I've been perplexing on this question for a while. I see knowledge as the driver for an imaginative mind. The more knowledge consumed through your own curiosity, not because someone has assigned you the knowledge, the more your imagination opens up. As you explore what interests you, you become aware of the ideas and questions that can be asked.
Curiosity for knowledge provides direction for the imagination...
When I look at children, I see a fantastic imagination with an intense curiosity. As we enter the world we all begin as a blank slate, everything is new and exciting. However when society forgets the importance and excitement of our 'First Experiences' it can be frustrating and detrimental to curiosity and creativity. There seems to be a larger focus on the teenage first experiences like; the first kiss, first car, or first job.
Initially as children we have a genuine excitement that comes with every first experience; our first step, first word, first sentence, the first time we understood addition and subtraction, our first book. This excitement and curiosity slowly disintegrates as we age. Our elders - with the best intentions at heart - try to pave the road for us, telling us what to do and what not to do, which begins to suffocate our desire to explore new firsts.
A purpose I chase within my life is to explore the mind and find the questions that I haven't yet asked, to slowly fill in the gaps with other people's understanding. This was driven by a realisation, "that everyone is an encyclopedia that I haven't been able to open yet, and only through earning the right to ask different questions can i begin to gain a perspective from their experience".
If we work on the idea of people as encyclopedias, who would you like to open up?
When you're a child, the innocence allows you the right to ask any question, as we navigate into adulthood we need to approach the same questions with a sense of curiosity and an absence of judgement. The unknown is both exiting and scary, however as humans we should always be trying to explore and fall over, like when we were children. This becomes easier to accomplish if we know we have someone watching over us.
Through my experience and through observing society, I've come to the conclusion that we as individuals are continually dictated to throughout our lives, with little freedom of expression. We're told we need to have focus or guidelines and that we must learn a certain way. Thus ensuring we become a "constructive member" of society. We are given rules and restrictions then told the punishments for not playing within them.
How would you feel if you had an ability to navigate the rules yourself?
As humans we are creatures of experience, we learn best from touching the hotplate and finding out that when it's turned on, it hurts! What school does for us is to explain the warning and rules, that we shouldn't touch the hot plate or it will hurt, thus we've been told the lesson but never learned it ourselves.
We've been told that we need to follow a strict structure of education, 13 years of Primary and Secondary Schooling, and 3-7 years of Tertiary so we can find a job and earn an income in a specific field. However the sad reality is that scarcity is what creates value and because everyone now has a degrees, they are no longer valuable.
Now it is our experience and our failures that differentiate us from others.
Which has created the problem that we all have expensive, debt ridden degrees and the large majority of jobs on offer are repetitive, and seldom require the extensive structured education we've all been afforded.
We've been sold on the idea of joining the rat race, to make money in a system which derives it's value from debt.
Is there another way?
Einstein said it right "Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”
The questions I have for you at this point of our journey together is, What is your genius?
What are you curious about? What can you give back to the world? What do you want to understand? and Why aren't you pursuing your side hustle whilst navigating the rat race?
We have 168 hours in a week, if you could reignite the curiosity you had as a child, what would you be interested in?
Just imagine what you could give back to the world!
