Inspired By A 4th Grader

In reviewing the work done so far by this community, it has been fun to see how the themes are weaving together. Accountability is better done in Community, but Curiosity pushes both forward and to new levels of greatness.

This morning while having breakfast, I searched YouTube for "Ted Talk Curiosity" and found this video of 9 year old Ray Wu. It might be one of the best Tedx Talks I've seen for how precise his delivery was, how inspired I am for the future generation, and how encouraged I am that there are children shouting out the power of curiosity as necessary for the future.

Ray lays out that curiosity is perhaps even more necessary in the future because we all now know that the answer to every question is in the supercomputer we all hold in our hand. The need to know anything is less than it used to be as we can always just google it. That changes our motivation for studying and mastery.

But after we learn something, we need to keep digging and keep looking for a more well-rounded understanding of the idea and all of its tangential ideas that might lead us down a path that we hadn't known was possible.

This is the part that I think is the most exciting about the future of learning. Because anything we want to know is available for free online, the opportunity to see and seek overlapping trends or patterns across space, time, culture, and subject matter is exhilarating. What do we know about music and the way that notes come together to form chords that could be applied with the same pitch-perfect precision to colors? Or even more abstract, to genome sequencing? Is there a perfect high C for our DNA? What if we played it back the other direction? What if our DNA was played as a song?

These are just loose fragments of an idea, but they represent some of the thinking I have been most curious about recently. I am hoping to continue to find more Ray Wu's in this world and search for ways to collaborate and build community with them and the other curious people they attract.