I have no special talents, I am only passionately curious.
—Albert Einstein
There is a story about Sandra Day O’Connor in Evan Thomas’s great book First. “During one of Washington’s every-seventeen-years eruptions of dormant cicadas,” he writes, “O’Connor collected a batch of the large, dead insects and sent them in a shoebox to her grandchildren in Arizona.”
Her clerk was baffled. O’Connor explained: “One of the most important things to me is that my children and grandchildren are curious. Because, if you’re not curious, you’re not smart.”
We don’t have control over what kind of brain our kids are born with. We don’t even really control what kind of college they get into. Are they a math kid or an artist? Right-brained or left-brained? That’s not up to us. But what we can influence is whether they’re curious. We can encourage this instinct— asking them questions and rewarding them for asking their own. We can cultivate this instinct until it becomes a personality trait—finding all sorts of interesting things and showing them to our kids. And we can demonstrate it —pouring fuel on the sparks of curiosity they exhibit by engaging with the things we’re curious about too.
We can’t make them a specific kind of genius. But we can make them smart . . . by showing them how to be curious.