Be Curious
Over the last three weeks I’ve had the opportunity to speak to a group of young college soccer players and students, interviewed by a college student for an entrepreneurship class, mentor some young professionals, and have numerous conversations with professional soccer players, business owners, and even my own kids. My number one piece of advice to all of them is almost always the same - “Be Curious.”
Be Curious
I recently came across an article in Inc magazine that described the two questions that Bill Gates, legendary founder of Microsoft, says he still asks himself to this day when trying to solve a problem. Those two questions were: 1) Who has dealt with the problem well? 2) What can we learn from them?
The simplicity of this idea resonates with me for a multitude of reasons. If you have been reading along with my post you know that a lot of what I’ve been talking about is focusing more on your process this year in order to find continual improvement and success for life. The incredible thing about Bill Gates' answer to solving big problems is that his first thought despite being an obviously successful and brilliant thinker is too actually be first a learner. He is curious first. He looks for those who have solved a problem, tackled it in the past, and seeks first to learn from them.
If one of the wealthiest, and arguably one of the most intelligent men in the world first seeks to be curious then why wouldn’t we do the same?
How do we train ourselves to be curious? How do we build that into our process, our systems, or organizational culture and structures?
Ask Questions
My second piece of advice to most people after telling them to be curious, is typically “Ask Questions”. Confucius said “The man who asks a question is a fool for a minute, the man who does not ask is a fool for life.” For years are teachers said there are no dumb questions. Like most of you I always rolled my eyes because it was usually said right after someone asked something that we considered to be a dumb question. The truth is that as Trey Gowdy says “Even the most stupid question is a thousand times better than a stupid declarative statement.” Take a minute to think back to those scenarios. The person asking the question may have seemed in our eyes to be a fool for that brief minute, but if they had not asked the question they would never have learned. They would still be a fool to this day. How often did the teacher, professor, your boss etc. also follow up with something that struck you as intriguing, interesting, or something you didn’t know. Asking questions gives the person on the other side of the table permission to speak, a chance for us to clear our mind and listen. When they do we almost always learn something, we gain insight, information, perspective. None of those things are a bad thing. By asking a questions we get clarity vs. making a profoundly stupid statement that is much harder to recover from.
In Trey Gowdy’s book appropriately titled ‘It Doesn’t Hurt to Ask’ he highlights the importance, and power of questions to be persuasive, to learn, and to feel you belong within a group. Gowdy even points out that “the chief motivation for using questions rather than declarative statements was and remains the impetus number one - that it is a defense mechanism for me. I never thought I was smart enough to participate in conversations with smart people, but I was drawn to be around them.” Asking questions opens us up to a world, it allows us to join groups, to participate, to explore. By asking questions you are constantly training yourself to be curious. We’ve discussed building habits and how they compound. The next time you have a chance to make a statement, stop, think, and ask a question instead.
Read and Think
Warren Buffet famously says that his key to success is to “Going to bed smarter than when you woke up.” He famously reads throughout the day. Spending his time finding productive material became second nature to him, and is said to have read 600-1000+ pages a day. What’s even more fascinating is that his partner Charlie Munger was doing the same thing. The key to their success is being curious. Buffet says “We don’t read other people’s opinions. We want to get the facts, and then think.” A fascinating recap of an interview with Buffet and Munger can be found here. There are numerous examples throughout the interview that show the importance of lifelong learning being a key to their process. It’s hard to doubt the success of Munger, and Buffett.
Charlie Munger wraps it up by saying:
“Develop into a lifelong self-learner through voracious reading; cultivate curiosity and strive to become a little wiser everyday.”
Scott Young, author of ‘Ultra Learning’, discusses how he learns hard things in less time. He famously used his approach to learn MIT computer science, multiple languages adnand cognitive science. When it comes to reading, Young gives us numerous ways to learn, to retrieve, and improve our process throughout his book. One example he gives is that when trying to retain information from something you are reading when you are done reading, put down the book, or shut the screen and try and remember as much as you can and write it down. This process builds pathways in the brain to find the information. It’s like building a map to the information for when you need it. It’s a simple trick, but one that if it becomes a part of your process can help you retain more information. The key as Munger points out is also to think. Don’t just take notes, paraphrase and think about what you’ve learned, what it means. This builds lifelong learning habits and encourages important skills.
Be like Warren Buffet. Read more, and as his partner Charlie Munger says take the time to think about it.
Surround Yourself with People who are unafraid to challenge your ideas?
As humans, we are social animals and ill-equipped to live on our own. We need social interactions. It’s been said that you are the average of the people you spend the most time with. What is interesting about this ideas is that we have a natural inclination to surround ourselves with people that look and think like us. In a national geographic column published https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/04/things-that-divide-us/#close in 2018 puts it. “We are wired at birth to favor our own groups over others. But science might be able to help us move past what divides us.” This idea of identity craze and the ability to move past what divides us is a critical piece to being curious.
One of the biggest issues I see on a daily basis today is people who are unwilling to listen, to try and understand why someone might think differently. We see it daily in sports, in politics, etc. The first inclination is to argue or cast aside opposing views. This is the downside to this identity craze, but what if we use this knowledge to our advantage? What if we stop, recognize this, and become curious. You may never agree, but you are likely to learn. Perhaps you will be even more confident in your own thoughts, maybe you will change. No doubt though you will grow, learn, and likely expand your tribe, your community for the better.
Marketers like Seth Godin have talked about Tribes for years and the power of tribes to make change. He argues that the internet has killed mass marketing. We identify with groups that are like minded, that have shared ideas and build tribes. “We can’t help it, we are wired that way from birth to tell us from them” as John Tooby, the evolutionary psychologist, has put it. So what is the lesson here?
While we are wired to find tribes, as humans we also have an ability that other animals do not. The ability to change our perceptions and actions. There have been numerous experiments and scientific studies to back this phenomenon. When we are only surrounded by people who think, look and talk like us we close off opportunities to learn, to negotiate, to argue, to grow. If you are building a team, an organization and everyone agrees with everything you say where are the checks and balances to keep you from making big mistakes? How do you learn to negotiate, or influence people with different opinions. In a previous post I discussed my friend Jonathan Brabson’s challenging question “Are you interested or committed?” If you don’t surround yourself with people who are willing to ask you tough questions, challenge your ideas, help keep you accountable are you really committed?
We must surround ourselves with people who are willing to ask questions, who are curious themselves and are unafraid to challenge us. In Ray Dalio’s ‘Principles’ he argues that one needs to be “Radically Open Minded.” Dalio says he began to “seek out the most thoughtful people I could find who disagreed with me. I didn’t care about their conclusions, I just wanted to see things through their eyes and to have them see things through my eyes so that together we could hash things out to discover what’s true.”
Find a Mentor
Successful organizations all have a Board of Directors, Non Profit’s fill their boards with people who bring expertise that leadership can lean on. Mac Lackey, a successful entrepreneur with multiple exits of his own, and whom I worked for previously as a member of KYCK, has written about this concept as it relates to entrepreneurs. In his blog post about advisory boards he shares a quote “Smart people learn from their mistakes, Geniuses learn from others.” It’s a wonderfully powerful statement that fits well with the concept of being curious. Mac says the single greatest lesson he has learned as an entrepreneur is in creating an Advisory Board. He calls it a secret weapon.
Essentially building an advisory board for your company, or for yourself personally is listening to Bill Gates. You are finding someone who has already been where you want to go and asking them to share the map. To guide you, to help you do the same. Finding mentors, a board of directors, or advisory board not only helps you identify people who have done, or been where you want to go, it also helps you follow Bill Gates second question which is what can I learn from them. Taken to another level they also are people who are unafraid to ask you hard questions, to challenge your ideas. It’s the very nature of being an advisor, or mentor.
Mentors help us fill areas or gaps in our own skill set. They guide us, they help us guide others. While they guide us we begin to learn, we put in our other practices and ask questions. It fuels are curiosity. How did you deal with this? How did you deal with that? Why did you do it that way?
Tim Ferris, of 4-Hour Workweek fame, and the Tim Ferris Show Podcast knows the power of mentors, of learning from others. In his book Tribe of Mentors, he takes lessons he’s learned from interviewing and learning from the in his words the “most impressive world-class performers in the world, ranging from wunderkids in their 20s to icons in their 70s and 80s.” His book is like having an advisory board in your pocket. While the book is a fantastic resource the real winner is Tim Ferris who was able to ask questions, learn, and organize all of his learnings into a book. The lesson is simple, building your own “Tribe of mentors” is critical to your success, and a fundamental part of being curious.
Putting it all together
Ray Dalio, Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, social scientists, and countless other leaders have come to realize the same things. They have built a system, a process around the idea of being curious, asking questions, reading and thinking, and surrounding themselves with people who are unafraid to challenge their ideas.
If you’ve read this far I’d suggest that you are well on your way to becoming someone who is “Curious.” The power of this simple idea whether it is to solve big problems like Gates, ingrained in your daily process of improvement like Munger and Buffett, or a principle you live by like Ray Dalio is one that if followed can lead to a lifetime of learning, continued growth and being a little bit better everyday.
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C