"Why do I feel cold when I have a fever?" "Why does the sun rise in the east?" I knew the day would come when my little girl Sophie would learn to talk and inevitably (不可避免地) start asking those questions. The questions themselves weren't worrying me. I was actually looking forward to seeing where her curiosity would lie.
What was bothering (烦恼) me was whether or not I would know the answers. In the age of the smartphone, this may seem like a silly worry. The answers to almost everything would be just one Google away.
Still, I struggled with how I was going to prepare to become an all-knowing mother. Then one day, it struck me: I didn't need to have all the answers. What a great example I could set if I let my daughter know that I, too, was still learning. And I realized how much more I could learn if I took another look at things I thought I already knew the answer to with the curiosity of a child. My little girl's mind is a beginner's mind— curious, open to new ideas, eager to learn, and not based on knowledge that already exists. I decided that I would deal with her questions with a beginner's mind, too.
Once I decided to become more curious, I started noticing that curiosity was becoming more important in the workplace, too. It seems that leaders don't need to have all the answers, but they do need to be curious.
Curious about curiosity, I searched for answers and found Albert Einstein's famous words, "I have no special talent. I am only passionately (热情地) curious." We might quibble over the view that Einstein had no special talent, but there is one thing for certain—he wouldn't have solved the puzzles of the universe without his passionate curiosity. Then I came across another Einstein quote, "The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason or existence."
