Curious

Second, because we’re too busy. Good questions require time to germinate and grow. When we’re over-occupied with things to do we focus on action at the expense of thinking and questioning.

Epistemic curiosity represents the deepening of a simple seeking of newness into a directed attempt to build understanding. It’s what happens when diversive curiosity grows up.

Rabinow thought the most important was ‘a big database’ of memorised knowledge: ‘If you’re a musician, you should know a lot about music … if you were born on a desert island and never heard music, you’re not likely to be a Beethoven … You may imitate birds but you’re not going to write the Fifth Symphony.’ The earlier you start building your datab

She wondered why there seemed to be two distinct categories, not just in her life, but in the world – things you do because they’re important, and things you do for pleasure.

‘Learning skills’ grow organically out of specific knowledge of specific domains – that is to say, facts (and I’m including here cultural knowledge, of the plot of Hamlet, for example). The wider your knowledge, the more widely your intelligence can range, and the more purchase it gets on new information.

Creativity starts in combination.

Progressive educationalists like Robinson frame existing knowledge as the enemy of new ideas. But at the most basic level, all of our new ideas are made up of old ones: to imagine a winged horse, you first need to be familiar with the ideas of horses and wings; to create a smartphone you need to know about computers and phones.

In a world where vast inequalities in access to information are finally being levelled, a new divide is emerging – between the curious and the incurious.

Jobs’s curiosity was crucial to his ability to invent and reinvent himself and his businesses. He had significantly more epistemic breadth than most of his peers in the technology business, and when the internet started breaking down the divisions between industries, he was best placed to take advantage.