Brian Grazer - A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life

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ALSO PRODUCED BY BRIAN GRAZER

FILM

A Beautiful Mind

Frost/Nixon

8 Mile

The Da Vinci Code

The Doors

Made in America

Rush

American Gangster

Inside Man

Friday Night Lights

Dr. Seuss How the Grinch Stole Christmas!

Apollo 13

Blue Crush

Liar Liar

The Nutty Professor

Parenthood

Splash

TELEVISION

The 84th Academy Awards

Friday Night Lights

Sports Night

Arrested Development

Parenthood

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Copyright 2015 by Brian Grazer

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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition April 2015

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Interior design by Joy OMeara

Jacket design by Jason Heuer

Jacket image by Jeff Koons

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Grazer, Brian, 1953

A curious mind : the secret to a bigger life / Brian Grazer, Charles Fishman.

pages cm

Summary: From Academy Awardnominated producer Brian Grazer and acclaimed business journalist Charles Fishman comes a brilliantly entertaining peek into the weekly curiosity conversations that have inspired Grazer to create some of Americas favorite and iconic movies and television showsfrom to A Beautiful Mind . For decades, film and TV producer Brian Grazer has scheduled a weekly curiosity conversation with an accomplished stranger. From scientists to spies, and adventurers to business leaders, Grazer has met with anyone willing to answer his questions for a few hours. These informal discussions sparked the creative inspiration behind many of Grazers movies and TV shows, including Splash , , A Beautiful Mind , Apollo 13 , Arrested Development , 8 Mile , J. Edgar , and many others. A Curious Mind is a brilliantly entertaining, fascinating, and inspiring homage to the power of inquisitiveness and the ways in which it deepens and improves us. Whether youre looking to improve your management style at work or you want to become a better romantic partner, this bookand its lessons on the power of curiositycan change your lifeProvided by publisher.

1. Curiosity. 2. Creative thinking. 3. Self-actualization (Psychology) I. Fishman, Charles, 1961 II. Title.

BF323.C8G73 2015

153.8dc23

2014032967

ISBN 978-1-4767-3075-2

ISBN 978-1-4767-3079-0 (ebook)

For my Grandma Sonia Schwartz.

Starting when I was a boy, she treated every question I asked as valuable.

She taught me to think of myself as curious, a gift that has served me every day of my life.

INTRODUCTION

I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.

Albert Einstein

IT SEEMS LIKE A GOOD idea to start a book about curiosity by asking an obvious question:

Whats a guy like me doing writing a book about curiosity?

Im a movie and TV producer. I live immersed in the most densely populated epicenter of entertainment in the world: Hollywood.

Whatever picture you have of the life of a Hollywood movie producer, Ive probably lived it. We often have ten or more movies and TV shows in production at a time, so work means meeting with actors, writers, directors, musicians. The phone callswith agents, producers, studio heads, starsstart well before I reach the office, and often follow me home in the car. I fly to the movie sets, I screen the trailers, I go to the red-carpet premieres.

My days are hectic, theyre overscheduled, theyre sometimes frustrating. Usually, theyre great fun. Theyre never dull.

But Im not a journalist or a professor. Im not a scientist. I dont go home at night and research psychology as a secret hobby.

Im a Hollywood producer.

So what am I doing writing a book about curiosity?

Without curiosity, none of this would have happened.

More than intelligence or persistence or connections, curiosity has allowed me to live the life I wanted.

Curiosity is what gives energy and insight to everything else I do. I love show business, I love telling stories. But I loved being curious long before I loved the movie business.

For me, curiosity infuses everything with a sense of possibility. Curiosity has, quite literally, been the key to my success, and also the key to my happiness.

And yet, for all the value that curiosity has brought to my life and my work, when I look around, I dont see people talking about it, writing about it, encouraging it, and using it nearly as widely as they could.

Curiosity has been the most valuable quality, the most important resource, the central motivation of my life. I think curiosity should be as much a part of our culture, our educational system, our workplaces, as concepts like creativity and innovation.

Thats why I decided to write a book about curiosity. It made my life better (and still does). It can make your life better too.

I AM CALLED A movie producerI even call myself thatbut really what I am is a storyteller. A couple of years ago, I started thinking about curiosity as a value I wanted to share, a quality I wanted to inspire in other people. I thought, What Id really like to do is sit down and tell a few stories about what curiosity has done for me.

Id like to tell stories about how curiosity has helped me make movies. Id like to tell stories about how curiosity has helped me be a better boss, a better friend, a better businessman, a better dinner guest.

Id like to tell stories about the sheer joy of discovery that open-ended curiosity offers. Thats the kind of joy we have as kids when we learn things just because were curious. You can keep doing that as an adult, and its just as much fun.

The most effective way to pass on these storiesto illustrate the power and variety of curiosityis to write them down.

So thats what youre holding in your hand. I teamed up with journalist and author Charles Fishman, and over the course of eighteen months, we talked two or three times a weekweve had more than a hundred conversations, every one of them about curiosity.

I know very well how important curiosity has been to my life. As youll see in the coming chapters, I long ago figured out how to be systematic about using curiosity to help me tell stories, to help me make good movies, to help me learn about parts of the world far from Hollywood. One of the things Ive done for thirty-five years is sit down and have conversations with people from outside show businesscuriosity conversations with people immersed in everything from particle physics to etiquette.