Dorothy Parker once said, “The cure for boredom is curiosity, there is no cure for curiosity.”

Staying curious is key to initiating learning. As we age, inquisitiveness tends to fade; our ability to learn does not.

Curiosity is a survival aid, a hard-wired natural motivation to find out about new things. Neuroscience has found that when we are curious our brain anticipates a reward in finding out the answer and gives us a dopamine shot when we do. We get a rush from learning something new.

Curiosity and learning are essential tools in managing life transitions, change, and new challenges where we may need new perspectives, new skills or to take different types of actions.

There is an exceptionally good chance that people have gone through these life stages or challenges before, that academics have studied them and that authors have written about them. You can benefit from what they learned and apply their ideas to your own situation.

Curiosity is often stimulated by uncertainty or novelty. We tend not to be curious about topics we have not been exposed to, so stimulating our curiosity usually means looking into new areas and trying new things.

What are you curious about?

Curiosity is step one of initiating the next step of your lifelong learning, a key topic in our portfolio life workshops, webinars and coaching.

By the way, if you’re curious about who Dorothy Parker was, look her up, she is the source of lots of great quotes.