Why I'm Curious
Two kinds of curiosity: one an edge, one a way of loving the world. This is about the second
I was thirteen when I took apart the cassette player.
Not because it was broken. Because I wanted to see how it worked — how a spool of brown tape turned into music. I remember the eight small screws on the back, the way the case finally gave, the inside of it: white plastic gears, a thin rubber belt gone slightly soft. I sat on the floor and looked at it for a long while before I touched anything.
I’ve been doing some version of that ever since.
To be curious about something is, I’ve come to think, a way of loving it.
Paul Graham has a test for figuring out what you’re built for: notice what doesn’t feel like work to you. When I sat down and made my own list, the thing at the top was massive curiosity.
So for a long time I assumed I understood it, curiosity was the through-line, and that felt settled.
What I’ve only seen clearly in the last few years is that the word covers two different things, and we almost always run them together.
The first I’ll call instrumental curiosity. It’s the cross-domain advantage: the engineer who reads history, the investor who reads biology, the way a question carried out of one field can crack open another. I’ve written about it at length, in The Curiosity Advantage and The Lawrence Protocol, so I won’t relitigate it here. It’s real. It also happens to be the version of curiosity that gets quoted in business books.
I’m a big fan of instrumental curiosity and think that this is where investing and entrepreneurial edge lives, that is where the biggest discoveries will be made.
But the second kind of curiosity is quieter, and harder to put on a slide. Call it relational curiosity: curiosity as a way of being in the world rather than a way of winning at it, the kind that doesn’t optimise for anything. As I wrote earlier this year, “curiosity directed at a question is love directed at a person, wearing different clothes.” That isn’t an edge. It’s a way of being.
This essay is about the second kind. Partly because I’ve already said my piece on the first. Mostly because the work I’ve just walked into is staked on it.
None of this arrived as a plan.
For years I thought of curiosity as something I did on the side, a private appetite, indulged after the real work was done. The real work was markets and technology. Curiosity was what I read on the train.
But I keep my own notes, and notes don’t lie about what you care about. There are hundreds of them, margin scribbles, half-written memos, lines copied out of books and never used again. At the time none of it looked like a thesis. It looked like distraction.
I spent the last month uploading many of my notes from notebooks and Evernote into my own wiki (btw highly recommend doing this regardless of the domain you operate in).
Here’s a graph view of my half processed notes.
Reflecting back, sometime in 2018, I stopped keeping the notes to myself and a simple monthly email was born that was about wanting to take something I’d understood and make it useful to someone else.
The early versions looked like this and went to 20 friends.
Sometime around 2014 I had read Steve Rosenbaum’s Curation Nation and underlined a single sentence: “What we make relevant for others defines who we are.” I didn’t know yet why it landed so hard. I do now.
Few years later, in the noise of a conference in Los Angeles, I wrote myself a note I still have: “My job has to be a curator. To help people make sense of all the things.” I wasn’t describing a job I held. I was describing one I didn’t yet know how to take.
The pattern held. The curiosity was never content to stay mine. It kept reaching for someone to give it to.
So when The Curious Mind finally arrived, it didn’t feel like a launch. It felt like the natural shape of something I’d been doing quietly for years, without ever having the language for it.
The instinct to give away what you've understood isn't a second step that comes after the curiosity. It's part of the same motion. The understanding wants out the way a held breath does. You haven't finished being curious about a thing until you've tried to hand it to someone else and watched whether it survives the trip.
Writing is that motion performed in public. It’s the curiosity continued past the point where it would otherwise stop — past private knowing, into something a stranger can pick up and use. The Curious Mind exists for no more complicated reason than that. The curiosity needed somewhere to go.
I think the seed of that sharing was planted by Austin Kleon’s great book: Show Your Work!
And in the end, the writing has given me two great gifts, one has been to curate and synthesise my own thoughts and the other has been to learn from many amazing people along the way.
But curiosity is more than just words on a screen, and I learned the other half of this at home. I have two daughters, and they’re curious in completely different ways.
The younger one loves history and languages. She wants to major in Latin and Greek. She views everything through the lens of classics and time.
The other one notices small human details - the thing in someone’s face that no one named, the small wrongness nobody else clocked. A completely different temperament, and not an ounce less curious.
For a long time I watched this the way any parent does, with no agenda but delight. Then I noticed something I now think is structural. Put the two of them in front of the same thing and they come back holding different halves of it, one with the mechanism, the other with the meaning. Between them they see more than either could alone, and more, often, than I can.
That isn’t only a thing I learned about my daughters. It’s now become the architecture of the Curious Mind Brain Trust.
The Brain Trust is the grown-up version of what happens at my kitchen table. A community of curious investors, founders, and operators, each carrying deep knowledge of a different corner of the world.
It’s a group of people that value truth above all else, and together they are curious, kind and the most original thinkers I have ever met.
The combination of my daughters and the Brain Trust has taught me the value of true cognitive diversity and multiple intelligences.
This is something I think about a lot in a world where our truths will be homogenous and easily available to all from fast LLMs, true alpha will continue to be human because the thing machines cannot contain is tacit human knowledge.
The other realisation looking over my notes was that what I do doesn’t really have a subject.
People call it markets, or geopolitics, or technology — but those are only the directions the curiosity happens to be facing. The subject was never the point. The work itself is the curiosity, given away. In public, through The Curious Mind. In community, through the Brain Trust. And now, for the first time, without the institutional frame I spent a career inside.
That frame protected a lot. It also kept the curiosity part-time — a thing I did around the edges of a job that was officially about something else.
So this is the experiment I’m running with the rest of my working life: what happens when the side practice becomes the whole of it. When the love version of curiosity isn’t the thing I do after hours but the thing I do.
I won’t pretend I know how it ends. The edge version of curiosity is far easier to sell, there’s a whole shelf of business books to prove it. The love version is harder to put a price on. It’s also the one I want to spend my life on. Whether a life can be built on it is the part I haven’t lived yet.
The world is fascinating. Curiosity is how I love it. The Curious Mind is curiosity made public. The Brain Trust is curiosity made communal. The work I’m walking into is what happens when those three sentences become a full-time vocation rather than a side practice.
I don’t know exactly what comes next. I know which kind of curiosity it’s powered by.
With Love.
Thanks! This piece resonates. The main motivation for my writing is to share with others things I have come to understand. This was a big personal driver during my scientific career, and is now a big driver for my current activities.