Cultivate Your Curiosity – Listen, Look, and Live

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Einstein left us with a lot of great quotes about the importance of imagination and curiosity. And it is important to cultivate your curiosity and find ways to inspire innovation in your life. You should never stop asking questions, and you should be interested in the answers. When you can come up with an answer, use your imagination to consider other possibilities.

So many people go through life totally oblivious to what’s going on around them. They might walk down a path, and do not see all the little critters scurrying about, or even notice the birds and the insects flying by. They aren’t curious about any of it, they aren’t paying attention, they aren’t looking, they aren’t listening, and quite frankly they aren’t alive. They aren’t not turned on and for some reason they turned themselves off hiding inside their little box, and even when they think they are free from stress, they are walking around brain-dead to the world.

There is no honor in that, there’s nothing valuable about living your life that way. Learning isn’t just about rote memorization, and knowing lots of facts. What’s the use in knowing lots of facts, you could just look that up on the Internet anytime you want to. You can read all the newspapers, you can even read the Encyclopedia if you want too, but you should be doing it because you are curious, genuinely interested, and really want to know and learn.

And while you are doing that you should be thinking and associating all this information with everything you’ve experienced, observed, and thought about during your lifetime. That’s how you cultivate curiosity. Let me tell you something that I do that works quite well, and maybe it might work for you. When I am walking or jogging down the trail, I ask myself what type of tree is that?

Is that the average size of a tree of that type? Do those types of trees grow larger in other parts of the world? What type of animals would most likely make that three their home, their home tree? How deep does the root system go? Do bark beetles eat the bark on these types of trees? Are those leaves the best for photosynthesis, how efficient are they in collecting energy?

In fact, I ask questions like this of everything I see, everywhere I go. I try to answer my own questions as best I can, and then later try to find out if I’m right or wrong. This is how you cultivate your curiosity. You look, live, listen, and learn. Indeed I hope you will please consider all this and think on it.

Lance Winslow is a retired Founder of a Nationwide Franchise Chain, and now runs the Online Think Tank. Lance Winslow believes writing 24,000 articles by July 24, 2011 is going to be difficult because all the letters on his keyboard are now worn off now..

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