Curiosity

According to Wikipedia, the word “curiosity” comes from Latin curiosus ("careful, diligent, curious"). It is “an emotion related to natural inquisitive behaviour such as exploration, investigation, and learning”. Because “this emotion represents a drive to know new things, curiosity is the fuel of science and all other disciplines of human study”. Perhaps, that explains, to some degree, my life-long interest in nature, an inexhaustible subject of study.

I've been very fortunate to live when I have and, even more so, now, in the Information Age. For the naturally curious person, the Internet is a fantastic, huge library. Search engines, like Google, allow me to find the answers to most of the questions I can frame as a series of 'key' words. I recognize, of course, that not everything a search engine turns up is worth reading or credible. But, after many years of using them, I can quickly weed through the trash to find the best and most accurate information that I want.

Invariably, what I find enables me to dig more deeply and read more widely about a subject. Some would argue that it would be better to read scholarly journal articles and books on a subject. Little do they know that you can even do that on the Internet, if you know where to look.

Someone once said (I think it was Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers) that you only become an expert at something after you've practised it at least 10,000 times.  I guess that makes me an expert at quickly finding things on the Web because I do it dozens of times every day.  Sometimes, hundreds of times in a day if I become obsessed with learning a new subject.  Is this skill worth the effort?  Yes, it is, if you're a curious person ...