I love doors and the secrets contained behind doors.

When I was younger, my brothers would often say how much I resembled DeeDee from Dexter’s Laboratory (did any of you watch the cartoon?)

To those of you who didn’t watch it, let me give you a brief background. Dexter was a boy genius who had a laboratory under his bedroom where he would perform his scientific experiments. DeeDee was his sister, who was a ballerina and she would often go to his laboratory and press things and ruin his experiments.

Being as curious as I am, I am often faced with a dilemma…”what does this button do?” and as you may have guessed I push the button and something happens, which is never a good “something”

When I was at university, after uni was done for the day, my friends and I went to a corner shop to buy some snacks. In that shop there was a coffee machine and I thought it was quite cool. In hindsight I’m not really sure why I was so fascinated by that machine. Unfortunately it had a lot of buttons. As my friends were paying, I pressed one of the buttons and I was extremely shocked as I saw the coffee/milk combination started coming out of the machine and there being no cup to hold it in, it was over the shelf of chocolates below the machine.

For some bizarre reason I thought that nothing would happen if I pressed the button because I didn’t pay for the coffee. I thought it was one of those that until you pay for the coffee (payment being in the machine itself) the coffee would not pour out. I was so embarrassed I actually said “Oh my God, what is happening” and I ran out.

I felt incredibly guilty though, not only did I waste a perfectly good cup of coffee, I also wasted all those chocolates under the machine, which would have become complete mush because of the hot coffee. I gathered up the courage and went back to the corner shop a few hours later, so that I could pay for the damages and apologise for my mistake. After my incessant persistence to pay him back, he told me it was completely ok and refused to take my money, he was just happy that I bothered to come back to apologise. I do still feel slightly guilty.

Oddly enough I don’t feel curious about doors that much. I’ve never really wondered what’s behind a door.Maybe because it’s impolite to be nosey, regardless of how my curiosity gets the best of me. I guess this is a prime example of my selective curiosity. I’m curious to see what will happen when I press something but not curious to see what’s behind a door.

I read a quote today which is the inspiration for this post “If opportunity doesn’t know, build a door” by Milton Berle. I like the idea behind that. We are responsible for making our own dreams come true by creating our own opportunities.

How can we create our own opportunities? Well having pondered over this question for the past twenty minutes, here are some ideas (in no particular order, though I think number 5 is the most important):

1. Depending on what you want to do, I would suggest doing research and finding out everything there is to know about that subject;
2. Put yourself out there, we live in an age of social media and internet and it’s become vastly easier to market ourselves;
3. be consistent, I guess what I mean by that is, have a routine and stick to it, even if you’re tired (this one is tough for me, I am unable to stick to a routine, so the fact that I’m still writing a post almost everyday is such an achievement on my end);
4. Put some time aside to just clear your mind and let your creativity flow through and you can be creative in everything you do, in my opinion creativity is what makes you different from the rest; and lastly
5. be patient.

Patience is key and also the most difficult thing to conquer.

Right, I think I’m going to watch some Dexter’s Laboratory before bed.

Goodnight all you beautiful people. 🙂

Selectively Curious©