A Curious Mind Read online

  If you’re at a boring business dinner, curiosity can save you.

  If you’re bored with your career, curiosity can rescue you.

  If you’re feeling uncreative or unmotivated, curiosity can be the cure.

  It can help you use anger or frustration constructively.

  It can give you courage.

  Curiosity can add zest to your life, and it can take you way beyond zest—it can enrich your whole sense of security, confidence, and well-being.

  But it doesn’t do any of that alone, of course.

  While Labrador retrievers are really curious, no black Lab ever decoded the genome, or got a job at Best Buy for that matter. They lose interest pretty quickly.

  For it to be effective, curiosity has to be harnessed to at least two other key traits. First, the ability to pay attention to the answers to your questions—you have to actually absorb whatever it is you’re being curious about. We all know people who ask really good questions, who seem engaged and energized when they’re talking and asking those questions, but who zone out the moment it’s time for you to answer.

  The second trait is the willingness to act. Curiosity was undoubtedly the inspiration for thinking we could fly to the moon, but it didn’t marshal the hundreds of thousands of people, the billions of dollars, and the determination to overcome failures and disasters along the way to making it a reality. Curiosity can inspire the original vision—of a moon mission, or of a movie, for that matter. It can replenish that inspiration when morale flags—look, that’s where we’re going! But at some point, on the way to the moon or the multiplex, the work gets hard, the obstacles become a thicket, the frustration piles up, and then you need determination.

  I hope to accomplish three things in this book: I want to wake you up to the value and power of curiosity; I want to show you all the ways I use it, in the hopes that that will inspire you to test it out in your daily life; and I want to start a conversation in the wider world about why such an important quality is so little valued, taught, and cultivated today.

  For a trait with so much potential power, curiosity itself seems uncomplicated. Psychologists define curiosity as “wanting to know.” That’s it. And that definition squares with our own commonsense feeling. “Wanting to know,” of course, means seeking out the information. Curiosity starts out as an impulse, an urge, but it pops out into the world as something more active, more searching: a question.

  This inquisitiveness seems as intrinsic to us as hunger or thirst. A child asks a series of seemingly innocent questions: Why is the sky blue? How high up does the blue go? Where does the blue go at night? Instead of answers (most adults can’t explain why the sky is blue, including me), the child might receive a dismissive, slightly patronizing reply like, “Why, aren’t you the curious little girl . . .”7

  To some, questions like these feel challenging, even more so if you don’t know the answers. Rather than answering them, the adult simply asserts his own authority to brush them aside. Curiosity can make us adults feel a little inadequate or impatient—that’s the experience of the parent who doesn’t know why the sky is blue, the experience of the teacher trying to get through the day’s lesson without being derailed.

  The girl is left not just without answers, but also with the strong impression that asking questions—innocuous or intriguing questions—can often be regarded as impertinent.

  That’s hardly surprising.

  No one today ever says anything bad about curiosity, directly. But if you pay attention, curiosity isn’t really celebrated and cultivated, it isn’t protected and encouraged. It’s not just that curiosity is inconvenient. Curiosity can be dangerous. Curiosity isn’t just impertinent, it’s insurgent. It’s revolutionary.

  The child who feels free to ask why the sky is blue grows into the adult who asks more disruptive questions: Why am I the serf and you the king? Does the sun really revolve around Earth? Why are people with dark skin slaves and people with light skin their masters?

  How threatening is curiosity?

  All you have to do is look to the Bible to see. The first story in the Bible after the story of creation, the first story that involves people, is about curiosity. The story of Adam, Eve, the serpent, and the tree does not end well for the curious.

  Adam is told explicitly by God: “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.”8

  It is the serpent who suggests challenging God’s restriction. He starts with a question himself, to Eve: Is there a tree whose fruit God has put off limits? Yes, Eve says, the tree right at the center of the garden—we can’t eat its fruit, we can’t even touch it, or else we’ll die.

  Eve knows the rules so well, she embellishes them a bit: Don’t even touch the tree.

  The serpent replies with what is surely the most heedless bravado in history—unafraid of the knowledge of good and evil, or of God. He says to Eve, “You will not certainly die. For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”9

  The serpent is appealing directly to Eve’s curiosity. You don’t even know what you don’t know, the serpent says. With a bite of the forbidden fruit, you will see the world in a completely different way.

  Eve visits the tree, and discovers that “the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom.”10

  She plucks a piece of fruit, takes a bite, and passes it to Adam, who also takes a bite. “And the eyes of both of them were opened.”11

  Knowledge was never so easily gotten, nor in the end so hard won. To say that God was angry is an understatement. The punishment for knowing good and evil is misery for Eve and Adam, and for all the rest of us, forever: the pain of childbirth for Eve, the unceasing toil of raising their own food for Adam. And, of course, banishment from the garden.

  The parable could not be blunter: curiosity causes suffering. Indeed, the story’s moral is aimed directly at the audience: whatever your current misery, reader, it was caused by Adam, Eve, the serpent, and their rebellious curiosity.

  So there you have it. The first story, in the foundation work of Western Civilization—the very first story!—is about curiosity, and its message is: Don’t ask questions. Don’t seek out knowledge on your own—leave it to the people in charge. Knowledge just leads to wretchedness.

  Barbara Benedict is a professor at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and a scholar of the eighteenth century who spent years studying the attitude about curiosity during that period, as scientific inquiry sought to overtake religion as the way we understand the world.

  The Adam and Eve story, she says, is a warning. “ ‘You are a serf because God said you should be a serf. I’m a king because God said I should be a king. Don’t ask any questions about that.’ Stories like Adam and Eve,” Benedict says, “reflect the need of cultures and civilizations to maintain the status quo. ‘Things are the way they are because that’s the right way.’ That attitude is popular among rulers and those who control information.” And it has been from the Garden of Eden to the Obama administration.

  Curiosity still gets no respect. We live in an era in which, if you’re willing to squint, all of human knowledge is accessible on a smartphone, but the bias against curiosity still infuses our culture.

  The classroom should be a vineyard of questions, a place to cultivate them, to learn both how to ask them and how to chase down the answers. Some classrooms are. But in fact, curiosity is often treated with the same regard in school as it was in the Garden of Eden. Especially with the recent proliferation of standardized testing, questions can derail the lockstep framework of the day’s lesson plan; sometimes teachers don’t know the answers themselves. It’s exactly the opposite of what you would hope, but authentic curiosity in a typical seventh-grade classroom isn’t cultivated—because it’s inconvenient and disruptive to the orderl
y running of the class.

  The situation is little better in the offices and workplaces where most adults spend their lives. Sure, software coders or pharmaceutical researchers or university professors are encouraged to be curious because it’s a big part of their jobs. But what if the typical hospital nurse or bank teller gets curious and starts questioning how things are done? Outside of some truly exceptional places like Google and IBM and Corning, curiosity is unwelcome, if not insubordinate. Good behavior—whether you’re fourteen years old or forty-five—doesn’t include curiosity.

  Even the word “curious” itself remains strangely anti-curious. We all pretend that a curious person is a delight, of course. But when we describe an object with the adjective “curious,” we mean that it’s an oddity, something a little weird, something other than normal. And when someone responds to a question with the tilt of her head and the statement, “That’s a curious question,” she is of course saying it’s not the right question to be asking.

  Here’s the remarkable thing. Curiosity isn’t just a great tool for improving your own life and happiness, your ability to win a great job or a great spouse. It is the key to the things we say we value most in the modern world: independence, self-determination, self-government, self-improvement. Curiosity is the path to freedom itself.

  The ability to ask any question embodies two things: the freedom to go chase the answer, and the ability to challenge authority, to ask, “How come you’re in charge?”

  Curiosity is itself a form of power, and also a form of courage.

  • • •

  I WAS A PUDGY boy, and I didn’t grow out of it as a teenager. When I graduated from college, I had love handles. I got teased at the beach. I looked soft, with my shirt on or off.

  I decided I didn’t want to look the way I looked. When I was twenty-two years old, I changed my diet and developed an exercise routine—a discipline, really. I jumped rope every day, Two hundred jumps a minute, thirty minutes a day, seven days a week. Six thousand jumps a day for twelve years. Gradually my body changed, the love handles faded away.

  I didn’t drive myself to be buff. And I don’t look like a movie star. But I also don’t really look like what you might imagine a movie producer looks like. I have my own slightly offbeat style. I wear sneakers to work, I gel my hair so it stands straight up, I have a big smile.

  And today, I’m still exercising four or five times a week, usually first thing in the morning, often getting up before six to make sure I have time. (I don’t jump rope anymore, because I eventually ruptured both my Achilles tendons.) I’m sixty-three years old, and in the last four decades, I’ve never slipped back into being soft.

  I took a resolution and turned it into a habit, into part of how I live each day.

  I did the same thing with curiosity.

  Very gradually, starting with that first law clerk’s job at Warner Bros., I consciously made curiosity a part of my routine.

  I already explained that first step, insisting on meeting everyone whose legal contracts I delivered. I took two things from my success with that. First, people—even famous and powerful people—are happy to talk, especially about themselves and their work; and second, it helps to have even a small pretext to talk to them.

  That’s what my “I have to hand these papers over in person” line was, a pretext—it worked for me, it worked for the assistants, it even worked for the people I was visiting. “Oh, he needs to see me in person, sure.”

  A few months after I started at Warner Bros., a senior vice president of the studio was fired. I remember watching them peel his name off the office door.

  His office was spacious, it had windows, it had two secretaries, and most important, it was right next to the executive suite—what I called the “royal” offices—where the president of Warner Bros. worked, as did the chairman, and the vice chairman.

  I asked my boss, Peter Knecht, if I could use that vice president’s office while it was empty.

  “Sure,” Knecht said. “I’ll arrange it.”

  The new office changed everything. Just like when you wear the right clothes for the occasion—when you wear a suit, you feel more confident and grown up—going to work in that real office changed my perspective. All of a sudden I felt like I had my own piece of real estate, my own franchise.

  This was a great time to be in show business in Hollywood, the late sixties and seventies, and the “royal suite” was occupied by three of the most important and creative people of the era—Frank Wells, the president of Warner Bros., who went on to head Disney; Ted Ashley, who wasn’t ever a household name, but who as chairman of Warner Bros. really brought energy and success back to the studio; and John Calley, the vice chairman of Warner Bros., who was a legendary producer, something of a Hollywood intellectual, a creative force, and unquestionably an eccentric character.

  I was just a law clerk, but I had an office, my own secretaries, and I even had one of those old-fashioned speaker-box intercoms on my desk. Just outside my door worked three of the most powerful men in Hollywood. I had created a situation where I was in exactly the right place at exactly the right time.

  I was baffled by the entertainment business, and it seemed as if even many of the people in the entertainment business were baffled by it. It was hard to understand how movies and TV shows got made. It was definitely not a linear process. People seemed to be navigating in a fog, without instruments.

  But I was fascinated and captivated by it. I became like an anthropologist entering a new world, with a new language, new rituals, new priorities. It was a completely immersive environment, and it ignited my curiosity. I was determined to study it, to understand it, to master it.

  It was John Calley who really showed me what being in the entertainment business was all about, and he also showed me what it could be like. Calley was a huge figure and an important creative force in the movies in the 1960s and 1970s. Under his aegis, Warner Bros. flourished, producing movies like The Exorcist, A Clockwork Orange, Deliverance, Dog Day Afternoon, All the President’s Men, The Towering Inferno, Dirty Harry, and Blazing Saddles.12

  When I was working just down the hall from him, Calley was forty-four or forty-five years old, at the height of his power, and already a legend—intelligent, eccentric, Machiavellian. Warner Bros. in those days was making a movie a month,13 and Calley was always thinking a hundred moves ahead. A handful of people loved him, a slightly larger group admired him, and a lot of people feared him.

  I think what he found appealing about me was my innocence, my utter naïveté. I wasn’t working any angles. I was so new, I didn’t even know where the angles were.

  Calley would say, “Grazer, come sit in my office.” He’d put me on the couch, and I’d watch him work.

  The whole thing was a revelation. My own father was a lawyer, a sole practitioner, and he struggled to be successful. I was headed to law school—a life of manila file folders, stacks of briefs, thick casebooks, working away at a Naugahyde-topped desk.

  Calley worked out of a huge office that was beautiful and elegant. It was set up like a living room. He had no desk. He had a couple of sofas, and he worked all day sitting on the sofa.

  He didn’t do any writing or typing, he didn’t carry piles of work home from the office each day. He talked. He sat in this elegant living room, on the couch, and talked all day.14 In fact, the contracts I delivered were just the final act, formalizing all the talk. Sitting there on Calley’s sofa, it was clear that the business part of show business was all about conversation.

  And watching Calley work, I realized something: creative thoughts didn’t have to follow a straight narrative line. You could pursue your interests, your passions, you could chase any quirky idea that came from some odd corner of your experience or your brain. Here was a world where good ideas had real value—and no one cared whether the idea was connected to yesterday’s idea or whether it was related to the previous ten minutes of conversation. If it was an interesting idea, no one cared
where it came from at all.

  It was an epiphany. That’s how my brain worked—lots of ideas, just not organized like the periodic table.

  For years, I struggled in school. I wasn’t that good at sitting quietly, tucked into a little desk, following a bell schedule and filling out worksheets. That binary way of learning—either you know the answer or you don’t—didn’t fit my brain and didn’t appeal to me. I’ve always felt like ideas come from all corners of my brain, and I felt that way even as a kid.

  I did well in college, but only because by then I had figured out some tricks to succeeding in that environment. But the huge classes and impersonal homework assignments didn’t excite me. I didn’t learn that much. I was headed to law school because I had gotten in, and because I wasn’t quite sure what else to do. I did at least have some idea of what it meant to be a lawyer—although, frankly, it seemed a lot like a life sentence to yet more homework assignments, assuming I passed the bar exam.

  Calley, on the other hand, was one of the hippest guys in the world. He knew movie stars, he socialized with movie stars. He was highly literate—he read all the time. He sat on his couch, with ideas and decisions winging through his office all day long without rules or rigidity.

  Watching him was intoxicating. I thought, I want to live in this man’s world. Who needs a life of brown accordion files? I want to work on a sofa, follow my curiosity, and make movies.15

  Sitting there in his office, I could clearly understand that the movie business was built on ideas—a steady stream of captivating ideas, new ideas every day. And it was suddenly clear to me that curiosity was the way to uncover ideas, it was the way to spark them.

  I knew I was curious—the way you might know you are funny or shy. Curiosity was a quality of my personality. But until that year, I didn’t connect curiosity to success in the world. In school, for instance, I had never associated being curious with getting good grades.