Stage 1: Self-Discovery | Your Curiosity Map

Photo by Celine Ylmz (Unsplash)

This is Stage 1, module 2 of the Life Design Method series, where I guide you through a 5-stage life design process: from self-discovery to life context, vision, strategy, and daily practice. It's designed for people who are tired of living a life that doesn't feel like theirs.

In this module, I cover how you can find a common thread amongst your many interests and curiosities.

I have a lot of interests. I usually say fourteen (although the last time I checked I counted 66), but the truth is that it changes depending on the week, and my bucket list only ever gets longer. For years, the advice I kept bumping into was some version of “pick one”. You know, the usual: find your thing, niche down, stop spreading yourself so thin. Very fair advice, I must say, because most of my interests were more than just interests - I’d read excessively, hyperfixate for a period of time, and truly believe that I should create fully fleshed-out projects for them. Liked photography? It’s not just pictures I’d want to take - now I want to become the best photographer, have a portfolio, and launch a business. Got into yoga? Now I want to become a yoga instructor, have my own space, and run spiritual yoga retreats. Discovered how fun it is to cast Jesmonite? Sure, let’s create various homeware accessories, rent a private studio, teach people how to do it, take photos of my creations, and set up Etsy and a website to start selling some! Well, I’m sure you get the point.

So I did try. And, of course, it didn’t last. I’d settle on something (that I would be sure was THE THING) and within a month or so I’d already be reading about something completely different, and feeling a bit guilty about it, as if I failed or something.

I’ve decided that I don’t want to pick one interest (I don’t think anyone has just one interest anyway), because I find so much joy in discovering and trying new things. But now I’ve learned how to find what my different interests have in common and how I can spread myself thin less. I think we can view our interests as data that’s telling us something important about ourselves.

If you read my previous essay about personality, you’ll remember that I scored very high on adventurousness (one of the facets of openness) when I did the Big Five personality test. I didn’t expect that to matter much, but it did. Seeing it written down as a test “conclusion” made it easier to stop treating my need for variety as a problem I should apologise for. It didn’t tell me what to do with all of it, though. My interests still looked like a pile of unrelated hobbies I kept picking up and putting down. It was only when I actually wrote them all down in one place that I started to see connections.

For example, I’ve always been very interested in website/graphic design, interior design, life design, and business systems. For years, I treated them as distinct, separate hobbies - one was about creativity and pretty images, another about designing cosy environments to be in, another one was about finding time to do everything I wanted to do in my life (that is, all my hobbies!), and the last one was about making companies work as they’re supposed to work. But when I put them next to each other, I realised they were all asking me the same thing: how do we design something intentionally and on purpose, so that it fits the person using it and the way they actually work, instead of just letting it happen randomly? It’s the same question whether it’s a website or a brand, a room, a week, or a company. When you lay everything out like that, a few things start to show up that you’d never spot looking at one interest on its own.

If you want to try this quickly, pick three or four interests you’ve always thought of as completely separate, put them side by side, and ask yourself: what was I really trying to find out with each one? You might be surprised how often the answer is the same.

Describe the tongue of the woodpecker

Leonardo da Vinci left behind more than 7,000 pages of notebooks, most of them written in his mirror script. Most people know them for the drawings, but what I love are the to-do lists.

One list from around 1490 has him reminding himself to ask someone how people get about on the ice in Flanders, and to ask a master of arithmetic how to square a triangle. These sit alongside notes about measuring Milan, borrowing books and examining someone’s crossbow. And then, on a page in one of his anatomy notebooks, there’s this note: “describe the tongue of the woodpecker.” He was just so curious about it!

Walter Isaacson used that line as the title for the coda at the end of his biography of Leonardo. It says a lot about how Leonardo worked - he took small, slightly odd questions he was curious about completely seriously, even when they had no obvious use for anyone else.

He’s usually described as the ultimate Renaissance man, who could do anything. Many people make him sound like a genius who was good at everything from birth. And maybe it’s true. But maybe he was just unbelievably curious about things? More so than everyone else around him at the time?

And his curiosity kept returning to the same few subjects: water, flight, the human body, and how things move. In one note, he tells himself to watch the surface of moving water, because the way it curls looks like hair. He studied birds for years, and that fed straight into his flying machines. His anatomy work changed how he painted people. So while the subjects looked scattered from the outside, he did actually keep asking very similar questions in many different ways.

I love this so much that I’ve started my own woodpecker list: small, oddly specific things I want to find out or try. Not just things like “learn about nature or animals”, but more like “do any animals think and feel in ways similar to us?”. Try writing just one this week, and then actually go and find out!

There’s more than one kind of curiosity

Most of us talk about curiosity as if it’s one trait that you either have or don’t. Psychologist Todd Kashdan and his colleagues found it’s more like five separate things that people have in different amounts:

• Joyous exploration: enjoying discovering new things and ideas

• Deprivation sensitivity: the itch of not knowing something, and needing to close the gap

• Stress tolerance: how comfortable you are with the uncertainty that comes with anything new

• Social curiosity: wanting to know what other people think and do

• Thrill seeking: being willing to take risks for new and intense experiences

This explains why two highly curious people can be so different. Someone high in deprivation sensitivity might read everything they can find on one topic until they finally feel they understand it. Whereas someone who is high in joyous exploration might try a different class every month and be perfectly happy never mastering any of them.

The same research found that people tend to fall into four broad groups. There are people who score high on almost everything, people who mostly love solving problems, people whose curiosity is mainly about other people, and a group who score low across the board, especially when it comes to coping with uncertainty. Have a guess which group you’re in - and then think about whether it explains the way you pick up (and put down) your interests.

I find this useful because it takes some of the guilt out of it. If your curiosity is mostly the exploring kind, trying lots of things and moving on might just be how you work, rather than a sign you lack commitment. If it’s more the itch-scratching kind, however, you’ll probably only feel satisfied once you’ve gone deep, and dipping in and out of lots of things will leave you frustrated. Or you might do a little bit of both, depending on the interest. I know I do.

Why some questions won’t leave you alone

Behavioural economist George Loewenstein described curiosity as a response to an information gap: the uncomfortable feeling of noticing that there’s something you don’t know. This is a very strong feeling, I must say. :))

It’s also the reason why we can’t stop reading a mystery book when we should be sleeping, and the reason cliffhangers still work even when we see them coming! I have complicated feelings about this, as after having some conversations with my friends, I realised that I might feel this more strongly than others. It can feel physically painful, as I just need to know what’s next, and as soon as possible!

Loewenstein’s idea also suggests that we have to know a little about something before the gap starts to bother us. If a topic is completely new to us, then there is, of course, nothing to notice. BUT, once we know a little bit, the holes become visible, and that’s when we want to fill them. One later study found that people were most curious about trivia questions where they had a rough guess but weren’t sure of the answer. Or you know, the words on the tip of your tongue? The ones you surely know but somehow can’t seem to remember? Yeah, that strange itchy feeling.

You can actually think about this when you’re feeling uninspired - sometimes the interest won’t come first, but once you start with something small, something might start tickling your curiosity.

Is all this curiosity actually good for you?

For the most part, yes. Kashdan and Michael Steger followed people’s daily curiosity and found that on days when people felt more curious, they also reported more meaning in life and more satisfaction with it. Curious people seem to engage with the world more, and that engagement feeds back into a sense that life is worth living. And, if I’m being honest, being allowed to be curious and having ways to address my curiosity has made my life so much more interesting and worthwhile for me, too. I’d rather have 10 different things I’m actively exploring than 1 or none at all. That simply sounds like a boring existence to me.

So if you’ve been told you’re all over the place, or that you can’t stick at anything, it might help to know that the trait behind it is linked to a more meaningful life (which is exactly what we want). But there is a downside, too, which I’ll come back to later.

Emilie Wapnick came up with the word multipotentialite for people with lots of interests and creative pursuits. Her 2015 TEDxBend talk is worth watching if you haven’t seen it (“Why some of us don’t have one true calling”). I’d also recommend her book, How to Be Everything. She argues that curious people tend to have three strengths: the first is idea synthesis, which is combining fields to make something new. A lot of good ideas come from where two areas overlap, and you’re more likely to be standing in that overlap. The second is rapid learning. If you’ve started from scratch many times, you get good at being a beginner and less scared of it. The third is adaptability, being able to shift into whatever role a situation asks of you.

David Epstein makes a related argument in his book Range. He gathers evidence that sampling widely before specialising often leads people to a better fit later on, and that breadth is an advantage in a world full of complicated and complex problems. The book opens with Tiger Woods and Roger Federer. Tiger was famously focused on golf from when he was a toddler, whereas Federer played a long list of sports as a kid, including skiing, wrestling, swimming, basketball, badminton and football, and only settled on tennis later. Epstein points out that we tell Tiger’s story far more often, even though sports research suggests Federer’s path is the more typical one! Anyway, the thing is that the many interests you’ve been apologising for might be helping you more than you think.

In the past, curious people kept commonplace books. These were notebooks of quotes, ideas and observations, sorted by theme so you could find them again and connect them later. John Locke, for example, had his own system for indexing one. It was first published in French and later in English as “A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books.” You filed each topic under its first letter and the first vowel that followed. I love that one of the most famous philosophers in history was into notebook organisation. Now curious people create their own digital Second Brains in Notion, Obsidian, or even Claude. And so do I! If you don’t have one yet, you don’t need anything fancy - even a single notebook or Notion page where you save things that catch your eye, sorted by theme, is a good start. Over time, you’ll start to see which themes keep coming back.

So what’s the downside then?

What I find really odd is that curiosity has been treated as something suspect for most of Western history. St. Augustine even listed it among the temptations and called it the “lust of the eyes”. What a strange thing to call it, but to him it was the pull towards new things simply because they were new. Indeed, very lustful.

In Goethe’s “Faust” (if you read it back at school), Faust has studied philosophy, law, medicine and theology, and still feels he knows nothing (and, to be honest, this is how I feel most of the time, too). So he decides to make a deal with the devil: if he ever finds a moment so good that he wants it to last forever, the devil can have his soul. The story is basically about a man who has learned an enormous amount and still can’t find anything that satisfies him.

Thankfully, people are much more forgiving about curiosity now. My guess is that it’s because we see more people writing about it online, which makes it more and more normalised. In fact - it’s actually cool to be curious now, isn’t it? I’m glad. However, the old warning does have a point, because curiosity can slide into consumption without us noticing. We sign up for yet another course, start another podcast, buy another hobby kit, read another book, and open another fifty tabs. Months later, we haven’t actually made or finished anything, or gone properly deep into any of it. And that’s why we feel that we have tapped into a lot of things but know nothing about anything. This is what we need to try to change, so that we get the benefits without the downsides.

How to tell the difference

It’s actually simple. Think about all the things you’ve been curious about over the years and ask these questions:

1. Did I make anything, even something rough?

2. Did I actually try it, or did I only read about it?

3. Does it connect to anything else I care about?

4. Would I miss it if I stopped?

Personally, when I go through them, I’d give different answers for different interests I’ve had over the years. For example, I’m very curious about adventure travel, but if someone asked me how many times I’ve done something very unusual, I’d say not many. I’ve mostly read about other people doing unusual things and daydreamed about doing them, too. Apparently it’s not my priority, as there are other interests and hobbies that I do keep coming back to and build fully fleshed-out projects for!

It doesn’t mean you need to do something with every interest you have. It’s perfectly normal to just read about some of your interests without doing anything with them. But sometimes, by asking yourself these questions, you’ll notice that you’re simply consuming things, not creating or living them. And when you notice that, I think you should listen and see what you can actually go and try, rather than just read about.

What’s next

Enough of the theory, time for the exercises!

You can get access to a growing Notion library of related exercises, prompts, and templates here👉 https://buy.stripe.com/dRm3cw0DF7lP2nlb6z9bO01

In this module, you’ll dig up every interest you’ve ever had (yes, even the embarrassing ones) and find the questions your life keeps asking behind them. You’ll draw your own Curiosity Map, work out your curiosity shape, and finally understand why some interests stuck and others burnt out.

There’s also an AI prompt to help you go deeper (I highly recommend it!), and you’ll finish with your own Curiosity Snapshot, which, together with future Self-Discovery modules, will help you to formalise your Core Identity.

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