A Curious Mind (10 page)

Curiosity is great, but if what we learn evaporates, if it goes no further than our own experience, then it doesn't really help us.

Curiosity itself is essential to survival.

But the power of human development comes from being able to share what we learn, and to accumulate it.

And that's what stories are: shared knowledge.

Curiosity motivates us to explore and discover. Storytelling allows us to share the knowledge and excitement of what we've figured out. And that storytelling in turn inspires curiosity in the people to whom we're talking.

If you learn about the nearby spring, you may immediately be curious about trying to find it yourself. If you hear about this new food, the potato, you may be curious if you can cook it, and what it will taste like.

Even modern stories that are emotionally satisfying often leave you curious. How many people watch Ron Howard's
Apollo 13
—which has a deeply satisfying ending—then want to learn more about that mission, or the Apollo program and spaceflight in general?

There is, of course, a profession that connects curiosity and
storytelling: journalism. That's what being a reporter is. But, in fact, we're all storytellers. We're all journalists and novelists of our own lives and relationships. Twitter, Instagram, and blogging are modern ways of saying “Here's what's happening in my life.” What is the old-fashioned family dinner table but a kind of nightly news roundup of your family?

Much of the power of stories comes from their emotional heft. That's where the humor and the joy are, the excitement and the unforgettableness. We learn how to behave, in part, from the stories of how other people behave—whether those stories are told by sixth-grade girls over lunch, or by software engineers whose product didn't succeed with a new customer, or by Jane Austen in her novel
Sense and Sensibility
. Stories are how we learn about the world, but also how we learn about other people, about what's going on in their heads, and how it differs from what's going on in our heads.

From the moment we're born, from the moment we wake up in the morning, we're saturated in stories. Even when we're asleep, our brains are telling us stories.

One of the great unresolved questions of life on Earth is: why are humans able to make such great intellectual and social progress, compared to other animals?

Maybe it's the opposable thumb.

Maybe it's the size and structure of our brains.

Maybe it's language.

Maybe it's our ability to seize and use fire.

But maybe what makes humans unique is our ability to tell
stories—and our reflex to constantly connect curiosity and storytelling in an M. C. Escher–like spiral. Our stories and our curiosity mirror each other. They are what make us successful, and also human.

•  •  •

WHEN I WAS GROWING
up, my reading ability was severely impaired.

I couldn't read at all in my early years of elementary school. I'd look at the words on the page, but they made no sense. I couldn't sound them out, I couldn't connect the symbols printed there with the language I knew and used every day.

Back in the 1950s, when I was young, there were only two reasons you couldn't read in the third grade. You were stupid, or you were stubborn. But I was just baffled, and frustrated, and always worried about school.

People didn't start talking about dyslexia until ten years after I was in third grade and they didn't start really helping typical kids with it until ten years after that. Today, I might have been classified as dyslexic.

As it was, I got Fs in elementary school, with the occasional D. My savior was my grandmother—my mom's mother Sonia, a classic 4-foot-10 Jewish grandmother. She was always telling me I was something special.

My mother was upset—her son was failing third grade! She went off and found me a reading tutor, who slowly taught me to lasso the letters and the words on the page. My
grandmother, on the other hand, was totally imperturbable. It was a real counterpoint.

She just kept telling me, “You're curious. Your curiosity is good. Think big!” My grandmother could see beyond the report card; it felt like she could see inside my head. She knew I was as hungry to learn as every other kid. I just had a hard time satisfying that hunger.

My grandmother really helped make me something of a dreamer. She said to me, “Don't let the system define you. You're already defined—you're curious!”

What a thing to say to a boy in elementary school—“Don't let the system define you!” But thank goodness she did. My grandmother taught me a lot, but one of the most important things she imparted was that all you really need is one champion.

When you can't read, and then when you've learned to read with real effort, a couple of things happen. First, in school, you hide out. If you can't do the reading, you can't answer the teacher's questions in class. So I was always ducking, not raising my hand, trying to be invisible. I was trying to avoid being humiliated.

When reading is hard work, you're cut off from the ease with which people learn by reading. And you're cut off from stories. For most people, reading is simply an unthinking tool—sometimes it's hard, when the material is hard, but often it's a source of joy or fun or pleasure. It's always a source of great stories.

But reading itself was so hard for me, I didn't curl up with a
book just for fun, just to be carried off to a different world the way so many kids are—and adults, too, of course. And I couldn't decide the way a sixth grader might that I was interested in something—the solar system, whales, Abe Lincoln—and go check out a stack of books on that topic from the library.

I had to be resourceful to learn what I wanted to learn, and also patient and determined.

My reading ability gradually improved throughout high school. If what I had was dyslexia, I seemed to grow out of it as I grew up. As an adult, I do read—I read scripts and newspapers, books and magazines, memos and email. But every page is an effort. The work never fades. Reading for me, reading for someone who is dyslexic, I think, is a little bit like what math is for many people: you have to work so hard at getting the problem into your brain that you can lose track of the point of the problem itself. Even today, in my sixties, the physical effort of reading drains some of the pleasure I might take from whatever it is I'm reading.

What I think is amazing is that, despite my struggle with reading, two vital things survived: the joy I find in learning, and my passion for stories. I was the kid who wanted nothing more than to avoid questions in the classroom, and now I relish the chance to be an eager student, to ask questions of people who are themselves discovering the answers.

I was the kid who didn't have the pleasure of losing himself in all those great growing-up classics—
James and the Giant Peach
,
Charlotte's Web
,
Dune
,
A Wrinkle in Time
,
The Catcher in the Rye
—but now I spend my life helping create exactly those kinds of completely absorbing stories, just on screen.

I love good stories, I just like them best the way they were originally discovered—told out loud. That's why the curiosity conversations have been so important to me, and also so much fun. I've described some of the dramatic ones, but most of the conversations have taken place in my office. Some of them have been like reading a story from the front page of the
Wall Street Journal
, perfectly crystallizing something in a way I'll never forget.

I've always been interested in manners and etiquette: What's the right way to behave, what's the right way to treat people? Why does it matter who opens the door and where the silverware sits on the table?

I invited Letitia Baldrige in to talk—the legendary expert on protocol of every kind who first became famous as social secretary for Jacqueline Kennedy, helping turn the Kennedy White House into a center of culture and the arts. Baldrige had left Tiffany & Co. to go to work at the White House, and she went on to write a newspaper column and many books on modern manners. She was tall—much taller than I am—and already silver-haired when she came to talk. She entered my office with elegant authority.

Letitia Baldrige gave me an understanding of the difference between “manners” and “etiquette”—something I had never quite grasped before.

Manners are really the basis for how we treat other people—manners are born out of compassion, empathy, the “golden rule.” Manners are, quite simply, making people feel welcome, comfortable, and respected.

Etiquette is the set of techniques you use to have great manners. Etiquette is the by-product. The way you invite someone to an event makes a difference. The way you greet people, the way you introduce them to people already present, the way you pull a chair out for someone.

Manners are the way you want to behave, and the way you want to make people feel. Etiquette is the granularization of that desire to treat people with grace and warmth.

I love that distinction. For me, it illuminates both manners and etiquette, making them more understandable and more practical. I use a little bit of what Letitia Baldrige taught me every day. You open the car door for your partner not because she can't open the door herself, but because you love her. You arrange the silverware on the table a certain way because that gives your guests comfort and predictability so they can be more relaxed at dinner.

And as Letitia told me, the feeling you're trying to convey—the hospitality, the warmth—is much more important than following any particular rule. You can follow the rules, but if you do it with a disdainful attitude, you're being rude, despite having “perfect” etiquette.

Not every conversation was so practically useful. One of my favorites was with someone who, at first glance, would seem to be the exact opposite of etiquette expert Letitia Baldrige:
Sheldon Glashow, the Harvard physicist who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1979 when he was forty-six years old, for research he did when he was twenty-eight.

We flew Glashow out to Los Angeles from Cambridge. He came to the office one morning, and he seemed as delighted at the novelty of meeting someone with influence in the movie business as I was to meet someone of his stature from the world of science.

When he came to visit, in 2004, he was seventy-two, one of the wise men of modern particle physics. Glashow's pioneering work in physics involved figuring out that what physicists thought were the four basic forces of nature might actually be three forces—he helped “unify” the weak force and the electromagnetic force. (The other two are the strong force and gravity.)

I enjoy trying to wrap my brain around particle physics. I like it the same way some people like to understand the complexities of geology or currency trading or poker. It's an arcane world all its own, with a distinct language and cast of characters—particle physics can literally seem like a different universe. And yet, it's the universe we live in. We're all made up of quarks and hadrons and electroweak forces.

Walking into my office, Glashow couldn't have been more enthusiastic or open. I'm a layman, but he was happy to talk me through the science of where particle physics is today. He has the demeanor of your favorite, patient professor. If you don't quite understand something, he'll try explaining it in a different way.

He's a teacher as well as a scientist. The morning Glashow
won the Nobel Prize, he had to cancel his 10 a.m. class—which was on particle physics—for Harvard undergraduates.

Glashow was curious about the movie business. He clearly likes movies. He'd helped Matt Damon and Ben Affleck get the math right for
Good Will Hunting
(he's thanked in the credits).

Glashow was the opposite of Edward Teller. He welcomed the chance to talk—he did give up two days to make time to visit—and he was interested in just about everything. We typically put the conversations on the day's schedule for an hour or two. Shelly Glashow and I talked for four hours, and it just flew by. The main feeling I had when I walked Dr. Glashow out of the office was, I'd like to talk to this man again.

A newspaper or magazine story, in the hands of a talented reporter, could have captured much of what I got from Letitia Baldrige and Sheldon Glashow. But I would have been working so hard at the reading, I think I would have missed the fun.

I understand every time that my curiosity conversations are a remarkable privilege—most people don't have a life that allows them to call people and invite them in to talk. But I get something special out of this kind of curiosity that isn't unique to me, or to this particular setting: meeting people in person is totally different from seeing them on TV, or reading about them. That's not just true for me. The vividness of someone's personality and energy really only comes alive when you shake hands and look them in the eye. When you hear them tell a story. That has a real emotional power for me, and a real staying
power. It's learning without being taught, it's learning through storytelling.

That kind of direct, in-person curiosity allows you to be surprised. Both Baldrige and Glashow were surprising—much different than I might have imagined in advance.

Baldrige was focused on manners, not etiquette. For all her experience at the highest levels of what you might call precision protocol—from Tiffany to state dinners at the White House—she really just wanted people to treat each other well. She was the legendary arbiter of the rules, but for her, manners weren't about the rules, they were about grace and hospitality.

Glashow works in an area of science that is so arcane, it requires as many years of school
after
high school graduation as before, just to get to the point where you can start making fresh progress. And yet he was the opposite of inaccessible and insular. It was refreshing to meet a brilliant theoretical physicist who wasn't at all the cliché of the distracted scientist. He was completely engaged in the wider world.