The Untapped Instinct that Can Grow Your Business and Yourself

A couple of days ago, I read an article in Good about a father who documented every time his toddler used a new word correctly, along with the child's exact age and the frequency the word was used. Then he then graphed the child's vocabulary over time. It formed a nearly perfect exponential curve. (You can see the graphs here.)

Besides wondering how on earth the father had the time to do this while chasing after a child under two, my reaction was awe at the human ability to learn. That talent is especially remarkable in children, who not only pick up language remarkably fast but also ask endless questions to add to their escalating body of knowledge. They are always growing, in every way.

In professional life, we constantly find ourselves pursuing growth of some kind: growth in the ability and potential of a team; growth beyond the status quo; growth in a relationship with a customer; growth in revenue; or growth into new markets.

It's tempting to do more of what we've already done, faster, to try to accelerate growth. The problem is, that rarely puts us on a lasting upward trajectory. After all, a toddler's explosively expanding vocabulary doesn't come from repeating the same words.

Growth, by definition, is extending beyond the familiar places we have been. Significant growth involves abandoning the easiest of the easy - what we already know - and stretching toward the harder, rockier terrain of the uncertain. You can't make a great leap by replaying the lessons of the past. You have to re-imagine how things can be going forward.

That can get harder as we grow up. Our youthful inquisitive appetites for new information can diminish. Sometimes it's out of exhaustion or overconfidence. At other times, it's out of fear. It can feel better to stick to what we know. Or we may meet disapproval if we dare to challenge the way things have always been. We might lack the courage to explore if we know it could come with rejection. Over time, if we let it, our curiosity fades.

If we truly want growth, we have to revive the strength of curiosity we had at birth. It's the key that unlocks our own potential and that of every professional endeavor. Curiosity is our inner detective, hinting at where we should go and what we most need to learn. When we heed its call to explore, we open the door to a more expansive understanding of ourselves and what might be possible in the world beyond.

When we not personally growing as leaders, the answer is to question. It is to be curious about ourselves. We must keep asking, "...and why? ... and why?" of our own feelings and actions until we understand what is beneath that is authentically our own and in need of coming forth.

When our business is not growing as we wish, we must also be curious. Where is the world heading? And why? What do our customers want in life? And why? How are they acting? And why? Where are there places where things don't work as they should? And why? And how is that an opportunity? We should seek out people, ideas and industries with a diverse range of answers to these questions until we have intrepidly entered a whole new way of thinking.

The wonderful science writer Steven Johnson describes this kind of curiosity as the origin of great ideas, over time, as people not only consider what is possible now - but what is beyond that, in the "adjacent possible." As the Guardian described, "The history of cultural progress," Johnson writes, "is, almost without exception, a story of one door leading to another door, exploring the palace one room at a time." The article continues:

What all this means, in practical terms, is that the best way to encourage (or to have) new ideas isn't to fetishise the "spark of genius", to retreat to a mountain cabin in order to "be creative", or to blabber interminably about "blue-sky", "out-of-the-box" thinking. Rather, it's to expand the range of your possible next moves – the perimeter of your potential – by exposing yourself to as much serendipity, as much argument and conversation, as many rival and related ideas as possible; to borrow, to repurpose, to recombine.

In other words, we should try to be as curious as we once were.

The photo that accompanies this post was taken on Mars by NASA's Curiosity Rover. The Rover was named in a contest won by a 12 year old girl, Clara Ma. In her winning essay, she described curiosity as "what gets me out of bed in the morning and makes me wonder what surprises life will throw at me that day."

If we want growth, we need to look for the surprises of the unknown. Growth isn't what has been possible. It's what could be.