Curiosity Is a Superpower — If You Have the Courage to Use It | Big Think

It began when I was a kid and my grandmother, Grandma Sonya, probably about this high, said to me that curiosity would be my greatest attribute and it would be a superpower in my life, and all I had to do was just have the courage to use it.

I remember looking at one of my report cards, and it was basically all F's, and she was saying, "You're going to be special. You're going all the way." And she's telling me how great I'm going to be. But I'm looking at this report card in her presence, and there was just no empirical evidence whatsoever to me that that would ever transpire.

And then out of college, I thought how can I apply this in a bigger way? I had this one outstanding professor in my entire four years at USC, and his name was Dr. Milton Walpin, who was a graduate professor of abnormal psychology at USC.

And I'm now two weeks out of college, and I thought I want to get together with Dr. Milton Walpin because I was just one of 300 kids in this class and, of course, had never had a chance to really introduce myself. So I pursued him, unable to get this meeting, so I thought I'm just going to show up at school again and wait for him to leave his class.

And he leaves his class, and I say, "Dr. Walpin, I would really like to just have ten minutes, a coffee with you. I don't really have any big asks beyond that other than ten minutes."

He said, "But Brian, haven't you already graduated?" And I said, "Well, I have graduated, but I'd just love to have a coffee with you." Anyway, he agreed.

And I turned that ten minutes; I expanded it into about an hour and a half conversation, which had greater value for sure than the year I spent in that classroom. For over 30 years, actually about 35 years, I've been doing this every two weeks, meeting a new person in any subject other than entertainment.

So science, medicine, politics, religion, every art form. And I've just been doing it, and it really has expanded my universe physically and mentally. It's created opportunities that I never even thought existed in my life or would exist.

And so that's kind of the sense of the breadth of what I've been doing.