Have you enrolled into the University of Curiosity?

Albert Einstein quoted that a mind that opens to a new idea never returns to its original size.

All research come to think of it is ‘ formalised curiosity ‘.

Doubt and inquiry are the two pillars of progress.. So, it makes sense to ‘ Start with Why? ‘

Scott Shigeoka is an advocate for the power of curiosity. Scott delves into the ABCs of our habitual thoughts – Assumptions, Biases, and Certainty – and how they shape our world views. In the age of digital information overload, he emphasizes the need to make room for new insights about ourselves and others.

If you are like me, we are all a failed by-product of our education system that does not encourage, respect or recognise individual curiosity. It is mostly about what there is and what has to be conformed to.

An interesting aside can be extracted from the movie ‘ Accepted ‘. After receiving his latest college rejection letter, senior Bartleby Gaines ( played by Justin Long) devises a novel way to fool everyone into thinking he is college-bound: Open his own university. Bartleby and his similarly stymied friends take over an abandoned building, create a fake Web site, hire a friend’s uncle to pose as the dean, and — presto — a school is born. However, they do their jobs too well, and soon many other rejects try to gain admittance to the nonexistent South Harmon Institute of Technology.

So these 1000 ‘ admitted students ‘ turn up at the supposedly non existent university on day one and there is Lewis Black, the Dean. And he asks, ‘ so, well , what should we teach them? Because he said he didn’t know but offers a solution- lets ask the students what they want to learn. The student reactions are truly telling because nobody has ever bothered to ask them what they are interested in. So, the Dean says, let’s take this students’ tuition and appropriate it towards something that she’s truly curious about. Could be a not so real and immediate possibility but can you imagine the first university that actually creates a pilot program to test this approach driven totally by curiosity? They will have students going to them in droves, needless to say.

Real curiosity is just truly open-hearted, open-mindedness. Like I’m here to just understand you and where you come from and to understand your experiences, to understand the person you are. We live in a society where people are flattened to their identities. You are Japanese or Indian. You are brown or white. You voted for the Democrats. But there’s so much more nuance and beauty and messiness and complication and contradiction. And the only way we can learn about those things is if we ask these really powerful questions and, you know, engage in a deeper form of curiosity.

If our cup of ABC( assumptions, biases & certainty) is full to the brim, often without us even noticing, leaving little room to absorb new information about ourselves and each other and the world around us. This gets in the way of deep curiosity. We live in a world which reinforces the biases that we have. And social media and the echo chambers that it wields the megaphone on, are not helping.

We need to enter this age where we reclaim our curiosity and really practice it every day, inspire others to do it knowing that it’s contagious.