Unblock Your Curiosity

Right from tender age, we have been taught to block our curiosities. Parents get annoyed with too many questions, teachers do not like to be questioned, colleagues often find it annoying to be asked questions they don’t know about. With a uniform curriculum in schools, a child is often told not to waste time on “out of syllabus” things and rather focus on scoring. This is enforced right until college (or in some cases, even after college). Someone gives you a curriculum. You perfect your learning of the “syllabus” and move on to the next grade. What this process teaches you is how to give exams. Later in life, the individual finds oneself in a limbo. Either they keep doing the first job they can get or do another course (a series of exams) just to postpone the discomfort of defining what it is that they want to do.

The end of school, or “education”, marks the end of exam taking and gives the individuals freedom to learn whatever they are curious about. It is often in this process that one finds what they’re passionate about. When exams are taken out of the equation, the natural curiosity of a person drives them to a much deeper understanding of the content they’re trying to learn about. Testing, no doubt, is an integral part of the process. Thus, individuals need to keep taking self-tests or assignments but that’s a topic for another post.

Let us first consider operating with a blocked curiosity after graduation. You might be lucky to have found something you really enjoy. This naturally allows you to be curious about more facets of your own job. As you uncover these facets, you are likely to expand your breadth and hence progress in your career. However, if you’re among 90% (?) of the working pool who do not like what they’re doing, then read on. You block your own curiosities and follow someone else’s. While this gives you a purpose, it doesn’t give you the motivation you need to be exceptionally good at what you’re doing. Consider someone passionate about their work. Their curiosities drive their learning on a day to day basis. In fact, many claim that the only way to find what your passion is is to follow your curiosities. To find really satisfying work, it has to come from within. It is possible that you may feel you’re not curious about anything but really that’s just because you’ve been practicing it for many years. Find an interest, be curious and follow that curiosity. You never know where this road might take you. What is it that you’d like to know more about today?

So you figured out what you’re curious about and started to read/learn/do more with it. What’s next? Once you’ve stuck to it for some time, let it merge with your creativity. One might ask, “I’m just a new-comer to this topic. What is it that I could contribute that others in the area wouldn’t have thought of?”. However, it is precisely because you’re so new at the area and come from a different perspective that you would be able to see things others would miss. It is at the intersection of disciplines that you’d find innovation happening when different perspectives bring shape to new ideas. As you start generating new work out of your curiosity and creativity, you would find that not only are you solidifying your understanding of something you were curious about but also giving it new wings.

Specific to those pursuing PhDs, I think this is close to what an ideal PhD experience should be like. Read about existing works driven by your curiosities and let your creativity take these ideas for a spin. There are of course problems with this approach like you may want to restrict yourself to the expertise of your supervisor or department, the problem you’re curious about might be too hard, or other things but in general, I think curiosities are infinite. You can be curious about a lot of things and pursuing these curiosities is the only way for long term engagement and motivation with an area of research.