In his blogpost How to build curiosity stamina? Dr Vinay Dabholkar talks about the curiosity of leading innovators of the world including Einstein and Jamshedji Tata. In fact I remember reading Letters of JRD Tata where he keeps looking for lessons from around the world that can be adapted in his businesses. It was nothing but his curiosity on how the other businesses are doing the things better than his businesses or a curiosity to learn from everyone he came across. From Dr Dabholkar’s post I learnt about his hunt for the right soil to setup a steal plant and how he persistently did that on the sideline while we thought he was running his multiple businesses. He also shares some practical tips to build your curiosity stamina.
This led me to think that while we keep reading about all possible ways to generate ideas, selective right ideas and then work on creating successful businesses from these ideas, there is not much popular literature on ‘Curiosity’. We need to have ample stamina for curiosity both as individuals as well as as organizations.
As individuals we need to constantly take ourselves to places, people and situations that are new to us to keep our curiosity alive and kicking. If we are curious about a niche subject, we need to see the center as well as the periphery of that subject constantly. We also need to be curious about what others are doing in that space and how the space is moving. This would help us being persistent with our curiosity and embark upon some breakthrough ideas in our pursuit. In general we need to expose ourselves to worlds that are not like our world to be able to give an incline to our mind – to be able to see things in different light and to be able to expand the horizons of out thought process. To me mind, this is our personal and individual responsibility to keep our curiosity high.
As organizations, it would require that we do not come in the way of nurturing individual curiosity and if we can find a way to tap into it or convert it into a collective curiosity – there may be prizes waiting for us at the end of the tunnel.
