How to Develop Curiosity

How to Develop Curiosity – Curiosity is an amazing characteristic that every person possesses when being a little child. When we grow older we start to develop concrete interests and hobbies, we aim to achieve fixed goals and start to discover the myths we desire to reveal. This process slowly but steadily starts to decrease our curiosity until only a slight minimum remains within ourselves. This is a negative development, especially when we clarify ourselves the importance of curiosity of our life and our personal development. The importance of curiosity drastically increases when we start to discover that a lot of “geniuses” were extraordinarily curious and inquisitive. Albert Einstein, Galileo Galilei, Leonardo da Vinci, and Archimedes are just a small fraction of those curious characters.

Definition of Curiosity:

What is the meaning of curiosity? Curiosity is a mental state or an attitude that allows you to be extraordinarily interested in something; curiosity is the ambition to learn more about a given topic, etc.

The importance of Curiosity:

Why is curiosity so important, especially regarding personal development? I think that one of the most important benefits of being a curious person is that you will become very open-minded towards new ideas, interests, and adventures. Being curious helps you to approach challenging tasks or problematic situations in a positive, curious way rather than steadily visualizing the associated fears towards a task. In the following are several other reasons that show you the importance of curiosity:

• Questions + Answers = new Ideas When you watch a little child for some minutes you will notice that it will ask his parents dozens of questions right away. Sometimes these kids are presented with an answer by their parents, but mostly they have to seek for the answers for themselves, when playing in the kindergarten, etc.  And this is what makes curious people so successful. Their mind is full of questions that want to be answered, questions that literally crave to be answered. When a person cannot find a suitable answer for a question it will either give up or develop other approaches to answer the question. One thing that evolves out of this process is new ideas.

• New Challenges Curiosity allows us to discover new challenges and to see possibilities where others see the end of the road.

• Perseverance A curious person will face a challenging task with interest where others already gave up. Curiosity helps us to develop a supportive interest in the tasks we are performing; we might even have the strong desire to solve the challenge in order to satisfy our curiosity.

How to develop curiosity?

1. Don´t be biased!

   One of the most important aspects that help you to develop curiosity is to be open-minded towards everything that is new in your life, may it be a question, a task or any other situation you are facing. Being biased will only decrease your curiosity as you start to separate something into “boring” and “interesting”, which means that you might lose 50% of the opportunities or challenges. Be willing to learn something new, invest some time to discover something that interests you and start to pursue new opportunities.

2. Question things!

   People often take everything in this world for granted, from the learning material in school up to the business concepts of successful companies without even thinking about it or question specific decisions that were being made. Well, do you think Albert Einstein became so famous because of his extraordinary ability to study what his teachers taught him? No, definitely not! It was rather his aspiration to question things and to come up with own ideas that allowed him to develop his special theory of relativity.

3. Be enthusiastic!

   Enthusiasm will allow you to be by far more interested in a certain topic than without it. You can become enthusiastic by associating fun and joy with the tasks you have to perform, rather than expecting them to be a waste of time or irrelevant for you. Another excellent way to become enthusiastic is to spot challenges in your tasks and to make contests with your friends or co-workers. Set up some challenges and you will become eager to win those contests!

4. Avoid boredom!

   By being bored you steadily decrease your curiosity until it reaches its anticlimax. In order to increase your curiosity, you will have to avoid boredom by any means. Boredom accrues when you aren´t interested anymore in new topics and when you accomplished all goals that you wanted to reach! In order to avoid boredom in your life, you need to be continuously interested in new topics that you really want to explore and learn more about. Inform yourself about new trends, read different books from other industries or learn a new language. Whatever you do, be sure to add variety to your lifestyle and make it challenging.

5. Avoid Routine!

   The number one enemy of curiosity is routine. Routine makes us do the same things day after day, sometimes for many years, which causes boredom. So instead of having fixed routines, you could add some variety to your life. It doesn´t have to be some major changes to your daily routine, you could, for instance, begin by brushing your teeth with the opposite hand or exploring a new route to your workplace.

6. Explore the world!

   You can increase your curiosity by exploring the world, from your neighborhood to nearby cities or trips to different places in the world. Discover new countries and let yourself getting surprised by the curiosity to learn more about the place and the people that are living there.

You can develop curiosity by making your life an interesting challenge, without boredom and too many routines, which helps you to add variety to your life! What are your favorite tricks to get you excited and curious about life?

Be curious like a cat

Photo by Dr. Hemmert

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