Article
The Psychology of Curiosity
George Loewenstein
Treats curiosity as a response to a gap between what somebody knows and what they want to know. It explains why interest can be intense and still not indicate a vocation.
Tool 65 · Develop yourself
What still makes you want to know more?
Curiosity doesn't need a business case.
A guided 12 to 16 minute conversation using ChatGPT. Free, no account, nothing to sign up to.
01
Copy
Take the TAIU prompt.
02
Paste
Open ChatGPT.
03
Talk
One question at a time.
Copies the TAIU prompt. Paste it into ChatGPT.
You don't need ChatGPT Plus. The free version is fine.
What are you interested in before you start asking whether it's useful?
The usefulness question tends to kill the interest that was worth having.
What you have read this month is better evidence than what you say interests you.
What you'll explore
- 01Recent attention
- 02The pull
- 03The older one
- 04The evidence
A note from Mark
Curiosity has driven a lot of my life.
People. Businesses. Countries. Why something worked. Why something failed. How two things that appear unrelated might actually connect.
I've also learned that curiosity loses some of its value when you immediately demand an outcome from it.
You don't have to build a business from everything you're interested in.
Sometimes following the question is enough.
What you'll get
You won't finish with a personality type.You'll leave with answers you can actually test.
01
What pulls you
02
The part that does it
03
How long
04
What to protect
+
Your TAIU handover — a portable summary of everything the conversation established.
See everything included ↓
- 01What keeps pulling your attention
- 02What it is about it
- 03How long it has been there
- 04What you have actually done about it
- 05The older curiosity
- 06The rival reading
- 07What deserves protecting
- 08What remains unresolved
- 09Where this goes next
What now?
01 · Save it
What genuinely holds your attention.
02 · Test it
Follow the question one step further this month without deciding what it is for.
Explore this further ↓
What I would do
- 01
Look at behaviour rather than at stated interests.
- 02
Find a second curiosity that has lasted years.
- 03
Work out what the two have in common.
- 04
Give it more room without asking it to justify itself.
- 05
Leave it alone if it is already in good shape.
Test it
- 01
What have you actually done because of it?
- 02
Has it lasted, or is it new?
- 03
Would you still be interested if nothing came of it?
The alternative
Repeated attention is not always curiosity. It can be novelty, which fades on its own. It can be work necessity dressed as interest. It can be status, or the influence of people around you, or avoidance of something else that needs attention. Test which one this is before giving it more room, because only one of them rewards the space.
Think about this
- What you have read, watched or asked about lately without needing to.
- The part of the subject that keeps pulling you back.
- When the interest first appeared.
- What you have actually done because of it.
- Which older curiosity has lasted, and what the two share.
Take this to Ask Mark
You've done the exercise. Now challenge what came back.
Interpretation, not another copy-and-paste exercise.
Take this to Ask Mark →Finished the exercise?
What did this uncover?
Tell us whether it helped and what you discovered. It takes less than a minute.
Further thinking
The Psychology of Curiosity
George Loewenstein
Why We Do What We Do
Edward L. Deci with Richard Flaste
Peak
Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool
Explore the thinking ↓
Book
Why We Do What We Do
Edward L. Deci with Richard Flaste
The readable account of self-determination theory, written by the man who spent forty years testing it. The finding that matters here is that rewards and approval reliably change why people do things, and that behaviour which survives without either is telling you something the rest is not. It gives you a usable test rather than a feeling.
Book
Peak
Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool
Ericsson spent his career studying how people become genuinely good at things, and the answer is boringly specific: structured practice at the edge of your current ability, with feedback. It belongs here as a corrective. Where an exercise finds that low confidence is an accurate reading of a real gap, this describes what closing the gap actually involves, and it is not a mindset.
Book
Flow
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
The original work behind absorbed attention: the conditions are a clear task, immediate feedback and difficulty roughly matched to skill. Useful here as a discriminator. Attention that absorbs you and attention that merely holds you feel similar in the moment and leave you in completely different states afterwards.