A Curious Mind (11 page)

My point is that you don't actually need to be sitting down, by appointment, with the social secretary of the White House or the Nobel Prize–winning physicist to have that kind of experience. When someone new joins your company, when you're standing on the sidelines at your son's soccer game alongside the other parents, when you're on an airplane seated next to a stranger, or attending a big industry conference, all these people around you have tales to tell. It's worth giving yourself the chance to be surprised.

•  •  •

I MET CONDOLEEZZA RICE
at a dinner party in Hollywood. I'd always been intrigued by her. She's a classical pianist. She was a professor of political science at Stanford University, and then the university's provost—the chief academic officer. And of course she was President George W. Bush's national security advisor for four years and secretary of state for four years. She has remarkable presence—given her level of responsibility, she always appears composed, even calm. She also conveys a sense of being in the know. To me, she almost seemed to have superpowers.

The dinner where I met her was in 2009, not long after she had stepped down as secretary of state. She was sitting just across from me.

Condi still had security shadowing her, but she was very easy to talk to. One thing you see up close that you never saw when she was speaking on TV is the sparkle in her eyes. As the dinner was breaking up, I said to her, “Can I call you? Maybe you'll have lunch with me?”

She smiled and said, “Sure.”

Not long after, we had lunch at E Baldi, on Cañon Drive, a well-known Hollywood restaurant. She arrived in a car with her security detail, and we sat in the only booth in the small restaurant.

Condi was relaxed and gracious, but I think I was more curious about her than she was about me.

I told her about a movie we were getting ready to make. It was called
Cartel
, about a man bent on revenge against the Mexican drug cartels after they brutally murder his wife. The movie was set in Mexico, the seat of so much cartel violence, and we were going to film it in Mexico, just a couple of months away. We originally had Sean Penn set to star; when he couldn't do it, we got Josh Brolin for the lead. I was worried about filming a movie sharply critical of the cartels, in the country where they were beheading judges.

Condi listened. I told her that studio security had assessed the areas where we wanted to film in Mexico and told us it was fine. She looked at me skeptically. “I don't think it's safe to do that,” she said.

Cartel
was at a crossroads. We had spent money. The studio thought it was safe. But what I read in the newspapers every day suggested something different. The issue of safety nagged at me. I thought, Would I personally travel to the set of a cartel movie in Mexico? Answering honestly, I thought I wouldn't. And if I wouldn't go, how could I be comfortable sending anyone else? I really needed another informed point of view.

Condi followed up after our lunch. She had done some checking and she said, “No. It's not safe to do what you're planning.”

That was the final straw, for me and the studio. We shut the movie down. We never took it to Mexico, it never got made. Looking back, I worry someone might have gotten killed. I've learned to pay attention to those instincts, to those occasional
nagging doubts, and I've learned to make sure we're curious enough to find really expert opinion when there's a big risk. I think making a movie about drug cartels, in the nation where they were operating, could have been a disaster.

I wouldn't be very good at my job without curiosity. It's infused into every step of the process now. But think about the number of people who should also say that, in professions we don't typically think of as requiring inquisitiveness—at least as the primary skill—the way we expect it in a doctor or a detective.

A good financial planner needs to know the markets and the way to arrange money for retirement, but he also should be curious.

A good real estate agent needs to know the market, the houses available, the houses that might become available, but should also be curious about her clients.

A city planner needs to be curious, and an advertising executive, a housekeeper, a fitness trainer, a car mechanic, a good hairstylist all need to be curious as well.

And in every case, the curiosity is all about the story. What's the story of your life, and how are you hoping that money or a new house or a new hairstyle will help you shape that story, and help you tell it?

This kind of curiosity seems so routine that we shouldn't even need to talk about it. I think it used to be. But in a world where so many of our basic interactions are structured and scripted—we're talking to “customer service” on an 800
number, we're trying to be heard over the speaker in the drive-through lane, we're checking into a hotel where the hospitality is “trained”—curiosity has been strangled.

It's considered a wild card.

But that's exactly wrong. If you think about a good hairstylist, the job itself requires skill at understanding hair, at understanding the shapes of people's heads, the quality of their hair; and it has a spritz of creativity and individualism. But it's also got an important human element. As a customer, you want a stylist who is interested in you, who asks what your hair means to you, and who pays attention to how you want to look and feel when you stand up from the chair. You also want a stylist who talks to you, who asks the kinds of questions that keep both of you engaged and entertained while your hair is being washed and cut and dried. (Or a stylist who is perceptive enough to realize you don't want to talk at all.)

The great thing is that this perfectly routine sort of curiosity works for both the stylist and the customer. The customer gets the haircut she's hoping for, she gets hair that helps her present her best self, that helps her tell her story, and she also gets a fun, relaxing experience. The stylist avoids falling into a rut. She learns something about her customer, and also about how the world works—every customer in the styling chair is a chance for a miniature curiosity conversation. She's giving the best haircuts she can give while creating happy and loyal customers and having an entertaining work life.

Going to the hair salon is not like sitting down with an
architect to plan the redesign of office space at your company, or to plan the addition to your house. But curiosity and storytelling add just a little bit of fun and distinctiveness—and occasionally learning and insight—to what can otherwise become routine.

If manners are the lubricant that lets us all get along, curiosity is the shot of Tabasco that adds some spice, wakes us up, creates connection, and puts meaning into almost any encounter.

“Curiosity will conquer fear even more than bravery will.”

—James Stephen
s
¹

I WAS SITTING IN THE
bar at the Ritz-Carlton in New York City, facing Central Park, with a man with the best muttonchop sideburns since President Martin Van Buren. I was having drinks with Isaac Asimov, the author who helped bring science and science fiction alive for a whole generation of Americans.

It was 1986, the movie
Splash
had come out and broken through, and I was using that success to make the curiosity conversations as ambitious as possible.

Isaac Asimov was a legend, of course. At the time we met, he had written more than 300 books. By the time he died, in 1992, that number had grown to 477. Asimov's writing is so clear and accessible—rendering all kinds of complicated topics understandable—that it's easy to overlook how smart he was. Although no one ever called him “Dr. Asimov,” he had a PhD in chemistry from Columbia, and before he was able to support himself by writing, he was a professor of biochemistry at Boston University's medical school.

Most people know Asimov as a storyteller and a visionary, a man who was able to look at how science and human beings interacted and imagine the future, the author of
I, Robot
and
The Foundation Trilogy
. But Asimov actually wrote more nonfiction books than fiction. He wrote seven books about mathematics, he wrote sixty-eight books on astronomy, he wrote a biochemistry textbook, he wrote books titled
Photosynthesis
and
The Neutrino: Ghost Particle of the Atom
. He wrote literary guides to the Bible (two volumes), Shakespeare, and
Paradise Lost
. He had a boy's mischievous love of jokes and wrote eight books or collections of humor, including
Lecherous Limericks
,
More Lecherous Limericks
, and
Still More Lecherous Limericks
. In the last decade of his life, Asimov wrote fifteen or more books a year. He was writing books faster than most people can read them—including me.
²

Asimov was a polymath, an autodidact, and a genius. And he was an instinctive storyteller. Who wouldn't want to sit down with him for an hour?

Isaac Asimov met me at the Ritz-Carlton with his second wife, Janet Jeppson Asimov, a psychiatrist with degrees from Stanford and NYU. I found her more intimidating than I found him—Isaac was relaxed, his wife was more on guard. She was clearly the boss, or at least his protector.

Both Isaac and Janet ordered ginger ale.

We started to chat. Apparently, it wasn't going that well, although I didn't quite realize how poorly it was going. After only ten minutes—the Asimovs hadn't even finished their ginger ales—Janet Asimov abruptly interrupted.

“You clearly don't know my husband's work well enough to have this conversation,” she said, rising from the table. “This is a waste of his time. We're leaving. C'mon, Isaac.”

And that was it. They got up and left me sitting alone at the table, mouth half-open in astonishment.

I had arranged a meeting with one of the most interesting, inventive, and prolific storytellers of our time, and I had managed to bore him (or, at least, bore his watchful wife) so thoroughly in just ten minutes that they couldn't bear it and had to flee the black hole of my dullness.
³

I don't think I've ever felt so much like I had been slapped—without actually having been touched—in my life.

Here's the thing: Janet Asimov was right.

It took me a few months to get over the sting of them walking out. But she had caught me, and she had called me on it. I wasn't prepared well enough to talk to Isaac Asimov. He had agreed to take an hour to sit down with me—for him, that
was a sacrifice of a whole book chapter—but I hadn't respected him in turn. I hadn't taken the time to learn enough about him, or to read, say,
I, Robot
from start to finish.

Going into that meeting, I was scared of Isaac Asimov. I was worried about exactly what ended up happening: I was afraid of not knowing enough to have a good conversation with Asimov. But I hadn't been smart enough to harness that fear to curiosity.

I never made those mistakes again.

I've learned to rely on curiosity in two really important ways: first, I use curiosity to fight fear.

I have a whole bunch of relatively ordinary fears.

I have a fear of public speaking.

I don't really love big social settings where I might not have a good time, where I might end up kind of trapped, or where I might not be as entertaining as someone thinks I should be.

Now, take a minute to consider this list. Given my fears, I sure have picked the wrong profession. Half my life—half my work life—requires me to go somewhere, give a talk, mingle in large social settings with important people who I kind of know, but not really.

Throw in that I'm a little scared of powerful people, and a little intimidated by intellectuals—exactly the kind of people with whom I want to have curiosity conversations—and it can seem like I've created a life that's perfectly designed to make me anxious from the moment I open my eyes in the morning.

In addition to using curiosity to tackle my fears, I use
curiosity to instill confidence—in my ideas, in my decisions, in my vision, in myself. Hollywood, as I've mentioned, is the land of “no.” Instead of spelling out the word H-O-L-L-Y-W-O-O-D in the famous sign in the Hollywood Hills, they could have spelled out: N-O-N-O-N-O-N-O!

An aspiring filmmaker was in my office recently for a meeting, and he said to me, “Oh, you're cool. No one ever says ‘no' to you.”

That's silly. Everybody says “no” to me. Everybody
still
says “no” to me. It's just the opposite of what it looks like.

Sure, people
like
me. People say “yes” to meetings.

People say, “Please come to dinner.” Sometimes they say, “Please come on this cool trip with me”—and that's flattering.

But if I want to do something creative, if I want to do something edgy—a TV series about a medieval executioner, for instance, that I helped push forward in 2014, or a movie about the impact of James Brown on the music business in the United States, which came out in the summer of 2014, people say “no.” These days, they just smile and put their arm around my shoulder when they do.

You have to learn to beat the “no.”

Everybody in Hollywood has to beat the “no”—and if you write code in Silicon Valley, or if you design cars in Detroit, if you manage hedge funds in Lower Manhattan, you also have to learn to beat the “no.”

Some people here charm their way around the “no.”

Some people cajole their way around it, some people
reason their way around it, some people whine their way around it.

If I need support on a project, I don't want to cajole or charm or wheedle anyone into it. I want them to have the same enthusiasm and commitment I feel. I don't want to pull someone in against his or her judgment. I want them to see the idea, the movie, the characters with the kind of excitement that carries them through the tough parts of any project.