Is Curiosity More Valuable Than Knowledge?

Every interesting thing I’ve done in my life has been a direct result of curiosity. Every professional and personal success I’ve experienced has stemmed from the fact that I was curious.

For me, a burning question that popped into my head twenty-five years ago drove me to relentlessly pursue a career as a sales coach and teacher. Here’s the question: “What if I could start a business that helped business owners, entrepreneurs, sales leaders, and salespeople transform ordinary sales potential into extraordinary sales performance?”

That question sparked an amazing business career for me. Twenty-five years later, I have had the privilege to coach and teach thousands of individuals, corporate sales teams, and business leaders. Sometimes true passion strikes when you least expect it.

At the Outset.

There’s a good chance that I would not have launched the Selling Skills Institute (my company) if I simply had knowledge about the coaching industry twenty-five years ago. This is a common story. Nearly every entrepreneur will tell you that their early unfamiliarity of the road ahead of them, coupled with insatiable curiosity, was a more powerful motivating force than knowledge.

A friend described my business start-up strategy as “optimistically na?ve”— having a lack of experience and knowledge about the sales coaching and training industry—but open to learning. I have found the learning a pleasant and wondrous experience.

Is Knowledge Less Valuable Now?

“Right now, knowledge is a commodity,” says Harvard professor Tony Wagner. “Known answers are everywhere, and easily accessible.” There is a consensus that because we’re drowning in information, the value of memorized knowledge (as opposed to applying knowledge) is dropping.

According to some experts, memorized knowledge has always been less valuable than curiosity. Einstein once said he had no special talent but was rather passionately curious. Curiosity led Einstein to the Theory of Relativity. Without curiosity, Isaac Newton would not have discovered the Laws of Physics, and Alexander Fleming probably would not have discovered Penicillin.

As Steve Quatrano of the Right Question Institute puts it, “forming questions helps us to organize our thinking around what we don’t know.” In a time when so much of what we know is subject to change or obsolescence, the comfortable expert must adopt a beginner’s mindset and go back to being a voracious learner.

In Shunryu Suzuki’s book, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mindset, he writes, “The mind of the beginner is empty, free of habit of the expert.” Such a mind, he added, is “open to all possibilities” and “can see things as they are.” “In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind, there are few.”

When it comes to questioning, people start out doing it (preschool children, on average, ask their parents about 100 questions a day), then gradually do it less and less, until what they’ve come to rely on no longer works.

Such is the case in today’s virus-infected business environment, where the speed of, and need for innovation has been ratcheted up—forcing some businesses to ask bigger and more fundamental questions than they’ve asked in years about everything from the company’s identity, to it’s mission, to a reexamination of who the customer is and what the core competencies should be.

Business leaders are beginning to ask: “Now that we know what we now know, what’s possible now?”

The challenge now is to figure out what these new conditions mean for each of us—what opportunities they create and how to best exploit them. The author Seth Godin addressed the challenge when he wrote, “Our new civic and professional life is all about doubt. About questioning the status quo and most of all, questioning what’s next?”

As John Seely Brown notes, “a questioner can thrive in these challenging times. If you don’t have that disposition to question,” Brown says, “you’re going to fear change. But if you’re comfortable questioning, experimenting, connecting things—then change is something that becomes an adventure. And if you can see it as an adventure, then you’re off and running.”

Is curiosity more valuable than knowledge? You decide. For me, curiosity empowered me to genuinely want to know more about everything. It allowed me to embrace unfamiliar circumstances; giving me greater opportunity to experience discovery and joy.

Charlie Anderson is President of Selling Skills Institute. He is the creator and author of Shift Thinking, a unique mindset shift teaching method that empowers business leaders, entrepreneurs, and sales professionals to achieve their goals and dreams in all areas of life.

If you’re struggling to get from where you are in your career to where you want to be, reach out to me. You might be a good candidate for my Shift Thinking Coaching Program. To inquire, call or email me.

To contact me call 339-927-2746 or email me at [email protected]t

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