Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It

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I've been slow-reading this, and remember the era of the first few chapters when the two main types of curiosity are discussed - Diversive (shallow/fleeting) and Epistemic (deep/effortful). There is also Empathic curiosity.

The men and women whose contracts I delivered changed my life. They showed me a whole style of storytelling I wasn’t familiar with, and I began to think that maybe I was a storyteller at heart. They set the stage for me to produce movies like Splash and Apollo 13, American Gangster, Friday Night Lights, and A Beautiful Mind.

CURIOSITY DISCUSSION STARTERS

There are different types of curiosity: (shallow) diversive curiosity, (deeper, more disciplined) epistemic curiosity, empathic curiosity (about thoughts and feelings of other people). Diversive curiosity distracts; epistemic and empathic curiosity are forces that deepen the bond between the individual and the world, add layers of interest, complexity and delight to her experience.

There is another point that I am not fully aboard with. The author argues that schools can't teach thinking skills without teaching knowledge. I think the issue here is how that knowledge is imparted. Is it rote memorization, or hands-on learning? types: diversive, epistemic and emphatic curiosity; epistemic main focus in the book, typically what Leonardo da Vinci did.I found _Curious_ to be interesting, but disappointing. I was disappointed because a majority of the book was dedicated to unrelated diversions. If you're an avid reader like me of non-fiction self-help, psychology, business, and biography literature you will be familiar with a majority of the anecdotal tangents contained herein. The entrepreneurial fairy tales of Steve Jobs and Walt Disney; the inquisitiveness and creativity of Ben Franklin; the success predicting ability of "grit" and the marshmallow test (boy do I get tired of reading about this test -- I probably would failed it as a child, yet I'm a successful adult); and so forth. I was hoping for a more detailed discussion of curiosity, particularly how to _cultivate_ curiosity, but it wasn't there. The child who feels free to ask why the sky is blue grows into the adult who asks more disruptive questions: Why am I the serf and you the king? Does the sun really revolve around Earth? Why are people with dark skin slaves and people with light skin their masters?

I never made a movie about F. Lee Bailey, of course, although his life is certainly rich enough for one. I didn’t even make a movie about lawyers until twenty years later, when I did Liar Liar, with Jim Carrey, about what happens to a lawyer who is forced to tell nothing but the truth for twenty-four hours straight. It is the serpent who suggests challenging God’s restriction. He starts with a question himself, to Eve: Is there a tree whose fruit God has put off limits? Yes, Eve says, the tree right at the center of the garden—we can’t eat its fruit, we can’t even touch it, or else we’ll die. I hope to accomplish three things in this book: I want to wake you up to the value and power of curiosity; I want to show you all the ways I use it, in the hopes that that will inspire you to test it out in your daily life; and I want to start a conversation in the wider world about why such an important quality is so little valued, taught, and cultivated today. It’s how I met William Peter Blatty, who wrote The Exorcist, and also Billy Friedkin, the Oscar winner who directed it. Yes, it was. The position of a lot of theologians in the Middle Ages was that there was no need to be curious, because everything we needed to know was in the scriptures, or in Aristotle and Aquinas which had acquired the status of quasi-scripture. The idea was that there was no need to look any further than that.

BOOKS ABOUT CURIOSITY

I met with Carlos Slim, the Mexican businessman who is the richest man in the world. 18 How does the richest man in the world live every day? I wanted to know what it takes to be that kind of businessman, to be so driven and determined that you win bigger than anyone else.

The second part of the book rehashes that material in ‘seven ways to stay curious’. The idea is to provide practical guidelines to develop and maintain a spirit of curiosity. Leslie seems to veer a bit from his initial position of relentless advocacy for epistemic curiosity in that he aims for a balance between the diverse and epistemic, hence for a cognitive investment in detail and the big picture, in the mundane and the abstract, in theory and practice. We can argue that curiosity is a trait which leads to a richer, more fulfilling life, but nevertheless, different strokes for different folks; some people are intellectuals, some are brawn, some leaders, some artists- people have innately different approaches to fulfillment and there's a myriad of ways that individuals are inspired to function and serve in society. Not everyone is going to have curiosity at the center of their lives, though we wish they all could share in the fun. One of the classic examples which was much debated in the 16th century, often attributed to [Renaissance physician and occultist] Paracelsus is called the weapon salve. This was the theory that you could heal a weapon-inflicted wound by applying an ointment not to the wound but to the weapon. It makes no sense and sounds like complete nonsense from our perspective, but the idea was that there was a hidden, occult force connecting the two, so you were transmitting the agency from one to the other.

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I like it when a book teaches me new things. I really like it when it expands my sense of possibility, and whets my appetite to go deeper (epistemic-me). I love it when a book can unsettle me enough to allow for growth to happen. I never meet anyone with a movie in mind (although in recent years, it’s clear that some people met with me because they thought that maybe I would do a movie about them or their work). The goal for me is to learn something. Curiosity is the spark that starts a flirtation—in a bar, at a party, across the lecture hall in Economics 101. And curiosity ultimately nourishes that romance, and all our best human relationships—marriages, friendships, the bond between parents and children. The curiosity to ask a simple question—“How was your day?” or “How are you feeling?”—to listen to the answer, and to ask the next question. I decided I didn’t want to look the way I looked. When I was twenty-two years old, I changed my diet and developed an exercise routine—a discipline, really. I jumped rope every day, Two hundred jumps a minute, thirty minutes a day, seven days a week. Six thousand jumps a day for twelve years. Gradually my body changed, the love handles faded away.