An intense curiosity about how things are done

In his book, The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light ^(#ad), Carlos Santana writes about hearing other guitar players, and wondering with an intense curiosity how those other people got their guitars to make the sounds they made. As I thought about this I thought it was a good attitude to have in programming. For instance, if I look at an application where someone has done something really cool I try to understand, “How did they do that?”