EXPLORATION: Why We Seek Out Big Challenges

LinkedIn presents. I'm Caleb Bissinger and this is the next big idea. Today, why you were born to explore. When I was in sixth grade, we did this thing called the Explorers Project. Every kid in the class was assigned a adventurer from the age of discovery.

I got Captain James Cook, and we spent weeks just learning everything we could about them. Thirty years later, that classroom project is still my anchor when I think about what it means to be an explorer. I picture swashbuckling rogues, hobbled by peg legs and scurvy, greedily sailing into uncharted waters. But Alex Hutchinson has a different definition.

When I'm talking about exploring, I'm talking about something that involves making a choice so that you're you're taking an uncertain pathway. You don't know what the outcome is going to be, which inherently means that there is the possibility of failure. You're putting something at risk, you're taking a chance and you don't know how it's going to turn out. In his new book, The Explorer's Gene, why we seek big challenges, new flavors, and the blank spots on the map, Alex marshalls the latest findings in anthropology, neuroscience, and biology to show that you don't have to be Columbus or Earhart to call yourself an explorer. The itch for the new is hardwired into all of us, and we can satisfy it in ways both big,

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