The wonderful pain of being morbidly curious

In David C. Baker’s excellent book “The Business of Expertise“, he encourages curiosity. In fact, he demands it. If you want to stay relevant in what you do, you need to stay curious.

I work hard to stay curious, and David gives an analogy that I found to be very accurate. I find that when I’m in places where it’s not as easy to jot down a note (when I’m driving or running, for example), sometimes the thoughts will pile up to the point where I just need to stop and write them down. David compares it to this:

You won’t be relevant for decades unless you are morbidly curious. In that pursuit, there are times when the urgency to write down a string of thoughts is as painful as waiting far too long to pee, and you’d better find a solution in a few minutes or someone’s going to be wet and warm.

While his analogy is kind of funny (and a bit gross), it makes total sense. I’ll feel that urgency to write something down grow and grow until I simply need to do something with it. While I don’t have a perfect answer for how to do that in every situation, here are a few things that help.

• If I’m driving with the family, I’ll ask my wife to email me. I’ll usually just say “email me experts don’t cold call” or some other out-of-context nonsense, but it’ll be enough to trigger my memory next time I’m at my computer and I see that email. She found it weird the first time I did that (and she probably still does), but it’s quick enough to do that so now she just does it and moves on.
• If I’m driving alone, I’ll have Google take the note for me through Android Auto (and you can do similar through Apple CarPlay). “Hey Google, take a note, experts don’t cold call”
• If I’m running, it’s a bit trickier. I could theoretically have Google take a note, but my inability to speak (while I can barely breathe) makes that tough. I’ll sometimes stop and type a quick note, or often I’ll do a quick memory trick with the “link system” to remember a few things (as taught to me by Joe Turner a few years ago). I’m not particularly good at it, but I can string a few together to buy me 20 minutes or so.

I’m often in a situation where I can jot a quick note in Google Keep or on a piece of paper or whatever, and that does the trick. As long as I process it into my system before it gets lost, all is good.

Today is something like 828 days in a row that I’ve blogged, and that doesn’t happen without a lot of intentional curiosity. My biggest concern is that I’ll run out of things to say, so having the urge to suddenly jot down some ideas is something that I’m always thankful to have to deal with.