Curiosity is desirable and powerful, but when fragmented, it becomes a liability. Every time you mindlessly consume content without context or an objective, you’re building a mental bottleneck.
However, you want to make room for serendipity and be able to follow rabbit holes even if there lacks evidence of a connection to your goals and work.
How do you balance following curiosity without falling into cognitive overload?
Last week, I discussed the importance of having a clearly defined “Why?” before starting a project and the need to create a plan that details the scope and deliverables before starting. Otherwise, how will you know that a project is finished?
I fully intended to have an example plan to share with you this week so I could explain the components to include, but life had other plans.
This week, I’m bringing you a behind the scenes look at my actual process of chasing curiosity while trying to minimize fragmentation and cognitive overload.
What Is the Project?
When I created a spreadsheet of potential projects and ranked them according to my SHELL Framework, I gained enormous clarity. It showed me which projects would provide me with the highest return on investment.
But this week, when I reviewed this list, I realized that many of these “projects” should actually be components of other undefined learning projects.
For instance, one project I listed was “Read On The Shortness of Life by Seneca,” I absolutely want to do it, but why?
I’ve been a subscriber to Ryan Holiday’s newsletter for quite some time, and what little I know of stoic philosophy seems to resonate with me. I also have an interest in reading classic literature to deepen my understanding of the world and life in general.
I actually don’t remember how On The Shortness of Life got on my radar and why I chose it over Meditations or Letters From a Stoic. I think it was because there was a newer translation that is supposidly more accessable and it’s fairly short. I thought it would be a good place to start.
But what am I specifically trying to learn? What is the actual learning project that would require reading this book to complete? What would the deliverable be?
I don’t know. So, for right now, I’m choosing to not move forward with reading this book.
If I want a project to have a clear why and deliverable, I’m going to need to reconsider what a project is. It’s clear to me that “Watch this video” or “Read this book” is insufficient.
A Real-Time Case Study
Here’s how this played out in real time this morning.
I was on YouTube and saw a clip from a TED talk by Manoush Zomorodi about boredom and how it activates something called “default mode.”
I was about to click through to watch the TED talk, but I stopped to ask, “Why?”
I then opened my notes (in Obsidian), created a new document under projects titled “Reading & Watching List,” and created a link to this TED talk.
Under this link, I started explaining my why:
I always tell Piper about how it’s good to be bored, and I know that when I’m bored and not filling my mind with stimulus, I have interesting thoughts. This video might give me pointers to primary research and evidence I can use in my broader picture of personal development.
Then I thought, “Does this relate to any of my favorite problems?” My gut told me it related to “How can I uncover and influence the hidden systems shaping my life?” But why?
So, I linked to the page for this question (you gotta love backlinks) and continued to think about how this is linked to hidden systems.
Well, it reminds me of something I initially read in the book Contact Modalities by Grant Cameron, so I hopped on Perplexity and asked:
In the book Contact Modalities, Grant Cameron mentions how setting an intention before sleep can give you the answer when you wake. He also mentions how Thomas Edison would sit in a chair with keys or ball bearings in his hand, so when he reached a certain level of consciousness, he’d drop the keys and wake up, and this was when he would have his answers. Please share any keywords or phrases about this phenomenon, including the brain frequency during this level of consciousness.
It comes back with an interesting result (with links to sources) explaining that the phenomenon described involves leveraging the transitional state between wakefulness and sleep (hypnagogia) to access creative insights or solutions.
Cool! Now I wonder if this is related to “default mode” that was mentioned in the clip about boredom, so I ask Perplexity, “Is there a connection between hypnagogia and “default mode”?
It turns out the term is actually “default mode network,” and yes, they share a functional connection.
Additionally, I recall that Bob Proctor mentioned Thomas Edison's story when discussing the topic of “Creative Imagination” in contrast to “Synthetic Imagination.”
So now I write in my notes:
I’m interested in leveraging the default mode network and the transitional state between wakefulness and sleep (hypnagogia) to access creative insights or solutions.
Now we’re getting somewhere.
Instead of spending 16 minutes watching a video with a vague idea of “this seems interesting, maybe it will be useful,” I now have new data. I discovered that boredom connects to the default mode network and hypnagogia, and this is interesting to me because it seems like a hidden system where ideas materialize from thin air.
I don’t know about you, but this seems like a way more productive use of time than passively watching YouTube.
In the past, I would have just clicked through to the video, watched it, and maybe I’d take away an interesting fact. But I’d have nothing to show for it. Even though this process wasn’t a predefined project, I could follow my curiosity and use it to develop clarity around my interests and build connections between them.
What started as fragmented curiosities are now tied together in a common thread. I didn’t plan for this to become anything more than a curiosity checkpoint, but it feels like the start of something bigger. That’s where the idea of “Project Seeds” comes in.
Project Seeds
There is a concept in knowledge management called “Digital Gardening,” where you write little notes and ideas (seeds), and over time, you revisit them, improve and expand on them, and connect them to other little seeds, which grow and develop into mature work.
I could easily see how these ideas might develop into a full project someday, but it wasn’t quite ready.
So I opened another note in my projects folder called “Project Seeds” and wrote:
This is where I allow project ideas to germinate. I don’t want to create projects willy-nilly and then waste a ton of time on dumb projects.
So, how would I connect the dots if I created a learning project around these topics?
Creative Imagination Project
Bob Proctor talks about creative imagination, which involves pulling from infinite intelligence to create things that have never existed before. An example of this is how Thomas Edison would sit with a problem in mind and fall asleep with keys in his hand. When the keys dropped, he’d wake up with new ideas.
This state between wakefulness and sleep is called hypnagogia and is somehow connected to the default mode network, which is activated when you’re bored.
How do these states work, and how can I leverage them to tap into creative imagination?
I’m interested in producing original work and feel like creative imagination is something I’d need to leverage.
Maybe I’ll embark on this project, maybe not. It will most likely evolve into a completely different project at some point. I don’t feel like I’m ready to jump in, and I haven’t defined the deliverable for this project.
This is good enough for now. The process I’ve been through has left me feeling energized. I feel like I’ve actually engaged with the learning process and actively learned about a few new concepts.
Takeaways
I hope this process of “showing, not telling” was helpful. I don’t want this newsletter to be a boring repository of theory, but rather a snapshot of the processes I’m going through as I try to become a more active participant in my life.
Curiosity is amazing and should absolutely be cultivated, but in a deliberate way. When you filter it through reflection, link it to deeper questions, and track it with intention, it becomes fuel for meaningful progress. This isn’t about killing wonder. It’s about harnessing it, turning drift into direction, exploration into momentum, and curiosity into meaningful creation.
This essay was originally published on my Substack newsletter.