Why Being Curious Will ALWAYS Be Positive 😄

🎉 This is my first article in the DEV community, yeay! I hope you will like it. Have a good reading! 🎉

I've always been a pretty curious person in life, and it's always been beneficial to me.

Before explaining how being curious is always positive, let's look back at my personal story.

My username is Olyno. I am a french young developer who (at the time of writing this post) is currently studying web development. From a very young age, I have always been interested in what surrounds me (even if I don't always show it 😅). Whether it is animals, plants, politics, high tech and so on. In short, a life of curiosity. We will come back to a concrete examples of my life later in the post.

But what did it bring me to be so curious?

Imagine you are young, imagine you are 6 years old, and you see a dispute between a young adult and his father. This one sees his son smoking. He preaches him that it was bad for his health because it destroyed his lungs in the long term and that he was still young, that he had his whole life ahead of him. His son tells him that he is of age and can do whatever he wants with his life and that he pays for cigarettes with his money anyway.

In this example, we will not try to find out who is right and who is wrong, but just what we have learned by listening out of curiosity to this conversation:

• Smoking damages the lungs over the long term
• Smoking reduces life time
• You have to pay for cigarettes
• You must be of legal age to obtain cigarettes
• We are responsible for our actions

In the end, at the age of 6, you have already learned 5 new things that can be useful to you later. That's what curiosity is for: in the long term.

Let's come back to the theme of programming. You like to program (or start in). You are researching new languages to learn on Google and BOOM you have just been curious and have potentially seen a TOP 7 of the current trend languages with their quick descriptions on many blogs or websites. So you have learned:

• The name of 7 popular programming languages
• What is the preferred language of the moment
• What language could you possibly use

To come back a little bit on my life (yes I like to tell my life 🙃), I was interested in programming at a very young age (at the age of 12). So I did a lot of research at that level and learned a LOT of things (including the DEV community, hi 😄). This year I started my studies in web. In my school, the "teachers" (interveners) start from the basics. You must then ask yourself: "But don't you mind starting over from the basics when you already know them? And that's where curiosity comes in. By focusing on the courses, we review the basics, and potentially points that were not clear to us or that we had simply forgotten.

The fact is, I have more experience than my classmates.

Another anecdote

As a programming research fanatic, I discovered many new technologies, including Svelte and Flutter. None of the people I see in my school (except for rare students and practitioners) are familiar with these tools. However, these are emerging tools that are likely to take a very important place in companies in the coming years. Learning these technologies early gives us an advantage over other developers and especially over the labour market.

Yet another anecdote (a little long I'll give you that)

One day, a 3rd grade student saw me code one of my many personal projects in my corner, and told me "you don't have the code level of a 1st grade, even the students in my class don't know how to do what you do". On that day, an event took place in the school bringing together several companies and a few students who had been selected in advance by the management. So not all the students were invited. The words of this 3rd year had motivated me (being vulnerable to flattery as I am). Despite the repeated refusals of my director to participate in this event, but considering myself a strong, beautiful, magnificent 3rd year, etc... after these fine words, I still participated in this event.

What were the consequences?

I was summoned a few days later and almost got a warning (being a first year probably saved me). Anyway, this intrusion allowed me to:

• contact many companies
• discover the requests and offers on the web market
• how this event was organized, so that I could prepare myself for the next one.
• that I was staying a freshman year somehow

A few days ago, a desperate 3rd year student (if I'm not mistaken) was looking for a Web Design internship. That's how I was able to give him some companies that were looking for Web Designs.

Conclusion

Being curious often has a positive side behind it and gives you a long-term advantage. Anyway, you risk:

• talk too much (not necessarily about the common sense of the term)
• take the big head very easily
• get warnings and sanctions (only in my anecdote ahahah)

As a good DEV, know how to stay curious, that's how you will progress in life.

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