Learning to Learn

Why You Need to Leverage Your Curiosity

Julia Sun

• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781636762074
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

As children, we naturally question everything. But as we grow up, we often lose this innate sense of curiosity. In Learning to Learn: Why You Need to Leverage Your Curiosity, Julia Sun uses her own experiences along with those of her interviewees to explore different aspects of learning and convey the importance of being curious in our everyday lives.

This book highlights a number of inspiring individuals who have used their own sense of curiosity and wonder to their advantage:

• Amanda Lang, business journalist for BNN Bloomberg, talks about the importance of instilling psychological safety in children so as to not inhibit them from asking questions.
• Shari Hughson, Director of the MMIE Program at the Smith School of Business, shares her openness to new experiences by recounting the time she lived off the grid for seven years.
• Charlotte Kirby, founder of The Village Hive in Markham, Ontario, Canada, who works hard to foster a community of learning and growth for those in her local community.

This book is a tool to help influence your approach to lifelong learning. Use it to ask more questions, fuel your curiosity, and discover the power in learning.

Part One

The Philosophy of Learning

Chapter One

The Pursuit of Learning

“Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious.”

(Stephen Hawking)

“An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.”

(Benjamin Franklin)

Connecting the Dots

“Stay hungry, stay foolish” is a quote from Steve Jobs that almost everybody knows. But there’s another quote from his 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University that has never quite left me. It goes:

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So, you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”15

In fact, since first hearing it in the 2005 Stanford commencement speech video that my professor had chosen for one of our lectures in my second year at Queen’s University, it has become so deeply rooted in my life in all new things I take on—new people I talk to, new opportunities I jump at, new places I go—I have this quote at the back of my mind. It sits there, guiding me through everything.

It is a constant reminder to be curious so I can form as many dots in life as I can. After all, once the dots are there, the possibilities can be endless when looking forward. In hindsight, you will see how they all lined up. They always say hindsight is 20/20, after all.

For example, one dot that you form earlier on in your life may be where you decide to go to postsecondary school. This dot leads to the possibility of forming other dots in your life—the people you surround yourself with, the teachers you meet, the knowledge you obtain through your courses, and the jobs you become exposed to. All these dots will connect in one way or another—the person you meet in one of your classes may introduce you to someone later on in your career that helps you receive a significant promotion, or the firm you choose to take on a job at may introduce you to someone new who eventually becomes your partner, and this partner might eventually end up becoming the forty-fourth President of the United States (this might just be applicable to Michelle Obama’s story right here). You are never sure how the dots will connect when you are in the moment, but looking back, you will see how each served as a stepping-stone. And you’ll only be able to see that looking back. But without any dots, there may be no possibilities, which is why it is important to form as many dots as possible in life.

This is another reason why I’ve started to believe in the fact that everything happens for a reason. I’ve started to subscribe to the notion that if you take one job over another, it was for a reason and will have an impact on your life later, when the dots line up. I believe if one friendship or relationship ends, it was for a reason. If the timing isn’t quite right just now, it’s for a reason.

In the moment—whether it’s bad or good—it can be easy to have doubt over all this, “everything happens for a reason” mindset. After all, in the moment, you’re swarmed with emotions, and you can never quite think long-term right up-front. We’re narrow-minded creatures—we’re focusing on the moment we are in right now, rather than a hypothetical situation or state that will take place in an indefinite period of time. We’re focusing on how we feel now and what the implications are for us now.

This is why I will never stop reinforcing the importance of curiosity, and the importance of forming the dots in life. Although you may not know what each dot will lead to (some may not even lead to anything), it is the realm of possibilities that makes it worth it.

Somebody once wrote about moving to a new city and wondering how you meet new people. They wrote, “And then I realized, you just say, ‘Hi.’ They may ignore you. Or you may marry them. And that possibility is worth that one word.”

The same is true with the dots in life—the possibility of what one seed could blossom into is worth everything. It could be a new job. It could be a life partner or a friend you hold onto for life. It could be the world’s biggest opportunity. Or it could just lead to a nice conversation over a cup of coffee.

For Steve Jobs, after he had dropped out of college, he chose to drop in on a calligraphy course that was offered at his college because he no longer had to take the normal classes.

“I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.”16

For Jobs, this truly did make all the difference, although it was in no way near obvious to him at first. In his Stanford 2005 commencement speech, he continues to say:

“None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course, it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backward ten years later.”17

This mindset—this opportunistic and very trusting mindset—has been a form of not only comfort, but also motivation in my own journey of curiosity and learning. Oftentimes, it is what pushes me to learn new things and ask any burning questions I have.

The possibility of a question asked and a question answered is worth putting up your hand.

I see each idea I learn—big or small—as a new dot that is forming. I see it potentially being the equivalent of the random, out of the blue calligraphy class that Jobs dropped in on. Again, I often won’t be able to see the immediate use of it in the short-term, but who knows? Ten years from now, that book I had randomly picked up at the bookstore to read might come back as a pivotal interview question that lands me the job and launches me on a new career trajectory. Ten years from now, the topic I had wanted to learn for the sheer sake of learning it may come back in the form of an idea for a greater project at work. Ten years from now, I may, too, look back at whatever the new thing I learned was, or the new opportunity I so eagerly jumped at, and cite that very moment as having made all of the difference, as having been the launchpad to everything, despite not knowing it at the time.

This is why it is crucial to keep pursuing knowledge. You never want to stop forming, and later connecting, those dots.

The Path is Long

Growing up, especially over the past couple of years as I’ve headed off to university, my parents used to always tell me, “Life is a marathon, not a 100m sprint.” Learning should be treated with the same mentality.

In school, especially, we are taught to learn it all for a final test or a final project. This is how we prepare ourselves for the sprint—we cram ...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Introduction
• Prologue
• A Note on the Post-COVID World
• The Philosophy of Learning
• Learning in Action
• Epilogue
• Resources
• Acknowledgements
• Appendix