Generating successful ideas is a weird business. Your job is, essentially, to venture into the unknown repeatedly to bring back the gold—be it a headline, a formulation, a structure, system, or design. 

But mind the metaphoric bears and sink holes. The odds you fail are typically higher than you’ll succeed; even with considerable resources. Witness Quibi. 

What helps improve your chances?

Time, or unlimited attempts—good luck getting more.

Partnership—after all, going it alone means there’s only the one brain.

Inherent talent—can’t hurt.

But curiosity is, I believe, the dominant factor in making it back, again and again, with admirable results. And unlike time, partnerships or talent—curiosity is a muscle you yourself can improve. 

Muscles function as an enabling source of power for maintenance, locomotion, and control. They help us build. They get us off the couch. They equip our passions. Back in 1975 the psychologist Rollo May wrote, “We cannot will to have insights. We cannot will creativity. But we can will to give ourselves to the encounter with intensity of dedication and commitment.” This is the curiosity muscle at work; an intense spirit of inquiry, a nosiness for as yet unseen connections. This is, in part, our inner Simon Sinek flexing, asking “Why?”

Muscles, too, are weird. They are elastic, rarely still, and often involuntary. For our purposes, we can generalize muscle biology down to filaments composed of myosin and actin proteins generating tension. (I have a B.A. in Jazz, so don't quote me if you’re aspiring towards a scientific Ph.D.)

I love the notion that curiosity is, in many ways, a generating of tension through expansion and contraction. As muscles go, this is voluntary action. We are willfully seeking and extending to the edges; testing limits of words, images, connections, theories. 

The gymnasium here is obvious and all around. Whatever we don’t fathom, or struggle to articulate offers the opportunity to strengthen our curiosity. This is May’s giving ourselves to the encounter. Hence, the challenge. This is real work. To willfully exert our minds in comprehending unknown realms takes effort. It might be ugly, or painful. It takes commitment to return to the wheel again and again. And the benefits are typically not clear. Reading to understand, researching to connect the dots, writing to test and iterate do not generate six pack abs. A svelte curiosity might not get you a first look at the local dating pool. But it can help close the deal. 

To serve you best, curiosity will insist you take it seriously; that it gets center stage when the time is right. Curiosity is never an autopilot, involuntary function. To grow stronger, curiosity must be exercised routinely. Think of curiosity as the opposite of what Pressfield labels “the Resistance.” In that same motif, recall that curiosity is a full time gig for children. In becoming adults, we literally learn how to curtail, constrain, thwart, disable, foil, impede and hamper our curiosity muscle. 

So much to un- and re-learn if we seek to leverage curiosity for its power, its advantage, its resilience. 

Lucky us.