Curiosity is Oxygen for Learning
How the prototyping mindset helps to set up the feedback system for sparks of curiosity to catch fire
If you were to force me to pick just one virtue that I want to cultivate in my students, it’s curiosity. Curiosity is to the process of learning what oxygen is to a fire. But just like you’ve got to have fuel for the fire or the oxygen is worthless, you’ve got to have an outlet for your learning or your curiosity will go to waste.
I’m certainly not the first one to argue that curiosity is worth cultivating. But most of the time we focus on the wrong side of the consumption vs. creation dichotomy. The typical advice to stimulate curiosity is something along the lines of reading more widely, thinking more deeply, or interacting with ideas that challenge our current ways of thinking. This is all well and good. But to really kick your curiosity into gear you’ve got to have an outlet for it.
What I’m about to say will come as no surprise to any of you who have been here for any length of time: a prototyping mindset can help develop curiosity. To cultivate an intrinsically motivated and persevering curiosity we’ve got to get the right system into place, consider the inputs and outputs, and then get the feedback loop started.
Supply and Demand
When we focus only on the supply side of the equation (e.g., the stimuli for our curiosity), we miss the critical aspects of the feedback loop and output. I’ve learned this firsthand many times in my life. One example is this newsletter. I never imagined how deeply it would change me.
I’ve always considered myself to be a relatively curious person. I’ve always done well in school and appreciated the opportunities I’ve had to explore a broad range of topics ranging from the STEM disciplines that are the bread and butter of my professional life to my broader interests in areas like philosophy, religion, and graphic design. However, building a weekly discipline of sitting down to crank out an essay taught me an important lesson about what it means to cultivate a mindset that leads to a flourishing life of the mind: you need a pull as much as a push.
So much of the way we think about school (and I’m speaking for myself as much as anyone else here) is about the content we deliver. We assume, consciously or subconsciously, that students come in with preexisting motivation and an understanding of why they want to learn the material that’s in our classes. As I wrote in a post a few weeks ago, the amount of time we spend teaching students content compared to the amount of time we spend teaching them how to understand and put that content into context is badly out of balance.
I’m not talking here about the context for particular problems within a course. We understand the importance of tying concepts to real-world situations, like showing how a differential equation can be used to model an underwater robot. This is good! However, this level of context is ultimately insufficient. We’ve got to make sure that we’re teaching students the broader frameworks and systems that help them categorize the content they’re learning and the skills they’re developing. Not just the what, but the what for.
It’s a big idea to unpack and it asks a lot of questions about the way our educational systems are structured. While there are certainly bigger structural questions to ask, I want to focus on how cultivating curiosity is critical if we have any hope of addressing the what for in any meaningful and sustained way. While I’ve got three points to today's sermon, there’s really just one take-home message: don’t just focus on inputs, find an outlet and build a system to cultivate your curiosity. What exactly that looks like will look different based on what you’re curious about. But regardless of the specifics of your situation, developing curiosity is the first step to authentically engaging with what it all means.
For the remainder of this post I’ll argue that developing your curiosity rests on three main actions:
Input: Consume quality raw material
Output: Create an avenue for your curiosity to flow
System: Connect the input to the output with feedback
1. Input: Consume quality raw material
To start it’s helpful to have plenty of ideas and material to pull from. Just like it’s important for your physical health to ensure you’re consuming a sufficient amount of nutritious food, a healthy habit of curiosity relies on a nutritious diet of information.
We should evaluate our information diet in much the same way as we would evaluate the food and drink we put into our bodies. Are we consuming the equivalent of unprocessed foods or does our information diet consist mostly of sugary treats, soda, and potato chips? It’s not that we need to totally cut out junk food, but we need to ensure that it makes up only a relatively small part of our diet.
As we think about the input to our curiosity system, are you engaging with ideas that are difficult to understand and require time and discussion to unpack? What about writing from folks who think very differently from us and live in a completely different world from us? Are we reading only living and contemporary authors or also digging back into the past to read thinkers who have stood the test of time?
If the only thing you eat is junk food, your physical health will suffer. If you consume only low-quality information, your curiosity won’t have the raw materials it needs to flourish.
2. Output: Create an avenue for your curiosity to flow
Just getting your information diet in place isn’t enough though. To continue to borrow from the physical health analogy, even if you eat healthy food, that isn’t enough to guarantee you’ll be physically fit. You still need to do something with what you consume.
This is where outputs come into play. Reading inspiring literature or spending a day at a museum or art gallery can do a lot to help you get in a place where you’ve got ideas, but to really get the flywheel moving you’ve got to do something with them or else you can’t maintain the momentum.
This is one of the reasons why project-based learning is so effective. This is a key part of our engineering curriculum at Harvey Mudd and is one of the major drivers of our program. Almost every class, especially those that students take later in the curriculum has a significant lab and/or project component. These projects offer students an outlet for the things they are learning.
Take MicroPs for an example, the upper-level embedded systems class I taught this fall. Each week for the first half of the class students do an open-ended lab assignment where they need to apply the things they’ve learned in class to solve a particular design problem. To do this, they’ve got to have the input there. They’ve got to have a grasp on the fundamentals that allows them to build something using them. But the fact that they have an outlet for their knowledge is critical. Without this, they wouldn't really learn the material.
The same holds for any area where our curiosity is in play. We’ve got to have the raw inputs to get the wheels turning, but until we have a place to synthesize that information into something new, we haven’t yet had the full experience of it.
Your creative outlets may look different than mine, but to make the most of what’s inspiring you, you need to find a way to make something with it.
3. System: Connect the input to the output with feedback
Once you’ve got the inputs and outputs in place, then it’s time to figure out how to best connect them. While there are better and worse ways to connect your inputs to your outputs, the most important part is to start. Once you’ve got some momentum, then you can tune your system to optimize it.
You probably know where I’m going here. The simplest system is an open-loop one. In other words, the input directly feeds the output. This is a great place to start and can get you a long way.
But the real secret sauce is when you find a way to incorporate feedback into your system. To use the current output of your curiosity, combined with a new input to determine where you go next.
This is what I take to be at the heart of
’s advice to be the “only” instead of the best. Each of us has a unique story to tell and a unique influence to have on the world since we are all unique people. Our experiences, upbringings, educations, and interests mean that we all have a unique set of inputs to draw from. The question is just whether we will combine those inputs in such a way that we can share them and further stimulate our own curiosity and the curiosity of those around us.
Many of you know that
was the spark that helped me decide to start writing on Substack and sharing my work publicly. He’s long been an inspiration for my creativity and curiosity. To close I’ll leave you by paraphrasing one of his lessons that resonates deeply with me from his book Keep Going.Forget the noun, do the verb. Don’t worry about what to call yourself. Just do the work.
The Book Nook
Today instead of suggesting one book as is my normal procedure, I want to highlight three books that I’ve found helpful in sparking my own curiosity.
Big Little Breakthroughs by Josh Linkner
I Never Thought of It That Way by
I’ve written about all of these in various places before, but here are two specific pieces I’ve written before about the way these books have shaped my thinking.
The Professor Is In
Last Friday was demo day in MicroPs and it went great! The digital lab was full of energy as lots of students came by to check out and celebrate all the hard work the students put into their projects.
You can find a list of all the projects with links to their final portfolio websites here. I’ve also compiled a YouTube playlist with some of the project videos here if you’d like to take a look.
Leisure Line
Tried out some Rainbow Rave cookies this last weekend (free NYT Recipe link). If you like colorful, crunchy cookies with sprinkles and mini M&Ms these are for you! Not my all-time favorite, but they were good!
Still Life
Got my new Absent-Minded Professor-themed YETI mug in the mail on Saturday and I’m loving it so far. It’s a 12 oz Rambler bottle with YETI’s HotShot lid. Appreciate that it’s spill-proof and has a nice sipping experience! I didn’t think it was possible, but I like it even more than my 10 oz tumbler which is also excellent.
For me, invoking curiosity needs an energizing spark, a catalyst, from outside the input-process-output loop. Your demo day is a great example, when the *visitors* say, wow! I want to understand / do that.