An intense curiosity about how things are done

In his book, The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light, 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?”