Curiosity Is Grown, Not Bought

Five days before my first hackathon, I deleted a line from my notes. It said: bring back observations. It was the kind of instruction that makes a weekend feel justified in advance, and I had come to think it would ruin the weekend. The scarce thing in my thirties is not time. It is interest, and interest has to be grown. Changing what you spend on does not grow it. Showing up does, and it stops growing the moment you ask it to pay.

My twenties were about time

In my twenties I decided that the asset that mattered most was time. Working life in Japan assumes long hours, and most of the communities I could have joined assumed them too, not as a rule anyone wrote down but as the floor everyone stood on. The way out I chose was to stand on the other side of the work: run companies, then invest, so that my hours were mine to allocate rather than mine to sell.

The second half of the plan mattered as much as the first. As income rose I kept my costs where they were, and somewhere along the way I became a minimalist without setting out to. It worked. The thing I wanted most at twenty is the thing I have.

The returned hours need somewhere to go

I wrote here recently that automation pays in hours, and that the usual use of a returned hour is more work. That essay ended without saying where the hours should go instead. This is my answer.

When AI makes execution cheap, skills turn over every couple of years, and catching up becomes a process you can put on a schedule. What does not turn over is how deeply you care about a field, and that decides which problems you notice in the first place. I used to wait for interest the way you wait for an idea in the shower. It does not work like that.

Spending differently did not grow it

For years the thing I watched most carefully was money. Not because it interests me, but because it converts into almost anything, so keeping it under control felt like the best hedge against whatever came next. Once there was room to spend, I tried pointing some of it at things I hoped would make me curious, and it did not suit me. Money is something I spend efficiently, so whatever I paid for turned into a question of whether it was worth it, and that question is the opposite of curiosity. What suited me was making things, which has little to do with money. I still want to spend money efficiently. What matters to me now is growing an interest in which I stop counting.

The hackathon I wrote about last week cost me a weekend, and I spent it making something. What did the work was the room: a deadline someone else had set, people building at the next table, and a field in which I had no position to protect. Being among people who build in that field every day gave me a sense of how fast it moves and what they actually care about, which no amount of reading had.

Don't ask it to pay

An interest that is asked to pay for itself stops growing. That is why I deleted the note, and why I keep two things apart. The business I run is judged on revenue and on whether it can run without me. The fields I am growing an interest in are not judged at all: no quota, nothing I am required to bring back. Some day the two may meet, and a business will come out of a field I first walked into for no reason. Forcing that meeting early is the surest way to lose both.

What the hackathon gave back, without my asking, was a changed reader: I now read the news about that field by who pays and who holds the capital, and against the people I met who are building in it. A book club did the same thing to me earlier this year. Neither came from anything I spent. Both came from being there, and I would not have got either if I had required them.