven Pinker puts it, ‘geniuses are wonks’. Without knowledge, including factual knowledge, a child is like a sculptor with no clay to work with – she is creative, but only in theory. (Location 1776)
Until a child has been taught the basic information she needs to start thinking more deeply about a particular subject, it’s hard to develop her initial (diversive) curiosity into enduring (epistemic) curiosity; to get her to the stage where she is hungry for more knowledge about English history, and ready to ask her own, probing questions about it. (Location 1863)
Anyone who stops learning facts for himself because he can Google them later is literally making himself stupid. (Location 1874)
How Children Succeed, (Location 1943)
Note: Check the book
A Technique for Producing Ideas. (Location 2137)
Note: Write an LinkedIn post based on this
You know, one of the things that really hurt Apple was after I left, John Sculley got a very serious disease. It’s the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90 per cent of the work. And if you just tell all these other people ‘Here’s this great idea’, then of course they can go off and make it happen. And the problem with that is that there’s just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product … Designing a product is keeping five thousand things in your brain and fitting them all together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little different. And it’s that process that is the magic. (Location 2498)
The Origin of Species (Location 2508)
Unless we make an effort to be thinkerers – to sweat the small stuff while thinking big, to get interested in processes and outcomes, tiny details and grand visions, we’ll never recapture the spirit of the age of Franklin. (Location 2522)
When all our interest is directed at the future, we get easily bored with the present. (Location 2620)
Can't Hurt Me