Richard Saul Wurman on his obsession with lifelong learning

Submitted by GlimmerGuy on 08/25/2009 – 3:23 pmAdd comment

The founder of TED talks about designing a life so that “every day is interesting.”

Richard Saul Wurman is best known for creating the TED Conference. But it is far from his only accomplishment. Wurman has been an architect, designer, teacher—and a very prolific author, having written more than 80 books. In his 1989 classic Information Anxiety, he coined the now widely-used term “information architecture.” During his days as a design teacher, Wurman preached that the biggest design challenge didn’t involve a house or a toaster, but designing your own life. “If we are able to design our lives,” Wurman has written, “wouldn’t the best result—the best measure of success ultimately—be that every day is interesting?” By that standard, Wurman’s own life clearly qualifies as a successful design. When I interviewed Wurman for GLIMMER, our conversation focused on the value of “asking stupid questions,” the importance of filling up buckets, and the real reason why TED came into being. Excerpts from that conversation follow.

I am both confident and terrified all the time. These are two emotions you’re not supposed to have. If you’re terrified, you’re called a scaredy cat. And if you’re confident, you’re called arrogant. But both of them working at the same time in parallel allows you to get at ideas and puts the edginess on your solutions. The terror of not knowing is where you begin, and you move backwards toward zero to find how to begin. And confidence allows you to begin. If those two emotions are out of balance, you’re not such a good designer.

When you start a project you want to understand what it’s like not to understand. That’s terrifying. But it actually helps not to know because it allows you to ask the most fundamental questions. It is good to be practiced in the art of being stupid. I know more about my ignorance than you know about your ignorance. We’re taught in school that you’re really a good student if you raise your hand and answer questions. Wrong! You’re a really good student if you ask the good questions. Because keep in mind: The person who answers a question learns nothing.

The same is true in a business meeting. Every time someone goes to a meeting they try to look smart. You should really try to look stupid, because by saying ‘I don’t know’ you show you have enough confidence to admit that. And that you’re really interested in learning more.

My definition of learning is as follows: Learning is remembering what you’re interested in. Think about that. If you don’t remember it, then you haven’t learned it. You may take a course during your schooling, and might do well in it, but you don’t remember what was taught. On the other hand, you may have also taken courses you didn’t do as well in—but you were interested in the subject, and you remember everything about it. I think interest, absolutely, goes hand in hand with learning.

If that is so, our entire educational system is fucked. Because it consists of the memorization of things you’re not interested in, which are then put on a piece of paper called a test and forgotten.

TED was designed to give people permission to be interested in whatever they wanted to be interested in. People who came saw how ecumenical my interests were, and they thought ‘Why the hell does he have this person onstage or that person? There must be some pattern to it.’ And I never told anybody what that pattern was.

The goal in starting TED was not to bring people together—who cares about that. I wanted other people to pay so that I could listen to interesting people talk. I sat on the stage the whole time and they talked to me. The goal was to take myself from not knowing to knowing, again and again—so that I could have that experience for as much time as I can throughout my life.

Making things understandable to yourself and happenstantially to others is what civilization is all about. What is more basic? Why did they do cave paintings? They were trying to make something understandable to themselves and others. I can’t imagine a life that is devoid of that. A life where you’re not trying to come in contact with those things that you’re curious about and don’t understand. I’m more curious now than ever.

All the books I do—whether they’re about healthcare or the Olympics or pets—they all have something in common. Each one is on a subject I find interesting but that I don’t understand. And I can’t find anything out there to make it understandable myself—and so I set out to make it understandable to myself. Not to others, but to myself.

Here’s how I do it. You imagine yourself as an empty vessel. I know that sounds like Zen shit. But I really start by saying I don’t understand anything, the bucket is empty. So what is the first thing I should put in that bucket? And you put things into the bucket until it is full—until you truly understand this thing you’re trying to understand. The way I know that I truly understand something is if I can explain it to another human being.