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

If you allow yourself to become incurious, your life will be drained of color, interest, and pleasure. You will be less likely to achieve your potential at work or in your creative life.

In our adult lives it generates a restless desire for new information and new experiences. Just as it made us peer into rock pools as children, as adults it makes us refresh Twitter streams.

Diversive curiosity can be a strength, leading people to take in more from their environment. But it can quickly become aimless, distracting, and frustrating.

B. F. Skinner, the great experimental psychologist, advised, “When you run into something interesting, drop everything else and study

Diversive curiosity makes us want to know what lies on the other side of the mountain; epistemic curiosity arms us with the knowledge we need to survive when we get there.

The more unpredictable the environment, the more important a seemingly unnecessary breadth and depth of knowledge become.

Unfettered curiosity is wonderful; unchanneled curiosity is not.

It is sobering to think that even at such an early age, infants are capable of telling whether or not you’re an idiot—a judgment that, when you think about it, demands substantial cognitive and social abilities.

This is what being human entails. We spend our entire lives at the entrance of a cave, caught between the safety of the familiar and the yearning for novelty, the peace of home and the thrill of travel, the tonic and dominant chords.