WHEN YOU'RE BECOMING YOURSELF

7. 好奇的生活 — A Life of Wonder and Curiosity

"The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity." —Dorothy Parker

Dear Kids,

There's a Chinese phrase that's been rattling around my head for months — hào qí, 好奇. The literal characters mean good and strange. Together, the phrase means curiosity — but it carries something the English word doesn't quite catch: a kind of friendliness toward whatever you haven't yet understood. A posture toward the world, not just a state of mind.

I keep returning to it because, more and more, it feels like the single most important quality I want you to grow into. Not the most impressive. Not the most ambitious. The most curious.

A dinner I keep thinking about

I want to start with a dinner I had a few months ago in Chengdu, because more than almost any conversation I've had in the last few years, it's the one that sent me back to first principles on this question.

I was working with a group of Chinese students — some of the most brilliant young people I have ever encountered, anywhere. These were kids taking eleven classes a term, dissecting hedge-fund strategies before breakfast, casually explaining transformer architectures the way most of my American peers explain a sports highlight. We were at dinner — a long table, hot food, the kind of slow Chengdu meal that goes on for hours and ends with everyone sharing fruit and arguing about something none of you remember by morning.

And I noticed something across the night that wouldn't leave me.

The students who were sharpest weren't always the ones who knew the most. They were the ones who asked the most surprising questions — questions I hadn't thought to ask, questions that turned conversations sideways, questions about adjacent fields they had no reason to know about and yet somehow did. One of them, in the middle of a discussion about AI infrastructure, suddenly asked what I thought the difference was between being lonely and being alone. Another asked how the Greek concept of eudaimonia — yes, the same one I'd been writing to you about — mapped onto Confucian rén. Another asked whether I thought, in fifty years, art made by humans would be valued more or less than art made by machines, and why.

These weren't the questions of people optimizing for a test score. These were the questions of people who were genuinely curious about the world, and who hadn't yet been ground out of that curiosity by the various systems they had successfully navigated.

I drove home that night thinking about how rare it is, at any age, to meet people whose curiosity is still intact. Most of us start out with it — kids are basically nothing but curiosity in human form — and then, slowly, we trade it in. We trade it for certainty. For credentials. For the comfortable pretense that we have, by some specified age, figured most things out.

I don't want you to make that trade. The whole letter is, essentially, a plea against it.

George Saunders has a book about reading Russian short stories called A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. I read it slowly over a Schwarzman afternoon last fall, on the lawn behind my dorm, sun and a thermos of bad coffee, and it changed the way I think about what curiosity actually is. Saunders's argument — taught through Chekhov and Tolstoy and Gogol — is that close reading isn't a school exercise. It's an act of love. You slow down. You attend to one sentence at a time. You ask why this writer used this word and not the obvious one. And what you find, when you do that, is that the sentence is wider than you thought. There's a whole world inside it you were skimming past. That is the curiosity I'm asking you to keep. Not the kind that consumes more — more headlines, more podcasts, more credentials — but the kind that goes deeper into the thing already in front of you. The water in a glass. The face of someone you've known for ten years. The line of a poem you thought you understood. Saunders's title metaphor — the pond is wider than it looks, especially in the rain — stuck with me.

The asymmetric mathematics of small moments

Here is something I've come to believe about how lives actually work, and it took me a long time to see it clearly.

Most moments don't matter. The vast majority of your days are noise. They fill the calendar, they tire you out, they leave behind almost no permanent mark. That isn't depressing. It's just true. You couldn't function if every moment had high stakes.

But a few moments — a small, irregularly distributed handful — matter enormously. They are the moments where everything else gets decided. The trip you almost didn't take. The class you signed up for on a whim, where you happened to sit next to the person you'd eventually marry. The conversation at a wedding you almost skipped, where someone said something that nudged you toward an entirely different career. The flight you missed, which would otherwise have changed everything.

And the cruel thing — the thing nobody told me at twenty — is that you don't know, in the moment, which is which.

Meanwhile, the decisions you spent six months agonizing over often fade into irrelevance within a year. The job you stressed about turns out to be a stepping stone you barely remember the title of. The relationship that consumed your whole sophomore year leaves no permanent mark. The Big Important Decision turns out to have been small. And the throwaway evening — the one you almost canceled — turns out to be the one your life pivoted around.

So how do you live, knowing that?

You can't predict which moments will matter. You can't optimize. The question of which evening will turn out to be load-bearing is genuinely unanswerable in real time. What you can do — and what I'm trying to do, imperfectly, every day — is increase the density of moments that have a chance of mattering.

This is what people sometimes call luck surface area. It's the idea that luck isn't random. It's a function of how many surfaces you expose to the world. The literal physical surface: how many rooms you walk into, how many cities you live in, how many strangers you sit next to on planes. The conversational surface: how many honest questions you ask. The reputational surface: how many people know what you care about and what you'd say yes to.

Cities help with this. Conferences help. Long dinners help. Saying yes to the random invitation helps. Being the person at the table who actually talks to the people sitting next to them, instead of the person looking at their phone, helps. The math doesn't care about your brilliance. It cares about your bandwidth — how many independent chances you give the world to surprise you.

The internet, by the way, has quietly made it possible to live a life of zero collisions. You can order everything, work from anywhere, friend-zone the algorithm into showing you only the things you already like. That's the version of a life I'm asking you to resist. Walk into the room. Sit at the long table. Ask the strange question.

Take swings, but stay in the game

There's a second move that pairs with collisions, and the two together describe most of how I think about luck.

When a rare moment arrives — and most won't, but a few will — take the swing.

If you meet someone who feels genuinely special, talk to them. If a door opens to something rare, step through it. The cost of trying is almost always small. The cost of not trying, when you later realize what you walked past, lasts forever. Most of the time the swing won't matter. But the few that do will pay for all the others. This is the asymmetric mathematics of a life with high upside — you only need a small number of swings to land for the whole thing to have been worth it.

The pairing is important, though. The pairing is take swings, but stay in the game.

Life is iterative. It is a long, multi-decade game, and the only real way to lose it is to be forced out — to take a swing so large that, if it misses, you can't keep playing. So while you're swinging, also: protect the ability to keep swinging. Don't be reckless with your health. Don't be reckless with your reputation. Don't risk capital you can't afford to lose. Avoid the gambles whose downside is ruin. The asymmetric math only works as long as you stay at the table.

This is the thing risk-takers in their twenties almost always miss and risk-takers in their fifties almost always understand. The point is not to be reckless. The point is to be brave inside a structure that lets you fail and try again. Most of the great compounders I know — in careers, in relationships, in money — were not the bravest people in the room at any given moment. They were the people who stayed at the table the longest.

What I've come to think actually decides a life

There's a thing I've been chewing on for a while, and I want to put it to you simply, even though I don't quite trust how simple it is. I increasingly believe that three choices determine maybe ninety-five percent of how a life turns out.

What you do. Where you live. Who you're with.

Almost everything else is downstream of these three. Your work shapes your identity, your hours, your peer group, your skills, your sense of purpose. Your city shapes your friends, your luck surface area, your default lifestyle, your range of plausible futures. The people closest to you shape who you become — slowly, almost invisibly, through proximity and repetition. You will, over a long enough timeframe, become the average of the five people you spend the most time with. I used to think that line was a cliché. The longer I live, the more it looks like a law.

So when you think about how to live a life of wonder, don't get lost in the small optimizations. Look at the big three. Are you doing work that lets you be curious for a living, or have you signed up for a job that will slowly drain it out of you? Are you in a place where the right kinds of collisions are possible, or have you locked yourself into a context where nothing new can come in? Are you surrounded by people who still ask questions, or by people who long ago concluded they had the answers?

These three choices, made consciously, will do more for the texture of your life than any number of small daily habits. They are the foundation. Everything else is decoration.

David Deutsch has a wilder version of this idea I keep returning to. He wrote a book called The Beginning of Infinity that I picked up in Beijing last winter and read in fragments over a couple of months, mostly because I had to keep stopping to think. Deutsch's core claim is that good explanations — the kind that genuinely make sense of something — never close down inquiry. They open it up. Every real answer you find spawns more questions than it solved, because real understanding shows you the next thing you didn't even know to ask. Most adults I know treat curiosity as a finite resource, something they hoarded as kids and have to spend down as they age. Deutsch says it's the opposite. Knowledge is unbounded. The set of things you could be curious about is, in any meaningful sense, infinite. The constraint isn't the world running out of strange things. The constraint is you, deciding when to stop looking. I want you, when you hit fifty, when you hit eighty, to still believe him.

A small warning about the sparks

I want to add one note of caution that I learned the slow way.

Curiosity is the highest virtue I'm asking you to cultivate, but it has a counterfeit. The counterfeit is novelty-chasing. Mistaking flashes of attraction for actual resonance. Mistaking interesting strangers for interesting friendships. Mistaking the dopamine of a new city for the meaning of a real life.

Not every spark deserves a fire. Some of them are just sparks. The people I've watched ruin their lives in their twenties usually didn't do it by being closed off — they did it by being too open in the wrong direction. They chased every spark, said yes to every offer, mistook intensity for depth, and ended up scattered, lonely, and exhausted. Real resonance is rarer than that. Looks fade. Charm fades. What lasts is depth, character, and the slow accumulation of trust.

So yes, take swings. Walk into the rooms. Ask the questions. But also — pay attention to which of the sparks turn into something that holds heat in the morning. The ones that do are the ones worth your life. The ones that don't are not failures; they're just data.

The simplest version of all this

If you remember nothing else from this letter, remember this. The world will reward curiosity for the rest of your life. Curiosity at twenty looks like asking strange questions over hot food in a city you don't speak the language of. Curiosity at forty looks like reading subjects you have no professional reason to read. Curiosity at seventy looks like still being the person at the family dinner who wants to know what's going on in your grandkid's life, in actual detail, not just the headline version.

The trade — certainty for closure — is one of the worst deals available to a human being. Refuse it. Stay open. Keep asking. Hào qí.

And every so often, if you let it, the world will surprise you back. Some random Tuesday, some unexpected dinner, some throwaway moment will turn out, in retrospect, to have been the door you didn't know you were walking through. The magic, when it comes, almost always comes that way. Not announced. Not predicted. Just arriving, quietly, through a door you were curious enough to leave open.

Love,

Dad