A Curious Mind (20 page)

And the point of all that curiosity isn't to turn something fun—like music—into a chore. We all know people who are totally immersed in contemporary music. They know every new band, they know every new style, they know who produces who, they know who influences who. Music aficionados like that make great playlists. They do it precisely because they love music. Their curiosity flows so naturally that it's a passion.

Taste is opinion, framed by the context of what you're judging. And taste gives you confidence in your judgment. Taste gives you confidence that you understand more than what you simply like—you understand what's good and what's not. It's taste that helps give you the judgment to assess something new. To be able to ask, and answer, the question, “Is that a good idea?”

For me, the dozens of curiosity conversations I've had are the foundation for developing a sense of taste about music, art, architecture, about popular culture in general. They give me an informed filter for assessing what comes my way—whether it's movie ideas, or a conversation about developments in particle physics, or electronic dance music. I don't think it gives me a “better” filter—my taste is my own. But it definitely gives me a more informed filter. I'm always talking to people with deep experience—and deeply educated taste themselves—about the things I care about. That curiosity gives me confidence in my own judgments.

There's one small caveat to using curiosity to develop good taste. Not everyone gets a sense of taste about art or music or food driven by their own curiosity and energy. If you grow up with parents who care about opera, who fill the house with classical music or modern art, poetry, or fine cuisine, you may well arrive at adulthood with a very well-developed sense of taste about those things. Especially as a child, you can develop taste based on immersion. That may be the best way to develop a sense of taste, in fact, but it's not an opportunity most of us have. And it's certainly not an opportunity we get to choose.

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CURIOSITY EQUIPS US WITH
the skills for openhearted, open-minded exploration. That's the quality of my curiosity conversations.

Curiosity also gives us the skills to zero in on the answer to a question. That's the quality of a police detective driven to solve a murder. That's the quality of a physician determined to figure out what disease is causing a patient's set of oddly contradictory symptoms and test results.

And curiosity gives us the skills to better relate to people, and to better manage and work with them in professional settings. That's the quality of my asking questions in the office. I'm not quite having an open-ended conversation with Anna Culp or our other executives about the state of our movies in production, but I'm also not pursuing specific answers with the relentless zeal of a police detective. Those kinds of conversations are a kind of accountability curiosity—open to hearing what's going on, but asking questions with a specific purpose in mind.

I think developing a sense of taste about something—or more broadly, a sense of judgment—falls into this third quality of curiosity. It's about being curious, but with a purpose or a goal in mind. I'm not asking about the progress on our movies because I'm idly interested in how things are going. I'm doing my part to move things along with the goal of getting those movies made, made well, made on budget, made on time. I'm doing it while deferring to my colleague's judgment and autonomy, but we both know that although I'm asking questions, I'm using them to hold her and the movie itself accountable.

Taste works the same way. You take your experience and your judgment and your preferences, and you apply them with
openness but also some skepticism to whatever comes your way—ideas, songs, meals, an acting performance. You're using taste and a skeptical curiosity to ask: How good is this thing I'm being asked to consider? How enjoyable is it? Where does it fit into what I already know?

Your good taste can discover things that are thrilling. It can save you from mediocrity. But it is skeptical. Using your judgment always involves raising your eyebrow, it means starting with a question mark: how good is this thing—how interesting, how original, how high-quality—given everything else I know?

There is one more quality of curiosity that we haven't touched on yet, and that's the quality of curiosity that the astronomer and author Carl Sagan refers to in the opening quote of this chapter: the value of curiosity in managing our public life, our democracy.

Democracy requires accountability. In fact, accountability is the very point of democracy—to understand what needs to be done in the community, to discuss it, to weigh the options, to make decisions, and then to assess whether those decisions were right and hold the people who made the decisions accountable for them.

That's why we have a free press—to ask questions. That's why we have elections—to ask whether we want to retain the people who hold public office. That's why the proceedings of the House and Senate and the courts are open to all, as are the meetings of every city council, county commission, and school
board in the nation. It's why we have three branches of government in the United States, in fact—to create a system of accountability among Congress, the presidency, and the courts.

In a society as complicated as ours, we often outsource that accountability. We let the press ask the questions (and then criticize the press for not asking the right questions). We let Congress ask the questions (and then criticize Congress for being either too timid or too destructive). We let activists ask the questions (and then criticize them for being too partisan).

Ultimately, the accountability has to come from the citizens. We need to be curious about how our government is functioning—whether it's the local high school or the VA health-care system, NASA's International Space Station or the finances of Social Security. What is the government supposed to be doing? Is it doing that? If not, why not? Who, in particular, is responsible—and do we have a way of getting them to do what we want, or should we fire them?

The way American government is designed assumes our curiosity. It doesn't have the skepticism itself built in—that has to come from us—but it has the
opportunity
for the skepticism built in.

Curiosity is as powerful in the public sphere as it is, for instance, at work. The very act of showing up and asking questions at a local government hearing is a vivid reminder that the government is accountable to us, and not the other way around. The questions communicate both authority and a sense of our values—whether we're standing at the lectern at the school
board meeting, or raising a hand at a candidate forum, or watching the House of Representatives on C-SPAN.

The connection between the personal curiosity we've been discussing and this more public curiosity is very simple: it's the habit of asking questions, of constantly reminding ourselves of the value of asking questions, and of our right to ask questions.

In fact, it's not just that democracy permits curiosity. Without curiosity, it's not democracy.

And the opposite is also true. Democracy happens to be the societal framework that gives freest rein to our curiosity in every other arena.

“Perhaps one day men will no longer be interested in the unknown, no longer tantalized by mystery. This is possible, but when Man loses his curiosity one feels he will have lost most of the other things that make him human.”

—Arthur C. Clark
e
¹

WE WERE DRIVING IN THE
car one afternoon with the windows open. It was 1959—I was eight years old. We stopped at a traffic light, and suddenly there was a bee buzzing around, in and out of the windows. It was making me nervous. I didn't want to get stung by the bee.

I couldn't wait for the light to change, for the car to get moving again. But all of a sudden I had a question: which moves faster—a car or a bee? Maybe the bee would be able to keep up with us, even after my mom pulled away from the intersection.

We eluded the bee that afternoon, but the question stuck with me. Which moves faster, a bee or a car? I tried to puzzle it out, but I didn't come to a satisfying answer. As an eight-year-old in 1959, I could do nothing with that question but ask a grown-up. So I did what I often did with my questions: I asked my grandmother. My grandmother was kind of my own personal Google—not quite as omniscient as the Internet seems to be, but much more understanding and encouraging.

She liked my questions even when she didn't know the answers.
²

I've been curious for as long as I have memories of myself. I was thinking of myself as curious before I was thinking of myself as anything else. It is my first personality trait. Fifty years later, I think of myself as curious the way some people think of themselves as funny, or smart, or gregarious.

For me, being curious defines not just my personality, not just the way I think of myself, it has been the key to my survival and my success. It's how I survived my reading problems. It's how I survived a bumpy academic career. It's how I ended up in the movie business; it's how I figured out the movie business. And curiosity is the quality I think helps distinguish me in Hollywood.

I ask questions.

The questions spark interesting ideas. The questions build collaborative relationships. The questions create all kinds of connections—connections among unlikely topics, among unlikely collaborators. And the interesting ideas, the collaborative relationships, and the web of connections work together to build trust.

Curiosity isn't just a quality of my personality—it's at the heart of how I approach being alive. I think it has been the differentiator. I think it's one of the reasons people like to work with me, in a business where there are lots of producers to choose from.

Curiosity gave me the dream. It, quite literally, helped me create the life I imagined back when I was twenty-three years old. In fact, it's helped me create a life much more adventurous, interesting, and successful than I could have hoped for at age twenty-three.

For me, writing this book has meant thinking about curiosity in ways I never have, and it has revealed all kinds of qualities of curiosity itself that had never occurred to me before. In fact, I've tried to make curiosity itself a character in the book, because curiosity is available to anyone. My stories are meant to inspire you and entertain you—they are my experience of curiosity. But everyone gets to use curiosity to chase the things that are most important to them.

That's the wonderful way that curiosity is different from intelligence or creativity or even from leadership. Some people are really smart. Some people are really creative. Some people have galvanic leadership qualities. But not everyone.

But you can be as curious as you want to be, and it doesn't matter when you start. And your curiosity can help you be smarter and more creative, it can help you be more effective and also help you be a better person.

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ONE OF THE THINGS
I love about curiosity is that it is an instinct with many dualities. Curiosity has a very yin-and-yang quality about it. It's worth paying attention to those dualities, because they help us see curiosity more clearly.

For instance, you can unleash your curiosity, or it can unleash you. That is, you can decide you need to be curious about something. But once you get going, your curiosity will pull you along.

The more you limit curiosity—the more you tease people with what's coming without telling them—the more you increase their curiosity. Who killed J.R.? Who won the Mega Millions lottery jackpot?

Likewise, you can be intensely curious about something relatively minor, and the moment you know the answer, your curiosity is satisfied. Once you know who won the lottery, the instinct to be curious about that deflates completely.

You can be curious about something very specific—like whether a bee or a car moves faster—curious about something to which you can get a definitive answer. That may or may not open up new questions for you (how do bees manage to fly at
twenty mph?). But you can also be curious about things to which you may never know the answer—physicians, psychologists, physicists, cosmologists are all researching areas where we learn more and more, and yet may never have definitive answers. That kind of curiosity can carry you through your entire life.

Curiosity requires a certain amount of bravery—the courage to reveal you don't know something, the courage to ask a question of someone. But curiosity can also give you courage. It requires confidence—just a little bit—but it repays you by building up your confidence.

Nothing unleashes curiosity in an audience like good storytelling. Nothing inspires storytelling, in turn, like the results of curiosity.

Curiosity can easily become a habit—the more you use it, the more naturally it will come to you. But you can also use curiosity actively—you can always overrule your natural pacing of asking questions and say to yourself, This is something I need to dig into. This is something, or someone, I need to know more about.

Curiosity looks like it's a “deconstructive” process. That seems almost obvious—by asking questions about things, you're taking them apart, you're trying to understand how they work, whether it's the engine in your Toyota Prius or the personality of your boss. But, in fact, curiosity isn't deconstructive. It's synthetic. When curiosity really captures you, it fits the pieces of the world together. You may have to learn about the
parts, but when you're done, you have a picture of something you never understood before.

Curiosity is a tool of engagement with other people. But it's also the path to independence—independence of thought. Curiosity helps create collaboration, but it also helps give you autonomy.