Blog

Updated July 27th 2023

Do you remember how to be curious?

If you spend any time with children you will be used to questions, about EVERYTHING!

My friends daughter asked her the other day ‘when trees get cut down do they hurt?’. It’s a valid question, which, depending on your philosophical or spiritual beliefs, we don’t actually know the answer to.

You’d rarely hear an adult asking a question like this for fear of seeming stupid. Young children don’t care about feeling stupid. They are curious.

I asked a client recently to ‘be curious’ about an issue he was having with his team. He replied with, what does the word ‘curious’ mean?  When he asked, I immediately wondered; have we all forgotten how to be curious?!

According to Wiki, “Curiosity killed the cat” is a proverb used to warn of the dangers of unnecessary investigation or experimentation.  Sometimes I think this proverb infiltrates our brains as we move towards and into adulthood, and that we take it way too literally, fearing that we might get squashed on the road like our childhood cat, and in doing so, we block ourselves from being curious!

Do you remember how to be curious? Many of us forget ‘being curious’ ever existed!  Do we lose our curiosity because it becomes less important to be curious? Are opportunities for curiosity being taken away from us at an early age? I often wonder, is this because of the experience the world provides us with i.e. the structure of education? Do we lose our curiosity once we are embedded in education? Or is it too important as adults to ‘appear’ like we know everything?

After this conversation with my client, I asked some trusted friends about their own curiosity. Many of them believe they lost their ability to be ‘stupidly’ curious when they were approximately 11 and 12 years of age, and more worrying they’ve noticed that their children are losing their propensity to be curious a lot younger.

Curiosity, innovation, critical thinking and problem-solving skills are all closely linked, and are becoming more and more important for every employee to have in their briefcase. In our work at Adaptas™, and also many of the projects we work on with PhathomHQ (www. phathomhq.com- optimising human potential in actively exploring and understanding innovation, problem-solving, critical thinking, and creativity  through highly relevant work-related challenges), we find that when people are given the opportunity to be curious, they come looking for permission to really ask big questions, to move out of their comfort zone, and to try things out. In essence, they turn into children looking for permission from us, to be allowed to be curious! Is it just me, or does anyone else see the irony in this?!

Einstein said ‘Logic will get you from A to B, imagination will take you everywhere’.

I recently also asked a friend to tell me what other words she thought of when I said curiosity. She said ‘enquiry’ ‘nosiness’ ‘busy-body’.  When I go myself on a word association with curiosity, I think of ‘imagination’ and ‘playfulness’.  Interesting the difference in associations we make to words and where our behaviour goes based on this association.

How does curiosity look/sound/feel to you?

It’s also important to note that a less frequently seen rejoinder to “curiosity killed the cat” is “but, satisfaction brought it back”. Hmmm, what can we learn from this?