A Curious Mind Read online

  It’s not a trivial, semantic argument.

  We live in a society that is increasingly obsessed with “innovation” and “creativity.”

  Twenty years ago, in 1995, “innovation” was mentioned about eighty times a day in the U.S. media; “creativity” was mentioned ninety times a day.

  Just five years later, the mentions of “innovation” had soared to 260 a day; “creativity” was showing up 170 times a day.

  By 2010, “innovation” was showing up 660 times a day, creativity close behind at 550 mentions a day.

  Curiosity gets only a quarter of those mentions in the daily media—in 2010, about 160 times a day. That is, curiosity gets as many mentions today as “creativity” and “innovation” did a decade ago.12

  The big U.S. universities maintain online databases of their faculty “experts,” so media and business can consult them. MIT lists nine faculty members who consider themselves experts on creativity, and twenty-seven who are experts on innovation. MIT experts on curiosity? Zero. Stanford lists four faculty experts on creativity, and twenty-one on innovation. Stanford faculty offering to talk about curiosity? Zero.

  It’s essential to cultivate creativity and innovation, of course. That’s what has driven our economy forward, that’s what so dramatically improves the way we live—in everything from telephones to retailing, from medicine to entertainment, from travel to education.

  But as indispensable as they are, “creativity” and “innovation” are hard to measure and almost impossible to teach. (Have you ever met someone who once lacked the ability to be creative or innovative, took a course, and became creative and innovative?) In fact, we often don’t agree on what constitutes an idea that is “creative” or “innovative.” Nothing is as common as the innovation I come up with that I think is brilliant and you think is dumb.

  I think that this intense focus on being creative and innovative can be counterproductive. The typical person at work in a cubicle may not think of himself or herself as being “creative” or “innovative.” Those of us who don’t work in the corporate research and development department may well be clear that “innovation” isn’t our job—because right over in that other building is the “department of innovation.” In fact, whether we might think we are creative or not, in most workplaces, it’s pretty clear that creativity isn’t part of our jobs—that’s why customer service reps are reading to us from scripts when we call the 800 number, not actually talking to us.

  Unlike creativity and innovation, though, curiosity is by its nature more accessible, more democratic, easier to see, and also easier to do.

  From my own experience pitching hundreds of movie ideas to studio executives, I know just how often people get told “no” to their brilliant ideas—not just most of the time, but 90 percent of the time. It takes a strong stomach to absorb all that rejection, and I don’t think most people feel like they get paid to come up with ideas that get rejected. (In the movie business, unfortunately, we don’t get paid at all without having our ideas rejected, because the only way to get to “yes” is through a lot of “no’s.”)

  Here’s the secret that we don’t seem to understand, the wonderful connection we’re not making: Curiosity is the tool that sparks creativity. Curiosity is the technique that gets to innovation.

  Questions create a mind-set of innovation and creativity. Curiosity presumes that there might be something new out there. Curiosity presumes that there might be something outside our own experience out there. Curiosity allows the possibility that the way we’re doing it now isn’t the only way, or even the best way.

  I said in chapter 1 that curiosity is the flint that sparks great ideas for stories. But the truth is much broader: curiosity doesn’t just spark stories, it sparks inspiration in whatever work you do.

  You can always be curious. And curiosity can pull you along until you find a great idea.

  Sam Walton didn’t walk the aisles of his own store trying to be inspired to do something new. That would have been as useful as looking inside empty Wal-Mart tractor trailers for inspiration. He needed a different perspective on the world—just like I found with Chief Gates or Lew Wasserman. Sam Walton wanted to innovate in the most ordinary of settings—a store. He started by being curious about everyone else in retailing. He just kept asking that question over and over again: what are our competitors doing?

  I don’t sit in my office, gazing out the windows at Beverly Hills, waiting for movie ideas to float into my field of vision. I talk to other people. I seek out their perspective and experience and stories, and by doing that I multiply my own experience a thousandfold.

  What I do, in fact, is keep asking questions until something interesting happens.

  That’s something we can all do. We can teach people to ask good questions, we can teach people to listen to the answers, and we can teach people to use the answers to ask the next question. The first step, in fact, is to treat the questions themselves as valuable, as worth answering—starting with our own kids. If you treat the question with respect, the person asking it almost always listens to the answer with respect (even if they don’t respect the actual answer).

  Being curious and asking questions creates engagement. Using curiosity to disrupt your own point of view is almost always worthwhile, even when it doesn’t work out the way you expect.

  That’s part of the fun of curiosity—you are supposed to be surprised. If you only get the answers you anticipate, you’re not being very curious. When you get answers that are surprising, that’s how you know that you’ve disrupted your point of view. But being surprised can also be uncomfortable, and I know that well.

  As I said, one of the people I was determined to meet and have a curiosity conversation with when I was just starting out in the movie business was Edward Teller. Teller was a towering figure from my youth, although not necessarily in a good way. He was a brilliant theoretical physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, developing the first atomic bomb. One of the early worries about the bomb was that the nuclear reaction an atomic bomb started might never stop—that a single bomb might consume the entire Earth. It was Teller’s calculations that proved an atomic bomb, while enormously destructive, would have a confined impact.

  Teller went on to drive the creation of the hydrogen bomb—a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb. He became director of the nation’s premier nuclear weapons research facility, Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California. He was more than just brilliant, he was a vigorous advocate of a strong defense, and passionate about the importance of nuclear weapons to that defense.

  By the time I was working as a movie producer, Teller was in his seventies, but he had found a fresh role advocating for and helping to design President Ronald Reagan’s controversial Star Wars missile defense shield, formally called the Strategic Defense Initiative. Teller was a cantankerous, difficult personality—he was widely rumored to be the inspiration for the title character “Dr. Strangelove” in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 movie.

  I wanted to meet him simply because I wanted to understand the personality of someone who could be passionate about inventing the most destructive weapon in the history of humanity.

  It was, not surprisingly, almost impossible to get an appointment with Teller. His office didn’t respond to telephone calls at all. I wrote letters. I wrote follow-up letters. I offered to fly to him. Finally, one day in 1987, I got a call. Dr. Teller—who was then seventy-nine and working on Star Wars—would be passing through Los Angeles. He would have a layover of a few hours, and would be spending those hours in a hotel near LAX. I could see him for an hour if I wanted to come to the hotel.

  Two military officers were waiting for me in the hotel lobby, in dress uniforms. They rode up with me. Teller had a suite of two adjoining rooms, and there were other military staff and aides. I didn’t see him alone.

  Right from the start, he seemed pretty scary to me.

  He was short. And he was indifferent. He didn’t seem
interested in my being there at all. You know, if people are interested in you, or if they simply want to be polite, they radiate some energy. Daryl Gates certainly had some energy.

  Not Teller.

  That indifference, of course, makes it hard to talk to someone.

  He did seem to know that I had been trying to make an appointment with him for a year. It irritated him. He started out crabby, and we didn’t move much beyond that.

  He was clearly very smart and professorial, but in a high-handed kind of way. I tried to ask him about his weapons work, but I didn’t get very far. What he said was, “I advance technologies as far as they can be advanced. And that’s my mission.”

  In our conversation, he exuded a barrier similar to the one he was talking about creating over the North American continent. There was an invisible glass wall between us.

  He was sending a very clear message: I was not important to him. I was wasting his time.

  To be honest, what you’re hoping for when you meet someone like Teller—who has had this incredible impact on the events that have shaped the world—what you’re hoping for, really, is some kind of secret.

  The secret to global security, or American security.

  The secret to who they are.

  You’re hoping for some kind of insight—a gesture, an attitude.

  That expectation is a little grandiose, of course. It’s hard to get secrets from someone with whom you spend forty-five minutes.

  But it felt like I got nothing but scorn from Teller.

  I asked him about television. He said, “I don’t do that.”

  I asked him about the movies. He said, “I don’t see movies. The last movie I saw was fifty years ago. It was Dumbo.”

  The great nuclear physicist had seen one of my precious moving pictures once, half a century earlier. Dumbo. A cartoon about a flying elephant.

  He was actually saying that he didn’t think what I did had any value. He certainly didn’t care about storytelling. It wasn’t just that he didn’t care about it—he had contempt for it. In that sense, I was kind of offended by him. Why bother to see me, just to be rude to me? But I was really only offended in a part of my mind. I was mostly fascinated by his contempt.

  In the end, he certainly qualified as disruptive—he really reached me in a way I’ll never forget.

  Teller was clearly a passionate patriot—almost a zealot. He cared about the United States, he cared about freedom, and in his own way, he cared about humanity.

  But what was so interesting, when I had time to think about it, was that he himself seemed to lack humanity, to be immune to ordinary human connection.

  When I met Teller, I was already well established as a movie producer. But you leave a meeting like that humbled, to be sure. I felt kind of like I’d been kicked in the stomach.

  That doesn’t mean I regretted chasing Edward Teller for a year. In a way I hadn’t expected, his personality kind of matched his achievements. But that’s the point of curiosity—you don’t always get what you think you’re going to get.

  And just as important, you don’t necessarily know how your curiosity is going to be received. Not everyone appreciates being the target of curiosity, and that too is a way of seeing the world from someone else’s point of view.

  In truth, though, I got exactly what I was hoping for: I got a vivid sense of Edward Teller. I got exactly the message Dr. Teller was sending about our relative places in the world.

  Curiosity is risky. But that’s good. That’s how you know how valuable it is.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Curiosity Inside the Story

  * * *

  “Human minds yield helplessly to the suction of story.”

  —Jonathan Gottschall1

  WHEN VERONICA DE NEGRI NARRATES the story of her life, it’s hard to connect the details of what you’re hearing with the quiet, composed woman who is standing alongside you.

  De Negri was a bookkeeper for a paper company, living with her husband and two young sons in Valparaíso, Chile, a historic five-hundred-year-old port city that is so beautiful its nickname is “the Jewel of the Pacific.”

  In her spare time, de Negri worked with trade unions and women’s groups in Valparaíso, and in the early 1970s, she also worked for the government of Chile’s democratically elected president, Salvador Allende.

  Allende was overthrown in 1973 by the man he had appointed to lead Chile’s military, General Augusto Pinochet. The coup was so violent that at one point, Chilean air force planes flew bombing runs against their nation’s own Presidential Palace in Santiago in an effort to dislodge Allende. Pinochet assumed power on September 11, 1973, and immediately started rounding up and “disappearing” Chileans he saw as opponents, or even potential opponents.

  Perhaps because of her trade-union work, or her work for Allende, officers from Chilean marine intelligence finally came for de Negri in 1975, taking her from her apartment to a marine intelligence base in Valparaíso. She was twenty-nine years old, her sons were eight and two. Her husband was also taken that day.

  At the time, Pinochet’s forces were arresting, imprisoning, and torturing so many Chileans—40,000 in all—that the dictator had to set up a network of concentration camps across Chile to handle them.

  De Negri was first held at the marine base in Valparaíso. After several months, she was moved to a concentration camp in Santiago. At both places, she was tortured systematically, relentlessly, almost scientifically—day after day for months.

  I met Veronica de Negri in the most unlikely of settings: the beach in Malibu, California. In the late 1980s, I lived in Malibu Beach, and my neighbors included the musician Sting and his wife, Trudie Styler. One Sunday afternoon, they invited a small group to their beachfront house for dinner.

  “I want you to meet somebody,” Sting said to me. “Veronica de Negri. She was incarcerated and tortured in Chile by Pinochet.” Sting was working with Amnesty International, and had gotten to know Veronica well through the organization.

  Veronica at that point had moved to Washington, DC. After being released from the concentration camp in Santiago, then rearrested several times to remind her that she was being watched, she was expelled from Chile, and reunited with her sons in Washington, who were in high school and junior high. When we met that day at Sting’s home, Veronica’s torturer, Pinochet, was still in power in Chile.

  We started talking, and then we went for a walk on the beach.

  For much of the time she was imprisoned, Veronica was blindfolded. Her torturers were devastatingly clever. Most of what was inflicted on Veronica was done episodically and erratically. So even when she wasn’t being actively tortured, she lived in a state of sickening fear, because she knew that at any moment, the door of her cell could fly open, and she could be hauled off for another round. It didn’t matter what time it was. It didn’t matter whether the last torture session had ended an hour earlier, or three days earlier. The next round could always be just a tick of the clock away.

  Pinochet’s men had contrived to make sure that Veronica was being tortured psychologically, even if they didn’t have the staff at that moment to torture her physically.

  They used the same technique to make the torture itself more unbearable. One thing Veronica was subjected to was something she called “submarines.” A tank was filled with the ugliest water imaginable, mixed with urine, feces, and other garbage. Veronica was bound, and the rope holding her was threaded through a pulley at the bottom of the tank. She was held just above the surface of the tank and then yanked down to the bottom, where she had to hold her breath until she was allowed to surface amid the stench of what was in the water. The time held underwater was never the same, the time at the surface to catch her breath was never the same.

  She said that the unpredictability was almost worse than whatever was done to her: How long am I going to be able to breathe? How long am I going to have to hold my breath, and can I hold my breath that long?

  It’s on
e thing to hear about human cruelty on the news, or to read about it. But to walk alongside Veronica de Negri and hear what other human beings had done to her is an experience unlike any I had ever had before.

  How does a person do that to another person?

  Where does the strength come from to survive?

  It takes enormous courage just to be able to retell that story to a stranger—to relive what was done, and also to absorb the reaction of the person hearing the story.

  I was completely mesmerized by Veronica because of that courage, and also because of her self-possession and her dignity. Her refusal to be silent. She opened to me a world I would never have been aware of, and a whole set of human qualities and behaviors I would never have thought about.

  Veronica de Negri gave me something critical in addition to the searing details of her story. She gave me a completely new sense of human resilience.

  One of the concepts that really animates me is what I think of as “mastery.” I want to know what it takes to really master something—not just to be a police officer, but to be the chief; not just to be an intelligence agent, but to be head of the CIA; not just to be a trial attorney, but to be F. Lee Bailey. That’s a quiet thread through my curiosity, and it’s also a theme in some form of every one of my movies. The stories touch the whole range of human experience, I hope, but the central struggle is often about achievement, or the struggle for achievement. What does success look like, what does success feel like, to a father or the president of the United States, a rap musician or a mathematician?

  Veronica de Negri really shattered the question of “mastery” for me. Of anyone I have ever met, she faced the most fearsome and enormous personal challenge. But it was also the most basic. She wasn’t trying to solve a math equation. She was trying to survive. She was trying to survive in the face of smart, evil people who wanted to destroy her.

  For Veronica, there was no help. There was no rescue. She was up against the most horrifying opponent—well-armed fellow human beings. The stakes were total: her sanity and her physical survival. And the only person she could turn to was herself. She had to search inside herself for the skills she needed to withstand what was done to her. Nothing else was available—not even a view of what she was facing beyond the blindfold.