Curiosity is where everything starts

If there were a ranking of the most important qualities, I think curiosity should be very high up.

There is a sentence I like a lot:

A child is not a vase to be filled, but a fire to be lit.

I find the image perfect. Curiosity is precisely the spark that starts that fire.

You discover one thing, which leads you to another, then another. You read something, you come across a word you don't understand, you look up what it means, then you discover a new subject, a person, a book, a country, a technology, an idea.

Little by little, the fire feeds itself. And from there, learning no longer really feels like an effort.

Opening a door

To me, being curious simply means agreeing to open doors.

Why does it work like that? Who built this? Why does that person think that way? What is behind that mountain? Why do some countries use that currency? How does an engine work? Why does Bitcoin exist? Why does the sky change colour?

It can start from anything. And that is exactly what I like. A seemingly useless question can sometimes take you extremely far.

Wanting to learn is already starting to give yourself the means to learn. You don't need to know the whole path at the outset. It is often enough to want to understand the next thing badly enough.

That is probably how a lot of my own interests appeared. I never woke up one morning with a perfectly built master plan, telling myself: "Here is exactly every subject I am going to learn over the next ten years."

One thing led to another. And then to another.

The cure for "what's the point?"

I also find that curiosity is a fairly good answer to the famous: "What's the point?"

What's the point of learning that if it is no use in my job? What's the point of visiting that place? What's the point of understanding how that technology works? What's the point of reading about a subject that has nothing to do with my life?

Because you never know where a piece of knowledge will take you. Not everything needs to have an immediate economic or professional use. Some things are interesting simply because they are interesting.

And sometimes, several years later, two subjects that seemed to have absolutely no connection end up meeting.

I think a curious person gradually accumulates pieces of the world. Ideas, experiences, knowledge, encounters. And the more pieces they have, the more new connections they can make between them.

Before motivation and discipline

People talk an enormous amount about motivation. About discipline. About routines. About productivity.

How do you become disciplined? How do you stop procrastinating? How do you work more? How do you force yourself to learn?

Obviously, all of that can be useful. But I sometimes wonder whether we are not starting a bit too far along in the process.

Before trying to force yourself to learn, maybe you should start by finding the desire to learn again. Before working on your discipline, maybe you should feed your curiosity. Find a subject that genuinely makes you want to ask a second question, then a third.

Because someone who really wants to understand something naturally becomes far easier to motivate. You don't need to force a child who is passionate about dinosaurs to learn the names of twenty species. They will probably learn them on their own, simply because they want to know.

That is the energy I find interesting.

Discipline obviously helps you keep going when the desire disappears. But curiosity can be what makes you want to start.

So rather than constantly looking for how to become more productive, more disciplined or more motivated, I think we can sometimes simply ask ourselves one question: What still makes me genuinely curious?

Then pull on that thread. See where it leads. One thing will probably lead to another. And maybe everything simply starts like that.

Back to the notebook