How I can use the book Curious - The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends On It by Ian Leslie
by Laura Cooley
After discussing The Zip Syndicate vision with fellow Curiosity Coach and frequent collaborator, Nancy Greenwald, recommended this book: Curious - The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends On It by Ian Leslie. I had never heard of it and immediately purchased it and began reading the day it arrived. I am normally a very fast reader but this book has made me slow down and really absorb each sentence in a different way. I have found myself captivated for many reasons: 1) so much of what I have read so far affirms the vision of The Zip Syndicate (I am almost surprised I hadn’t read it before starting this venture); 2) I had no idea there was so much research into “curiosity”; 3) I had no idea how important curiosity is to human growth and development; 4) I have had many, many ideas spark as I am reading. Honestly, I am just curious about a lot of stuff and am compelled to help myself and others explore what makes us go “hmmm?”
To solidify what I am learning, I am sharing some passages from the book along with my notes on how I might apply these ideas in my own personal and professional life. I look forward to having a Curious Mastermind session using this book as the springboard for conversation and discussion.
I will be adding notes from each chapter/section of the book as I create them. I am very curious about your thoughts and comments on not only this content but also this approach!
Introduction: The Fourth Drive
From Ian Leslie pages xiv - xv
Curiosity is unruly. It doesn’t like rules, or, at least, it assumes that all rules are provisional, subject to the laceration of a smart question nobody has yet thought to ask. It disdains the approved pathways, preferring diversions, unplanned excursions, impulsive left turns. In short, curiosity is deviant. Pursuing it is liable to bring you into conflict with authority at some point.
...a society that believe in progress, innovation, and creativity will cultivate it, recognizing that the inquiring minds of its people constitute its most valuable asset.
…the new challenge is to find ways of making more people hungry to learn, question, and create.
Thoughts: Current doctrine for good learning and development programs in organizations says there must be clear career progression roadmaps with supporting training plans for each level. One of my current projects is focused on just that, a leadership training framework for each tier in an organization. This becomes a highly complex project when you try to define when someone should be learning or mastering what. Can you really say that an individual contributor doesn’t need to be able to see the “big picture” as much as a senior leader does if you are talking about “leadership skills”? It just gets hard to break things down into finite buckets without restricting individual learning and development. How to you build a solid model that respects the current knowledge, skills and interests of an individual so that they can become intrinsically motivated to learn more but still give them a path/roadmap to follow. We are left with finding the best fit we can whilst knowing it will not be a precise or accurate solution. This is a conundrum explored with a discussion of puzzles versus mysteries later in the book.
From Ian Leslie page xvi
Curious learners go deep and wide. They are the people best equipped for the kind of knowledge-rich, cognitively challenging work required in industries…They are also the ones most likely to make creative connections between different fields.
Thoughts: I remember a conversation with Greg Howell (founder of the Lean Construction Institute) in which we were discussing innovation in construction. He said something that resonated with me and I have thought about often since that 2011 conversation: “We must look outside our industry for a spark for the next big innovation.”
I think it is important to pull our heads up from our current focus to look around and see what is going on. Attending multi-discipline, company and industry events is a must when looking for a spark to the next idea. The Construction Institute is an example of a unique association because it includes members and influences from across the full spectrum of the industry. I am a firm believer in this type of diversity.
I often think of a dialog between Red & Heywood in The Shawshank Redemption:
Red: Would you knock it off? Brooks ain’t no bug. He’s just…just institutionalized.
Heywood: Institutionalized, my ass.
Red: The man’s been in here fifty years, Heywood. Fifty years! This is all he knows. In here, he’s an important man. He’s an educated man. Outside, he’s nothin’! Just a used up con with arthritis in both hands. couldn’t even get a library card if he applied. You see what I’m saying?
Floyd: Red, I do believe you’re talking out of your ass.
Red: Believe what you want. These walls are funny. First, you hate ’em, then you get used to ’em. Enough time passes, you get so you depend on them.
We don’t even notice when we become “institutionalized”; it just happens. We become used to our environment, caught-up in the day-to-day, arrogant in what we know, etc. I see a correlation between this idea and Chapter 3: Puzzles and Mysteries. Ian Leslie provides 3 simple charts about the “Curiosity Zone”. Each compares how curiosity is impacted by surprise, knowledge, and confidence. Basically, people can be the least curious at the lowest & highest levels of surprise, knowledge, and confidence; it is when we are in the middle zone of each of the three that we are the most curious. I am thinking that part of being “institutionalized” is where nothing surprises you anymore, you think you know about everything, and you are confident there is nothing more you can learn or improve. If that correlation is true, then you are out of the “Curiosity Zone” and incapable of innovating until your mindset shifts. Hmm, Interesting.
From Ian Leslie page xix
…But the scientific literature on curiosity, while it disagrees on many things, agrees on this: a person’s curiosity is more a state than a trait. That is, our curiosity is highly responsive to the situation or environment we’re in. It follows that we can arrange our lives to stoke our curiosity or quash it.
…Curiosity is vulnerable to benign neglect.
…To stop it from happening, you need to understand what feeds curiosity and what starves it.
Thoughts: If a person is not at least in the Love/Belonging tier of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, how can they be curious? Maslow’s work shows up over and over again in literature and research. It can be applied to so many situations and is a critical explanation for behaviors.
Understanding that people who are suffering from a lack of food, water, shelter, sleep, etc. due to stress, financial hardship, … whatever.
or
people who do not feel safe and secure within their homes, family, school, places of work, etc.
are focused on the struggle to just survive.
When someone says to me: “We are surviving, not thriving.”, what I hear is they do not have the bandwidth to be as creative, curious, innovative, collaborative, . . . as they would be otherwise. As leaders, peers, friends, partners…fellow humans we need to appreciate where each person is and adjust our expectations accordingly. During this terrible pandemic, we need to be aware that many people who used to be in higher tiers of the Hierarchy of Needs are now struggling because they are living everyday with Safety and Physiological needs that are not being met.
From Ian Leslie page xx
…This attraction to everything novel is what the scientists who study it call diversive curiosity. In adults diversive curiosity manifests itself as a restless desire for the new and the next.
…Unfettered curiosity is wonderful; unchanneled curiosity is not. When diversive curiosity is entrained—when it is transformed into a quest for knowledge and understanding—it nourishes us.
This deeper, more disciplined, and effortful type of curiosity is called epistemic curiosity, and it is the subject of this book.
Epistemic curiosity, in these pages, refers to a wide-ranging desire for intellectual and cultural exploration.
For individuals, epistemic curiosity can be a font of satisfaction and delight that provides sustenance for the soul. For organizations and nations, it can supercharge creative talent and ignite innovation, turning the base metal of diversive curiosity into gold.
Thoughts: Years ago, I was teaching a large group of MWBE owners and executives. Several asked: “How do I motivate my people?”, I had no answer, not one that wasn’t BS anyway. Curiosity sparked! My research quickly led me to Dan Pink, Abraham Maslow, and others. I read Dan Pink’s book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us and my understanding and mindset was forever changed.
Because of his book (and super-fantastic 2009 TedTalk: The Puzzle of Motivation), I can now provide the following answer to the question:
You cannot motivate anyone.
You can (and must) build environments that nurture and foster motivation.
There is a direct link from Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to Dan Pink’s Motivation = Autonomy + Mastery + Purpose to Simon Sinek’s Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action and what Ian Leslie is talking about in this book. It strikes me that the importance of fostering curiosity cannot be denied and that it is a critical requirement to nurture motivation and self-actualization.
From Ian Leslie page xxi
You practice empathetic curiosity when you genuinely try to put yourself in the shoes—and the mind—of the person you are talking to, to see things from their perspective. Diversive curiosity might make you wonder what a person does for a living; empathic curiosity makes you wonder why they do it.
Curiosity has a deeply social quality.
Thoughts: Practicing the habit of wondering why someone does what they do; and asking them about it, would help me be a better conversationalist particularly when trying to network and navigate those awkward conversations when just meeting someone. For example: if someone says they coach basketball with kids on the weekends. Rather than saying, “blah blah how nice blah blah”, ask: “What do you like most about that?”, “How did you get into that?”
I want to be better when connecting with people so I should figure out ways of doing this in all settings: personal and professional.
From Ian Leslie page xxi - xxiii
The internet ought to be giving epistemic curiosity another epochal boost, because it is making knowledge more widely available than ever before. But its amazing potential is undermined by our tendency to use it merely to stimulate diversive curiosity.
We confuse the practice of curiosity with ease of access to information and forget that real curiosity requires effort.
“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.” — Steve Fry, Comedian
Reference from The Leader’s Handbook by Peter Scholtes
Thoughts: In the conventional learning curve curiosity isn’t shown; but, in the transformative learning curve curiosity begins at the dip after B beginning C.
The Zip Syndicate wants to live in C as shown on the Transformative Learning Curve — after the first stage of learning: initial awareness, understanding, and knowledge.
I think this is where curious exploration starts. This is when the strive for mastery begins (Dan Pink;, this is where esteem and self-actualization (Maslow); this is where people become more motivated and curious.
Also, this is another way of thinking about the “Curiosity Zone” described in Chapter 3.
From Ian Leslie page xxiii - xxiv
Being epistemically curious seemed like a natural way of life. As I grew older, I came to think of it as a crucial condition of feeling fulfilled and alive.
Science supports this intuition. Neurologists use the term “cognitive reserve” to describe the brain’s capacity to resist the ravages of old age. For a study published in 2013, a team led by Robert Wilson at the Rush University Medical Center in Chicago enrolled three hundred elderly people and tested their thinking and memory skills each year. The participants were also asked about how often they read, wrote, and engaged in other cognitively demanding activities, not just currently, but in childhood and middle age. Following each participant’s death, their brain was examined for evidence of dementia. It was discovered that, after taking into account the physical effects of dementia on their brains, the subjects who made a lifelong habit of a lot of reading and writing slowed their mental decline by a third compared to those who only did an average amount of those things. (footnote: People who rarely read or wrote experienced a decline that was a staggering 48 percent faster compared to average participants.)
Thoughts: This just pulls me out of my chair. We have had several retired explorers join our sessions. Several have displayed a lack of confidence in their ability to contribute to the discussions in a meaningful way. When this occurs, I often abruptly respond with encouragement and a great deal of respect and appreciation for what they bring to the table. This passage in the book just emphasizes the importance of keeping explorations highly diversified. Exploration and Curious Mastermind sessions are meant for people at every professional stage, we need to actively seek curiosity coaches from all ages and professional stages. We need the questions and challenges from new professionals as much as we need to wisdom and experience from retiring/retired professions. It is an imperative for the health and wellbeing of all of us.
Can you believe that this all came from just the introduction of the book?!?! Get your own copy from amazon click here.
Stay tuned for more chapters. Up next will be from Part One: How Curiosity Works.