Boundless Curiosity

Boundless curiosity in a networked society.

In her newsletter, Shannon Tipton invited us to think deeply about how we do make curiosity a practice:

“Curiosity is time spent listening to the people in your business and being mindful of your surroundings. It’s taking time to understand people and situations from different perspectives and not your own biases.

To this point, let’s get together on Friday and discuss how you “Lead with Curiosity”.

What are your favorite techniques for discovering and sharing information?

How do nurture your growth mindset?

How can we make being curious a practical application?” 

Those questions are great ways to prompt us to review, refresh and refine our curiosity habits over time.

I wrote extensively about the personal routines/habits with a curiosity blog post series.

Curiosity matters. Curiosity Calling.

How Can We Discover

“Curiosity is a muscle.

Sometimes, you really need to go off the grid.” — Jessica Bellamy

We can wander and widen our interests to learn from and with creative generalists.

We seek and spot signals with emergent practices from disciplines such as personal knowledge mastery, futures thinking, and community management.

How can we regain our natural curiosity and creativity, love for continuous learning, and develop our personal growth and resilience? Community/coffee club calls, project exploration, and asynchronous chats help us get to know each other better and discover more exciting ideas, initiatives, and realities.

How do you bring newness in your life? Feedly, Youtube and prints are where we can look for novelty.

Going screenless often and slow are how we can go with the knowledge flows and our tempo.

Disconnecting. Going for a walk is rewarding to discover and connect to nature.

Being in motion and keep doing.

Reading books are ways to discover, too. Books can map knowledge and mention other books and ideas from people. They can be such valuable sensemaking artefacts.

I rediscover myself and the people within my ecosystem while writing, editing and formatting my book on connectedness and continuous learning.

Marinating ourselves in learning events and activities is a way to go way back and in the future on how we think, learn and work out loud and behind the scene, especially with workshops, courses, webinars, conferences, meetups, coaching and mentoring.

I love exploring at large through travelling to marinate myself, hone my curiosity and broaden my sense of possibility. I go to exhibits and third places to discover new ideas, artefacts, projects and people.

We can get moving and observe our data and patterns to self-improve. In that way, we are curious about ourselves and our surroundings.

We connect physical, cognitive, emotional, and social and ask deep questions.

“Curiosity is your willingness to ask questions and probe deeper.” — @Omar_Itani

Doing something to figure out independently or together in projects is another way to discover and rediscover.

For instance, I discovered and learned more about innovative approaches, workplace learning, book editing and formatting, transmedia content creation, and community management.

“Let your curiosity drive your next small step into the Unknown. Courage will follow.” — Simerjeet Singh

Embracing our ignorance and not knowing. Starting from scratch and having a beginner’s mind.

How Can We Share?

“When we are curious, we engage the world by exploring, learning, and making meaning from our discoveries” — @ariannahuff

We can share content creation and curation in various formats. Here are below ways I use it:

Blogging. Blog posts, series of blog posts, annotated reading of books, photography, microblogging, newsletter.

Visual thinking – diagram, infographics, puzzles, sketchnotes, maps, synthesis, whiteboards, collages and typography.

Community, 1-1/1-3/1-4 audio or video calls, and asynchronous chats via community platforms and IM tools.

Documents: pitch deck, one-pager, proposal, co-created artefacts, synthesis of research, lessons learned.

Playlists: books list, music playlists, podcast notes.

I am painting myself through social profiles and my website.

How Can We Nurture our Growth Mindset?

We can explore people and topics to nurture and trigger our curiosity.

Read. Watch. Hear. Draw at large.

Start with small steps. Take it from there.

How Can We Make Being Curious a Practical Application?

“1. Boundless Curiosity

In a world that is constantly in flux, dominated by a cascade of technological, sociological, and economic change, the temptation may be to shut our eyes and close our ears. However, the appropriate response is to remain flexible, adaptable, and responsive: and the only hope for that is a boundless curiosity.”

(…) I believe that the most creative people are insatiably curious. They ask endless questions, they experiment and note the results of their experiments, both subjectively and interpersonally. They keep notes of ideas, sketches, and quotes. They take pictures of objects that catch their eye. They correspond with other curious people, and exchange thoughts and arguments. They want to know what works and why.” — Stowe Boyd

 

“He [Karl Lagarfeld]’s permanently filling himself with independent culture and establishment culture, so basically he knows everything, and he’s like a sampling machine.” Lady Amanda Harlech, Lagerfeld’s “muse,” concurs. “He said to me once, almost in a worried way, that he has to find out everything there is to know, read everything,” she says. “The curiosity is ceaseless.” — in The New Yorker

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