Over the past few weeks, a number of people have independently asked me, “What do you hope to accomplish with your social experiments?” And “What are you hoping to solve through your social experiments?”
Usually when people ask, I say things like, “Helping the world feel a little smaller, closer, and a whole lot more meaningful.” Or “Helping strangers become friends in minutes.” While it’s all true, I came to that conclusion after I started. Yet, the real reason I started was simply out of curiosity. I didn’t have an end goal in mind. I didn’t have a hypothesis I was trying to prove. Frankly, I just had a yearning knowing I’d find answers, but not knowing what kind of answers I would find.
For the longest time, I felt pressured to give a reason. Particularly, one that was results-oriented. In a world, where outcomes speak for themselves, I felt that a genesis starting from pure open-ended curiosity wasn’t enough. The reasons I gave were less for others, but more for myself. This self-inflicted feeling of inadequacy. Infinitesimally small, but still lurking around.
Walter Isaacson‘s recent interview with Tim Ferriss led me to introspect once again. Known for his incredibly intricate studies on the lives of Steve Jobs, Leonardo Da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, just to name a few, and most recently, Jennifer Doudna, he said:
“Be curious about everything. All walks of life. Arts, and sciences, technology, and the humanities. That’s what Steve Jobs did. He had one foot in the arts, another foot in technology, and he did not make a distinction between those two. That’s what Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man is about. It’s a work of art, and it’s a work of science, and he didn’t make a distinction between those two. And for Jennifer Doudna, she doesn’t make a great distinction between the life sciences and the humanities. And by being curious about all things, she’s about to see the patterns in nature.”
It’s funny that it took a message from someone else for it to resonate, no matter how many times I’ve told myself the same message. While I can’t even begin to compare my selfish curiosity to the greats of Doudna, Jobs or Da Vinci, but like them, I start from a state of open inquiry. I, a humble traveler, merely enjoy the meandering adventure my curiosity leads me on. As my French high school teacher used to say to us all the time, “Bon voyage!”
Photo by Joseph Rosales on Unsplash
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