 The way this came to me is really reading an article that was published in the Wall Street Journal on the 10th anniversary of the death of Steve Jobs. And it was a short commemorative piece about Steve Jobs who died on October 5, 2011 by Johnny Ive. Johnny Ive was Steve Jobs' partner. He was the chief design officer at Apple for many years. He was part of the team that launched Apple's revolutionary products and ultimately responsible for their design. He worked very closely with Steve Jobs over these years and I think developed a deep friendship with Steve Jobs. And I think got to know Steve Jobs really, really well during this period. And so Johnny Ives wrote this commemorative piece in the Wall Street Journal. You know, what was it now? Four weeks ago I intended to do the show earlier and then other stuff got in the way and I didn't get to it. And there was a paragraph that Johnny Ives wrote in this that really struck me. Now, you guys probably know this, many of you know this, people who've been following me for years know this. I am a huge Steve Jobs fan. I love my iPhone, right? And I use my iPhone in my talks and in my presentations quite often. But it's not just the iPhone. I have real admiration for Steve Jobs as a entrepreneur, as a businessman, as a thinker, as a visionary, as a designer and as a human being from what I know about him. Not to say he wasn't fraud, not to say he didn't do stupid things taking care of his health or as the case may be, not taking care of his health and not applying reason and rationality to the issue of his health is sad and disappointing from somebody like Steve Jobs and sad in a selfish way for me in not having Steve Jobs around for another 20, 30, 40 years. It's, I think, sad for all human beings, all human beings who value human life and value human progress, not to have Steve Jobs around to guide us with beautiful products, with efficient, productive products to guide us towards greater fulfillment and a greater manifestation of our lives. So, I'm a huge Steve Jobs fan. I love heroes. Steve Jobs is a hero. I don't really believe many of the nasty stories that have been written about him and been told about him. You know, and everything that Steve Jobs ultimately touched was a massive success and a massive success in an inspiring way, in a pro-human way. I mean, just think of Pixar, the movie studio that he became CEO of before he rejoined Apple the second time and just the beauty of those movies. And what they meant and how they revolutionized animation and how the best movies in those days, the best movies in those days, were made by Steve Jobs, in a sense, by the team under Steve Jobs. So, the nastiness that so many people tell about him is inconsistent with the level at which he was successful. Anyway, that's just our background, because the paragraph that struck me was this, and I'm quoting from Johnny Ives' article about Steve Jobs, short article about Steve Jobs. He was without doubt the most inquisitive human I have ever met. His insatiable curiosity was not limited or distracted by his knowledge or expertise, nor was it casual or passive. It was ferocious, energetic, and restless. His curiosity was practiced with intention and vigor. Now, this is, I think, a stunning paragraph, and it connects in my mind to books that I've read about other great people, whether it's Leonardo da Vinci or whether it's the book I just read about, you know, the bio-scientists, Dauden, who was one of the key people in the CRISPR, you know, CRISPR biotech revolution that we are living through right now. They're all, all these people are ferociously curious, energetic, restless. But there's something about this term, ferociously curious, ferociously inquisitive. Most people assume that being curious is something you're born with, something you cultivate when you're young. And, you know, it's just kind of passive afterwards that curious people and less curious people, and it just is what it is. But what you get from this paragraph, and what I think is so inspiring about the way it's written, is that Steve Jobs' curiosity was intentional. It was focused. It was not casual or passive. On the contrary, it was ferocious, energetic, and restless. And to find a sentence, his curiosity was practiced with intention and rigor. Now, I think curiosity is essential for a flourishing life. And it says a lot about one's attitude towards the world and towards one's own life, the extent to which one is curious. And, well, I think one can train, you can train yourself to be curious. So, you know, a lot of the traits that we require as adults are developed when we're children and developed in a sense out of our control. Developed, you know, or not in full conscious control because we're not full conscious control of our minds when we are children. Curiosity can be drummed out of us when we are children. Many, many parents do their best to drum curiosity out of their children's minds. But I think what is important here is curiosity is something you can resurrect. Curiosity is something you can activate even if it has been drummed out of you as a child. And this is how you do it. So what does it mean to be ferocious when it comes to curiosity? What does it mean to be intentional? It means that you know that the world is rich with knowledge. The world is rich with opportunity. And opportunities for you, for your life, for your growth as a human being. You know that you don't know everything. However much you know there's always more to learn, more to know, more to gain. And you're constantly seeking that knowledge out even when it's not clear how this particular knowledge connects with your values right now, with what you're doing right now, with what you're pursuing right now. Because, and this is philosophy, teaches this and an objectivism teaches us this. If you, you know, Leonard Peacock talks about this quite a bit in OPPA. Reality is a whole. It is one. Everything is connected to everything else. Knowledge is integrated. Now, not everything necessarily is important. Not everything is with the effort, but so much is. So many connections can be created. So much knowledge is related to one another. The more one knows, the more one knows about the things that one wants to pursue, about one's own goals. And to realize this, to realize the unity of knowledge, to realize the scope of what is available to us in terms of information, in terms of knowledge. I think if one realizes that and one knows that, you want to find out about stuff. Now, many of us were curious as kids. And I think as kids, you know, our minds are in a sense, in a sense, empty. They're empty of knowledge. And we spend that time trying to fill it in. Fill in that knowledge. And part of that is we want to understand the world. We want to understand connections between things. We want to understand a cause and a fact. We want to understand what's going on around us. Everything is new. Everything is exciting. One of the things I love about babies and children is how exciting the world is to them. How exciting knowledge is to them. How curious they are. Every child, when they reach about two years old, every healthy child, when they reach about two years old, starts asking, why? Why? Why? Because they're curious. Because they want to understand the world around them. Because they want to integrate, not consciously, but they mind, is demanding. It's an integrating machine. It wants to connect the thing that's observing right now to the things that it learned yesterday to everything else that it thinks that is going on around. And it wants to understand the cause and effect relationships. Why? Why? Why? Just watch a two-year-old, three-year-old, four-year-old. And it drives the parents crazy. I can understand that because it's non-stop. It's constant. And you explain something and they go, why? And you explain that and they go, why? And the challenge is to explain these things in a terminology that is both true and at least somewhat comprehensible to the child. And that's difficult, challenging. You have to keep pursuing it. You have to at some point, they ask you, why is green green? And you just have to say, it just is. So, you know, an important part of being a parent, an important part of being a parent, an important part of choosing to be a parent is willingness to engage in cultivating this curiosity and not suppressing it against so many. Stop asking why. It just is. This is just how the way it is. There is no, you know, they start yelling at their kids. They shut them up. Don't bother me now trying to destroy. And I'm sure you had, some of you had parents like this. Never explaining, never teaching, never encouraging. But that curiosity is that wanting to know the world is so exciting and so thrilling. It's what much of life is about. It's about discovering the truth. It's about knowing what's out there. And it's about then learning how to use that knowledge to make your life better. And you never know where the next piece of knowledge might be that might really help enhance your life. It might be that book on biotechnology that tells you something you didn't know about gene editing that might be able to resolve a genetic issue that you might have. Who knows? But part of it is just the love of knowing what children have. The love of just understanding the world around them. And you can see it in the eyes. You can see it in the, when they get an answer that they understand, that explains something to them. Oh, wow, they're so excited. You can see kids in a Montessori classroom from a very young age when they figure something out for themselves, the level to which that becomes exciting. So that excitement about knowing the future, not knowing the future, knowing, knowing the world, understanding reality, understanding cause and effect, understanding the world around you. Of course, that's what reason is about. That's what cultivating your mind is about. That's what is required for human survival. It's certainly required for human flourishing, for human success, for productivity, for creativity. Knowing the world around you, understanding it. And some of us as children are super curious and maintain it and sustain it. I used to read encyclopedias when I was a kid. I used to, I mean, I love just sometimes just opening an encyclopedia at random on a particular page and reading. And no matter what the topic, it was interesting. I mean, and it's the problem I have to this day. I can go into a bookstore and I can very quickly say, I want this book and I want this book and I want this book and I want those books. All of the different topics, all of the different subjects, all of the things I don't know right now. I want to know who has time. I don't. But it's a wonderful sense, that curiosity, that desire to learn. And again, it gives you a scope of knowledge about reality when you learn it. That opens up opportunities, opens up avenues for you in terms of your life. That you can't just imagine rationalistically trying to plot your life into the future. You need to be engaged in the world. In its challenges. Engage means understanding. You need to be engaged in understanding the world around you. To really ultimately benefit from the world around you. Now many of us, I know a lot of people who this curiosity is stomped on when they're children. They lose it at some point. I don't know any child who's not curious. But I know lots of 16 year olds who are not. I used to gobble up biographies and history books and science books and just a whole variety of things from all over the place. Because it was all fascinating. You know what? Why? Because reality is fascinating. The world is fascinating. And again, if everything is connected to everything, it's useful to know important stuff about lots of different fields. You actually never know when the information will become useful specifically. But in the sense of your mind, in the sense of grasping reality as a whole. It's useful to have examples from biotech and example from physics and examples from business and examples from finance and examples from politics and ethics. And history, history, history, history, history. No one says curiosity killed a cat. Yeah, but we're not cats. We're integrating souls. And we need fodder for that integration. We need knowledge. We need concretes. We need examples. We need to understand the world around us. A survival depends on it. And indeed, I think the most creative, the most productive people in the world also tend to be the most curious people in the world. The most inquisitive people in the world. Doudin, as an example, the bio-scientist sees biological phenomena and wants to understand it. And ultimately, what drove her was want to understand the origins of life. And in order to understand the origins of life, she understood earlier that she needed to figure out RNA. That RNA was the key to understanding the origins of life in a sense more important than DNA. And she did. Doudna. Doudna, yes. I highly recommend again the Code Breakers, the Code Breaker story of Doudna and CRISPR, the use of CRISPR, the discovery of CRISPR as a gene editing technology. Fascinating book. Fascinating book. And she's a hero. A hero for being so inquisitive, a hero for being such a good scientist, a hero for dedicating herself or being focused. That's another thing. Johnny F. talks about Steve Jobs. On the one hand, he's super curious. He wants to know all the stuff from all kinds of fields, from all kinds of parts of life. On the other hand, super focused on what he's got to do. Super focused on the particular project. Says no to lots of things. That's the kind of combination that I think makes for great producers, great scientists, makes, you know, for interesting people. I've continues about Steve Jobs. Many of us have an innate predisposition to be curious. I believe that after traditional education or working in an environment with many people, curiosity is a decision requiring intent and discipline. Yes. So what we have this, called it innate curiosity as children. It's discouraged. It's stomped upon. Not just by our parents, by our teachers. What an irony is there. And by the people around us, by our bosses, don't ask. Just do what I tell you. And therefore it requires of all of us to be intentional and disciplined about it. So Iran's rules for life is be curious, which means activate it, pursue it, do it. Thank you for listening or watching the Iran Book Show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening. You get value from watching. Show your appreciation. You can do that by going to iranbrookshow.com. I go to Patreon, subscribe star locals and just making a appropriate contribution on any one of those, any one of those channels. 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