Hello world, it's Malcolm Gladwell, your guest host for the week.

Welcome to Radio Headspace and to Thursday.

If you don't know, I'm an author, a journalist, and a podcast host, so being curious is a big

part of my work.

Today I'm going to talk about why curiosity can be a great asset in life and how it helped

shape my career.

There's no learning without curiosity.

That's the main reason why curiosity is so important.

Learning is where you are adding to your existing store of knowledge.

And you can only add to your existing store of knowledge if you can see to yourself that

your existing store of knowledge is inadequate.

That requires an active humility, understanding that even if you consider yourself an expert,

your expertise is not complete.

I went into journalism when I was quite young, when I was just out of college.

I was a newspaper reporter and being a newspaper reporter is essentially curiosity training.

You never know what the news of the day is going to be.

And you're very often called to master some situation, some phenomenon, some happening

in a very short period of time.

You do that by having a kind of radical form of this humility.

You have to be willing to call someone up and say, I know nothing about what just happened.

Please tell me.

And then when you talk to that person, you call up someone else and you say, I just talk

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