There are two interrelated traits that are common to all the innovators I’ve written about. The first of these is curiosity—pure and passionate and playful curiosity about everything. Like Benjamin Franklin, as a teenager, going over to England for the first time and measuring the water in the ocean because he’s trying to figure out how does the Gulf Stream work. Or Leonardo da Vinci, my favorite, who in his notebooks writes things in the margins like “Describe the tongue of the woodpecker.”
