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Curiosity is a Success Factor that I Found in a Book

Updated: Feb 11, 2022


As humans we are wired to be curious, to know the unknown. Study any successful person and you'll discover that they had insatiable curiosity. It was curiosity that pushed the Wright Brothers to experiment with air flight, Henry Ford to improve mass production, and it was curiosity that drove Steve Jobs to lead the development of the many Apple products that we have today.


When I was 12 years old, I was curious to know how radios worked. Google wasn't in play back then so I went to the library and read every book I could find on how radios worked. After pouring through no fewer than a dozen books, I grabbed a screw driver and started taking apart the only radio we had at home. I disassembled the unit down to its basic circuit board components and studied each part learning to identify transistors, resistors, rheostats, diodes, and others. I learned early Ohm's Law and a mnemonic to help me identify the value of resistors by looking at its color band. With my curiosity satisfied, I tried re-assembling the unit. Unfortunately, I missed something during the re-assembly and the unit never worked again. It didn't matter because I was just happy that my curiosity was fed.


I kept reading and feeding my curiosity. At 16, I took a collection of electron tubes and constructed a 1000 kilowatt amplifier that I connected to my CB radio transmitter. I was curious to see what would happen when I powered the glowing tubes and spoke through my microphone. My mother received many complaints from residents within a twenty block residents that they heard my voice on anything in their house that had a speaker. Five years later, it was reading and curiosity that inspired me to research and draft my college senior thesis that outlined nonexistent computer controlled lawn mowers, auto piloted cars, and cashless shopping decades before the present experimenters.


My curiosity started with reading and is still nurtured today with reading. I have more than 100 books presently on my phone that I am currently reading, all for the express purpose of acquiring knowledge. Like me, you are wired with the same desire to know what you presently don't know. The best way to feed that desire is to pick up a book and start reading.

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