One of my six critical qualities of leadership is Innovation. After reading John Maxwell’s 15 Valuable Laws of Growth, it has become clear that a crucial condition for innovation is curiosity. John Maxwell’s, The Law Of Curiosity – Growth Is Driven By Wanting To Learn More. If you are a curious person, you have the potential to take ordinary situations and create or accomplish extraordinary things.
Are you a person who asks questions? Are you a person who wants to learn more? Chances are your answers are yes and yes. However, is that always true? Sometimes I wonder if I annoy people by the number of questions that I ask during a business meeting. I recall very distinctly how different I was as a young student and then a young salesperson. Some of us are afraid to ask questions because we don’t want people to know how little we know about the subject.
I struggled with math in high school because when I asked my math teacher to explain an algebraic equation, he looked at me like I was an idiot. I laugh now and don’t debate that I may have been ignorant regarding the subject, but it made me feel bad when he did that. Perhaps you have felt that way in a similar circumstance. So, if you were like me, you didn’t continue to ask questions for fear of embarrassment caused by the reaction of the teacher. I thank God that He rescued me from that awful condition and now freely ask questions even if I feel that I am at risk of ridicule. Curiosity often takes courage and fear usually kills interest.
Thinking about whether curiosity killed the cat or not, the answer could be yes and could be no. If the interest caused the cat to put itself in a life-threatening situation, that cat must have wanted very badly to discover something. Enough so that it determined the reward to be worth the risk. On the contrary, the cat could have symbolically died from the lack of curiosity and become lethargic and neutralized. Putting the cat on a treadmill may have accomplished the same result with the feline going nowhere because it remained on that floor to no place.
John offers these six ways and more to get off the non-curious treadmill that may be helpful for you to cultivate curiosity:
1. Believe that you can be curious – If you don’t think you can, you won’t!
2. Have a beginner’s mindset – Be like a learning sponge that can’t become saturated. Be in relentless pursuit of getting answers that you want. You may be surprised to learn that persistence will impress those providing answers and to taking you to new places of discovery.
3. Learn something new every day -Tracking that for a few days will be an exciting and revealing exercise for you. It could bolster your confidence in what you are already doing, or it could inspire you to do more.
4. Make failure your friend – Remember that we all have three things in common: we are not perfect, we are going to die in this life one day, and we will make mistakes. Get used to it and leverage it to learn more. Errors are not often fun, but they are often the best teachers.
5. Stop looking for the right answer – There may not be a perfect answer, and there may also be degrees of correct answers. Also, it may not take an ideal solution to learn and improve something or accomplish something new and significant. Instead of saying, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, ask these questions:
i. If it ain’t broke, how can you do it better?
ii. If it ain’t broke, what is likely to break in the future?
6. Get out of the box – Thomas Edison said: “There ain’t no rules around here, we are trying to accomplish something.” Restrictions often impede progress so drop the self-imposed barricades and tear down the walls blocking your vision of something better.
In the Old Testament of the Christian Bible, Ecclesiastes 1:9 reads: “ What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” That may be true, but you and I both know that there is still a great deal that we haven’t yet learned. So, it may not be new to others, but it may be new to you. Are you curious enough to kill stagnation?