Your curiosity is a clue.
Do you ever find yourself down a rabbit hole of exploring something that feels completely unrelated to the pressing tasks of your day?
It happens to all of us at times. Our minds sometimes need a break, and with a computer in your hand it’s easy to satisfy your urge to explore the most banal curiosity.
You hear a song come on, look up the lyrics, and before you know it you’re knee deep in researching the band’s history and greatest hits.
You read something and suddenly have an insatiable curiosity about the origins and etymology of a certain word.
A combination of my natural curiosity and ADHD can make my day feel like navigating a field of landmines, where every twinge of interest presents a risk of falling down a research rabbit hole.
This tendency isn’t always well-received or appreciated.
The Criticism of Curiosity
Our culture tends to praise single-minded focus and attention and to demonize distraction, believing it’s the opposite of focus.
When you find yourself down yet another rabbit hole, you might default to self-criticism and self-judgment. It might trigger those old soundtracks of stories that told you being curious was a “bad” trait: that you need to focus on one thing; that distraction is a weakness; that you’re not serious about your work or studies.
Maybe it’s time to rewrite that story.
Your Curiosity is a Direction, Not a Detour
Before you give into the cultural conditioning and the belief that you’re somehow morally flawed by your tendency to follow your curiosity, consider that what looks like a distraction might actually be a direction pointing you toward something important.
Not all distractions are created equal. There’s a difference between a passing curiosity and one that draws you deep into its well, down the black hole of hyper-focus.
What looks like a distraction might actually be a direction pointing you toward something important.
Your Curiosity is a Clue.
The curiosities that lead you down deep rabbit holes are often clues that tell you what you find most fulfilling. They show you the types of mental, physical, emotional, or spiritual engagement that you need to have in your life.
To see these patterns you need to take a step back and get curious about the object of your curiosity.
- what’s triggering your curiosity and exploration?
- what specifically about this thing is drawing you in?
- what deeper need is it meeting?
A Case Study: What Curiosity Reveals
Here’s an example of how to put this into action.
With the Memorial Day Murph workout coming up, I found myself deep in the CrossFit sub-Reddits exploring strategies for partitioning the workout’s 100 pull-ups, 200 push-ups, and 300 air squats. I wasn’t content with a list of different options; I wanted to read about people’s experiences, to understand which option would be best suited to my current capacity.
This isn’t the first time I’ve gone deep to strategize a workout. I’ve written many essays breaking down my own strategies for various CrossFit workouts.
Indeed, strategizing is one of the aspects of CrossFit that draws me to this style of workout. Whether it’s for myself or others, I love to strategize.
A Deeper Dive: What’s the Theme Beneath the Surface?
On the surface, this might look like an superficial obsession with working out. But that’s a very narrow view. A broader perspective reveals that my love of strategy — invoked in CrossFit — infuses many of the things that pull me. In fact, it’s a thread that runs through the broad range of my work.
Some examples of where this pattern of strategizing shows up:
- time blocking and space planning a day
- working with the cycles of the seasons
- optimizing a sales process or a workflow
- creating a course curriculum,
- helping clients negotiate to buy or sell their home
- helping yoga students find their way into poses with greater ease
- helping clients create time for the activities that they want to do
Seeing how this pattern arises in so many areas reaffirms that being a strategist is central to my identity and my needs for fulfilling work. Anything that grabs and sustains my attention and interest has a strategic element.
Moreover, I’m at my best when I’m learning about how something works and using that information to create an effective strategy.
In fact, one of my superpowers is taking a strategy from one realm and applying it to another — such as using a workout strategy to optimize my daily schedule.
In the context of CrossFit workouts, there’s also another element present: it’s a context in which I can easily test different strategies. While a marketing or sales strategy has a longer time frame, a workout is short; I can quickly test whether the strategy works and iterate as necessary.
This element is a clue that directs me to seek for ways to easily and quickly test strategies in other realms of my work.
Get Curious About Your Curiosity
Anything that draws you deep down its rabbit hole can be explored in this way. All it takes is a willingness to release the judgment you hold about your “lack of focus” and to get curious about what’s drawing you in.
Your curiosity can be a deep well of insight, but to access it, sometimes you must be willing to dive in — and fall down the rabbit hole.
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