7/23/2019 What Children Can Teach Us About Risk

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MARIE CURIE ON CURIOSITY,

WONDER, AND THE SPIRIT

OF ADVENTURE IN SCIENCEby Maria Popova

A short manifesto for the vitalizing power of discovery.

“Few persons contributed more to the general welfare of

mankind and to the advancement of science than the

modest, self-effacing woman whom the world knew as

Mme. Curie.”  So read the obituary for Marie Curie, the

first woman to win a Nobel Prize and the only person to

date to win a Nobel in two different sciences, published

the day after her death in 1934. Three years later, her

younger daughter, Eve Curie Labouisse, captured her

mother’s spirit and enduring legacy in  Madame Curie: A

Biography  (public library).

Among the ample anecdotes of the great scientist’s life

and the many direct quotations of her humbly stated yet

fiercely upheld convictions is one particularly poignant

passage that speaks to the immutable resonance

between science and wonder, the inextinguishable causal

relationship between childhood’s innate curiosity and

humanity’s greatest feats of discovery. Eve Curie quotes

her mother, adding to history’s greatest definitions ofscience:

“I am among those who think that science has great beauty. A scientist in his

laboratory is not only a technician: he is also a child placed before natural

phenomena which impress him like a fairy tale. We should not allow it to

be believed that all scientific progress can be reduced to mechanisms,

machines, gearings, even though such machinery also has its beauty.

Neither do I believe that the spirit of adventure runs any risk of

disappearing in our world. If I see anything vital around me, it is precisely

that spirit of adventure, which seems indestructible and is akin to curiosity.”

WHAT CHILDREN CAN TEACH

US ABOUT RISK, FAILURE, AND

PERSONAL GROWTHby Maria Popova

“If I limit myself to knowledge that I consider true beyond

doubt,”  E.F. Schumacher wrote in his timelessly wonderfu

A Guide for the Perplexed  in 1977, “I minimize the risk of

error but I maximize, at the same time, the risk of missing

out on what may be the subtlest, most important and most

rewarding things in life.”   In the decades since, the notion

of embracing risk and failure has become one of the mos

common tropes in motivational talks, self-help books and

business articles alike. It’s been championed by everyone

from Ray Bradbury, who considered failure essential to

creativity, to Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull, who argued

for the importance of cultivating a failure-fearles

culture, but none more eloquently than social sciencewriter John W. Gardner in a section of  Self-Renewal: The

 Individual and the Innovative Society  (public library) — his

altogether fantastic, forgotten field guide to keeping

your company and your soul vibrantly alive, which

remains a must-read as much for entrepreneurs as fo

those of us on a private journey of self-transcendence.

Gardner considers what children’s supple membrane fo

experience can teach us about the role of failure in

learning and growth:

“One of the reasons why mature people are apt to learn less than young

people is that they are willing to risk less. Learning is a risky business, and

they do not like failure. In infancy, when the child is learning at a truly

phenomenal rate — a rate he will never again achieve — he is also

experiencing a shattering number of failures. Watch him. See the

innumerable things he tries and fails. And see how little the failure

discourage him. With each year that passes he will be less blithe abou

failure. By adolescence the willingness of young people to risk failure ha

diminished greatly. And all too often parents push them further along tha

road by instilling fear, by punishing failure or by making success seem to

precious. By middle age most of us carry in our heads a tremendou

catalogue of things we have no intention of trying again because we tried

them once and failed — or tried them once and did less well than ou

self-esteem demanded.”

The cost of our ever-shrinking comfort zone, Gardne

argues, is tremendous:

“We pay a heavy price for our fear of failure. It is a powerful obstacle t

growth. It assures the progressive narrowing of the personality and

prevents exploration and experimentation. There is no learning withou

some difficulty and fumbling. If you want to keep on learning, you mus

keep on risking failure — all your life. It’s as simple as that.”