In this article I will share with you the three principles of how to cultivate curiosity. Curiosity is defined as a strong desire to learn something or do something. Here I want to put the focus on cultivating curiosity for things that are challenging but important because it’s easy to cultivate curiosity for things that are easy and fun, such as playing video games or painting. The three principles for cultivating curiosity are (1) Reduce Barriers to Entry; (2) Threshold for Relevance; (3) Self and peer validation.
Reducing barriers to entry means make it easy to be curious about things that are challenging but important. For example, once you become really good at reading, writing and math, you will find it easier to learn more challenging topics. Once you become really good at research, you will find the best resources for that challenging but important topic, then it is much easier to learn about it.
Threshold for relevance means understanding the relevance of the challenging but important topic. If you learn enough about reality that you begin to see connections and relate to your life. When you're able to relate your learning to your life it makes it a lot more interesting and fun! For example, I was learning about supply and demand in economics, one of the things I learned is that when you raise the price of what you're selling less people are willing to buy it, which is related to psychology. This caused me to be more interested in the topic because i could make connections to other things.
Lastly self and peer validation means receiving enough positive reinforcement from yourself, friends, family, and community that you begin to make curiosity part of your personal identity. For example when I stopped eating candy people gave me a lot of praise and so I made it part of my identity! It wasn’t hard for me to resist candy once I was known as the sugar-free kids.
Thank you for reading my article about how to cultivate curiosity! If you are interested in this topic you can check out my other article called How to Motivate Yourself.