Yesterday my son Oiva finally learned his newest skill: turning from his back to his belly. It was a great victory for him: the first step towards being able to move by himself.

And just look at the video: it’s a fight!

It’s a great accomplishment, something he feels that is really important for him to do, so he is ready to suffer some pain and frustration to get it done. It’s not easy, but he understands that it’s worth it.

And it’s only the first step.

There is so much he still needs to practice before he can walk around freely and go wherever he wants.

That’s it. The lesson for today: No great victories can be achieved without enduring some pain. Without stepping out of your comfort zone.

If Oiva would have decided to stay on his back and look at the same old view forever, he would never have learned to turn around, and he would never learn to walk. But curiosity took over and forced him to step into the unknown and start practicing.

Are you doing it? Or are you just sticking to what you feel comfortable doing?

Music: Kevin MacLeod

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A few days ago when chatting with a friend I promised him that I would write something about the meaning of this blog and the reasons why I am working on it. I planned to do this some day next week but as a coincidence Nate Whitehill asked the very question, “What motivated you to start blogging?“, in his blog yesterday. So there really was no other option than to start typing.

I think it all started about a year and a half ago when I found my way to Steve Pavlina’s blog. I had been maintaining many web sites before that, even writing some blog-like rantings, but Steve’s blog was the first real blog I started to follow on a regular basis. His writing style inspired me and I soon subscribed to his RSS feed.

That changed my surfing habits.

Before subscribing to Steve’s RSS feed I used to browse the web in the way most people do, googling for things and visiting a list of sites I was keeping in my bookmarks. But now that I had a feed reader all I was interested in was blogs. I soon collected a list of about 70 blogs I was following on a daily basis, and it just kept growing as I found more and more interesting blogs by clicking on the links I found in the posts I was reading.

That was too much so I had to cut the number down a bit (now it’s growing again, so I’ll have to do some more cutting pretty soon). But you get the point: at this point I was sucked in to the blogosphere and the next logical step was to start my own blog and really participate. I just couldn’t stay an outsider any longer.

Just having a blog is nice, but if you really want to make it work, you need to have a guiding idea that defines what the blog is all about. You need to know who you are writing it for and what kinds of topics you want to write about. So I started to write random thoughts to my tumble log while still trying to figure out what my blog should be all about and why I want to be doing it.

Finally it boiled down to a few key ideas:

1. Insanely interested in everything

It was my wife who first started describing me as being insanely interested in everything. I wasn’t quite sure what she meant, but for some reason it seemed that everyone who heard that description was nodding in agreement.

So I thought about it. A lot.

And then I realized that those four words might actually be the best four words I had ever found for explaining who I am. When I then started this blog it was clear to me that this had to be its guiding principle.

This blog is meant to be a learning experience to both you and me.

To me it’s a lesson in the world of blogging, but also a lesson about all the topics that I cover in my posts. Writing about something in a way that other people will benefit from it forces you to really think about the topic, and explaining something to other people is often the best way to master that something.

But that’s not the only thing I’m learning by writing this blog. Just as important to me are the lessons that I get from interacting with my readers. Sometimes it’s a new view point to a topic I covered in my post. Sometimes it’s an “aha!” moment when someone explains my thoughts in a better way than I could have done. Sometimes something just as simple as a person saying “Hi!” in an e-mail message can serve as a lesson about life.

Thank you for leaving your comments and sending me e-mail. I hope that the discussion continues to grow and we can share more and more interesting ideas with each other in the future. Don’t hesitate to leave a note if you have something to say about a specific blog post, or send e-mail if you have something else you want to ask me about.

2. Interacting with the world

Lately I’ve been working on a short description of this blog to use for marketing it a bit to advertisers and web directories. Here goes my current version:

A blog about creating software in an honest, positive way that feels good to you, your family, your customers and your environment.

I want to make a difference.

My impact might not be huge, but what I can do is to throw my ideas out in the open and see what comes back. Maybe some of the ideas catch fire and come back as more polished versions, while some of them get shot down. And that’s how it should be. That’s why I call it “interacting with the world” and not “changing the world”.

1. Way too many people are struggling with their work. Either there is too much of it or it doesn’t feel like the right thing for them to be doing. I’m waiting to see a world in which people don’t work just for the money but instead because they really want to do what they are doing. It’s probably not going to happen fast, but we can get there if we want to, one person at a time.
2. Too many people are still forced to choose between their career and family. More and more people are making the right choice by valuing family over work, but I still think that it’s a choice that we shouldn’t have to make. To me having a rewarding career means living a life you are happy with, not getting lots of promotions and pay rises.
3. A few days ago some visitor found my blog by typing “don’t be a programmer” in Google. When I noticed those keywords in my site statistics it made me laugh, but as I thought about it more I realized that this person had a point: We shouldn’t be just programmers and forget about our customers, but instead try to be approachable and make sure that our customers get what they really ask for. Making your customer feel comfortable after all is more important than knowing all the latest algorithms.
4. And last but not least, the environment. Don’t worry, the planet will survive global warming and other problems just fine. The problem is that the changes like rising sea levels and bigger storms are threatening our way of life. I don’t know about you, but I enjoy my life so much that I wouldn’t want it to change for worse anytime soon. I want to keep coding and writing which is why I think we need to find ways to work and do business in a way that is good for our environment as well.

3. Building a career

I named my blog after myself to emphasise on the fact that what I write on my blog is always a piece of who I am. I try to be as open as possible while still keeping the reader, you, as the main focus. This way, by reading my thoughts you’ll learn to know who this guy Jarkko Laine actually is.

And that’s my way of shaping my future.

My long term goal is that by writing valuable content to my readers every day I will one day be able to make a living by maintaining this blog and building online services that match with the values described above. So if you start seeing some ads here and there, don’t worry, it’s just me trying to become a professional blogger. But if you feel that I’m putting in too much advertisement, let me know. After all, you come first and my personal goals only second.

Thanks for visiting and reading my ideas! I hope you enjoy your stay and come back soon, maybe even move in and grab my RSS feed. If this was your first visit, you might find something interesting by checking out the most popular posts listed on the right sidebar.

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Today I’m writing something a bit more personal by digging into some birthdays that have shaped my personality and made me the man I am today. After writing the story I realized something important: while this story is about me, what’s really important in it isn’t me. It’s my dad.

August 3rd, 1980: This is where it all started

I was born exactly 27 years ago at the Kätilöopisto hospital in Helsinki as the first child to two young students full of energy. I don’t know how they managed to do it, but having me and my brother Lauri (he was born about 1.5 years after me) didn’t stop them from studying and finally finishing their studies.

I don’t remember much from my early childhood (after all, who does?) , but I was lucky to be born in a supportive and loving family. And being the first of four certainly has it’s advantages: It gives you a natural leadership role among your brothers, and a responsibility to take care of them and provide something interesting for them to do. What could be a better school for life than that?

August 3rd, 1986: Legos!

On my sixth birthday I got a yellow Lego truck. I remember exactly what it looked like, and I loved it. Just like all my other Legos before and after that.
It’s fair to say that I was raised by playing Legos.

Most of the playing I remember from my childhood was in some way or another related to them. At first we followed the instructions, but pretty soon we just mixed all our Legos together, arranged them by color and started building all kinds of more complex things. First the houses grew bigger and more architectural (this is probably why I still occasionally dream of becoming an architect), and soon we moved on to really big things like big airplanes, trains and boats made by combining almost all of our Legos.

Then we got dad to take pictures of them.

You can guess that I just can’t wait for Oiva to be in the age when he starts playing with Legos. Our house will be so full of them that you cannot even imagine! If my wife just let’s me.

I learned a lot by playing with Legos, but the real lesson was that following instructions is for newbies. Building what you see in you own mind is the real thing!

August 3rd, 1987: Senegal

On my seventh birthday we were living in a small Senegalese town called Fatick. I spent most of my childhood living in this West African country far away from the place where I was born. And I loved it.

The greatest thing of all was our school.

It was a small school (about 10-20 pupils) for children of Finnish missionaries living in Senegal with a spirit that seeded in me the love for learning and the curiosity for new things: In a school where everyone knew everyone and no one had to be ashamed or afraid of doing or saying something that would make others laugh at you it was easy to be open and show the real you. That’s something that doesn’t happen in our schools with classes of 20-30 pupils.

Another thing that stuck to me during the years spent in Senegal was the feeling of globality. To me globalization isn’t anything special. It’s more like a law of nature: This is one world. It may be divided into different countries, but if you take a close look at it you notice that it’s actually just one planet.

August 3rd, 1989: My first computer

On my ninth birthday my uncle gave me his old Atari 800 home computer. The joy was enormous: a real computer! For me!? Wow!

And as it was always with the computers of that time, the machine came with a book teaching you how to create your own programs.

The first few days my dad, my brothers and I spent countless hours trying out all kinds of BASIC commands producing lines, beeps and small animations. You couldn’t really call it programming as we just copied code from the book, but still I think that’s where I got my first inspiration to programming. It has to start from something small, you know.

The joy with the Atari 800 wasn’t that long however. We couldn’t save any of our code and we didn’t have any games to play on it so my dad went and bought a disk drive. But it didn’t work out that well. I can’t recall what went wrong, but the outcome was that in just a few days after getting the computer we drove to a nearby city and switched the first computer to the second, a Commodore 64.

And boy, what a computer it was! On our Commodore 64 we played countless games, even breaking a brick in our living room floor because of my brother jumping in excitement while playing. On that computer together with my dad we learned the basics of programming. He stayed along for a while until I left him behind and continued to learn more and more.

Lauri and I are now both programmers, which means two third of the Commodore 64 infected kids in my family. I wonder if current computers have a similar effect - I doubt it.

August 3rd, 1990: Learning to play guitar

I’m not actually sure if it was 1990 or 1991, but one of those years I got a guitar as my birthday present. I started learning the chords, my dad teaching me (do you see a pattern here: all the great things I’ve learned in my childhood were somehow coming from my dad) . And almost as soon as I knew my first three chords it was time to start writing my own songs.

I was never into learning to play guitar solos from famous guitarists like most of the young kids playing guitar. I wanted to make my own music (just like my dad). My songs weren’t anything spectacular, but my parents were supportive and during the years I learned a lot more about writing both lyrics and music.

But more than anything, it was about creativity and expressing yourself.

August 3rd, 2002: Mari

On my 22nd birthday I felt like I was the happiest man alive. It was a sunny day, we were listening to great music at a rock festival right next door, and I had just got married to my lovely bride, Mari on the 27th of July.

Now we’ve been married for five years, and it just gets better every day.

Although childhood is the time in life that defines who you will become, learning doesn’t end there. These five years being married to Mari have taught me a great deal about loving someone, thinking about what’s good for not only you but also the people close to you, as well as life in general.

It is refreshing to have someone around who isn’t afraid to give you a different viewpoint to thinks you take for granted.

August 3rd, 2007: Oiva

Today is my 27th birthday. And I’m a father.

A father. Wow!

This fact has changed my life more than I could have ever imagined.

This little fellow is completely dependent on me and Mari. It’s up to us to raise him and be the best parents we can to him so that he can have a good starting point for his life. It’s time to pass on the gifts that I have received from my mom and dad and to support Oiva in expressing and acting on what he believes in and being the one and only Oiva he is meant to be.

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Only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live. - Dorothy Thompson

One of the greatest obstacles for learning is fear. It can be the fear of failing, fear of being laughed at, or just a fear with no apparent reason. Usually I’m a person that doesn’t fear many things and it’s quite hard to come up with something that I wouldn’t do because of fear. But I have my share of fears as well. One example has long been my fear of phone calls. For some reason I really don’t like calling people on the phone. I have no idea why, but even the thought of placing a call has been something that has made me nervous.

Today I’m happy to say that although calling people still isn’t one of my favorite passtimes, I can call people if I need to, and it’s not a problem to me anymore. And here’s the secret:

You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do. - Eleanor Roosevelt

You must do the things you think you cannot do. - Eleanor Roosevelt

These two quotes from Eleanor Roosevelt say it perfectly: If you’re afraid of doing something, you should do it. It’s the only way to overcome fear. By doing the thing you’re afraid to do you notice that it actually wasn’t so bad: after all you were able to do it quite easily. And the more times you do it again, the more your fear dissappears.

The same goes for all kinds of fears: If you’re afraid of public speaking, give a speech. If you’re afraid of heights, climb on a mountain. If you’re afraid of selling your product, create a web site and enable people to buy. The worst thing you can do is to let go of your dreams because of fear. Give a few thoughts to the following quote:

Too many people are thinking of security instead of opportunity. They seem to be more afraid of life than death. - James F. Bymes

Then think about any sucessful person that comes to mind. If Bill Gates would have been looking for security, he wouldn’t be the richest man alive. If Martin Luther King wouldn’t have stood up for his beliefs, what would be the racial situation in the world today? If I wouldn’t have started this blog, you wouldn’t be reading this post today. Well, the last one is in a quite different league than the first two, but it’s a big deal for me personally.

It’s true that some of our experiments fail - actually many of them do. But that’s why they are called experiments: even if they fail, we learn from them and know where to go next. As Louisa M. Alcott nicely puts it:

I’m not afraid of storms, for I’m learning how to sail my ship. - Louisa M. Alcott

When your sail gets torn or you lose a few weeks of time fixing an experimental solution that didn’t quite turn out the way you wanted, it’s usually not wasted time. Through your experiment you have learned a valuable lesson, something that makes you more of an expert on your area. And definately something that you wouldn’t have learned without trying.

And many times you succeed!

So, I’m encouraging you: be it in software development, business or any area of life, embrace your fears and do the very thing you’re afraid to do. As Franklin D. Roosevelt once said:

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

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Learning is at the same time one of the most natural things and one of the most difficult things there are. Organizational learning is even harder. It’s easy to learn things when you want to learn them, but it requires a tremendous amount of work to get someone learn something when the inspiration doesn’t come from himself.

One of the biggest obstacles to learning is fear. The fear of changing, the fear of leaving a safe area and going out to the wilderness. And the scary thing is that without changing there is no learning. When you learn something, something inside you changes.

But learning can also be an exciting adventure in which you experiment with your limits, your interests and your life.

Here are some ideas to start your experiments with. Don’t try them all, but maybe by doing a few of them already makes you enjoy change, and thus enjoy learning a bit more. After a few more changes, learning becomes fun, and you become more curious.

1. Change your working hours
2. Change the way you talk
3. Change the way you drive
4. Change the way you wake up
5. Change the way you listen to people
6. Change the way you sleep
7. Change the way you set your professional goals
8. Change the way you write
9. Change the way you read the Bible
10. Change the way you treat your family
11. Change the way you look at the world
12. Change the way you look at deadlines
13. Change the way you market yourself
14. Change what you eat
15. Change what you appreciate at work
16. Change the way you treat your customers
17. Change the things you’re teaching to your children
18. Change the way you view the human race
19. Change the way you think about déjà vu
20. Change the way you plan projects
21. Change the way you code
22. Change the way you collect requirements
23. Change the way you decorate your office
24. Change the way you use the library
25. Change the way you look for information
26. Change the way you sketch

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In the era of RSS feeds and Internet it’s easy to get used to getting all your information from only one source - the Internet. Although you could argue that you’re reading many sources (for example I’m subscribed to about 70 different RSS feeds) there are some really important alternatives that you shouldn’t ignore. These sources can broaden your world view and teach you different styles of looking at things compared to blogs. Also if you really want to be a constant learner, you don’t want to learn only when you are at your computer, do you?

1. Books: I suggest you read both fact and fiction as they both can be enlightening in their own ways. From fact books you get new information and inspiration, and by reading great fiction you improve your language skills and imagination. Fictive novels can also make you think about life and in that way inspire you to learn more.
   Suggestions: Blink, Next of Kin, Space Trilogy
2. E-books: E-books are often less polished than “real” printed books, but there are some important exceptions. Basically from an E-book you get the same benefits than from regular books, plus they are more easily available and often more up to date. The annoying part is that you’ll need a computer to read them, which makes them quite bad for reading in a toilet.
   Suggestions: Getting Real, Make a name for yourself
3. Blogs: Although I said that you shouldn’t be relying to blogs only, I’d say that blogs are one of the greatest channels of media today. They are fast to read, up to date and there is a lot of free options for you to choose from. Make sure you use an RSS reader - otherwise keeping track of your blog posts pretty soon gets impossible.
   Suggestions: Copyblogger, Nate Whitehill dot com, Signal vs. Noise, Freelance Switch
4. Scientific magazines: If you’re looking for a reliable source of good professional information, scientific magazines can actually be interesting reads. For example I’ve noticed that IEEE Software is a well-written and interesting magazine and beats easily all the mainstream computer journals.
   Suggestions: IEEE Software (let me know if you have some other favorites)
5. Newspapers: Newspapers are good for keeping you up to date with what’s happening around your world. I’m currently mostly skipping these due to prioritisation reasons. A quality newspaper is of course better than a free one, but you shouldn’t ignore the free ones like Metro, because they are available when you have the one or two extra minutes to spend reading a newspaper (in a bus, waiting in a line and so on…)
   Suggestions: Metro
6. Podcasts: One of the reasons why I’m currently mostly ignoring newspapers is that the commuting time that is best for reading newspapers is also best for listening to podcasts and I figured that I will learn more by listening to podcasts I select myself than some random news bites. The major benefit for podcasts in my opinion is that you can consume them when you’re on the move. In addition to that they can also teach you a thing or two about a foreign language, and often they are more interesting than just regular blog posts or articles.
   Suggestions: Hello, my name is PODCAST, Freelancing on Rails
7. People: I would say that all the best programming advice I’ve ever received has come from other, more experienced programmers I’ve worked and talked with. This is an easy way to learn: hang out with geniuses, or well, even regular people who are experts on their field and have a curious mind, and you’re guaranteed to learn something new. Send them e-mail, chat over a cup of coffee, or go for a long walk.
   Suggestions: You can start from easy ones, like your grandpa and gradually start looking for and contacting people who you don’t know yet.
8. TV: Every now and then there are some great documentaries, news flashes and interesting series or movies that can teach you new things or inspire your mind. Some things just are easier to understand when you see the picture and hear the sound, instead of just reading. On the negative side however, you cannot watch the shows when you want to (VCRs are good in this though - if you remember to schedule them), and it’s easy to get stuck to the TV screen and also watch all the nonsensical series that just eat up your time.
   Suggestions: Lonely planet, CSI
9. Discussion forums: When I started game programming as a 15-year-old kid, I first read some books and browsed the Internet for tutorials on C, graphics programming and so on. These were good sources, but pretty soon when trying things myself I ran into trouble: everything didn’t quite go the way I wanted and I sometimes spent hours looking for something I had missed in the tutorial. During these years I learned to trust the Internet community of like-minded people learning the same things as I was. I joined the GameDev.net forums and asked my questions. Pretty soon someone answered and I wasn’t stuck anymore! So, go ahead and do a Google search for a forum on your favorite subject. People are willing to help, just make sure you help them in return at some point.
   Suggestions: GameDev.net, Suomipelit.com
10. Lectures: If you have a possibility to attend university courses, go ahead. At least in Finland it’s free for all to attend lectures, even if you’re not a student. Of course you cannot participate in the exam or any exercise group, but go ahead and listen to what the lecturer has to say.
    Suggestions: Introductory courses in any interesting subject (e.g. programming, psychology or accounting). Also, you should check out MIT’s free online course materials

This was my brief list of great information sources, now let me ask you a question: what are your favorite sources of information?

Image source: stealthtractor @ Flickr

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As a kid I shared a Commodore 64 with my brothers. For a while we had a lot of fun playing games like Giana Sisters, Kickstart or Outrun, but pretty soon the urge to learn how to make the computer do what I tell it to do became irresistible. At the time programming was everywhere, even the operating system was a BASIC interpreter and when you were using the machine you were always running programs. No compilers or any special setup was needed. Even the Commodore 64 user’s manual was teaching how to program using BASIC!

That was more than 15 years ago, and times sure have changed. Getting started with programming is getting harder and harder all the time while the programming languages and environments are made more efficient and productive for the professional minds. The new languages, frameworks and class libraries are great for a seasoned professional, but they raise the bar so high that a 10-year-old kid will likely just click a few buttons and then give up saying: programming is too hard, or that programming is just plain boring.

APPROACHABILITY. That’s what’s missing from today’s programming environments.

A few days ago I bumped into a promising tool called Scratch, created by the Lifelong Kindergarten research group at MIT. Scratch is aimed at children of age 8-16, but if your kids can read, they will probably enjoy Scratch even at a younger age. My newborn is just four days old as I write this so I don’t yet have experience on how well this system really works for the target audience. But my initial impression is that Scratch has a great deal of approachability and it definitely is a step to the right direction in order to get children excited about programming and practicing their logic skills!

To try out Scratch I created a simple space ship duel game. There is no collision detection or scoring mechanism, but otherwise it’s kind of playable already. You can get the game from my Scratch profile page.

The best innovation in Scratch is that no typing and thus no remembering of code structures is required, but the programming is rather done by combining control structures and commands in a Lego-like way. For example, the following image represents the code needed for rotating my space ship left and right:

Really simple, and at least to me also really easy to understand. When we go on adding the logic for moving the space ship it starts to look a bit more like programming. For a professional programmer it was fascinating to see these familiar structures on the screen without any real lines of code. I started even wondering why programming isn’t always like this.

And piece by piece a game was built. Some of the terminology is a bit strange (for example different animation frames are called “costumes”) and there is no object instantiation (to make two space ships I had to copy paste the ship “sprite”). Running the games is a bit slow, but that might be acceptable if we keep in mind that Scratch is meant to be the initial learning tool for programming - and when you collect more experience, you can actually move to real programming languages that then have better performance.

Maybe Scratch isn’t quite today’s Basic, as it’s not as widely available. Nothing really beats having the programming language as a part of the operating system. But on some other aspects I think Scratch is even better: it lets the user concentrate on the programming logic and forget about language details like semicolons at the end of the lines. The logical skills and feelings of success that can be gotten from playing with Scratch are anyway the most valuable parts of programming for kids even if they don’t become programmers when they grow up.

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A beautiful boy was born on the 19th of May, at 3:18 PM. Both the boy and his mother are doing well, and the whole family is trying to get used to real family life. So, in a few days I’ll start slowly posting updates again - but until then, at least now you know the reason for the silence.

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Scott Ginsberg, better known as “That guy with the name tag”, is a 27-year old entrepreneur from St. Louis, Missouri who has built his business by wearing a name tag every day for already 7 years. I must admit: my first thought when I found my way to Scott’s web site was that this guy must be crazy! But I had to find out what’s with the name tag. I spent hours reading his posts just to understand why a person would choose to wear a name tag all the time… And then I found out that he even had tattooed the name tag on his chest! But at the same time I really enjoyed his writing. The more I read the more I began to like this guy. And his words made perfect sense: the name tag makes him more approachable and that in turn makes people around him friendlier!

Scott has written four books and five free e-books. He’s also maintaining a very active blog that is updated nearly every day. The book I just finished was his latest effort, “Make a name for yourself” which was just released on the 1st of May. The book can be bought from Scott’s website or Amazon - but it can also be downloaded as a free e-book. I must confess that because getting the e-book was so easy, I just went on and downloaded it. But now I’m having this enormous urge to go and order the book from Amazon - I’m sure that will happen any time during this or next week… So be warned, if you decide to read the free version, you’ll end up buying the book anyway. It’s just so much easier to grab a physical book from the bookshelf and read a few chapters while making notes.

The book is divided into 55 short chapters that each give you one more tip on personal branding, namely, making a name for yourself. The key point in the book is that your personal brand is created by being honest: letting yourself be who you are and making others see your true self. What’s nice about this approach is that you can easily read just one chapter whenever you have a few minutes of free time at hand: in a bus, at a restaurant, waiting in a queue, and so on. But although you can read the text fast, this book definitely is not fast-food in the sense that you could forget about it quickly. At least for me each chapter is still raising new thoughts and questions forcing me to think about my life and ways to - well - make a name for myself. That’s also why I’m planning to buy the book after all: I’m sure it’ll give me new ideas still after the second or third read-through.

The book is full of great quotes and I’ve already posted some of them occasionally to my tumble log, but here are two of my favorites:

“It’s simple, folks. Write everything down. Everything.”

“How many cover bands have ever been inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?”

Finally, it’s up to you to decide whether this is the right book for you or not. But luckily in this case finding that out couldn’t be any easier. Just get get the free version, read a few chapters and decide for yourself. Then go out and make a name for yourself, before someone else does it for you!

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1. Your life depends on it: Just think about when you were a child. Without your natural curiosity you would never have learned all the skills required for surviving as a grown up human being - and the consequences could have been disastrous! Just think about all the things children need to learn: talking, listening, crawling, walking, jumping, recognising what can be eaten and what cannot, not touching hot objects, not going too close to snakes, driving a bike, saving money, investing on stocks… I could go on for many pages.
2. Your career depends on it: So, you know COBOL? Good for you, but although some years ago it was a modern programming language, most of the programming jobs today are for Java programmers. And soon that’s going to change again: Ruby on Rails is becoming more and more popular, and the next generation is already in the making. There is no more escaping from the fact that the only thing that stays the same in today’s business environment is change. Everything changes, and you are required to be one step ahead - or at least following really close. Being curious and keeping an eye open for all possibilities to improve yourself certainly helps.
3. Your brain depends on it: Most scientists agree that learning does the same to your brain as running or gym training does to the rest of your body. It has been found that a higher level of education lessens the risk of Alzheimer’s and makes the symptoms start later compared to people with little or no education. The Alzheimer’s Association web site’s number one brain health suggestion is perfectly in line with my theme: “Stay curious and involved — commit to lifelong learning”
4. Your understanding depends on it: The more you learn the more you understand about Life, the Universe, and Everything. A wide knowledge on many areas makes you more prepared to receive new information and critically assess it’s quality and importance to you and your goals. You can compare the new information against material that you have accumulated to your mind through a life style of continuous learning and curiosity. This way your curiosity leads you to make wiser decisions and less suffering.
5. Your happiness depends on it: A curious person is rarely - if ever - bored. The smells, the colors, the way how a bus driver controls his car, can all lead to rewarding moments of discovery. For example today I found out that a cucumber is actually a fruit. I had never thought about it before, but discovering it still made my day a bit brighter. Learning is much more fun than your Swedish teachers ever told you in high school!
6. Your social life depends on it: Just admit it, curious people are more interesting than the rest of us. And the reason is actually quite simple: they know more about things, and therefore they can discuss all kinds of topics and usually even bring up some fresh and creative viewpoints to the discussion. Just remember one thing: your girlfriend might not be quite as interested in dinosaurs or new web development platforms as you are - so choose the discussion topics based on the people who you’re talking with. A wise man is more than just a person who knows a lot…

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