I would love to say that I am a lifelong learner, especially here on this site where learning is celebrated. But I can’t say this because that would not be true. Contrary to what you might think, it’s not because I quit learning when I left school, quite the opposite really. In school, I begrudgingly learned the bare minimum to get by and then promptly forgot much of that knowledge.

Look. I’m not blaming the adults. I had some lovely teachers and librarians.

I just wasn’t interested.

It would be very easy to blame my, at the time undiagnosed, ADHD. But I eventually discovered that by following my hyper-curiosities and letting my dopamine-deprived brain lead a little, I could unleash my ravenous passion for learning, reading, and processing new ideas.

I realized in my late teens that curiosity was such a gold mine for the brain-cocktail that I so needed. Not only did curiosity satisfy this need, it had almost only positive side effects rather than the negative ones that my other teen dopamine seeking habits came with. At the end of high school a friend of mine gave me an article from a popular science magazine about quantum physics, other dimensions, and string theory.

It totally blew my mind.

Now I’ll admit, it wasn’t much beyond the classic, trippy science-ish ideas that college kids geek out about. You know the type of fun fact or quandary I’m talking about:“If the universe is everything that exists, but it’s also expanding, what is it expanding into?!”

“How can we be sure that what you think of as the color blue and what I think is the color blue, is actually the same thing!?”

I’ve lived long enough to see actual physicists wince at the simplicity or inaccurate logic of these sorts of questions, but for all their simplicity and scientific shortcomings, I wish I would have been introduced to these “big questions” earlier, or maybe even bigger, better ones! I wish as a kid I had been introduced to the vast sea of what we don’t know, as much as I was schooled in the facts of what we do know.

From my vantage point as a kid, I could only see school, learning, and knowledge as a means to gain something else in the future. A serious grown-up type job. It all seemed important, but not fun.

As an adult with ADHD, I’ve come to see learning less as a means to an end and more as something much more intrinsically related to satisfaction and happiness. This rewarding moment-to-moment focus on curiosity, has allowed me to learn and grow so much more than I ever thought possible.

This idea is at the heart of my latest picture book Mysterious Things that I illustrated and co-wrote with my wife Sophie Miller. It’s the book I wish I had as a kid.I In school I saw books as collections of things we already knew. Solved equations and facts I just had to catch up with. We wanted this new book to be different. Instead of being full of what we know, we wanted to make a book about all the mystery and exciting possibilities of the stuff we don’t know.

This “not knowing” is what unlocked my curiosity when I read that pop-quantum physics article that my friend gave me. It wasn’t discovering the wild stuff we knew, it was being introduced to the paradoxical nature of knowledge itself—and how “the more we know, the more we realize we don’t know.”

I think it’s important to introduce these gaps in knowledge to kids and be open about the doubts that even the experts have, because they have the potential to spark the true engine of lifelong learning: that innate curiosity.

According to research, curiosity may not be what we thought it was. It’s not just a basic human drive for knowledge that we can assume is pre-installed and active in every human being big and small. It’s something that needs to be switched on.

So what switches curiosity on?

Doubt.

Doubt arises when we realize we don’t know as much as we think we do.

This article on the UC Berkeley News site gives a suggestion on how to create the kind of doubt that can unlock kid’s curiosity drive:

“For example, if students are quizzed on what causes climate change, how a bicycle works, or about the U.S. constitutional separation of powers—and realize they only have a partial understanding of how these things work—their curiosity is stimulated, and they’re more open to learning, if only to get it right the next time.

Meanwhile, the subjects we know nothing—or too much—about can prompt disinterest or even boredom.”

I do a version of this exercise in almost every one of my school visits when talking about my book Invisible Things and its new companion Mysterious Things. I ask, “How much of our universe do you think is invisible?” Even though kids are very smart and can guess that I’m asking this because the answer is surprising, they almost never guess high enough. I then reveal that, according to sources like National Geographic, nearly 95% of our universe is invisible!

And when I share this fact, I can see their curiosity switch on. It is a visibly glorious thing!

Now that I’m a parent, who did in fact get a job, I often feel the urge to appear like I have it all figured out. But realizing that doubt sparks that inner drive to learn, in work as a picture book maker and in parenting, I try to remember what I needed to find my own inspiration. I try to share moments of curiosity and wonder with my kids, to help spark natural interests and to be honest about being a grown up. We aren’t know-it-alls. We are all learning and growing. And this world around us is infinite and mysterious!