Curiosity and Resistance

Steven Pressfield, who wrote The Legend of Bagger Vance, also wrote a book about how artists, particularly writers, sabotage themselves by giving in to what he terms: resistance. The book is titled The War of Art. Resistance being defined as:

“There is a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don’t, and the secret is this: It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What is hard is sitting down to write. What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance.”

Anything that keeps a writer from putting butt down on seat and writing seriously is termed resistance, which is a broad definition by design. The book identifies the source of the problem, it is us. We, by giving in to our reaction to the myriad of reasons and excuses for not doing what we were born to do, create our own resistance. Resistance is NOT the reason for our procrastination, the reason is our emotional reaction to the resistance.

I turned Pressfield’s  resistance idea into an explanation for my lifelong resistance to pursuing my Curiosity.

The first resistance that I confronted set the tone for my lifetime of resistance. It germinated into a lifelong excuse for deferring the urge to ask question elicited by my curious nature.

The first resistance came from the social stigma of being a precocious only child. I was always curious and as an only child, I was afforded opportunities to ask questions and express opinions in front of adults because those were the people that I interacted most with as I didn't have any siblings or have ready access to peers my age. I asked childhood types of questions: Why is this happening? What if this happened? How do you do this? Fully exercising my curiosity. I drove the adults around me crazy with questions because I was unaware of society’s feelings about the expectations of children’s behavior. Most answered my questions as best as they could.

I was with a group of kids going on a weekend outing when I was young. One of the adults said, in a teasing way: “Why are you asking so many questions”. I doubt anyone else took notice, but it made me self-conscious of being identified because of my curiosity, I remember that was the  point where I learned that maybe I shouldn't ask so many questions which would show my curiosity in front of adults; that was the turning point in how I forced myself to behave.

Even as I was chastened, it didn't quell my curiosity, rather than fight the curiosity, my natural reaction turned my questionings inwards; I asked questions of myself, as I learned to do research on my own. In many ways the great inward turn made me more self-reliant about answering my curiosities. I am an introvert, perhaps due to being an only child, but that self-administered early  rebuke as a reaction to an innocent comment accelerated my proclivity to turning my curiosity inward and remaining silent.

My inward turn continued and became a habit even as I progressed through junior high, high school, and college. I did not ask questions of others, in class or out,  because the social stigma lingered on the surface, even as I  continued to be curious. Curiosity is far too powerful an emotion, so my search to quench that curiosity was sidetracked as I spent my time digging rather than asking. One unintended consequence of my inward turn was that the deliberate mind turn evolved into a fiercely independent autodidactic habit. Even though I am grateful for the inward turn, as autodidacticism helps me remember and retain knowledge, the process was anything but easy, efficient, or effective. One key byproduct was that I was often unsure of the answers. I did not know whether my sources were reliable. I was always fearful of being wrong or expecting to be contradicted. Which, mixed with being risk averse became a greater drag on my curiosity; the fear of being wrong ironically led to incuriosity: if I don’t know something then I can’t be held responsible for being wrong, i.e. being ignorant is less embarrassing than being wrong.

This modus operandi followed me throughout most of my working life, even as I was going through university and for my PhD. I entered the most challenging endeavor of my young life with two negatives: an unwillingness to open myself up to ask questions, combined with the fear of being wrong.

My advisor called me out once, he had recognized that I was someone who would rather find answers on my own. He told me: you don't have to answer everything by yourself, you need to take advantage of the people who are around you, people who know more than you, people who are fluent in  different knowledge. Of course, that had the opposite effect, I was unwilling and unable to change my deeply ingrained habits. Indeed, I reacted in the worst possible way, I assiduously held my ground on the first two resistances and added a third: I faced the world as the mythological stereotype of the rugged individual. I blame it on all the John Wayne movies I watched.

Maturity wasn’t a strong suit at that time.

The dire combination diminished my curiosity as I was too busy treading water, but it couldn’t snuff out my curiosity, although it shrank considerably, as my curiosity was limited to what I can learn my myself, which ignores the vast area of unknown that can be described as things that I don’t know I don’t know.

The most enjoyable aspect of the gradual school experience is the extemporaneous bull sessions with fellow gradual students, taking place anywhere, lasting deep into the night, fueled by caffein or alcohol, it is one of the great luxuries of being around curious and likeminded people. Yet  I misused those opportunities because of my inability to fully engage in the intellectual stimulations afforded because of my self-imposed limits on my curiosity.

More insidiously, being in gradual school concatenated another resistance atop all the others: the imposter syndrome. The imposter syndrome is an oft reported mental hurdle amongst the general population, it seems to be especially prevalent amongst those who are enrolled in post-graduate degree programs. In my case, the imposter syndrome intricately wove itself  into my already ingrained other resistances as it frolicked with the rugged individual myth. The resulting resistance was a finely tuned fear of being found out that I have been faking it all along, that if I couldn’t speak with authority on any topic, I would be discovered as a fraud. It never occurred to me that I was not supposed to be a perfectly formed product of the academic factory, well versed in every and all things in my topic, or any topic. I was afraid of being found out, even in the informal confines of a bull session with brilliant people who are doing what I wanted to do: seeking, extrapolating, forming hypotheses, and venturing into the wonderment of creating ideas. Yet I let the accumulated resistance dominate my now flickering curiosity.

I completely missed the point of gradual school; the point is the process of satisfying curiosity rather than just having the answers.

Self-knowledge and self-awareness could have done me a lot of good.

Being the autodidact was not a complete failure, I learned to be efficient and effective in conducting research which satisfied my curiosity. My curiosity made me adept at researching, although in hindsight, I ponder the tradeoff between the self-sufficient autodidact versus having  a broader perspective because of his unfettered access to the hivemind due to the lack of resistance.

My PhD was going slowly because of resistance: I could not identify open areas to make  my own niche in the space of my research area; a critical and necessary milestone in any researcher’s process. I believe it was something that curiosity could resolve if  unencumbered by resistance. If I had asked, collaborated, been honest about my blind spots, took advantage of the collective wisdom, abandoned my rugged individualism, opened my mind to the deeper granularities and broader perspectives much earlier, and had clearer vision of the broader scope, I would have identified my thesis topic sooner. The main point is that if I had been brave in freely asking questions of others, I would have realized that not only did I not  have all the answers, I also didn't have all the questions, a tragic fate for one who is supposed to be curious.

Somehow, by the grace of my advisor and other mentors, I finished. To this day I cannot read my thesis all the way through, for I know it was less than perfect; yet at the same time  I am at peace with it. This is a common theme amongst gradual students: we all think that a thesis is supposed be the pinnacle of our intellectual capacity. What I now realize is that it should be the pinnacle of my intellectual capacity at that point in time. I realized that fact many years after the fact: I am just a little bit slow.

Resistance continued, if not exacerbated, after I entered industry. This time the resistance comes from the expectations that a newly minted “expert” elicits from those who are already working. The attitude in the working world takes two connected but contradictory forms. On the one hand an “experts” should know everything; on the other hand, the “expert” is only good at theory, they know nothing about the real world. It was a double-edged sword that reinforced my perfectionist habits while at the same time hampered my curiosity.

I worked harder to be the expert that I was expected to be while trying to demonstrate my prowess at being practical. The resistance here is unrealistic expectations, something that was obvious to everyone, except I was blind to it because I just assumed what was expected. I tried to meet those expectations by becoming everything to everyone, an impossibility. But in so doing, I siloed off from those who could have rekindled the  curiosities, those who knew more about what I did not know.  I subconsciously could not admit that there are  gaps in my knowledge. This untenable mindset combined with all the other resistances made my natural curiosity nearly disappear: I stopped looking to answer my curiosity, I just looked for answers.

A position in industry is an ideal position to pursue curiosity, yet I became Sisyphus, rolling that rock up the hill, never realizing that I could never stop and kept my focus on what was expected rather than asking the questions which stems from being curious.

Being curious became a burden rather than a joy.

What changed between then and now?  How did I overcome my resistance to my curiosity?

The first step came from taking Richard Feynman’s book title as my mantra: What Do You Care What Other People Think? As soon as I stopped caring, except for those who I respect, the stress melted away and my curiosity returned. A large part of not caring anymore was unburdening myself of my coupling to the resistances. If I did not care about the resistances, my reactions to the resistance would no longer have a hold on my curiosity. I became emancipated from the worry of answering to the resistances.

As I became an academic while also coaching, my focus went away from being centered on what my “managers” thought of me, my focus was on how I thought of my students and players. The focus went away from myself and away from my façade, something I have no control over, to shining on how I can best reach the students and players, something I have control over.

I don’t want to make it sound like I am being oh-so-noble and altruistic. On the contrary, turning the focus on the needs of others brings me more joy than keeping the focus on the swrod of Damocles which was in the form of the expectations of others.

There has always been a pedagogical trait in me. I coached because those needs were not met in my work: designing better commodity motors did nothing to quench my need to teach. Teaching drives my curiosity. How do I make these humans better students and players? How can I get through to them? How can I get them to acquire and make permanent this knowledge that I want to relay to them? How can I overcome their resistance, resistance which was born of their own reactions to how they were taught to learn? What is it that inherently powers their ability to learn and make permanent what we are taught?

Coaching was a big part of the revelation. Coaching youngsters who are guileless and possessors of a proverbial clean slate is an ennobling life experience. Teaching at a collegiate level gave me that same ennobling life experience but in different ways.  

I have been coaching for nearly thirty years and have become addicted. What I did not realize, beyond satisfying my need to teach, is that this addiction has make me more curious: about the nature of the sport, about how I can coach better, both individually and collectively, and how I can coach the intangible and the nuanced.  Carrying that curiosity to the university classroom was a natural result. My curiosity was challenged because I cared about the Quality of my teaching skills, just as I cared about the Quality of my coaching skills.

I would not say that I am completely free of resistance to curiosity. I feel, however, that I am greatly liberated from my self-imposed mental prison that is my reaction to resistance. The turning point was when I stopped caring about how others judged me as peers and supervisors, and started to care about how I can develop those who I am teaching with what I know and how well I can transmit that knowledge. The resistance is still there, it will peek out from under its hiding place to taunt me, but I know what it looks like now and I am better prepared to deal with it. As Monty Python  says in The Life of Brian: I got better.