Curiosity
Why I'm Starting to Write About What I'm Curious About
Starting today, I’m posting something every day about whatever I’m curious about. No theme, no niche, no pressure to make it useful. Just: here’s a thing that caught my attention, here’s what I noticed.
I’ve been sitting on this idea for a while, mostly because I kept overthinking what the “right” first topic should be. Then it hit me — the right first topic is curiosity itself.
Steve Jobs put words to something I’ve felt but never quite articulated:
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. — Steve Jobs, Wired, February 1996
That’s the part people miss about creative work — it’s not conjured from nothing. It’s connective tissue. You can’t connect dots you never collected in the first place. The only way to have more dots is to stay curious about things that have no obvious payoff yet. Read the weird article. Ask the tangential question. Follow the thread that isn’t “productive.” Somewhere down the line, two unrelated dots turn into an idea that looks obvious in hindsight — but only because you bothered to go looking.
The catch is that curiosity requires you to sit with not-knowing, and not-knowing makes most people uncomfortable enough to reach for a judgment instead. It’s faster to decide you already know what something is than to actually find out. Ted Lasso said it better than most self-help books manage:
“Be curious, not judgmental.” — Ted Lasso, Ted Lasso, Season 1, Episode 8, “The Diamond Dogs” (2020)
(Ted attributes it to Walt Whitman in the show — he never actually said it, but the advice holds up regardless.)
So that’s the project: a daily post, a genuine question or observation, no requirement that it lead anywhere. Some days it’ll be a small technical rabbit hole. Some days it’ll be a dumb question I finally looked up the answer to. The only rule is that it has to be something I actually wanted to know, not something I think I’m supposed to write about.
More dots. Fewer judgments. See you tomorrow.