I’m a curious person.

I’m also an obsessive person.

This combination can be magical but also infuriating.

Magical because I explore everything and anything that interests me. I mean it when I say that. I can’t turn my brain off. The other day, for no good reason, I investigated the history of peanut butter. Turns out that peanut butter has a reasonably interesting history tied to the Incas and Dr Kellogg, yes the cereal guy. Outside of being interesting the peanut butter research was pretty useless. I abandoned the article and wasted about 2 hours of my day.

Which brings me to the infuriating part of my curiosity. Sometimes I go wide and then I go a bit wider and then after a few hours I’ve found myself on an obscure Reddit page in the depths of the Internet about a psychedelic trip report focused on hallucinations that people share across locations and time. It can get weird.

My obsession with curiosity also extends to a podcast that I host called the Curious Cult. Recently one of my guests gifted me a phrase that I didn’t know I was looking for. She told me that sometimes you have to investigate your curiosity along a horizontal plane and sometimes you need to investigate along a vertical plane.

Sometimes you need to go wide and sometimes you need to go deep.

But therein lies an interesting conundrum; when do you choose to dive into a specific topic? This is one of the most interesting questions I ask on my podcast and the answer is almost universally the same. Most guests will tell me that they go deep when the absolutely can’t stop themselves. They become obsessed. They just can’t bring themselves to move on. The curiosity grips them and they must know more about the particular topic of interest.

Obsession and curiosity are intimately tied together but often we force ourselves to move on because we believe that our obsession verges on strange, odd or useless.

I don’t remember a world without the Internet. I was ten years old when I first connected to the web and since then I have learned and relearned one universal truth: There is something out there for everyone online.

Your strange curiosity about Italy and all things Italian might feel strange because you live in Djibouti. But it’s precisely this odd interest that sets you apart. Your wide curiosity which differs from the people around you makes you interesting. Embrace it, go deep and lose yourself in it and then emerge and apply the lessons you’ve learned to your own context.

The smashing together of unexpected things sets people apart.

My random deep-dive into the history of peanut butter may not have been practically useful but it really did engage me for a few hours.

What are you smashing together? Comment and tell me about your strangest curiosity and how it has changed your life. I’d LOVE to hear about them all!

Explore your curiosity horizontally and when something inspires or intrigues you don’t be shy to dive in vertically and spend time exploring. Sure, my peanut butter article didn’t amount to anything but I do know that it was invented more than 3500 years ago and that’s pretty cool.