When I was a boy, everything was fascinating.

How did trees grow? Why was the sky blue? What made stuff fall down, instead of up? My curiosity was insatiable.

But over the years, life got in the way and little by little, my reservoir of enthusiasm began to diminish. And now, sometimes I spend more time lost in a virtual world than the actual world itself.

There are two reasons why this matters.

First, curiosity drives creativity, something becoming increasingly important to me over the years. As journalist and author Walter Isaacson observes in an interview with The Knowledge Project:

“What Leonardo da Vindi had, just like Benjamin Franklin had, and just like Steve Jobs had, was an insatiable curiosity and a willingness to be curious about those things that you and I quit noticing after a while… We’re all curious as kids until grownups say, “stop asking so many dumb questions”, but Leonardo teaches us that to be creative, all we have to do is nurture that curiosity we all have inside of us.”

Second, things are generally more interesting when you’re curious. “It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows,” Epictetus wrote, and to the know-it-all, the world becomes increasingly mundane. One of the biggest things I look forward to each day is learning something new, or having my mind changed. You know something is up when the world doesn’t fascinate you anymore.

And so, I’m on a quest to rediscover curiosity. It will take a lot of journalling and observing to make notable changes, but this post is a start. More updates to come.