Is curiosity the prerequisite or the outcome?
The One Page Review # 11
If you never pulled apart an old PC were you even curious? That’s the 90s-kid definition of the word. But what if you just enjoyed watching someone else do it, then wandered off because you didn’t actually care how it worked? What if instead you loved asking why people did things — what made them smile, what made them sad, why they chose things the way they did, why do you have to do things a certain way or talk a certain way? Does that count as curiosity too? And do you have to be born with it, or can it come after you go through something?
If you’ve always been the employee trained not to ask too much — just enough to get the job done — or the girl trained not to question the status quo, does that mean the curiosity was never there, or was it trained out of you? What if questioning things later comes from actually wanting to know, instead of trying to prove what you already believed? What if you were always curious, but it got buried under a culture where asking too much made you seem rude, uncultured, like you were challenging someone just by asking — not necessarily by immediate family, but by the environment overall. And what if you just didn’t want to be seen as difficult?
The most fun I’ve had was during my venture apprenticeship, where the expectation was to talk to people and understand what they built and why. The problem was it was structured — every conversation was shaped by the hope of getting connected to the right investor. What if I just want to know why someone does something, because I’m trying to find my own path?
And if I tried before and stopped, does that mean trying again goes nowhere? I wonder if you’re born with the kind of personality that does its own thing, or if you can build it along the way. Not knowing what I enjoyed after my concussion was scary — such a strange place to be. Do people figure things out because they were born curious and asked the right questions early? Or can curiosity come after — can it be the outcome of an experience instead of the reason for it?
I haven’t figured it out yet, and I don’t know how to keep going and build something without knowing the direction. It’ll be an interesting thing to find out.
Shermeen