I've been trying to figure out what connects the best people I've worked with. Not the smartest, not the most experienced — the ones who consistently did something interesting with their careers, who were genuinely good to be around, who seemed to get better year over year without obvious explanation. The answer I keep landing on is embarrassingly simple: they were all really, genuinely curious.
Not curious as a personality trait they listed on a resume. Curious in the way that meant they actually read the thing, asked the follow-up question, went down the rabbit hole when everyone else had moved on. They treated not-knowing as an interesting problem rather than a liability.
I think about this a lot because curiosity has been the most reliable thing in my own life. More reliable than any particular skill, any credential, any job title. It's the reason I ended up in a PhD program studying cognition and mental health. It's why I've ended up in rooms I had no obvious business being in. It's the thread that connects a research career to a strategy career to a product career — not because those things are similar, but because curiosity doesn't respect category boundaries.
What curiosity actually does
The practical case for curiosity is underrated. People talk about it like it's a soft trait — nice to have, good for culture, not really a lever. I'd argue the opposite. Curiosity is how you build judgment faster than your experience would otherwise allow. Every time you get genuinely interested in something outside your lane, you're adding a frame that you'll use later in ways you can't predict.
Travel did this for me in a way that's hard to fully articulate. Spending time in places where people make decisions I didn't understand — about family, money, risk, community — taught me that most of what I thought was universal was actually just local. That's a humbling and useful thing to know. It makes you slower to assume and faster to ask.
Curiosity is how you stay a beginner at the things that matter, even after you've stopped being one.
The people I've seen get stuck — really stuck, not just between jobs but stuck in their thinking — almost always stopped being curious about something specific. They got good at a thing and then defended their expertise instead of building on it. Curiosity is the antidote to that. It keeps the surface area of what you're learning larger than the surface area of what you already know.
The version I'm still working on
I'm good at being curious about ideas. I'm still learning to be as curious about people — not in a clinical way, but in the patient, unhurried way that lets someone actually show you who they are instead of who they're presenting as. The best listeners I know have this quality. They seem genuinely interested in what you're going to say next, which makes you want to say something worth hearing.
That kind of curiosity is harder than intellectual curiosity. It requires slowing down, which doesn't come naturally to me. But it's the version that actually builds the relationships that matter — at work, outside of work, everywhere.
I'm working on it. Which is, I suppose, the curious thing to do.