Following Curiosity Until It Becomes Real Work
Created at: August 24, 2025
Pursue the strange pull of your curiosity; it often leads to real work. — Haruki Murakami
Murakami’s Invitation to Begin
Murakami’s line reframes curiosity as a compass rather than a distraction. The pull feels “strange” because it moves against planned careers and tidy calendars, yet it points toward work that is authentically ours. His own origin story underscores the point: after a quiet epiphany at a 1978 baseball game in Tokyo’s Jingu Stadium, he went home to try writing, drafting at his kitchen table after closing his jazz bar, Peter Cat. Within a year he finished Hear the Wind Sing (1979). As he later reflected in Novelist as a Vocation (2015/2022), the impulse was inexplicable—but following it generated a body of work he could not have engineered by strategy alone.
From Spark to System
However, the quote also hints that curiosity matures into “real work” only when the initial spark gains a system. Murakami describes rising before dawn to write for hours and then running or swimming most afternoons—a steady rhythm that converts fleeting interest into durable craft (What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, 2007). Psychological research names this shift: curiosity creates entry, while sustained practice enables “flow,” the deep absorption where skill and challenge align (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). In other words, play opens the door; routine keeps you inside long enough to build something that matters.
Serendipity’s Track Record
Moving beyond literature, history shows how following odd questions catalyzes breakthroughs. Alexander Fleming’s messy petri dish led to penicillin after he wondered why mold killed bacteria (British Journal of Experimental Pathology, 1929). In a stranger tale, Hennig Brand’s 1669 alchemical experiments yielded phosphorus while he searched for gold. More recently, microbiologist Francisco Mojica’s curiosity about peculiar DNA repeats in salt-loving microbes helped reveal CRISPR’s immune function, paving the way for gene editing (Mojica et al., 2005). These episodes share a pattern: the investigator lingers where most would shrug and move on. That lingering may look impractical at first, yet it often plants the seeds of later, concrete work.
Building a Bridge from Wonder to Work
The bridge from fascination to output is constructed with small, testable commitments. Entrepreneurship research calls this effectuation: start with who you are, what you know, and whom you know, then iterate with affordable losses (Saras Sarasvathy, 2001). Careers grow similarly. Rather than chasing a vague passion, the craftsman mindset asks you to improve rare skills until they create meaning and autonomy (Cal Newport, So Good They Can’t Ignore You, 2012). Thus, curiosity chooses the direction, while repeated, modest bets—drafts, prototypes, field notes—lay down the roadbed beneath your feet.
Embracing the Awkward Middle
Even so, the path will feel uncertain. That is the “strange” in Murakami’s pull: early efforts are ungainly and socially hard to justify. Yet breadth and experimentation can compound into distinctive strengths, as David Epstein argues in Range (2019). The antidote to paralysis is to define games you can win: a weeklong inquiry, a single experiment, a mini-article, a tiny dataset. Each deliverable reduces ambiguity, creates feedback, and nudges curiosity closer to competence. Gradually, the work stops looking odd and starts looking inevitable.
A Simple Way to Start Today
Begin by listing the questions that keep tapping your shoulder, then pick one and schedule a 10-hour sprint across a week. Commit to a tangible output—a memo, sketch, dataset, or demo—and share it with one person who can respond. Treat any positive signal as a cue for a second, slightly larger sprint. This iterative posture mirrors the lean approach to projects (Eric Ries, The Lean Startup, 2011) while honoring the playful origins of inquiry. Over a few cycles, the pull of curiosity and the push of practice converge—and what felt like indulgence becomes, unmistakably, your real work.