Have you ever wondered about your ability to wonder about things? It’s a wonderful gift, when you think about it. It’s the ability that has unlocked most of our discoveries, because the most fertile ground for discovery is always a curious mind. I’m sure you can learn things without being curious—some lessons will slap you in the face whether you ask them to or not—but there’s no question you’ll learn a lot more if you start with questions. Isn’t our entire scientific method just a systematic series of questions? Without curiosity, the whole world fades into nothing more than a boring necessity, the people around us flatten down into a procession of stereotypes, and God himself starts to look like some kind of tired trope or taskmaster. Without curiosity, life goes stale. Tasteless.
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Sometimes The Best Way To Support Me Is To Thwart Me
Growing up, I was part of a Boy Scout Troop that met in an old converted house. I have a lot of good memories associated with that building, some of which stand out so vividly that I can almost smell the musty walls again—like the time the Scoutmaster told me that I had failed my Board of Review and would not be progressing to the next rank. Meanwhile, my friends passed. I can still taste the embarrassment of that moment, but today I count it as a good memory, along with all the victories and laughter of those years. The fact is, I earned that failure. I went in overconfident and underprepared, fully expecting to be the best of the bunch by just showing up. When they asked me about the things I was supposed to know, I didn’t. So I really did fail, and they let me. They could have bailed me out and given me the rank anyway to spare my feelings, but I’m glad they didn’t.
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