Be More Foxhog

Wrapping up Ian Leslie's "Curious."

The final third of Ian Leslie’s lovely book, Curious, was perhaps the most relevant to the GoodRiches project. In this section, Leslie offers his “Seven Ways to Stay Curious.” Each has something important to say about cultivating our inner lives and connecting with others over shared interests—the heart of the GoodRiches project. Using Leslie’s framework, I invite you to consider how we might stay curious together.

• Stay foolish. The main point of Leslie’s first suggestion regards the importance of a curious culture. He offers several vignettes to illustrate this point- from Steve Jobs and Pixar to 17th century China. Curious cultures, Leslie suggests, are often led by people who have a high “need for cognition.”¹ While such leaders are certainly driven and intense, being ensconced in a curious culture seems to push them into overdrive. Says Leslie, “There is no formula for creating a curious culture,” (139) but he does offer some clues. The first involves sheer numbers. We need others- we need the opportunity for conversation- to truly engage our curiosity. A curious culture’s emphasis is on exploration rather than exploitation. That is, its members are continually seeking questions that have yet to be answered- or perhaps even asked. This is a very important reminder to me. Thus far, the GoodRiches project has centered on my thoughts. I know that’s insufficient. And that’s why the next step will be to engage others’ curiosity to lead new and different intellectual adventures. (There are schemes afoot, I promise.) So while there may be no exact formula for building a curious culture, we’re going to give it our best shot!

• Build a database. This suggestion reinforces all Leslie has had to say earlier in the book about the role of content knowledge in fostering curiosity. Remember, you have to have something to learn about, and the way you do so is by continually adding to your stock of knowledge and then combining that knowledge in new and novel ways to satisfy some of your curiosity. Further, to the extent that you build your database of knowledge is the surest route to producing ideas that will someday become part of someone else’s database.” (148) The relationship between content and curiosity, you may recall, is why I took some issue with Ryan Holiday’s rule about reading for wisdom, not facts. Creativity isn’t magic, according to Leslie. It’s built on a bedrock of deep knowledge and habits of mind:

Highly curious people, who have carefully cultivated their long-term memories, live in a kind of augmented reality; everything they see is overlaid with additional layers of meaning and possibility, unavailable to ordinary observers. (145)

• Forage Like a Foxhog. This section hit me hard, in part because it opens with a museum curator who describes curators as being one of two types- conservers or hunter-gatherers. The curator in question is decidedly the latter, “interested in gathering and synthesizing different materials from disparate fields.” (149) Didn’t I see myself in this description? And more importantly, I saw my vision for the retail GoodRiches. Our goal is to one day create curated collections of books-not an endless and unrelated array. And this is where we will take advantage of the varying “databases” and curiosity paths of our guest curators. If that sounds cryptic, I suppose I mean it to be. Besides, we must get to the foxhog.

Of course this image was generated with AI. Where else am I going to get a picture of a foxhog???

The foxhog is of course an allusion to the famous distinction between the fox and the hedgehog, commonly associated with Isaiah Berlin; Leslie uses this to discuss the relationship between depth and breadth of knowledge. While Berlin proposed all thinkers could be categorized as either a fox (the wily fellow whose breadth of knowledge enables him to evade capture) or a hedgehog (a creature with very deep knowledge of just one topic or strategy and hunkers down and lets his spikes do the work). Foxes, that is, know many things, while hedgehogs know one big thing. Leslie argues that this dichotomy is insufficient:

…it’s crucial to know one or two big things and to know them in more depth and detail than most of your contemporaries. But to really ignite that knowledge, you need the ability to think about it from a variety of eclectic perspectives to be able to collaborate fruitfully with people who have different specializations. (151-2)

In other words, big ideas are often a result of big databases from different domains coming into contact with one another and combining elements from each to form new knowledge. Sounds like great conversation to me.

• Ask the Big Why. Negotiation is the focus of this piece of advice. Leslie again offers fascinating examples of successful negotiations, such as that between Northern Ireland and the UK government- to highlight the importance of empathic curiosity. To negotiate well, Leslie argues, you must be able to put yourself in the shoes of the person on the other side of the table. Says Leslie, “Only negotiators curious enough about the other side’s fundamental beliefs and feelings will discover them.” (160) Largely this can be done by asking “why” instead of “what.” Tense negotiations tend not to be about specifics, but about what’s sacred. When one side or the other is asked to trade-off their sacred, negotiations often break down. While a fascinating suggestion, I confess I failed to see the immediate relevance of this advice to my project. Perhaps that’s naïve. Any space devoted to ideas and conversation will eventually encounter disagreement. If GoodRiches is to become a place for real dialogue, not just polite agreement, then learning how to ask “why” rather than “what” may matter more than I’d like to admit.

• Be a Thinkerer. Another lovely made-up word! As my partner says, someone’s gotta make up new words!² Leslie invokes my favorite founder- Benjamin Franklin- to introduce this concept, specifically, one of Franklin’s unsuccessful experiments to determine whether oil could soothe choppy seas. (It can’t.) The real point of the story is that Franklin was never satisfied thinking only of big ideas; he also spent a lot of his brain space on the practical. A failed experiment was no obstacle to Franklin; he delighted in shifting between the practical and the philosophical. He was a thinkerer, employing a,

…style of cognitive investigation that mixes the concrete and the abstract, toggling between the details and the big picture, zooming out to see the wood and back in again to examine the bark on the tree. (166)

Thinkerers are the sort of people we want to engage in conversation with. And they are certainly the sort of people we will look for to curate our reading collections. We’re looking for people who, like Franklin, would love “to sit around a table with friends and new acquaintances, drinking coffee, telling stories, and making plans for a better world.” We assume Franklin enjoyed a robust text-based conversation as well.

• Question your teaspoons. This recommendation is really about “the transformative power of attention.” Leslie recounts his experience at London’s Boring Conference. (Yes, it’s a thing, and it sells out.) Speakers at the conference give talks on topics such as the intricacies of supermarket checkout machines, or the proper way to make perfectly browned toast. All would qualify as deep explorations of “the mundane, the ordinary, and the overlooked.” (172) It’s mostly an admonition to slow down, think of the “now,” and appreciate the extraordinary of the ordinary things right in front of us. Leslie worries that we have collectively made ourselves too “goal-oriented,” or future focused, disallowing us to adequately appreciate the present. We fear that focusing on the immediate and less interesting comes at the expense of our future selves. The kicker is that when we lose our focus on the less interesting present, we miss out on learning a lot of “tricks.” In short, when we focus on our immediate experience, rather than on some future outcome, we both have a more enjoyable experience, and we learn more from it. We need to allow our epistemic curiosity time to bloom, to get into the sort of “flow” state that we want to return to again and again.

Curiosity is likely to lead to better work, but only if it’s allowed to breathe…If diversive curiosity is the flash and splash of novel stimuli, epistemic curiosity is a path you want to keep traveling down, even when the road is dumpy. (176-7)

• Turn puzzles into mysteries. Puzzles can be solved. Mysteries can sustain our curiosity indefinitely. Puzzles can be attacked like a goal; you gather the information you need to solve it, then you’re done. You move on. A mystery, on the other hand, lives just beyond your currently available scaffold of knowledge. Like diversive curiosity can lead to epistemic, puzzles can lead to mysteries. The former are not to be avoided, it’s just best not to dwell there.

Puzzles are stepping-stones to mysteries. The more mysteries we pursue, the more knowledge we gather, the greater our intellectual and cultural range. (183)

I hope I can encounter more mysteries with you, friends. My attention is all yours.

1. Need for cognition (NFC) is a concept Leslie introduced in his introduction as a scientific measure of curiosity. For example, people with a high NFC prefer complex to simple problems, enjoy coming up with new solutions to problems, and prefers difficult intellectual tasks to simpler ones, even when the latter are less important. (xvi-vxiii)

2. Leslie does not claim the word “thinkerer,” though he points out its etymology in unknown. You can read his account on page 166.