When you walk down the grocery aisle at the store, the magazines on the side seem to always be screaming about some “secret scandal” or “something you didn’t know about [insert star]. For whatever reason, we as humans have a fascination with things that are kept in secret. The more famous the person, the more interesting these things seem to become.
Not only do we like to know the secret things, but we love to know them first. How many times has someone said “I probably shouldn’t tell you this” and you know that they shouldn’t, but you push them to anyway because you’re so curious? We want so badly to know things that we don’t know and we’ll do almost anything to find.
There can be good and bad behind this. Personally, I have a huge fascination about this kind of stuff with large historical figures. Finding out the personal life of those people in history who had the biggest impact. One of the reasons I like Tim Ferriss so much is because he really dives deep at trying to find out what makes big figures in our society tick. What has put them in the places they’re in. Not just the stuff that you can see from the outside, but what only they could tell you.
I remember one of the most interesting experiences I had was listening to an audio book about Kennedy and at one point hearing about how his wife, Jackie, would take smoking breaks between every take of a documentary that was being recorded at the White House. That day, I went online and was able to watch the documentary itself. It’s so interesting for me later to come back and realize that those who saw this documentary would have had no idea that Jackie was such a heavy smoker, and yet it was such a big part of her life.
When you look at the many, many stars in Hollywood, politics, etc. now, you have to realize that many of them have the same things going on in their life, but we may not ever know, or may not know for another 50 years until there’s a documentary that comes out about them.
I believe curiosity can be good. The willingness to ask questions that no one else will, but you also have to be mindful of what people really want to share with you and what they’re sharing just to make you feel good. Also, sometimes when someone says “nevermind” after they start saying something, they mean it for a reason, and you shouldn’t press people to tell you things that they don’t initially. There may be a very good reason why they need to keep it from you.
What are your intentions behind knowing more? How does it benefit your life to know more about things that you didn’t before? Obviously some knowledge is quite good, but we think too often that we’ll always be a better off person knowing more, but that’s simply not always the case.