Purposeful Curiosity

Think of this book as a curiosity manifesto and a practical manual designed to help individuals, teams, or organizations channel their curiosity to move ahead in their careers and lives, solve fascinating problems, and innovate.

Getting psyched about a curiosity project requires a sense of urgency. You need to tap into your sense of yearning to explore what you find meaningful, and you must remind yourself that this is a time-limited quest. You only live once, after all. When others say, “It cannot be done,” the curious respond, “If we start now, we might be able to do it.

Turn students from passive recipients of information to curious owners of their learning journey, advised John Underkoffler, the previously mentioned cofounder of Oblong Industries. We must encourage students to delve deeper into topics that spark their curiosity. Curating relevant information will enhance their confidence and incite curiosity in o

Doing nothing is the absolute worst thing you can possibly do, because if you take the risk and you succeed, fantastic. If you take the risk and you fail, learn from it. If you do nothing, then you have neither succeeded nor learned. The danger of inaction far outweighs the risk of doing almost anything, really.”

Purposeful curiosity is a love affair, not a one-night stand. It’s a big world, and there are many places where no one has been; there are still many discoveries to be made in every area of study. You could live until you are one hundred, and you’d still just be finding your way around. Being purposefully curious is about being constantly inquisiti

To get inspired, the preternaturally curious people I interviewed tend to ask five questions time and again: •What if? •Am I sure? •What’s next? •Have I looked closely enough? •Have I looked everywhere? Let’s ask these questions ourselves and go into a little more detail as we try to understand how they can help us become inspired.

As head of school, you must tackle several tasks: •Establish your framework. •Create your own curriculum. •Build your own community. •Become a conversation connoisseur. •Piece the puzzle together.

As a mentor or an adviser to several start-ups, I have seen more than one team fail to find its first customer or secure external funding because it focused on finding answers that didn’t exist instead of pivoting when necessary.

However, what many of my colleagues were underplaying was the importance of looking at what we don’t know or understand; such examination is the underpinning of all good academic inquiry.

Three components of a potential interest transform it into an insatiable itch that drives our passion and fuels our perseverance. For simplicity’s sake, I like to put them together in the following equation: Let’s look at this equation in more detail. What are boundaries, purpose, and belief? How can they be added together? And why do they add up t