‘Curiosity killed the cat’ is a well-known idiom which is actually only half correct. The full idiom is “curiosity killed the cat but satisfaction brought it back.” Some say the original phrase was coined by Ben Johnson back in 1598 and went like this “Care will kill the cat,” which implies that excessive worry will kill you and we can all agree on that. But I’ve been curious about curiosity for some time now.

Curiosity is defined as “a strong desire to know or learn things.”I was listening to a YouTube vide on putting by Brad Faxon, the world’s best putter, and I learned that what makes Faxon a great putter is his curiosity. The owner of the Scotty Cameron putting lab was interviewing Faxon and he remarked that there were only two golfers who would contact him almost weekly on ways to improve their strokes.

The two guys were Tiger Woods and Brad Faxon. Both Woods and Faxon have become extremely knowledgeable about golf and that is thanks to an endless curiosity about how to improve their putting stroke. So it occurs to me that curiosity is one of the essential characteristics of successful athletes.

Curiosity is such a simple trait, but it’s probably one that can’t be learned. You either have curiosity or you don’t. My guess is that curiosity must have something to do with one’s need to compensate for feeling stupid or generally inadequate.

Growing up, I was lucky enough to have an older brother who was a genius. This is a positive thing in many ways. As a kid I was exposed to great artists like Warhol and Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, great writers like Dostoevsky and Henry Miller and great music. My brother knew about Bob Dylan before the rest of the world, which meant that he dragged me along to those Dylan concerts when I was a kid. I got to see the famous Forest Hills concert where Dylan changed from acoustic to electric and I watched in amazement as fans stormed the stage in protest. Pretty cool.

But being the younger sib to a genius also meant that I perpetually felt dumb and uninformed. This was a negative for sure and thus I had no choice but to compensate for this problem by developing an insatiable thirst for knowledge.

And this turns out to have been a positive thing since my quest to compensate for my apparent stupidity urged me not only to gain a Ph.D. in psychology but better yet, to embark upon a quest to read the top 100 books ever written. I am on No. 60 and so far I have gotten through many of the big name classics like “The Odyssey”, “A Thousand and One Nights“ (the long version ), “The Divine Comedy”, “Faust”, “Don Quixote”, “The Search for the Holy Grail”, “In Search of Lost Times”(1,235 pages) “Les Miserables”, “Tale of Two Cities”, ”Far from the Madding Crowd” and “Look Homeward Angel.”

And by the way, there are no short cuts here. The film versions of these masterpieces are essentially failed efforts to capture magic in a bottle. To discover the knowledge contained in these classics, you have got to put aside the required 50 hours or so to read them.
So as the saying goes, “no pain , no gain.” Or as Einstein said, “I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.”

But it looks like in order to be “passionately curious,” you will have to have experienced some serious deprivation or pain early on. We all know how Tiger Woods was racially marginalized as a child and thanks to perseverance, persistence, endless curiosity in a quest to find the perfect swing, he rose to the heights of fame and fortune. Come to think of it, Ben Hogan , the guy who had an impoverished childhood and witnessed his father shooting himself in the head, went on to prove to the world that he was the best there was. Probably Brad Faxon has a similar back story, which accounts for his “passionate curiosity.”

It is comforting to think that no matter how painful our beginnings may have been, within that feeling of inadequacy are the curious seeds of growth, exploration and discovery. Apathy is the real killer — not curiosity.