Why you need to develop curiosity if you want to achieve brilliant results

Curiosity is a natural quality

People are inquisitive by nature. However, as we grow older, society and educational institutions often force us to choose a different path. Life and work take so much time from us that it becomes almost impossible to study the world around us and satisfy our natural curiosity.

Let's take a life story Einstein. He never received letters of recommendation from his professors at the university, so from 1902 to 1909 he worked as an ordinary clerk in the patent office. Nevertheless, he managed to satisfy his intellectual curiosity, even when he had to work six days a week. Einstein found an opportunity to develop his own scientific ideas, wrote four groundbreaking papers and forever changed our understanding of what light, matter, time and space are.

Almost everyone is capable of critical, creative and innovative thinking. Given the right environment and time, we are able to refine existing ideas or

invent new. However, those of us who hone our natural human drive to understand the complexities of life and the world around us are more likely to discover or create something unique.

There is no universal standard, law or rule that allows you to become a genius. Genius is a developmental process that has little to do with IQ level. Our abilities are not carved in genetic stone. They are made up of the expectations of our parents and those close to us, as well as the ideas that have influenced us since childhood.

Successful people master principles, practices, and learning methods that improve over time—and become geniuses. And any of us can achieve excellence in our field with a sufficient level of purposefulness and curiosity.

Genius begins with curiosity

It takes years, sometimes decades, to perfect your skills. Such hard work is impossible without curiosity, without an unstoppable desire to dig deeper and find new ways to hone the craft.

According to research, people who take less than 10 years to reach a high level of skill are more likely to become geniuses. Mozart was incredibly passionate about music. It took him almost 20 years to write his first masterpiece. Leonardo da Vinci he was madly interested in everything in the world and was a real erudite. Thomas Edison was obsessed with light bulbs. Charles Darwin devoted his entire life to studying the origin of living organisms. Einstein doubted almost everything about time, mass, light and space. The people we think of as geniuses find the missing pieces of the big picture that everyone else ignores. They connect ideas and discover the invisible connection between things.

The brain of each person carries potential. Many dwell on what the education system offers. They don't push themselves out of comfort zone and do not learn what else they are capable of. They calm down. Or they are "eaten up" by life. Or they cannot go beyond what society expects of them. They learn to get good grades and stop moving forward when they don't need to. They don't follow their curiosity.

We each have our own unique mindset. People of art think differently than people of science. But that doesn't make them any less outstanding. Geniuses differ in their set of skills. Picasso was a genius, but he was not a scientist. Beethoven threw school at age 11 to help the family, and never learned the multiplication table.

At the same time, anyone can become the same as Albert Einstein, Virginia Woolf, Charles Darwin or Marie Curie. This requires the right environment, purposefulness and constant interest in what deeply excites. Everyone is capable of achieving their own greatness if they really want to and can devote a reasonable amount of time, sometimes decades, to what they truly care about.

A genius is anyone who has the curiosity to search for more complete answers to familiar questions, to make discoveries, establish non-standard connections between objects and phenomena and come up with new ways of doing something do. It could be you.