Principle: To prevent boredom from dulling your senses, you must approach your work with a curious mind-set.
All great feats and brilliant accomplishments, regardless of their nature, begin with a question: Why? How? What if? The response to that question leads to another one, which provokes another, and so on. The pursuit of sustained, great work demands a commitment to pursuing the answers to a never-ending series of inquiries. However, in dealing with the pragmatic elements of daily life and work, our curiosity can become worn and obscured by a tangle of tasks and expectations. We can fall out of touch with our deeper questions and lose the will to ponder.
Reclaim curiosity by embracing an engagement mind-set rather than an entertainment mind-set. This means dedicating yourself to the pursuit of new and better questions, attuning your mind to dive deeply into important problems, and questioning the assumptions that sometimes limit fresh new perspectives.
To avoid becoming one of the busily bored, you need to stoke the fires of your curiosity by addressing its two forms: specific (diving deep into topics of interest) and diversive (exploring possibilities through purposeful questioning). There are two strategies for doing so: establish hunting trails and develop possibility thinking.
Establish Hunting Trails
If you want to integrate applied curiosity into your work and life, you need to have a system to support that aim. You must establish parcels of structured curiosity in your life, which means setting aside time and giving yourself permission to stoke the fire of your curiosity in a way that doesn’t interfere with your more urgent work. Here are a few strategies for doing this.
- Keep a list of questions
- Dedicate time to pursue your questions
- Prototype relentlessly
- Find your “bliss station”
Develop Possibility Thinking
A second strategy for developing your curiosity is to leverage possibility thinking, especially in how you engage with your projects. This means refusing to settle for status quo ideas and instead relentlessly embracing the pursuit of great ones.
* Source: Die Empty by Todd Henry