I'm unconvinced by this article in general. First, I don't really beleive you can become more curious or more smart so the choice between the two is rather acad

I'm unconvinced by this article in general. First, I don't really beleive you can become more curious or more smart so the choice between the two is rather academic. What you can do is mimic smart people and mimic curious people. Reading a book doesn't make you more curious, it skips the part where you're curious and gives you the behaviour of the curious person. Is that enough? I'm not sure. I think it's probably difficult to motivate yourself to behave like a curious person, when you aren't one. It's all well and good to say "read a book" but a curious person reads a book with intention - they want to learn something about a specific thing. For example, I read history books because I'm curious about human nature in society. For the person who isn't curious, they can read the same books but who is to say they're taking the same information from that book as the curious person? I also think however, that there is value in not being curious. The author talks about how someone with a degree may be smart not curious. But actually, it's very valuable for someone with a degree not to be curious in some cases. At some point we draw the line between learning and application, and if you are always learning, always curious, you do literally have the possibility of never using the things you learned. I really enjoyed starting a new job a few years ago- not because I was curious - but because if it offered me the opportunity to get my head down and use all that knowledge I'd accrued. I'm not an incurious person, but curiousity isn't an end in itself.