Study everything: Curiosity as the engine of meaning

The nature of knowledge

Most people imagine the mind as a container: you put information in, and when it gets full, something else falls out. But that isn’t how memory works, and it certainly isn’t how learning works. The mind is a network. Every new skill or idea doesn’t fill space — it adds structure. Once it’s there, it changes the shape of everything that comes after it.

Learning doesn’t fill space — it shapes it. Each sketch is a node in a network of understanding.

A new skill is not just something you know. It’s something you can use. It becomes leverage.

When you learn drawing, you also learn to see.
When you learn design, you learn hierarchy and clarity.
When you learn photography, you learn composition and timing.
When you learn programming, you learn systems and constraints.

None of these skills stay isolated. They reinforce one another. They become lenses — ways of perceiving and evaluating the world. And once a lens sharpens your perception, you cannot return to the world you saw before. The learning is irreversible. There is no fixed limit. The more you learn, the easier learning becomes, because new knowledge has somewhere to attach. The network grows denser. Retrieval strengthens. Insight accelerates.

Knowledge is not stored information. Knowledge is stored capability.

The question, then, is not how much you know, but how many capabilities you’ve integrated into how you think.

Everything is connected

School presents the world as a set of separate disciplines: math, literature, physics, art, history. Neatly labelled, neatly divided, quietly implying that each belongs in its own box. Reality is nothing like that. The world is one continuous system. Every field influences every other. Creativity doesn’t happen inside a discipline — it happens between them. When I moved from art to photography, then to design, and later to development, I wasn’t starting over each time. I was rotating through the same landscape from different angles. I didn’t always stay with each field consistently. Interests shift with circumstance and need. I recognized something interesting happening whenever I returned to a discipline after a break: after the initial rust wore off, I found that I hadn’t merely retained the skill — it had evolved. My illustrations began to feel more cinematic because photography had taught me to think in light and framing. My code became easier to structure because design had taught me clarity and hierarchy. My compositions improved because storytelling had taught me what matters in a scene. Each field sharpened the others. When knowledge is isolated, progress slows. Every field eventually runs into questions it can’t answer alone. Neil deGrasse Tyson captured this perfectly:

“There is no true understanding of biology without chemistry. And there’s no true understanding of chemistry without physics.”
—Neil deGrasse Tyson

Not because chemists should become physicists, but because the deepest truths don’t belong to one domain. They reveal themselves at the intersection of many. You start to see patterns beneath the surface. The same principles appearing in different forms. The same logic echoing across mediums and disciplines. Understanding expands fastest when you treat knowledge as a single, interconnected system — not a catalogue of unrelated parts. Creativity is not a spark. It is a synthesis.

The strength of your ideas equals to the diversity of your inputs

Ideas do not appear from nowhere. They are assembled. Every thought you have is shaped by the patterns you have already absorbed. If your influences are narrow, your ideas become predictable. When a developer only studies frameworks, they build framework-shaped solutions. When a designer only studies design, they produce tasteful variations of what already exists. Refinement without surprise. Originality requires cross-pollination. When you combine domains, your internal vocabulary expands. You stop thinking in terms of tools and begin thinking in terms of possibilities. A problem you cannot solve as a developer may be trivial if you approach it as a writer, or a painter, or a systems thinker. The solution doesn’t come from “trying harder”. It comes from switching the lens. Once UI is often perceived from the outside as a UI kit — a collection of components and screens. But that was never the point. It emerged from drawing, photography, design systems, writing, and the attempt to build worlds. The visible surface is structure; the invisible core is philosophy. The thing that makes it what it is did not come from one field, but from the conversation between them. Breakthroughs don’t come from brilliance — they come from blending. The more varied the inputs, the richer the connections you are able to form. And the richer the connections, the more naturally originality emerges — not as a performance, but as a consequence of how you think.

When these inputs accumulate, something subtle begins to happen.You stop deliberately applying what you’ve learned — and it becomes the way your mind operates.

Real learning is integration, not memorization

School trains you to recall. Reality rewards you for embodiment. Memorized knowledge sits on the surface of the mind. It can be repeated, but not used creatively. Integrated knowledge sinks into the nervous system. It becomes automatic — a way of moving, deciding, perceiving, without conscious effort.

~80 bits/sunconscious

~11M bits/sconscious

The conscious mind is slow. It can only hold about 40–120 bits of information per second — just enough to think a sentence or plan a small action. The unconscious mind processes around 11 million bits per second. It handles pattern recognition, timing, coordination, intuition — all the things that feel “natural” once a skill is integrated. This is why real learning doesn’t happen when you’re thinking hard. It happens afterward, when the skill sinks below awareness and begins to run on its own. Integration is not repetition — it is transfer. A skill becomes real only when the brain stops trying to remember it, and starts being it. I learned this first through my hands. In high school I became obsessed with Japanese pen-spinning. For weeks my fingers fumbled through movements that felt impossible. Then, gradually, the motion stopped being something I was trying to do. It began doing itself. The skill had migrated out of thought and into muscle. That is what integration feels like.

Years later I realized the same process happens intellectually. I have always been terrible at memorising details: facts, dates, even the plots of films I love. But when I revisit old notes, I find the ideas there have already shaped how I think — even if I have no memory of the moment they entered. The mind absorbed them, metabolised them, and wove them into perspective. That is learning in the only sense that matters. A skill becomes real when you no longer have to remember it. You inhabit it. You think from it, not about it.

Memorization builds scaffolding. Integration builds identity.
—
Lorant

And once something becomes part of who you are, it does not need effort to maintain. It reinforces itself. It extends itself. It compounds. Learning, then, is not a task. It is a gradual re-organization of the self.

Talent is sensitivity cultivated over time

We often speak about talent as if it were a rare inheritance — something a few people simply have from the beginning. But what we call talent is almost never innate. It is a sensitivity that has been sharpened by attention, care, and return. Curiosity is the seed of every long-term craft. Not passion, not confidence, not even discipline in the strict sense — but the quiet pull toward something you cannot quite explain. Something you keep circling back to, even when life shifts, even when your interests expand or collapse for a while. When you follow that pull, the skill deepens. And as it deepens, it becomes easier to stay with it. Curiosity reinforces itself when rewarded with small progress. Progress invites more curiosity. Over time, this forms a feedback loop — a self-sustaining rhythm of learning. This is why people appear “naturally gifted”. Not because they began ahead, but because they continued where others stopped. And because they continued, something subtle happens: their curiosity starts to reach outward. It begins to pull in related skills, adjacent tools, concepts from neighboring fields. You learn drawing, and suddenly composition makes photography easier. You learn design, and clarity begins to guide your writing. You step into programming, and your intuition for structure changes the way you organize ideas everywhere else. New skills do not replace what came before — they expand the center of who you are. The question is not "What am I naturally good at?" That question freezes you at the beginning, where you know the least.

The real question is: What am I drawn to strongly enough that I am willing to return to it?

Once you find that, every project becomes a small extension beyond the current boundary. Not a reinvention, not a dramatic transformation — just a gentle reach outward. A step just beyond where your knowledge ends. And as you repeat that process, what was once unfamiliar becomes natural. What was once effort becomes expression. What once required thought becomes instinct. Talent is not a gift. It is curiosity sustained long enough to become identity. And all of this becomes even more important in the age we are entering.

In the age of AI, curiosity is the new superpower

We are entering a time when knowledge is no longer scarce. What once required years of study can now be retrieved in seconds. A model can generate an explanation, a summary, a structure, even a draft of a solution. But the ability to produce output is not the same as the ability to understand meaning. AI can execute. AI can recombine. AI can predict. But AI cannot care. It cannot decide what matters. It cannot form intention. It cannot choose a direction. The value shifts to the human who initiates, not the one who reacts. To the one who asks the question, not the one who stores the answer. To the one who can see what is missing, not the one who can reproduce what exists. As tools become more powerful, the difference between people becomes clearer:

Those who wait for instructions
And those who compose

To direct the machine, you need curiosity — the impulse to explore beyond what is given. You need perspective — a sense of which ideas matter and which paths are empty. You need taste — the capacity to recognize the difference between noise and signal. These are not technical skills. They are ways of perceiving. The future will not belong to the person with the most information in their head. It will belong to the person who knows how to think, how to connect, how to assign meaning.

The machine can solve, but it cannot choose what to solve.That part is still ours.
—
Lorant

Learning is easy when you don’t try to reinvent what we already know

Innovation is difficult and rare. It requires pushing into territory where no map exists, where no structure has been established. It demands patience, stamina, and a tolerance for uncertainty. But re-discovering what has already been discovered demands the same effort — without any of the reward. When I was studying art, I often heard people say: “I don’t want to copy others. I want to find my own style.” Or: “That’s not wrong. I’m inventing my own way.” But what was actually happening was a refusal to learn the fundamentals that painters, sculptors, illustrators, and draftsmen have refined for centuries. Instead of standing on proven structure, they were starting from zero — every time. And so they circled in place. If you want to draw a head, you could struggle for years to “figure it out” by observation alone. Or you could learn the Loomis or Riley head construction methods in an afternoon, and start at eighty percent immediately. The point is not imitation — the point is leverage. Learning should feel like entering a conversation that has already been happening for a long time. Not like being alone in the dark. And today, that conversation is easier to enter than ever. When you want to learn something new, begin with a question that orients you:

What are the three most important things I need to know about photography as a beginner?

Light creates mood — learn to notice where it comes from and how soft or harsh it is.
Composition is intention — decide what the subject is and remove the rest.
Emotion matters more than perfection — a technically “imperfect” photo with meaning is stronger than a flawless one with none.

Then you apply it in context:

There’s a beautiful rainbow from my window. How should I capture it?

Focus on the rainbow and leave out everything unnecessary
Try different zooms to see which one works best
Expose softly to preserve atmosphere

You move from information → orientation → application in minutes. You are not memorizing. You are integrating. We have crossed into a time where knowledge is abundant and retrieval is instant. This does not make learning less meaningful — it changes what learning is. Lastly: feedback. This used to be the hardest part of learning due to scarcity. Now, the feedback loop is available instantly, whenever you need it. Simply show your attempt and ask:

How can I improve this? What should I try next?

Straighten the horizon
Leave out the tree in the foreground
If you have a telephoto lens, try a closer crop

How does it look now?

Excellent. Now try cropping a bit from the left to shift the rainbow off-center. It creates a stronger composition by giving the scene more visual movement. After that, add a touch of contrast and a bit of vibrance to elevate the image without pushing saturation.

The advantage no longer belongs to those who can store the most. It belongs to those who can ask, connect, and apply the fastest. Your mind is no longer limited to what fits inside your head. It extends into the tools you use, the questions you ask, and the conversations you are willing to have with the world. You don’t need to learn alone anymore. You just need to know how to begin.

Learning is finding balance within ourselves regardless of the noise

We spend so much of life thinking learning is a race — something to finish, something to prove. But the longer I’ve been on this path, the clearer it becomes that learning is simply the process of becoming more able to see. The world does not change. We do. With every skill absorbed, every idea integrated, every perspective taken seriously, our perception shifts just a little — and what once felt opaque becomes legible. The patterns reveal themselves. The connections surface. The complexity feels less overwhelming, and more like something alive that we’re slowly learning to converse with. The tools we have now ensure we no longer have to make that journey alone. Knowledge is not distant anymore. It’s something you can reach for in an instant, shape to your context, and refine with feedback as you go. The work is not to know everything. The work is to stay open enough to keep learning — in small steps, consistently, with curiosity intact. The rest takes care of itself. Skills deepen. Patterns merge. The center expands. You wake up one day realizing that everything you’ve learned has been quietly stacking, one layer at a time, forming a way of seeing that is unmistakably your own. The journey is still unfolding.

If this piece resonated, share it forward. Every time curiosity spreads, understanding grows. You can support my work by getting a fragment from my store — a small token of the journey we’re all taking toward meaning and mastery.

A mind in motion — Notebook

Hold the moment — Tee

Sagittarius A* — Paper print