From Curiosity to Exploration

Category:Connections,Edges,Emotions,Exploration,Fear,Growth,Learning,Opportunity,Passion,Potential,Transformation

I’ve written a lot about the growing importance of curiosity in the Big Shift world that is evolving around us. While curiosity is an essential core capability that we all need to cultivate, it is far from enough. Today, I want to move one step forward and make the case that curiosity without exploration is far from sufficient.

The role of curiosity

In a rapidly changing world, curiosity becomes more and more essential. Curiosity has many different dimensions, but it essentially involves asking a lot of questions as we become intrigued by what we do not know.

The strong desire to ask more questions can be a valuable way to launch us on our journey to learn more, but it is hardly sufficient.

The need for exploration

Exploration is about action, action beyond questions. How do we learn from the questions that we ask? Well, here we need to make a key distinction that has become central to a lot of my work.

There are two forms of learning – learning in the form of sharing existing knowledge and practices and learning in the form of creating new knowledge and practices.

If we’re focused on learning in the form of sharing existing knowledge and practices, there are many ways we can learn from the questions that we ask. We can do a lot of reading. We can attend classes and take careful notes. We can follow instructions to practice in ways that will help us develop important skills that other people already have. Those actions can be very useful when we are learning in the form of sharing existing knowledge and practices.

But, what about learning in the form of creating new knowledge and practices? In a rapidly changing world, existing knowledge and practices are becoming obsolete at an accelerating rate. Success in the Big Shift world hinges on shifting our focus to learning in the form of creating new knowledge and practices. That requires a very different set of actions. Now, we are venturing out into unknown territory.

This is where exploration becomes central to success. To learn in an unknown territory, we need to travel through the territory that no one has seen before and carefully inspect, search, experiment and analyze what we encounter. This is a very different form of action compared to learning in the form of sharing existing knowledge and practices.

Exploration becomes even more successful if we come together with others who share our curiosity about unknown territories. No matter how smart or intelligent we are, we will learn a lot more from exploration if we can connect with others who bring different perspectives and experiences to help assess what we are encountering.

Without exploration, curiosity becomes a dead-end. We have so many questions, but no answers.

But there’s more

This is where the passion of the explorer becomes key to unlocking the value of curiosity. I’ve done a lot of research on this very specific form of passion and written about it extensively, including in my most recent book, The Journey Beyond Fear.

In brief, people with this form of passion are excited about a long-term commitment to achieving increasing impact in a specific domain. They are excited when confronted with unexpected challenges and their first instinct when confronted with an unexpected challenge is to find ways to connect with others who can help them come up with better answers faster.

The passion of the explorer helps to focus us on the domains that are the most exciting to us. Those domains differ, depending on who we are – they could be anything from gardening to space exploration. Whatever the domain is, people with the passion of the explorer will be driven to find the edges of the domain that have not yet been explored because that is where the greatest impact can be achieved by learning in the form of creating new knowledge and practices.

We all have the passion of the explorer within us, waiting to be discovered, but very few of us have found this passion, much less pursued it. We unfortunately live in societies and cultures where this form of passion is deeply suspect and often discouraged. Our schools, families and institutions encourage us to focus on pursuing careers that will pay a good income and to not let passion distract us.

The focus that we achieve with the passion of the explorer is essential to accelerating learning in the form of creating new knowledge and practices. Without this passion, curiosity and exploration can be overwhelming. There’s so much that we don’t know and could explore that we are very much at risk of spreading ourselves way too thinly across too many domains. That would significantly limit our ability to learn faster. But, if we are excited and focused, we will be driven to learn faster and achieve more and more impact in the domains that matter to us.

The bottom line

Curiosity is a critical capability that we all need to develop in a rapidly changing world, but it is of little value, and can become a distraction, if we don’t combine it with action through exploration that is focused by our passion of the explorer. The passion of the explorer is fundamental – if we find and cultivate that passion, we will be driven to cultivate curiosity and pursue exploration with the goal of achieving more and more impact that is meaningful to us and to others.