Don't try to cure cancer
A few weeks ago, there was an interesting discussion on twitter: If you can rewrite DNA on the fly, do you want to cure cancer or do whatever you want? Where do you fall on the Spider-Man to dinosaur man spectrum on this topic?
Most people, when asked, say they want to do the most good for the world. But aiming for social good is not how you change the world. Aiming for curiosity is.
Curiosity is a force behind geniuses.
Richard Feynmann was watching a student fool around and throw a plate in the cafeteria of Cornell University. He saw that as the plate spun, it wobbled, and noticed that there was a relation between the two motions. He solved the motion of the plate, then went on to work out the equations of the wobble. When his colleague questioned him on why he was doing it, he replied: “There’s no importance whatsoever. I’m just doing it for the fun of it.”
Turns out, it was quite important, because that’s the insight that got Feynman the Nobel Prize in Physics.
It is almost a pattern that paradigm-shifting work is done by people who are purely curious about why things are the way they are. Darwin paid close attention to the finches on Galapagos Island because he was curious about them, not because he knew it would lead him to the Theory of Evolution. Einstein was obsessed with his thought experiment of chasing after a beam of light because it was a puzzle, not because he thought he would develop special relativity.
Geniuses did genius-level work because they followed their curiosity, not because they set out to do something great.
Curiosity gives you the courage to believe in your taste.
To Frank Oppenheimer, “Taste was an intellectual tool as valuable as logic, empathy, or common sense.”
Some might argue that taste might even be the most valuable intellectual tool you can have, because taste dictates what you choose to pursue. It’s important to develop your own taste because paradigm-shifting work itself is contrarian. Both the Theory of Evolution and Theory of Relativity challenged the current paradigm. And they ended up changing everything.
Curiosity makes you develop your taste instead of adopting someone else’s. Being curious, playing and messing around is how you discover your taste for things that seem “right” and rewarding. And taste, like everything else, develops with practice. The more you follow your curiosity, the more you develop the intuition for your taste. And when you have that intuition, you trust yourself more.
Steve Jobs said of his own life: “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.” It’s much easier to believe in your taste and ideas when you know they are your own. And the best way to do so is following your curiosity.
Curiosity keeps you going when things are hard.
Success does not come overnight. The mRNA vaccine we benefited from during this pandemic took 25 years to develop. Katalin Karikó, the scientist whose work it was based on, was demoted and denied funding for several years as her work was too radical. She almost gave up, but she persisted.
To keep going, you need to find what you are doing fun as well as believe in it. When you follow your curiosity, you naturally find doing things fun. That doesn’t mean that it’s easy, but the motivation driven by curiosity fuels you to work hard. When you have strong conviction in your ideas, you also have the courage to keep going, no matter how contrarian they are.
Greatness is a matter of survival, and curiosity helps you stay in the fight.
Curiosity ≠ passion
Passion is a goal, whereas curiosity is a process.
Passion is like a crush you have from afar. You build up an idealized version of them and when you finally talk to them, you end up disappointed.
Curiosity is like your friend you end up dating. You get to know each other through the years, all the good and the bad. In the end, you chose them because you know you like them for who they are, not because of an unrealistic idealization.
How exactly do you follow your curiosities then?
When you first start out, you probably have some propensity towards one thing over another. Dig deeper into it and ask why. Seek out similar and opposite things, give everything a chance at least once, and iterate.
Have courage. Your taste might not yet be refined, and that’s okay. One of the mistakes I made early on in life is being scared to share what I’m interested in. But how can my taste improve if I never seek out a feedback loop to iterate and refine? So really, be shameless in sharing your taste, and importantly, surround yourself with people who want the best for you — who might make fun of you without being demeaning and force you to improve.
It might take a while to find your dinosaurs and wobbling plates, but once you do, chase them relentlessly. Who knows where you end up? You might cure cancer after all.