Is lack of curiosity an age-related condition? by Peter Attia
What is it about children that makes them ask so many curious and thoughtful questions that adults can’t answer, or never even think to ask? If I’d been keeping score, I doubt I’ve had answers to more than half of my kids’ questions. Or maybe it’s just that the questions I can’t answer become more seared into my memory than the ones I can.
In Building a Second Brain, Tiago Forte suggests relating your work and learning efforts to a set of questions you’re interested in:
Ask yourself, “What are the questions I’ve always been interested in?” This could include grand, sweeping questions like “How can we make society fairer and more equitable?” as well as practical ones like “How can I make it a habit to exercise every day?” It might include questions about relationships, such as “How can I have closer relationships with the people I love?” or productivity, like “How can I spend more of my time doing high-value work?”
This quote from Willingness to look stupid, by Dan Luu, reminds us to keep asking questions without the fear of “looking stupid”:
Although most of the examples above are “real life” examples, being willing to look stupid is also highly effective at work. Besides the obvious reason that it allows you to learn faster and become more effective, it also makes it much easier to find high ROI ideas. If you go after trendy or reasonable sounding ideas, to do something really extraordinary, you have to have better ideas/execution than everyone else working on the same problem. But if you’re thinking about ideas that most people consider too stupid to consider, you’ll often run into ideas that are both very high ROI as well as simple and easy that anyone could’ve done had they not dismissed the idea out of hand. It may still technically be true that you need to have better execution than anyone else who’s trying the same thing, but if no one else trying the same thing, that’s easy to do!