I’ve been thinking, do blind people feel love at first sight? Why is the word “abbreviation”, so long? Why is the meaning of life hard, when you have a dictionary.
Well, my little niece once asked me, “Uncle Eizu, are oranges named orange because the colour is orange, or is the colour orange, orange because it’s same colour as the fruit orange?”
Someone asked me, “why is the third hand of a clock called a seconds”.
I think these are brilliant questions.
Be curious. Ask questions.
In the word of Henry Ford, “Anyone who stops learning is old. Whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young”.
“The important thing is not to stop questioning.” – Albert Einstein
Question can be start of a great quest. Be curious.
Curiosity killed the cat. But that’s a very honourable way to die.
Ask questions. A brand built on curiosity to help your curiosity, (Google) is today, the richest in the world. It hit the trillion dollar mark dollars this year. With its net income between the first and second quarter of the year between most African countries GDP combined. Kids grow from asking question without thinking through it, even if it’s silly and that’s how they learn.
I volunteered at a teenage boot camp sometimes ago, and while teaching business and financial intelligence, one of the kids asked me, “how can a man who invests money be called a “broker”..lol.. I love kids. When I grow up, I’ll like to be like them.
Having lost our childish but awesome gift to ask silly questions, we need to nurture the curiosity of their young minds to find solutions to our world. We need to structure out curiosity.
Be curious. Dig for knowledge and you will be shocked with the other discoveries you will make.
Curiosity took the first men to space, and the reward became satellites and today’s internet. Out of sheer curiosity, men once dug the ground to find what was underneath, and guess what they found today’s clean water!
But out of satisfaction, they stopped digging. It took millenniums later for a new set of curious men to carry on that curiosity, and guess what they found after water..Crude oil!… now what’s next, gas, Uranium, a new planet was found last month, it’s the closest and best thing to earth, it is most likely going to be the next home for the next generation.
Life is deep, there are things the forces of the universe does not want us to know. So when you become too curious, it distracts you, by giving you something else, with vague and material success. So curiosity at less, is our trick to succeed. Outsmart the universe.
My dear, Keep digging!
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. If you must drink from its fountain, drink a lot or drink not at all, for a little intoxicates the mind, but the much makes us deep and sober, wisdom.
Knowledge is the new gold. But it’s important to know when, where and what to explore and what to exploit, knowing when to explore mainly and the others times to exploit. It’s about finding that delicate balance like YingYangs do.
Exploitation is that leveraging phase of what you already know or have. Exploration, on the other hand, is those times you need to just stop already because you need to apply something else, you need to learn something new.
The challenge is that a lot of people don’t know when to explore a new idea, concept, trend or opportunity, when to keep exploring then suddenly stop; to stop digging for gold to start exploiting it because you already have acres of it. And as you exploit, you keep at it till the point to not get too comfortable with exploitation. At that point you move on to exploring. If we were to draw it in a quadratic graph, that point of sudden turn just before redundancy sets in, and marginal growth becomes zero, innovation will be born through exploitation.
Life is all about exploration and exploitation, same as business. Stay on a delicate balance between both.
If you knew better, you’ll do better. Before you make up your mind, open it.
Eizu Uwaoma
Uwaoma is a start-up, corporate restructuring and strategy consultant, and wrote via
