curiosity plus drive leads to success

Curiosity without drive leads to never finishing things. Drive without curiosity leads to speed with no direction. Curiosity + drive = success.

Curiosity alone is not enough. Drive alone is not enough. We will be most successful doing projects for which we are naturally curious and have a certain level of drive in the chosen field. I am curious about a million things. But my focus and drive are in a specific field.

I am very curious about music and have wanted to learn piano for ages. But apparently I don't have the drive for it. I know many examples of topics/activities/ideas for which I am curious about without any plan of following through. I am trying to think of cases where I am driven but not curious. Personally, I don't have any that I can think of. But given I am curious about more things than I can actually follow through with, this is a good filter for me to focus on the ones where I have a certain level of drive attached. There could be an argument though for exploring things for which I am simply curious without any focused outcomes attached. But in work life, we have to narrow things down.

The more I write about this the more I convince myself of the importance of following curiosity as my guiding light. Once there, my drive will take over and be the second green light. From there, it should be obvious where my time and attention are best spent. This goes with Paul Graham's advice to always follow your curiosity over your ambition.

Ambition tends to make you climb existing peaks, but if you stick close enough to an interesting enough question, it may grow into a mountain beneath you. — Paul Graham