Why is curiosity critical for achieving professional success, personal fulfillment, and a more peaceful world?

Unless every aspect of our lives is exactly as we would wish it to be, Curiosity is critical. Many people have the desire to be more successful, have greater impact, feel more balanced, fulfilled or happy, or experience more meaningful relationships, but desire without curiosity results in persistent frustration. Curiosity is the impulse that propels us toward change. Without curiosity, we become stagnant; with it, extraordinary things become possible.

Brian Grazer, Hollywood producer and author of A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life summarizes it powerfully:

For me, curiosity infuses everything with a sense of possibility. Curiosity has, quite literally, been the key to my success and also the key to my happiness.

We live in an age of unlimited potential. With the tools and resources at our disposal, anything is possible. Whether we are developing new products, designing services that work better, transforming employee culture in the workplace, generating solutions to critical global problems, or reinventing our lives, the possibilities are limited only by the boundaries of our own curiosity.

Why does it take Courage to be Curious?

We are all born curious, so why does it take courage to BE curious?

As humans, we are biologically wired with competing needs. On the one hand, we are wired to enjoy things that are novel and new; on the other, we are designed to seek security. As kids, our impulse for curiosity is very strong and thank goodness because the rate of learning is huge in the first 10 years of life. During this period is when each of the 100 billion neurons (information cells) in the brain expands from 2500 connections each to other brain cells to 15,000 connections, forming the basis of our brain and shaping how our mind interprets the world.

As we mature, the desire for security (and fear of uncertainty) generally amplifies and we become conditioned to the familiar. It feels safe. It also means that regardless of whether we feel satisfied in any area of our life, we will feel inclined to maintain things as close to status quo as we can. Given our biological wiring, if we want to change something, if we want to have more success than we have, feel happier than we feel, or achieve more closeness, something will need to change. We will have to get curious – and this requires courage since change challenges our perceived sense of safety and security.