Curiosity Can Dull Your Winning Recipe And Sidestep Danger

LONG AGO YOU decided that you could not succeed in an extroverted world, so you built a winning recipe to compensate.  Today the recipe allows you to hide behind a socially acceptable way to be – comforting, flippant, competitive, formal, or subdued. Or any of the thousands of other roles introverts adopt to be successful.  For example, my recipe is to be process-driven by building step by step procedures to cope with life.

Post #11 discussed how to be honest with yourself about your introversion. The goal was to avoid the long-term dangers posed by your recipe.  Here we address how being curious can help you to escape from dangerous surprises emanating from the external world.

You are probably quite curious about your inner world. You think deeply and often about whatever is going on in your head.  But extending that curiosity to the world around you is likely not a priority.  That can be dangerous, since it may not reveal something hiding in plain sight that could upset your plans.

That happened to me after I graduated from the Harvard Business School.

How I Discovered The Curiosity Solution

FOR MY MASTER’S thesis, I traveled with my first wife to São Luís, the capital of Maranhão, a poor state in Northeast Brazil. The purpose was to research an agribusiness opportunity sponsored by the United Fruit Company. 

I knew no one in that small city so to succeed, I uncharacteristically had to reach out to strangers.  In creating a project to develop a whole section of the state of Maranhão I engaged three people. A local businessman as a partner, the state governor as the sponsor of a land grant, and a locally-working Canadian priest to do community development.  Back in Boston I encouraged my thesis adviser to promote the idea to the CEO of United. 

I was so focused on the details of the project, and on bringing it to life, that I completely missed the possibility that something might upend it.  And sure enough it did.  At the last moment another company acquired United; the new owner was more interested in selling root beer in Brazil than in developing the local economy.  The project died.

My winning recipe had kept my vision away from the external environment to such an extreme degree that an unintended – and foreseeable – event emerged as a surprise.  I knew only to well that an integral part of any decision-making process needed to be a visceral, aggressive look at the business setting that a company was in.  Grad school had drilled that into my head.  But I instead, I paid attention to my recipe and its step by step details.

The solution would have been to be curious about the political situation at United.  Had I done so I would not have been so blindsided, and early on might have found another sponsor for the project.  As it was it was too late – I now had no job and urgently needed to find one.

Unpacking The Curiosity Solution

The sale of United Fruit to another company caught my thesis adviser off guard as well.  He was a consultant to the CEO but the negotiations were so secret that nobody brought him into the loop.

For him that was excusable.  But not for me, because I owned the whole project and could easily have done my own research on the company using public records in the school library.  The amount of cash United had on hand would have been a dead giveaway that they were a likely acquisition target. 

Had I suspected that, I could have mentioned it to my adviser. He might then have been more able to pick up on body language and other indirect signals in the firm’s executive suite that something might be up.  If so we could have created a backup plan.

How To Become Curious

Curiosity is a function of mood.  According to Larry Senn, author of The Mood Elevator (Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler, 2017), being curious requires you to think at your best.  And when you are depressed, angry, self-righteous, judgmental, defensive, worried, irritated or impatient, you do not have the freed-up mental resources that you need to be inquisitive. To overcome this:

1. Elevate your mood.  Check in with where you are emotionally.  If you have any of the negative emotions mentioned above, sit and focus for a few moments on something you are grateful for.  Gratitude is one of the most powerful positive emotions we can experience. It has the ability to counteract negative feelings quite effectively.

2. Become curious about the environment that surrounds something you are working on.  Your winning recipe probably has you assuming that as soon as you act in the way that it prescribes, things will work out.  But what if they don’t?  What are all the elements that have to go right for the approach to succeed?  You may find that you are in the middle of a string bet in which the failure of any one piece could doom the whole enterprise.

3. Harvest your curiosity and act.  Inventory the things that you learned when you expanded your vision.  What can you do to mitigate the pitfalls that you discovered?  Perhaps the project is doomed, as mine was.  But perhaps it is salvageable if you do certain things.  Or maybe there is nothing wrong and you can keep going as you are now.  Regardless of what you find, take the action needed to bring success.

4. Stay curious.  Curiosity is not one and done; it requires constant vigilance.  This is true particularly when you have a winning recipe that always insists that you be a certain way to solve problems.  Unless being curious is your recipe (if so it probably has its own issues, including one of going to extremes!), you will need to consciously move your mood upwards so you can continue to be curious about the world around you.

Potential danger lurks everywhere.  When you have a winning recipe that demands much of your attention and effort you are particularly vulnerable to surprise consequences.  The best defense against being attacked from an unexpected position is to stay curious.

I Invite You To Become Curious Today

• What did you discover the last time you became curious?  How did that discovery bring you success?  If you would like us to consider sharing your story anonymously with The Satisfied Introvert community please email it to me at thesatisfiedintrovert@gmail.com.
• How can I help you become more curious? Please go to the Contact page and enter your name, email, and questions. I cannot answer everyone, but will do my best – especially if the answer could benefit others.
• To be notified of new posts to The Satisfied Introvert blog, please go to the Subscribe section at the bottom of this post and enter your name and email. Under no circumstances will we share your information without your express permission.  A new post appears every two weeks.  Coming up next: “Being Present Can Inhibit Your Winning Recipe And Reduce Danger.” If a particular post does not apply to you, future ones most likely will!

Welcome to the revelations that come from 

becoming curious, and to your new skill

in detecting dangers that are 

hidden in plain sight

 

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