Curiosity isn’t a personality trait. It’s metabolic survival.
Curiosity rocks. I’m not talking about the polite, corporate version. The one that shows up in meetings wearing clean shoes, a perfect haircut, nods at the right moments, and asks questions that were already answered three slides ago. I mean the slightly unhealthy, unruly kind. The kind that keeps turning things and thoughts inside out even when they appear to work. Especially then. The kind that distrusts shallow surface explanations because they feel too light for the weight of the moment.
Most days, before the world has properly warmed up, I’m already training. Not my body (you would have noticed that). My head. Questions and puzzles are the weights. Heavy ones. Awkward ones. The kind that don’t fit neatly into roadmaps or quarterly narratives, corporate greys and therefore get treated like disturbing noise. I treat them like oxygen.
I sweat through the motions. I read. Then read again, analyze, ponder, disagree. Hesitate, research, curse, espresso. Fact-check. Then read something solid that actively contradicts me. Back to square one. Push until the brain protests. Push a bit further. That resistance, that friction is the point.
Somewhere along the way I realized curiosity isn’t just about accumulating vast heaps of knowledge, although let’s be honest, an internal database of actual knowledge helps like hellfire. It’s about staying mobile, level and sharply clairvoyant while everything accelerates. When the river speeds up, you don’t paddle harder. You learn to read the water. You sense undertow. You fix the gap between the rocks. You feel where it bends before you see it.
But mental mobility alone isn’t enough. You still need to know where the lighthouse is. You need a map. You need reference points. You need to be able to plot a course rather than admire the current. You need to shape, charge, change, lead.
That’s where relentless reading and learning come in. Not skimming. Not harvesting quotes. Reading until your confidence wobbles. Books, studies, and articles that mess with your assumptions. Papers that force you to pause mid-paragraph. Essays that leave you staring at the wall because something quietly rearranged itself. Not because they are comfortable or immediately useful, but because they sharpen the edge. My library is my worst enemy, full of stuff that disagrees with my status quo.
Add conversations that don’t aim for alignment but for friction. The best ones feel slightly unsafe. You leave with fewer answers than you arrived with and an itch you can’t yet scratch. That itch is progress.
There’s a darker side to all this that’s getting harder to ignore.
The lack of curiosity I see around me isn’t neutral and does nothing to ease my mind. It scares the living hell out of me. A lack of scrutiny is nail-biting nerve-wracking. A lack of projection is genuinely sad. And the slow erosion of basic common sense should worry anyone who still pretends to be paying attention.
You think using the same strategic template as last year, racism, lizard-people theories, flat-earth nonsense, artificial scared people and white supremacist fairy tales bubble up by chance? They don’t. They grow because the ground is fertile. Because curiosity dried up, scrutiny was labelled inconvenient, and context and common-sense quietly left the room.
What troubles me most is how many people seem unable, or unwilling, to work with references. Benchmarks. Time-frames. Patterns. Memory. Context. A sense of before and after. In a world that’s becoming more complex by the hour, personally and organizationally, operating without those anchors isn’t bold. It’s irresponsible.
You don’t get to have strong opinions anymore without scaffolding. Not now. Not at this pace. Gut feeling, hunches, vibes, and stubborn ignorance don’t scale. They don’t survive contact with reality either.
Which is why I have very little patience left for the whining about AI, GPT, and friends making our brains lazy. That anxiety says far more about the person expressing it than about the tools themselves. Intellectual laziness didn’t arrive with silicon. It was already here. The tech just gave it a mirror.
My own brain is fizzing sixteen hours a day. Every day. No exaggeration. It’s challenged constantly by humans who push back, books that destabilize me, podcasts that irritate me into thinking harder, puzzles that refuse to resolve cleanly, agents that expose sloppy assumptions, and generative AI that brutally rewards sharp questions and punishes vague ones.
I have never trained my grey cells this hard. Not even close.
And it’s not exhausting. It’s dopaminergic. Friction as fuel, curiosity as chemistry. That moment when a question suddenly locks into place and five unrelated domains start talking to each other. The quiet jolt when a pattern emerges that simply wasn’t visible yesterday. That’s the good stuff.
The real risk today isn’t machines thinking on our behalf. It’s people opting out of thinking altogether. I increasingly see competent people shamelessly delegating their life, their strategy, and their personal mess to Dr. Chat GPT, and Uncle Claude. Newsflash. It won’t fix your strategy. It won’t fix your personal life. It definitely won’t fix your fight with that high-potential date.
Get your neurons firing on all cylinders. Complexity doesn’t demand retreat. It demands conditioning. You don’t complain that the mountain is high. You train your legs. You learn the terrain. You carry references. You respect time.
Curiosity has become non-negotiable, scrutiny isn’t a luxury. Projection is a responsibility. And common sense, grounded in memory and pattern recognition, remains one of the last edges that can’t be automated away.
Trust me.
Never miss brain day
