A few days ago I was asked what my spiciest take was. And just like every other time I’ve ever been asked that question, it p*ssed me off. This question makes me feel judged before I've even opened my mouth.

I feel like a big chunk of the way our society is structured doesn't encourage or nurture the curiosity that all humans are born with—and without a well-practiced sense of curiosity it’s much harder if not impossible to form your own spicy takes.

In school, curious kids who ask many questions are seen as a disruption to the class. And technically it's true—they are a disruption!

As a teacher, if you’re trying to follow and encourage the curiosity of the thirty students in your class, you're never going to find the time to go through any of the curriculum that's been set out for them to learn. Also, if you're following the curiosity of a specific student, you might lose the other twenty-nine in the process, just because that's not the bit that they were personally curious about.

It's easier to shut questions down, when there are too many. But if you shut kids down, they’ll learn very quickly not to ask questions again, and suddenly you're teaching the full curriculum (as planned) to a class of kids who are getting a lot of practice at burying any curious questions they might be tempted to ask. The problem is, curiosity is like a muscle. If you don't activate it, it becomes atrophied. 

By the time I’d reached the end of high school, I had accumulated a huge amount of knowledge in history, biology and geography. I'd mastered some pretty complex exercises in math and physics. I'd sharpened my critical mind through reading and analysing literature and philosophy. And I’d learned not to ask any questions in class. I wouldn’t have been able to come up with any questions even if you had asked me to - I realise only now just how deflated my curiosity muscle had become. The French education system was wonderful on so many levels, but helping kids build their sense of curiosity and their sense of self was not one of those.

When I joined the workforce, I started working for a consultancy that did market research. My job was to be intellectually curious, but only about things that I was paid to be curious about. Day in, day out, I was asking a bunch of questions to experts across the globe so that I could forge an understanding of some niche markets that no-one had done any public research on. So I got curious about heat pumps in Germany. I got curious about novel wastewater treatment options across Europe. I got curious about the airport service industry in certain parts of West Africa. 

‍My consulting job was giving me an opportunity to exercise my curiosity muscle every day. 

‍Great.

I started bulking up.

The thing is, neither heat pumps nor wastewater treatment nor airport services were things that I had personally decided to be curious about. I was doing great at being curious about those things, but I still had very little idea what I would end up being curious about if I hadn’t been given a specific direction to explore. But it didn’t matter at all to me at that point.

In a way, I was so busy strengthening my arm muscles that I never noticed I was skipping leg day every. single. time. 

Things got more serious when I joined the world of corporates, in the energy industry. The company I joined was just starting a massive transition of its own in support of the wider energy transition which was in full swing. There were so many exciting things for me to be curious about! 

I was responsible for pulling together the first-ever strategy to position the company I worked for as one of the leaders of the energy transition in Great Britain. So I got curious about what the energy industry would need to look like in 2030 and 2050 if it were to be fully decarbonised. I also got curious about what the company would need to do to accelerate the transition. 

Then when the company realised that it would need to hire hundreds of people if it were serious about delivering that ambitious strategy, I secured a new role in which I was given the responsibility for being curious about how a company of 1,000-people who’s just gone through a multi-year recruitment freeze would go about doing that in the most efficient and humane way. 

The list of things I got to be curious about—and was officially being given responsibility for being curious about—got more and more exciting as I climbed up the corporate ladder. 

But one day, as I was busy being curious about important work stuff and doing tricep extensions, my legs wobbled noticeably for the first time. I was worried I’d fall, so I let go of the dumbbell—and it fell on the floor with a loud thud. Something was clearly off balance. 

A part of me seemed to be trying to speak up. 

Timidly. 

Tentatively.

I had no idea what it was trying to say but one thing was intuitively certain to me: if I didn’t make space for that part to express itself it would end up shutting itself down again, just like the curious kids in school who stop asking questions.

I kept exercising but this time I was paying a lot more attention to what the rest of my body had to say—and it took a while for me to understand what was going on.

Turns out I didn’t want to spend another decade being exclusively curious about things that others were paying me to be curious about. Even if I found a lot of meaning and happiness in doing that for a company that was making a positive impact on the world, I still wanted to figure out where my curiosity would lead me if I were to give it directions myself. Or rather if I let it lead me into figuring out who I really was. Playfully.

The thing is, I hadn’t done that in such a long time so I was well out of practice—and I had no idea what exercises would help build my atrophied leg muscles back up to a healthy level. 

The only thing I knew is that if I kept distracting myself with bench presses and shoulder presses, I would never have the courage to start training my legs. It’s much harder to start doing something that you don’t know how to do than it is to keep doing something that you’re already good at.

So I took a deep breath and decided to ditch the upper body work for a while. 

I went on sabbatical from the working world as I knew it. I wandered into the uncharted world of self-direction, trusting that the wide open spaces would feel inviting enough for my deeply curious self to start playing there. I knew fully well that there was no way my legs would be able to squat 10 times in a row with no weights on my shoulders, let alone squat 120lbs anytime soon.

It’s been a wild ride. A ride that no part of me regrets. 

But it did take me a few months to start mapping out the parts of that world that my curiosity seemed to want to explore. It then took me even more time to start uncovering what some of what my first fully-self-made takes on the world might look like, independently from any school, university or work structures. And it took me even more time than that to be able to start articulating a small subset of those in a legible way.

Everything’s difficult when you’re doing it for the first time. But one thing is certain, I am not doing that so I can come up with spicy takes whenever someone demands that of me. I am doing that because following my curiosity is incredibly good fun—and because I'm learning so much about who I am in process.

One day, though, my legs will be strong enough that I'll end up deadlifting 180 lbs without noticing.

‍

Photo by Joseph Rosales on Unsplash