Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends On It

In a high-information, highly competitive world, it’s crucial to know one or two big things and to know them in more depth and detail than most of your contemporaries. But to really ignite that knowledge, you need the ability to think about it from a variety of eclectic perspectives and to be able to collaborate fruitfully with people who have diff

He advises his clients to adopt the ‘you idiot’ test. It works like this: mentally recite to yourself the question you’re about to ask. At the end of your private question, add the words, ‘you idiot’. If the question still sounds natural, don’t ask it.

It is hardly possible to overstate the value in the present state of

As Danah Boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft, puts it, the spread of internet access ‘mirrors and

The fourth and most magical stage takes place in the mind’s subterranean chambers. After the concert, advises Young, retire to bed, and ‘turn the problem over to your unconscious mind and let it work while you sleep.’

Only fiction has the power to cross the mental barricades, to make strangers intelligible to each other, because it moves people’s hearts as well as engaging their minds.

The fourth reason we don’t ask questions, says Marquardt, is that we lack the skills required to ask them.

Success isn’t good for curiosity.

A puzzle is something that commands our curiosity until we have solved it. A mystery, by contrast, never stops inviting enquiry.

‘Curiosity about life in all its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people.’