“…here’s the really important question: does having all of human knowledge available in the palm of our hand make us more curious, or less curious? …You can’t search for the answer to a question that hasn’t been asked yet. And you can’t Google a new idea. The Internet can only tell us what we already know.”
– Brian Grazer, Hollywood producer, from his book (with Charles Fishman), A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life
Since I’ve often used “more better” as a technical term, I’ve decided to try to get more curiouser, too. ‘Cause I think that is what makes us smart.
Spoiler alert: It’s not a great book. It’s a good book, one that I am glad is in my Kindle database, and there are 20-25 excerpts I found “highlighter worthy.” This is the first of those, leading off this week’s DD series.
When my buddy LJ and I get together, I love it that we don’t have to argue about whether Jim Palmer or Tom Seaver won more Cy Young Awards (they each won three, primarily because Seaver got robbed of two more he shoulda won….but I digress). So, on the one hand, it is very cool to have human knowledge in the palm of my hand.
Except for when it makes me dumber. More dumber, even.
The stuff of Difference Making begins with the questions that haven’t been asked yet, and the idea that opens a door forward instead of the one that sends us back down a path we’ve already traveled. If all we’re going to rely on is what them Interwebs or The Google tells us –we won’t go wrong necessarily. But, we also won’t create constant progress. We might “get” the difference, but I wonder whether we’ll make one.
Give me curiouser. More curiouser. Every time.
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