They say curiosity killed the cat. Worth it!

I have an insatiable hunger to learn new things. I smash through my reading goal of 100 books every year because i know that the more I add to my toolbox of resources and experiences the better i can make new connections.

I’ve made a point of enriching my resources because I’ve often found that the ideas I uncover come from having found those unexpected links.

As an example: I got quite excited about home automation and figured out how to coble together a sensor that could detect when the dry stopped vibrating so that it could notify me to get the sheets before they wrinkle. I was driven to do this by equal part curiosity and laziness.

A few years later I was working in a refugee hospital in Bangladesh and we had an issue. All the midwifes in our delivery unit were students. The trainers were all foreign and government policy didn’t allow them to be in the camp at night. Problem is that babies love to come at night. We needed the midwives to be measuring the fetal heartrate regularly and recording it in a ledger book.

Everytime we tragically lost a baby the record book showed no fetal distress but we had no way of knowing if anything was actually measured. 

I used the same kind of sensor I added to my dryer to the handheld Doppler monitor and kept a timestamp of every time the device was picked up and moved. I could cross-reference the movement of the device with the records in the ledger and determine if the measurements were truly done.

My curiosity helped me connect to a solution that saved lives. If I didn’t fill my life with randomness and chaos I wouldn’t be able to make the same links.

In the excellent video above the band OK Go talks about the value of making space for noise.