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36 Power Up Your Mind

be that the context in which you are answering these questions is
not a good one for you today.
There are two aspects of being emotionally ready: the interior
environment (what’s going on inside your mind) and the exterior
environment (what’s going on outside, in the environment in which
you find yourself). It is comparatively easy to change the latter,
which is covered in the second half of Chapter 3, but more difficult
to alter what is happening inside you.
As psychologist William James puts it:

The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human
beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the
outer aspects of their lives.

CURIOSITY AND EMOTIONAL STATE

There are at least two elements to what may be going on inside your
mind: your curiosity and your emotional state.
While we are all born curious, we seem to lose this instinct
or at least dampen it down as we grow older. A young child will ask
hundreds of questions in a typical day, but an adult asks only a few.
Partly this is because children have a lot to find out and their curios-
ity is consequently very high. Partly, I am afraid to say, it is a result
of the tendency of schools and other formal educational institu-
tions to discourage the inquiring mind in its attempt to gather and
assess knowledge. As American scientist Paul Maclean puts it:

It surprises me how our culture can destroy curiosity in the most curious of
all animals—human beings.

Essentially, curiosity is a natural love of learning. It is the driver for
much of the informal learning that we undertake. We want to find
out how to grow a certain plant, how to cook a new meal, or where
a particular word comes from. We are intrigued and it spurs us on
to do something about it.
Some people seem to be more curious than others. Perhaps