What the dog saw
Why is a two year old so terrible?
Because she is systematically testing the fascinating and, to her, utterly novel notion that something that gives her pleasure might not actually give someone else pleasure and the truth is that as adults we never lose that fascination.
What is the first thing that we want to know when we meet someone who is a doctor at a social occasion? It isn’t “What do you do?”. We know, sort of, what a doctor does. Instead we want to know what it means to be with sick people all day long. We want to know what it feels like to be a doctor, because we’re quite sure that it doesn’t feel at all like what it means to sit at a computer all day long or teach school, or sell cars. Such questions are not dumb or obvious.
Curiosity about the interior life of other peoples day to day work is one of the most fundamental of human impulses, and that same impulse is what led to writing you now hold in your hands.
Malcolm Gladwell (Quoted by Tim Davey)
