Curiosity

What are you excessively curious about — curious to a degree that would bore most other people? That's what you're looking for.

Being curious is important to me. Not only because it is how I get ideas for essays. It feels to me like everyone has something unrepeatable to bring into the world. And we can manifest it by going in our direction of maximal interestingness.

Perhaps, if your goal is to discover novel ideas, your motto should not be "do what you love" so much as "do what you're curious about."

In filling the well, think magic. Think delight. Think fun. Do not think duty. Do not do what you should do—spiritual sit-ups like reading a dull but recommended critical text. Do what intrigues you, explore what interests you; think mystery, not mastery. A mystery draws us in, leads us on, lures us. (A duty may numb us out, turn us off, tune us... See more

When I was younger, he used to tell me that one of the best things about life was that you never run out of new material to learn and absorb, that even at his old age, he still felt young in the face of new information.