Cause of misjudgment № 6
Curiosity Tendency
A built-in drive to learn — the rare tendency that is mostly a force for good, helping counteract the others if you cultivate it.
Most of Munger’s tendencies are failure modes — built-in habits that lead us into error. Curiosity is the conspicuous exception: a natural drive that, when developed, makes you smarter, helps you have more fun, and partly inoculates you against the other tendencies. He noted that the great civilizations, starting with the Greeks, deliberately nurtured curiosity, and that the modern research university institutionalized it on a scale never seen before.
The practical value is that a curious person keeps learning long after formal schooling ends, and keeps asking “why” instead of accepting the convenient answer. Munger’s own life was the example: a man who read constantly across history, biology, physics, and psychology, and who attributed much of his success to being, in his words, a “learning machine” who went to bed each night a little wiser than he woke up. Almost none of that reading was required of him; curiosity drove it.
The reason this counts as a defense against the rest of the list is that the other tendencies thrive on ignorance and the urge to stop thinking. Curiosity does the opposite — it keeps the inquiry open, pulls in information from many disciplines, and resists the easy closure that doubt-avoidance and inconsistency-avoidance push you toward. It is the one tendency you should consciously try to strengthen rather than guard against.
