Too little
Stay inside the story
The wiki gives the fictional answer. Nothing else matters.
A satisfying account closes an adjacent question before it can develop.
Curiosity
Follow the question that reaches beyond your specialty.
A settled desire to understand rather than remain content with unexamined assumptions.
Curiosity lets an interest lead beyond its familiar borders. A game, novel or wiki can supply the first question; following it may take you into mathematics, history or another person’s craft. The pleasure is in finding something you did not know to ask about.
Curiosity gives more questions worth pursuing
You open a fan wiki to find out how a fictional starship finds its way home. One reference leads to a real account of celestial navigation. Soon you are comparing a story’s convenient engine with the patient work of finding a position at sea. The browser has gained several tabs, but you have gained a question worth keeping: what can the sky actually tell a traveler?
Finding the balance in Curiosity
Follow a fictional navigation question into a reliable explanation of real navigation, keeping the two accounts distinct.
A fitting response
Follow the connection
That is how the story explains it. How did real navigators solve the problem?
The question opens another subject while keeping fiction and evidence distinct.
Pursued too far
Keep every tab open
I cannot stop until I follow every link on every page.
The invitation to explore becomes an impossible demand to exhaust the subject.
A worthwhile detour has room both for surprise and for a stopping point. Keep the question that gives the next link a purpose.
What Curiosity makes possible
An unexpected connection can make both subjects richer. Real navigation gives you new questions about the imagined voyage; the imagined voyage gives you a reason to care about bearings and observations. A detour has become an entry into another field.
Curiosity in ordinary life
An unfamiliar credit
A game’s music credits name an instrument you do not recognize. Listen to an example and find out what it contributes.
A museum detour
On the way to the meteorites, a calendar wheel raises a question about how people organize the year.
Nearby virtues, different work
Attentiveness
Attentiveness notices what is present; Curiosity asks what else can be discovered.
Integrance
Curiosity opens a connection; Integrance works out how it belongs in a coherent account.
Curiosity and its counterfeits
Collecting impressive questions
Asking only what will display your range is a counterfeit of Curiosity. Let the answer matter more than the performance.
Intrusion
Another person’s private life is not an exhibit. Interest does not entitle you to their information.
How to cultivate Curiosity
Follow a question far enough to learn something specific.
Use a source capable of answering that question.
Keep a promising detour without abandoning every existing inquiry.
Try it today
Follow one public reference from an interest you enjoy into an unfamiliar subject. Check a reliable explanation and write the next question it opens.
Questions worth returning to
- What surprised me because it belonged to another subject?
- What would I like to understand even if nobody heard about it?
Keep the practice proportionate
Explore public material and welcome conversations. Respect access restrictions, privacy and a person’s choice not to explain.
Quotations and further reading
Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.
As before remarked, no little discovery of mine ever gave me so much pleasure as the making out the meaning of heterostyled flowers.
Charles Darwin · The Autobiography of Charles Darwin · Written May 1, 1881
The delight belongs to understanding a particular floral difference. A small subject can reward deep attention without first proving that it is grand or fashionable.
There is no better, there is no more open door by which you can enter into the study of natural philosophy, than by considering the physical phenomena of a candle.
Michael Faraday · The Chemical History of a Candle · Lecture I, The Flame
Faraday opens a broad inquiry through an ordinary object. The starship question also becomes an entrance into a wider subject when a useful connection invites further reading.
We shall better know this corner for having traveled in distant countries with which we have nothing to do.
The distant inquiry returns with a changed view of the familiar. It suits a favorite subject acquiring an unexpected neighbor rather than merely acquiring more trivia.
But we have a hunger of the mind which asks for knowledge of all around us, and the more we gain, the more is our desire; the more we see, the more are we capable of seeing.
Maria Mitchell · Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals · Chapter XI, Colors of Stars
Mitchell describes knowledge increasing the appetite and capacity to notice. Following the starship question into navigation gives that appetite a new subject.
For Angling may be said to be so like the Mathematicks, that it can never be fully learnt; at least not so fully, but that there will still be more new experiments left for the trial of other men that succeed us.
Izaak Walton · The Compleat Angler · To the Reader
Walton treats even a well-practiced hobby as open to further experiments. A familiar fan universe can similarly lead beyond the questions you already know how to answer.
The prescription is that the subject must be made to show new aspects of itself; to prompt new questions; in a word, to change.
James proposes finding new aspects and questions within a subject. In a voluntary interest, that helps distinguish deepening attention from mechanically repeating familiar facts.
And then the sense of the word solution enlarged, the insoluble problems became the most interesting of all, and others unforeseen presented themselves.
The history of mathematical problems is used to show that inquiry can enlarge the meaning of an answer. Learning may reveal better questions than the first one.
Continue through the catalog
Practice this collection
Choose this approved collection as an optional workbook program, or select individual virtues in My Virtues.