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Picture your to-do list, the whole tangle of things you could work on today. Somewhere in that tangle is one thread that keeps pulling your attention back, again and again, however many times you set it down.
That thread is worth more than it looks like.
Researchers Todd Kashdan and Michael Steger spent years studying what curiosity actually does for people over time, and found something wonderful. People who follow their curiosity day to day report more meaning in their lives, alongside more enjoyment in the moment. Curiosity, it turns out, is one of the more reliable paths to a life that feels worthwhile.
The essayist and Y Combinator founder Paul Graham built an entire theory of good work around this same idea. In his essay “How to Do Great Work,” he offers a simple test for finding what deserves your energy. He asks a simple question.
“What are you excessively curious about?”
The word “excessively” is doing real work there. He’s pointing past the tidy hobbies and toward the thing you’d happily talk about far longer than anyone wants to listen, the thread that pulls you back on its own, effortlessly.
We’ve written before about how small, curiosity-sized deposits compound into something bigger over time. Graham’s essay makes the same case from the work side of life. The thread you keep returning to, even the small, slightly embarrassing one, is quietly pointing toward where your best effort wants to go.
Here’s today’s invitation. Name the thing you’d keep thinking about even if it bored everyone else. Give it fifteen real minutes today, on purpose, and let curiosity lead instead of the to-do list.
That’s a good place to start early. Today.
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Sources and further reading. Kashdan, T.B., & Steger, M.F. (2007), “Curiosity and pathways to well-being and meaning in life: Traits, states, and everyday behaviors,” Motivation and Emotion. Full text via George Mason University. Paul Graham, “How to Do Great Work”, paulgraham.com.