Of Explorers and Scientists

The Explorer

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In my mental model, the explorer is the type of learner who dives headfirst into the unknown, embracing uncertainty as part of the process.

“If you’re exploring the unknown, by definition, you don’t know where you’re going.”

I will take the example of Marco Polo as prototypical explorer.

Polo, an Italian merchant from the 13th century, travelled the Silk Road from his hometown of Venice, crossing all of Asia and eventually reaching the Pacific Ocean near Japan. His incredible journey, which lasted around 25 years, is documented in his book, “Il Milione”¹.

Polo encountered many things that were so radically different from the reality of Europe that neither he nor his contemporaries in Venice fully understood their significance. For instance, he described paper money (which Europe wouldn’t see until four centuries later), coal used as fuel (a century later), eyeglasses (two centuries later), gunpowder for military use (one century later), and postal services (two centuries later). As a result, Polo was often accused of embellishing his stories, and legend has it that his dying words were: “I did not write half of what I saw, for I knew I would not be believed”.

Like Marco Polo, the learner who uses the explorer archetype ventures into the unknown and - by definition - doesn’t know where they are going. Consequently, resourcefulness is a key asset for this kind of learning and the learner-explorer is bound to do many serendipitous discoveries, sometimes being unable to fully appreciate their depth or implications, due to a lack of context.

Out of the metaphor, examples of learning as an explorer could be things like:

• buying a kayak and just figuring out how to paddle on your own,

• partaking in a boot-camp for coding without having ever programmed in your life,

• leaving for a hitch-hiking trip in a country you never visited before.

The Scientist

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By contrast, the scientist is the archetype who seeks new knowledge by validating their hypothesis through rigorous testing.

Rather than venturing in the depth of the unknown, they methodically probe just beyond the boundary of what has already been thoroughly mapped.

“if you do not know where you are going, you will probably end up somewhere else”

I will take the example of Marie Curie as prototypical scientist.

Curie was a Polish-born French scientist. She was the first woman to win a Nobel prize. In fact she is among the handful of people who won it twice and - as 2026 - she remains the only person who won it in two different scientific fields.

Curie discoveries built upon each other: intrigued by Uranium, she wanted to see if other elements shared the same characteristics, and in doing so she discovered Polonium and shortly after Radium, thus winning the Nobel prize for the discovery of radioactivity in 1903. However, Radium is a very difficult element to work with, and her work on the method to isolate it and the study of its compounds were exceptional enough to make her win the Nobel prize in Chemistry in 1911. A few years later Curie used her knowledge of radioactivity and radioactive materials to pioneer medical radiography, going as far as building and operating mobile units on the front of WWI.

Like Marie Curie, the learner who uses the scientist archetype is extremely deliberate about the direction they follow. Their strengths is intentionality, and through it they often do incremental discoveries that contribute to a deeper understanding of the topic they are focusing on.

Out of the metaphor, examples of learning as a scientist could be things like:

• learning to swim crawl if you already master backstroke,

• deep diving into wood turning after your learnt traditional wood working,

• reading an anthropological study of a different culture.

Two to Tango

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In my years as an educator, I observed that people have a favourite archetype they use by default, and that they rarely switch to the other one on their own accord.

However, my working hypothesis is that a deliberate effort to embrace both ways of learning, yields better results. That is: the combination of an explorer’s serendipitous discovery with the depth of a scientist’s understanding of it, yields a more complete knowledge and a deeper understanding.

In particular, I am not advocating for an approach that some could call “balanced”: I find that there is very little to gain from an explorer who won’t go further than their backyard, or a scientist who’ll only play with a junior chemistry set.

What I am advocating for, is developing the capacity to efficiently switch between archetypes and moving seamlessly from passionate exploration to methodical lab work at a moment’s notice (and vice-versa). In fact, one could see this model as the opposite of balanced: the middle point between the two archetypes is not the local minimum (where the system naturally balances) but the local maximum, which requires additional energy to cross.

I must confess that I am not an exception relative to my own observation that people rarely switch archetype on their own accord, thus I have been experimenting on how to improve along the years. These are three of the techniques that I use give myself that extra energy needed to cross-over to the other archetype:

• Writing about what I am learning. By doing so (even by only taking notes - no prose required), it often becomes apparent where the weakest link of my mental model is, whether that is missing an entire perspective on the problem (requiring more exploration) or a deeper understanding of the mechanisms that govern it (requiring more science).

• Being aware of the mindset I am adopting. Since resourcefulness and intentionality are the hallmark of the two archetypes, by recognising them in action, one can understand which archetype they are using. For example: if I’m coding and I find myself trying to solve the same problem by testing out 5 different half-baked approaches (resourcefullness) I know I am in exploration mode, while if I’m reading through the API documentation, and watching a tutorial on how to do something (intentionality), I know I am in science mode.

• Prompting myself with questions. Once I know which archetype I need to use, I try to awaken it by prompting myself with questions that are targeted to either of the two specifically. For example, to awaken the explorer I may ask myself: “What is something radically different that I haven’t tried before?” or “How would a person with a completely different background look at this very problem?”. While if I wanted to awaken the scientist I may ask myself: “How can I validate this assumption of mines?” or “How can I measure the effects of X on Y?”.

I have now expressed all that I wanted to communicate, and this is therefore a good point to end of this post².