Arjun Khemani

Yesterday’s article “030 Curiosity” was on the great significance on curiosity and the art of questioning. Today, we’ll look at how we can use curiosity to our advantage in our work life and/or business. Curiosity is something that if applied to businesses and people’s work lives, I believe- will build and shape winning leaders and great companies through novel and amazing inventions.

Being curious about how things work, people, different perspectives, nature, the universe or anything and everything to some extent, really—can have great impacts in major fields of our lives. Being curios can make us feel good and even happy. Understanding or even trying to understand what you don’t understand is great. It’s like delicious “mind food” (because, well, it’s “feeding your curiosity”).
A study by Harvard Business Review notes that people with a higher “curiosity quotient” or CQ are more “inquisitive and open to new experiences”. Curious people can tolerate uncertainty to a larger extent, their passion for understanding leads to higher levels of knowledge acquisition over time.
The study concludes: “Knowledge and expertise, much like experience, translate complex situations into familiar ones, so CQ (Curiosity Quotient, or the measure of curiosity of a person) is the ultimate tool to produce simple solutions for complex problems.”

There are numerous other studies on the topic of curiosity, but it doesn’t really matter. Be curious, not for the advantages in the different fields, but to know more. When we do something only to take the benefits out of what happens when we do them, it never works out. Take exercise and working out for example. If you view working out as a necessity (even though, it is for some people) and view it as something that if you do, will give you great benefits and so you try doing it, but you quit like just weeks in because you don’t see the “results” you wanted to see. But if you work out because you like to, it’s not a necessity, rather a form of pleasure for you.

Same way with curiosity, don’t be curious for the sake of it, but be curious to understand, to learn, to study, to examine, to research, to observe, to investigate and to implement and execute on the things you don’t yet know.

Having said that, the world’s greatest minds in innovations, revolutions, the Renaissance, and just those people who made huge breakthroughs in any field that made us, humanity as a whole, move forward. Most of those incredible minds had some great innovations and ideas which were in the form of simple objects or ideas or paintings, notes and sculptures, that all stemmed from observations which grew from a passion to know more, curiosity.
– Newton and the falling apple. That was curiosity. Newton just wanted to know why the apple falls to the ground. Now, four centuries later, if you open any physics book, you’ll find his name. Not only that, we are sending satellites and people into space by using his principle. Only due to a “foolish curiosity”, some would call, of wanting to know why an apple falls to the ground.
Then, Galileo, Einstein, Graham Bell, all their inventions and much much more such as the internet, the birth of the camera, rockets going into the air, the airplane, people going to the moon—everything, and much more stemmed from curiosity. We want to know what we don’t know. We may think that some questions are foolish, rather crazy to some extent but they are the ones that led to revolutions and will lead to many more in the future.
You may say that, well we already know everything and there’s not much more to know about anything. And you’d be WRONG, even though I hate to call something wrong. You’d be wrong because even centuries ago, people believed that they knew everything that there was to know. But that surely wasn’t the case. There’s always more to know. And you never know what you don’t know.

Curiosity can help businesses and anyone anywhere to once again create novel ideas and inventions. By questioning everything and then understanding. Through observations and experimentations stemmed by curiosity, businesses will be able to file more and more patents everyday and work toward the betterment of humanity by understanding and creating. And staying curious, always.