Curiosity Killed the Cat

The saying goes ‘curiosity killed the cat,’ and as a child I remember being told this whenever my parents thought I was getting ‘too’ curious about something they thought might be dangerous or was poking my nose into something I shouldn't know about. Though it never stopped me wanting to learn about things, there was a small part of me that started to think that curiosity was a little dangerous and might get me into trouble. Recently though, I heard a different version of this quote. It went, ‘curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back,’ and I prefer this one. It is much more encouraging towards curiosity, and because of a connection between curiosity and creativity, it encourages creativity as well.

Photo credit: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140605152640-184607318-curiosity-killed-the-cat-that-s-okay

While at the Bendigo Writers Festival, I went to a session ‘Looking and Learning’ where Nick Brodie, Gisela Kaplan and Chris McAuliffe discussed the importance of curiosity and its connection with learning, writing and creativity. Kaplan in particular talked about her curiosity as a child and how it caused her to devour books on every topic under the sun. This led to an interest in birds and eventually to her writing a book about birds. Kaplan said she had a lot of trouble getting published because it was on a topic that publishers didn’t think there was a market for. She went further with this and said that she thinks sometimes someone needs to write about certain topics for them to become interesting and to find a market because it inspires curiosity in more people.

When she said this, I really thought this shows how important curiosity is. It causes people to be innovative and pioneering. It causes people to look at the world in a new way and to create things that then causes other people to look at the world in a new way. It takes something that starts out as being quite personal and then gives it a wider audience, which in turn inspires more creativity. as Brodie said at one point, creativity inspires more creativity.

Creativity, to me, is the root of almost everything because it is what has led to the creation of almost everything that humans rely on. Be it more scientific, such as medicine, mechanical, such as cars, or even more traditional creative things such as music and art, the core of all of these things has been creativity. The core of creativity in turn is curiosity, as curiosity is the initial spark that starts everything off, and it should be encouraged not cautioned against.