The Difference Between Curiosity and Distraction

What happens when you commit to something difficult before you know whether you are ready? I have decided that next summer I want to try to hike the Colorado Trail. “Try” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. The Colorado Trail runs nearly 500 miles from Denver to Durango, crossing some of the highest and most beautiful terrain in the country. If everything went according to plan, I would expect to spend roughly 35 days hiking it. That is a long time to walk. It is also almost a year away, which means there is plenty of time for the plan to change. I may get into the training and realize I am not ready. I may modify the route. I may decide to do only part of it. I could start the hike and eventually decide to stop. Those are all legitimate possibilities. But I have also noticed something else: even though the hike itself would not happen until next summer, the adventure has already started. Choosing Something Difficult Enough I have thought about longer trails before. The Appalachian Trail and Pacific Crest Trail are legendary for a reason, but both feel too daunting to me right now. The mileage alone is enormous, and the time required makes them difficult to imagine fitting into my life. Closer to home, I have the Ozark Trail in Missouri. It is still a significant long-distance trail, and parts of it could become useful training, but it presents a different experience. The Colorado Trail somehow sits in an interesting middle ground. It is intimidating. But it also feels possible. That distinction matters. Sometimes a goal needs to be large enough that we cannot casually assume we can do it, but not so large that our brain immediately files it under impossible. Colorado feels like that to me. Long enough to require serious preparation. Difficult enough that I have no business taking it lightly. But still within the range where I can imagine standing in Denver, putting on a pack, and starting south. Imagining that first step is easy. Preparing to deserve it is something else. Preparation Is Part of the Adventure When we talk about adventures, we usually focus on the visible part. The summit. The race. The trip. The finish line. But there can be months of activity before any of that happens. I am already researching packs, tents, sleeping bags, water systems, food, navigation, satellite communication, first aid, clothing, resupply, altitude, weather, and how much weight I really want to carry for hundreds of miles. Then there is training. Walking farther. Carrying weight. Doing consecutive days. Testing equipment when the weather is bad instead of only when it is comfortable. Learning what my feet do after fifteen miles instead of five. Eventually I need to test myself on longer sections of trail, perhaps in the Ozarks, where the elevation is lower but the lessons about sleeping outside, managing food and water, carrying a pack, being alone, and waking up the next morning knowing I have to do it again are very real. None of that is administrative work surrounding the adventure. It is the adventure. The actual Colorado Trail may last around five weeks. Getting ready for it may occupy a year of my life. That changes the math considerably. I Have Done This Backwards Before There is some precedent for this behavior. In 2011, I heard about the Missouri River 340, a kayak race that runs 340 miles across Missouri. I decided I was going to do it. Then I started telling people I was going to do it. At midnight on New Year's Eve, when registration opened, I signed up. About two months later, I bought a kayak. In retrospect, purchasing the basic equipment required to participate might have been a logical step before registering for a 340-mile race. That was apparently not my preferred order. I trained and started the race that year. Fourteen hours and approximately 75 miles later, I was done. I had reached my limit. I did not finish. That could easily have been the end of the story. Instead, I trained more and came back the following year. That time, I completed all 340 miles. I do not tell that story because I assume Colorado will follow the same pattern. I have no idea whether it will. What stayed with me from the MR340 was something different. The first attempt was not wasted because I did not finish. It taught me what the race actually required. There are things research cannot teach you. Eventually you have to enter the river. Or step onto the trail. Telling People Before I Know the Ending I have already started telling friends and family that I want to attempt the Colorado Trail. There is an uncomfortable part of doing that. It would be much easier to keep the idea private until I was completely confident. I could train quietly, make all the plans, and announce the hike only when success seemed likely. That would also remove one of the things I think may help me most. Accountability. If people know what I am working toward, they will ask me about it. How is the training going? Did you test the pack? Have you done any overnight hikes yet? Are you still planning Colorado? Those questions create a little pressure. Not the kind that should push me into doing something unsafe. If the preparation tells me I am not ready, then the smart decision may be to change the plan. But there is a useful difference between changing a goal because you learned something and abandoning it because nobody noticed you stopped working toward it. By telling people now, I am creating a small group of accountability partners without formally asking anyone to become one. I have made the idea slightly harder to quietly forget. That is intentional. Documenting the Attempt I have also been thinking about carrying a GoPro and turning some portion of the experience into an adventure video or documentary. At first that sounds like a separate project. I am beginning to think it may become part of the hike itself. Thirty-five days is a long time to spend inside your own head. Recording pieces of the experience would give me something creative to think about along the way. I could talk about what I expected before a section and what actually happened. Capture the beautiful moments, certainly, but also the bad ones. The day when everything hurts. A storm rolling across a ridge. A campsite that does not work. A mistake. A moment when quitting feels completely reasonable. Or maybe just the strange things you think about after walking alone for eight hours. Documenting the experience would force me to notice it differently. Not simply, “Did I make today's mileage?” But, “What happened today?” Those are different questions. And I suspect they create different memories. Commitment Without Certainty We often treat goals as binary. You did it or you did not. Finished or failed. But that feels incomplete to me. There is another form of commitment that happens much earlier. You choose something difficult enough to take seriously. You tell people about it. You begin preparing. You discover what it demands. Then you keep making decisions based on what you learn. The final decision may still be to go. It might also be to change the plan. That does not make the months beforehand meaningless. If preparing for the Colorado Trail makes me stronger, teaches me more about hiking, gets me outside more often, gives me new experiences, and eventually leads me onto trails I would not otherwise have walked, something valuable has already happened. That is not permission to quit casually. It is permission to learn honestly. The challenge is knowing the difference. The Adventure Has Already Started Next summer, I may be standing at the beginning of the Colorado Trail with a pack on my back. I hope I am. If I get there, though, it will not really be the beginning. The beginning is now. It is reading about something difficult and thinking maybe. It is turning maybe into a plan. It is buying equipment, testing it, training, asking questions, making mistakes, and telling people what I am trying to do before I know how the story ends. The destination matters. The attempt matters too. And maybe one of the best reasons to put something difficult far out on the horizon is not simply that you might eventually reach it. It is that long before you arrive, it begins changing the way you spend your days. Something to Consider  What is something difficult you have been thinking about attempting—and what would change if you started preparing for it before you knew whether you could finish?

Trying to explain an idea to someone else may be one of the best ways to discover what you actually think. Earlier this year, I had a conversation with a friend who had recently retired. The conversation stayed with me because it connected to several ideas I had already been thinking about: what happens when work stops providing most of the structure in our lives, how identity shifts, what fills the space that used to be occupied by schedules and responsibilities, and why financial readiness is only one part of preparing for retirement. That conversation did not create the idea from nothing, but it gave the ideas I had been carrying around a clearer shape. I started thinking more deliberately about the period before retirement itself. There is already plenty of good advice about saving, investing, Social Security, healthcare, and determining whether we have enough money to stop working. What interested me was something different. What happens before that? More specifically, what happens when we begin approaching a major transition like retirement while most of the structure in our lives still comes from work? What happens to identity, expectations, relationships, routines, discipline, and the way we think about our time? Eventually I started calling that period Pretire . At first, it was simply a concept I wanted to understand better. I started taking notes, developing ideas, writing about some of my own experiences, and trying to figure out what belonged together. Then the notes started becoming chapters. And somewhat unexpectedly, the idea became a book. Over the past several months, I have been writing Pretire Before You Retire. I haven't talked publicly about it yet, but the manuscript is now nearly finished and working its way toward publication. Writing a book has been an interesting experiment in its own right, but one part of the process has surprised me more than anything else. I thought I understood Pretire before I started writing about it. I didn't. At least not nearly as well as I thought I did. I understood the general idea. I could talk about why it interested me and give examples of what I meant. But trying to explain it clearly enough that another person could follow the idea across an entire book exposed questions I had not yet answered. If Pretire was more than financial preparation, what exactly was it? Which changes mattered most? How did structure, expectations, identity, discipline, and curiosity relate to one another? What belonged in the idea, and what was merely adjacent to it? Those questions did more than help me explain Pretire . They helped me understand it. Over time, separate observations became more defined. Some ideas became central, others disappeared, and connections I had only vaguely sensed became much clearer. Eventually, five themes emerged as the foundation of the book: Structure, Expectations, Identity, Discipline, and Curiosity. I had assumed I was writing down an idea I already understood. Instead, writing was showing me what the idea actually was. Ideas Are Forgiving in Our Heads An idea can remain surprisingly comfortable as long as it stays private. We know the context. We know what we meant. We automatically fill in the missing pieces because the assumptions behind the idea are already familiar to us. That makes it easy to believe something is clearer than it really is. Writing changes that. At some point, I had to explain what I meant by Pretire to someone who was not already living inside my head. If it was more than retirement planning, what exactly was it? If money was not the central subject, what was? Which changes before retirement mattered enough to deserve attention? How did ideas like identity, structure, discipline, expectations, and curiosity relate to one another? Those questions did not simply help me describe the idea. They changed it. Over time, those themes became more defined. Some became central. Others disappeared. Separate thoughts began to form relationships. What initially felt like a collection of observations gradually became a framework. I had assumed I was writing down an idea I already understood. Instead, writing was showing me what the idea actually was. Explanation Raises the Standard There is something demanding about trying to make an idea understandable to another person. You can no longer rely on “you know what I mean.” You have to decide what comes first. You have to identify which details matter and which merely happen to interest you. You have to notice when two ideas that sounded different are actually saying the same thing. Most importantly, you have to confront the places where your thinking is still fuzzy. This is one of the things I have found most interesting about writing a book. Drafting produces words, but revision often produces understanding. A paragraph that does not quite work may be a writing problem, but sometimes it is a thinking problem. The sentence is difficult to write because the idea underneath it has not been resolved yet. Editing becomes more than improving language. It becomes a way of asking harder questions. Is this really what I mean? Does this idea add something, or am I simply repeating an earlier point in a slightly different way? Does this example clarify the argument or distract from it? What am I assuming the reader already understands? The more I revised the book, the more I realized that explaining something is not merely the final stage of thinking. It can be part of the thinking itself. Creativity Is Not Just Generating Ideas We often associate creativity with producing something new. A story. A painting. A business. A product. A song. A book. But I am beginning to think there is another form of creativity that receives less attention: finding a form for something that is still incomplete in our own minds. That process requires choices. What belongs? What does not? What is the simplest way to express this without making it simplistic? What structure allows another person to see the relationship between ideas that I can already see instinctively? Those are creative questions, but they are also intellectual ones. The act of making something forces us to move from possibility toward specificity. As long as an idea remains abstract, many versions can coexist. Once we try to turn it into something real, we have to choose. That can feel restrictive, but it is also clarifying. A Draft Is a Prototype There is a familiar idea in product development: instead of debating every possibility theoretically, build something and see what happens. Create a prototype. It does not need to be finished. In fact, it probably should not be. Its purpose is to make assumptions visible. Once something exists outside our imagination, we can react to it differently. We can see where it breaks. We can notice what is missing. Someone else can ask a question we never considered. The prototype teaches us something that thinking alone could not. I have come to think of writing the same way. A draft is a prototype for an idea. Once the thought exists on a page, it becomes something I can examine rather than simply something I believe. I can move pieces around, remove sections, challenge assumptions, and occasionally realize that the point I thought I was making was not actually the most interesting one. The same principle applies far beyond writing. A business idea becomes clearer when you try to explain why someone would pay for it. A strategy becomes clearer when you have to present it to people who must act on it. A product becomes clearer when someone tries to use it. A framework becomes clearer when someone asks how one part relates to another. Even a personal belief can change when we try to explain it carefully enough that another person understands why we hold it. In each case, creation gives the thinking something to push against. The Useful Question: What Do You Mean? One of the most productive questions another person can ask is also one of the simplest: What do you mean by that? It is a question we often try to answer quickly, but it deserves more respect. We use shorthand constantly, particularly in areas where we have experience. We assume other people share our context. We use words that feel precise because we have used them for years. Then someone asks us to explain them. That is when we find out how much of our understanding is genuine and how much depends on familiarity. Expertise can sometimes make this harder, not easier. The more comfortable we become with a subject, the easier it is to forget which assumptions we stopped questioning years ago. Trying to explain something to a beginner, a reader, a customer, a colleague, or even ourselves can reopen those questions. And sometimes the person asking the basic question is not exposing their lack of understanding. They are exposing ours. Curiosity, Creativity, and the Next Question Curiosity often begins by noticing something that does not quite make sense. Why does this work that way? What would happen if we tried something different? Is there another explanation? Creativity gives those questions form. We write something. Build something. Draw something. Explain something. Test something. Then the thing we created begins asking questions back. That may be the part I underestimated. I thought curiosity led to ideas and creativity helped express them. I now think the relationship is more circular. Curiosity leads us to create, but creation often creates new curiosity. The process of trying to explain Pretire did not simply answer the questions I already had. It produced new ones. Some of those questions strengthened the book. Others changed its structure. A few led me away from ideas I initially thought were important. The result was not just a clearer manuscript. It was clearer thinking. Make the Idea Push Back Not every idea needs to become a book. It does not even need to become something public. But if there is an idea you believe you understand, it may be worth giving it enough form that it can challenge you. Write a few pages about it. Sketch the model. Build the presentation. Explain it to someone who has never heard it before. Create the rough prototype. Do something that forces the idea to exist outside your own head. You may discover that your thinking was already solid. You may also discover contradictions, assumptions, and gaps you could not see while the idea remained abstract. That is not evidence that the idea was bad. It may simply mean the idea is finally becoming real enough to teach you something. Sometimes we think in order to create. Sometimes we have to create in order to think. Something to Consider What idea do you think you understand that might become clearer if you tried to explain, build, or create something from it?