Yara Shahidi

Do you remember how big the world felt when we were younger?

Because my childhood was filled with time travel and adventures.

I sat in awe of how flowers grew from a simple seed.

I remember looking up at the sky and wondering, was the earth moving, was the sun moving, or was I moving?

And I filled the rest of the time by reading books about fantasy lands.

But slowly, the time travel and adventures of my youth became using my GPS to figure out how much traffic I'd inevitably be sitting in.

The flowers became the screensaver to my laptop I spent way too much time on.

I only saw the sunrise when pulling all-nighters to get work done.

And those fantasy lands, well, those became essays and articles from underfunded newspapers.

And yeah, some of this is just a part of growing up, necessary even, but I realized the imaginative and creative forces that drove me had less and less space to thrive in my young adult life.

And in being forced to look at the world as it is, I was missing out on the opportunity to look at the world as it could be.

Now, more than ever, we live in a world that requires of us an imagination so that we can envision what could be different.

And while I didn't come prepared today to answer the world's largest problems, I would like to make a case for how one tool can help us continue to build new worlds and find our place in it.

Curiosity.

I don't have any fancy graphs to show you all today, but I would like to think that I'm sort of an expert in the field, as my entire life has been a case study and following my curiosities.

It started super simple.

My grampy and I would reimagine and act out the entire saga of the Odyssey with my Polly Pocket dolls, as one does at the age of four.

And around the age of five, I asked for every religious book.

I mean, every religious book.

Fast-forwarding to 13, I read my first short story from the formidable James Baldwin, and my life was forever changed.