I previously talked about my 5 Design Rules to Live By, drawn from the design mind-sets from Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. Today, I would like to talk about Rule 1 – being curious.

Why should you care about curiosity?

Curiosity is a powerful, valuable skill that can have wide ranging impacts to our lives, including many health benefits. Thanks to a phenomenon called neuroplasticity, our brains have the continuous ability to change and grow when faced with opportunities to learn, forming new neural connections. Taking the time to satisfy your curiosity involves using the same regions of the brain where feelings of well-being, the reward center, and new memory formation reside. Taking the time to ask “Why?” can even help your brain breakdown stress-inducing barriers and lead to more explorative thought. It can make you smarter, happier, more open-minded, and learn easier. You will end up building healthier relationships and growing as a leader.

Where can you start?

Athletes warm-up their muscles before every practice and game. Curiosity is also a muscle. It requires practice and regular use. By trying it every day, we get better and better at using our creative minds. There are a variety of things you can do every day that will help build the muscle.

• Let yourself explore areas where you little or no knowledge of the subject. For instance, do a search for information about a random topic that popped up in your news feed, or take the time to try a hobby you’ve never experienced before.
• Take part in an activity where you are uncertain of the outcome. For example, watching a new movie or a sporting event. Think about times when you went into a situation with no idea of the outcome and came away with a positive result, like a first date gone well or a job interview that resulted in an offer.
• Add an element of playfulness to everyday tasks.
• Withhold judgment about something you are unfamiliar with until you have taken the time to really experience it.
• Look for novel moments in things you see or do every day.
• Use the “Ask Why” method (this one is easy to do on the fly and has become a new favorite of mine).

If you have ever spent any amount of time with a toddler, you are probably very familiar with the “Ask Why” method. Kids tend to apply it liberally to everything they encounter as they learn about the world around them. You were probably asked “Why?” about something you had never actually stopped to consider before. I have a lot of fun with this process with my 4-year-old cousin. He likes to get us into a cycle where he asks a question about one thing, and then asks why to every answer I give until either I’m stumped, or he says, “Oh,” and his curiosity is satisfied for the moment.

How has it helped me?

How can being curious help us work through problems, more than just asking “Why?” all the time? Let’s take my experience in finding my next job role as an example. I knew I wanted a new role, and I didn’t want to leave my company if I could help it, but I really didn’t know where to start. The not knowing where to start part was very daunting. How did I know where to go if I didn’t know what was out there?

Then a new supervisor joined my group. During one of our first meetings, we started having a honest and refreshing discussion about how I wanted to steer my career. I shared the activities that I had most enjoyed while I was in college (classes that involved early product development, getting to know the customer and their wants and needs, asking a lot of questions, transforming what were sometimes vague inputs into tangible ideas). He in turn helped me develop a plan to start finding out what groups performed work that most closely matched my interests from college and that I would want to build a career off of. It turns out he wasn’t sure what the answer would be either, but now we were both curious.

We started by asking ourselves, what groups were working on addressing customer wants? The answer was actually a lot, and they all had different approaches. After tossing around a few ideas of teams that we knew existed, we got to the point where I needed to reach out and learn more. We learned through asking some of his connections in the company that someone in R&D was helping form a new team that focused on something called “user experience” and could be a good next step.

Being curious and poking around ended up leading me to my first professional experience with networking, taking action, and using even more curiosity to start building my way from a job to a career. After 1 year and 8 very insightful conversations, I moved into a new role in a very dynamic team that I can seeing myself growing and developing with for a long time.

Even while writing this post I used curiosity to get curious about curiosity. It turns out I knew very little about what really goes into building this important engineering trait.

What is an area you’re stuck on that you could use curiosity to address? Have you used it in the past to help you? I’d love to hear your stories and methods!