In this episode, we discuss the importance of being curious.
Full Transcript
Hi Everyone, welcome to the You’re Daily Cup of Joe Podcast, where my goal is to give you quick lessons on how to grow yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually so you can have better careers, better relationships, and better personal finances.
I’m also the author of the book “More You Know, More You Grow: How to Get Better Every Day”. In this book, I wrote down over 30 tips to help you grow in those four cornerstones.
In today’s episode, we’re going to talk about the need to be curious. I just read Brian Glazer’s book on curiosity and it was a great book. Brian Glazer is a movie producer is responsible for just hits like 24, a beautiful mind, apollo 13, and Empire. He would try to talk to someone new every single day and just learn from folks. He said that you can’t really understand something until you engaged with it. The book reminded me a lot about myself.
I love change and I know it can bring opportunities to become better. I just seek it out. When I’m in a new city, I love to walk around and just see what is going on. What are the different stores, who are the different people, and what amazing landmarks are around? I just like to explore and see what’s around. I also like to try different events to see what is going on. When I was in DC, I would hear of an event that was happening in New York City and I would just go. This would give me an opportunity to network with other folks and see what NYC had to offer. I got to meet some cool folks and I am surprised that I was able to just live that life. I grew up in Oregon and I never thought I would be in NYC growing up. But experiences like this make me realize what my potential is in life. At the events, I would meet people and see what they did in life. This gave me the confidence to believe that I could do the same. These were just regular people and I found out what they did and I just followed their path. If I was never curious, I would have just stayed in my small town from Oregon and not join the Marines, move to DC, or travel to Colombia by myself. I’m just trying to see what is out there and what I can experience.
When I do this, it gives me a lot of new ideas that I can implement in my life. This is a big reason why I like to listen to podcasts and hear stories. I want to use the best lessons from someone else and implement them in my life to be better. This requires me to be open to new ideas and might even tell me that I need to improve my life. I don’t think we know everything, and we can learn a lot from other people. A lot of my big ideas I use in my coaching come from other people. I was talking to a client the other day and they mentioned they were working on a project and this simple step wasn’t working properly. This then reminded me of a podcast episode I heard on the Tim Ferriss show where he interviewed the founder of Instagram Kevin Systrom. And Kevin gave an example of how a simple approach, is most of the time the best solution. In the early days, of Instagram, they had to figure out how to fit the data on more servers. They spent four months trying to be fancy with it by adopting a new technology bu the solution they came up with was if a client ID was odd it would go on server 1 and if the client ID was even, it would go on server 2. This was a two-hour solution. I love hearing things like this because it makes me realize that sometimes I want to make the problem harder than it has to be and no one is really going to see the back end work, they just care about the front end.
So back to my client, he was trying to implement this new software that had this bug in the software that prevented people from knowing who set up the meeting. The sales reps get paid based on the number of prospects they set, so they want to get paid and will use whatever system is working to do so even it means not adopting a new technology yet. This software is supposed to help speed line client acquisition process and instead of waiting for the bug to be fixed, I just recommended that they add a title in the meeting notes or headline that identified who set up the meeting while the bug gets fixed. You can still use the software and have the sales team get better familiar with the software while it is getting fixed without having to worry about getting paid.
I would not have come up with this solution if I wasn’t curious about business and coaching. To be creative and innovative, you have to be curious. When you sit down with someone, just start asking questions. Questions are very valuable tools that we need to use in our day. If you don’t know something, don’t pretend you know what is going on, ask a question to figure it out. We don’t know everything and can benefit from other people’s knowledge. If I have a question, I just google it and go down that rabbit hole and now I know a little bit more. When you’re curious you’re just trying to figure out the world and how to make the world work in your favor. The day we stop being curious is the day we give up our superpower to stay in this world. The world is constantly changing around us. What looks like a ripple now can turn into a huge wave. So we can be curious and learn how to surf or we can get crushed by the wave. The choice is ours but the safer one is to be curious and keep learning.
To summarize today’s episode, be curious about life. Go read a book about a different part of the world. Go watch a YouTube video on how to become better in your job. Go for a walk in a different part of your town and see how other people live. Go talk to a stranger and hear their story. You will be surprised by what you learned and will have a very valuable education that can be used to solve problems in the future.
Thanks for listening to today’s episode.
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*Music outro
