No, but Really, What Are You Curious About?

My favorite piece of content in the whole internet is an essay called “How to do great work” by Paul Graham, the co-founder of Y Combinator.

It is a very well-regarded essay. If you’re ambitious and working close to tech, you have likely heard about it.

Graham explains the process to do great, remarkable work that can become a reference within its field. Something as relevant as the work of Alan Turing for Computer Science or as Isaac Newton’s Laws of Motion for Physics.

So what does it take to make such impactful contributions to the world?

The article describes a process to accomplish this and it is very, very thorough.

It can take you hours to read it, and I’ve always read it across several days.

However, if you wanted to compress it into a single, core sentence, you could do it. 

That sentence would actually be a question, and it would be:

“What are you curious about?”

That’s it.

Easy, right?

Think again.

If you are over 12 years old, you have likely not thought about it in a long time. 

Actually, maybe you have NEVER thought about it properly, because before 12 years old, you didn’t think about it at all. Following your curiosity was a natural and thoughtless process.

And this creates the following issue: now, as a grown-up wanting to do great work, you cannot simply say “okay, I’ll try to remember what I was curious about as a kid and follow that,” because most likely, you are not so curious about it anymore.

I was, for example, highly curious about dinosaurs and the outer space. As a grown-up, I like those topics, but they no longer captivate me as they once did. They don’t have the same “pull” over me.

It turns out that curiosity evolves with us, and it also appears to be like a muscle: you either use it or lose it.

What looks like a “simple” question is in reality one of the hardest and most crucial questions we can ask ourselves.

So think about it once again: what makes you really, deeply, and naturally curious? 

Not “I should be curious about this” or “I would make a lot of money/have a lot of success if I learned about this.”

We’re talking HONEST curiosity here. 

Don’t worry if you don’t have an answer right away. Many of us don’t.

A useful question in Graham’s essay is “what type of work would you do even if there was no payment involved?”

To that, I would add the following: what do you tend to INDULGE in, leaving “important” topics aside to squeeze 5 more minutes reading or watching about, or losing some sleep to just learn a bit more about?

In my experience, that’s the staple of curiosity: the intellectual indulging, the impossibility to leave it aside because the pull is just so strong.

Give it a thought.

You may not want to do work as tremendously relevant as that of Turing or Newton, but whatever our expectations, a life close to our curiosities seems to be one of the keys for a satisfying existence. Specially when talking about work.

So, one last time:

What are you curious about?