Issue #27: Question the fear, and do it anyway – how to make curiosity your superpower, in 5 steps

An interview with author Constantine Andriopoulos on using purposeful curiosity to reclaim your attention, check your ego & conquer your inner critic. Plus, what are Impossible Questions?

Dr Constantine ‘Costas’ Andriopoulos, author of Purposeful Curiosity: How asking the right questions will change your life.

Four-year-olds ask between 70 to 200 questions a day. For grown adults, it’s 20 ‘on a good day’. That’s according to Dr. Constantine ‘Costas’ Andriopoulos, who cites the research in his book, Purposeful Curiosity: How asking the right questions will change your life.

Curiosity, according to Costas, is a quality we’re born with, which diminishes in adulthood – the result of a brick-in-the-wall education system which grinds those inquisitive young minds in the mill of convention, although a co-credit must surely go to our highly-receptive internet culture, an all-you-can-eat world buffet of over-information which, oddly, leaves us both overstimulated and dissatisfied.

‘We lose interest in any journey that takes more than a few minutes and a few clicks on our smartphones… We have become addicted to breadth over depth, worshipping quick and straightforward answers.’

The antidote is what Costas calls purposeful curiosity, or ‘channeling [your] curiosity to a particular purpose’ for instance ‘discovering new opportunities or reaching a significant goal.’ It’s the antithesis to falling down a Wikipedia rabbit hole, or worse still the Instagram/TikTok infinite scroll – this is elite level curious-ing, with the end result of ‘improving your life and business… helping you meet your goals and thrive’ (says the book blurb).

There’s a David & Goliath-esque satisfaction in this notion: that the child-like quality of asking questions – which exists in direct opposition to say, maximising productivity, or the ego-preserving ‘faking it ‘til we make it’ – could be a secret superpower. In our conversation, recorded for your listening pleasure, Costas talks me through how curiosity can be employed as a secret weapon against fear, neutralising that screaming inner critic that too often gets in the way of us pursuing a certain dream. What if we treated that start-up idea, or side business, or hobby, as a more benevolent-sounding ‘curiosity project’?