Podcast #1593

Welcome to the show, my friends. I’m glad you’re here because today I want to talk about something that feels almost magical in a practical way curiosity. It’s not a flashy feature, not a headline, and yet it powers every moment of learning, every invention you admire, every time you stumble upon something you didn’t know you were looking for. Curiosity isn’t a spark that merely lights a fuse. It’s a habit, a stubborn lens through which the world becomes edible, navigable, and endlessly surprising. If you’ve ever found yourself staring at a problem and thinking there has to be a better way, then you’ve already danced with curiosity. Today I want to unpack what curiosity really is, how it works in everyday life, and how you can cultivate it so it becomes less of a rare moment and more of a daily practice. This is not about chasing new trends or chasing fame for curiosity’s sake. It’s about a quiet, reliable tool you can carry into your kitchen, your commute, your conversations, and your creative work.

Let me start with a simple, stubborn truth: curiosity is not just a feeling; it is a method. When we feel curious, we aren’t just experiencing a mood. We are inviting a process. We observe, we ask questions, we test ideas, and we adjust when the world doesn’t cooperate with our first guess. This is how electrons discovered the nature of light, how scientists uncovered the structure of DNA, and how a small irritation become a better pencil, a safer car, a more efficient way to ship goods across oceans. Curiosity doesn’t need a grand stage. It starts with noticing something ordinary and asking a question that doesn’t necessarily have an immediate answer.

I want you to picture a routine moment in your day. Maybe you’re washing dishes, maybe you’re waiting for a meeting to start, maybe you’re walking from your car to your front door. In that quiet space, curiosity can slip in if you invite it. It can be as simple as asking, what is this thing really for? how did it end up this way? why do people do it this particular way? And then, instead of giving yourself a pat answer, you chase a few possibilities. If you do that regularly, curiosity stops being a rare visitor and becomes a companion that sits beside you, occasionally nudging you toward a new connection, a new method, or a better question.

The thing about curiosity is that it thrives in the presence of friction. If you give yourself an easy, obvious answer, curiosity shuts down. It’s uncomfortable to admit you don’t know something, and yet that vulnerability is exactly what turns on the learning engine. Friction can be practical—like trying to replace a single tool you’ve used for years and discovering a better one. It can be cognitive—like realizing your assumed narrative about a person or a process was incomplete and you’re choosing to reexamine it. Friction can also be social. When you admit you don’t understand something aloud, you invite others to help you, and sometimes their perspective unlocks a doorway you wouldn’t have opened on your own. Curiosity loves that space where you aren’t sure, because that’s where ideas begin.

Now, I want to tell you a story that you can return to in your head whenever your curiosity feels a little sleepy. A long time ago, a designer named Jane stood in a studio filled with scraps of fabric, bits of metal, and a handful of half-broken tools. She noticed that one thread kept snagging on a sharp edge of metal as she stitched a prototype. It wasn’t a dramatic defect, just enough of a nuisance to slow her down. Instead of shrugging and moving on, she asked a tiny question: what if we redesigned the edge so it wouldn’t catch? She experimented with a slightly rounded corner, then another, then another. The changes weren’t glamorous, but they produced a small, measurable improvement in speed and safety. That tiny improvement changed the rest of the project’s life. It wasn’t a legendary breakthrough; it was a steady discipline of noticing, testing, and iterating. Curiosity is often like that—quiet, persistent, and profoundly practical. If you train yourself to notice the small frictions—the frayed edge of a process, the extra step in a routine, the thing that slows you down—you begin to see opportunities you wouldn’t notice otherwise.

Let me give you a framework you can use this week: Observe, Question, Try, Reflect. Observe what’s happening around you without judgment. Question what you see as you would a curious child, not a critic. Try a small experiment that could plausibly improve things, no matter how tiny. Then reflect on what you learned and how you can apply it next time. The beauty of this framework is that it doesn’t require permission or genius. It requires attention and a willingness to tolerate a little ambiguity. Ambiguity is not something to fear; it’s the environment where curiosity thrives.

You might ask, what kinds of questions should I ask? Here are a few that often yield practical answers without demanding a PhD in anything. What is this thing for, exactly? How did it come to be this way? What would have to change for it to be better? What would happen if I did the opposite? What would someone I respect do in this situation? Questions like these don’t have to be existential or sweeping. They can be about a kitchen gadget, a commute route, a software feature, or a routine you perform every day. The important thing is that you pursue a string of questions that lead you toward action, even if the action is as small as a tweak in your morning ritual or a quick note to yourself to try a different approach next time.

A lot of people tell me they don’t feel curious when they’re exhausted, stressed, or overwhelmed. I hear you. Those states are real blockers. But curiosity can learn a trick from those states as well. When you’re tired, curiosity can be gentle. It becomes a patient, collaborative observer rather than a harsh critic. It invites your mind to wander and play within safe boundaries. If you’re stressed, curiosity can serve as a counterweight to anxiety by focusing on practical questions that produce concrete steps rather than abstract worries. The trick is to tailor your curiosity to your energy level, not to demand your brain perform at a peak level all the time. You don’t need a grand experiment when a tiny, well-placed probe will do.

This brings me to a facet of curiosity that often goes underappreciated: the role of constraints. Creativity loves constraints precisely because they force you to think differently. Consider the famous example of a writer who must tell a story in exactly a thousand words. The constraint doesn’t choke the imagination; it concentrates it. Curiosity thrives when you put a boundary around your exploration. It gives you a playground that is small enough to manage yet wide enough to surprise you. So today, I challenge you to set a constraint for your curiosity practice. It could be a time constraint—five minutes of questions and notes, nothing more. It could be a material constraint—examine only the objects in a single drawer, or only the things that begin with a certain letter. Or it could be an audience constraint—explain your questions to a friend or family member and see how their perspective reshapes your thinking.

Let me share another practical slice of curiosity from everyday life. A friend of mine started keeping a curiosity journal. Every day, they write down three things they noticed that they initially took for granted and one question about each thing. Over weeks, patterns emerged: they realized they were overlooking the logic of everyday tools, the invisible decisions behind where things are stored, and the unspoken rules that govern workflows at work. The journal taught them to see the world as a system of decisions rather than a pile of unrelated items. The habit isn’t flashy, but it compounds. A year of small notes becomes a map of the world, with dead ends that became new trails, with questions that turned into collaborations and tiny breakthroughs.

Curiosity also has a storytelling side. When you attach a question to a narrative, you give your mind a hook to remember. For instance, why does bread crust brown in the oven? It’s a story about heat, sugars, amino acids, and the Maillard reaction, a little chemistry that turns a dull slice into something both fragrant and delicious. If you tell yourself little stories about the way things work, you’ll find your memory becomes more reliable and your interest more lasting. And once curiosity becomes a storyteller, it travels faster through your life. You’ll start noticing stories in the people around you too—why a neighbor redesigned their garden path, why a coworker’s process seems to have a weird extra step that actually makes it better. You’ll begin to connect dots you didn’t know existed, and those connections, dear listener, are where insight lives.

There’s a famous, almost comical example from the history of everyday objects that illustrates how curiosity travels across disciplines. A chemist named Spencer Silver discovered a adhesive that was not too sticky and not too weak, which seemed almost useless at first. A few years later, a colleague named Art Fry found a practical use for it while trying to bookmark pages in his church choir hymn book, something he kept losing. The result wasn’t a dramatic invention in a lab, but a product people rely on daily: the Post-it Note. It wasn’t an overnight sensation; it was curiosity in motion, a chance observation, and a willingness to play with an idea that didn’t fit the conventional use. The point isn’t fame or fortune. It’s what curiosity does when you allow a wayward observation to linger and then find a practical, repeatable use for it.

We should also acknowledge the social side of curiosity. Humans are social animals, and our curiosity is amplified by discussion, by sharing questions, and by watching others poke at problems in different ways. If you keep your curiosity bottled up inside your head, it grows quiet and small. If you share a question with a friend, a coworker, or a family member, you invite a wave of perspectives that can expand your own view in minutes. The best kind of curiosity, I’ve found, isn’t a solo expedition; it’s a communal practice. Talk about the odd thing you noticed today. Let someone walk you through their own questions. You’ll be surprised by how quickly your own curiosity pivots toward a broader horizon.

So what should you do right now, in the next 60 minutes, to cultivate this habit of curiosity in a sustainable way? Here are five small, doable steps. First, pick one object in your immediate environment and ask yourself three questions about it in a clock-timed five-minute sprint. What is this object for? How did it get here? What would change if you redesigned it, even slightly? Second, start a curiosity journal for a week. Each day, write one thing you observed that didn’t fully make sense to you and one question you’d like to answer by tomorrow. Third, design a micro experiment. Take something you use every day and tweak one variable—your routine, your setup, your environment—and observe what happens. Fourth, tell a story about a failure or a near miss that taught you something valuable. Narratives help you remember the lesson and reinforce the habit of examining what went wrong with curiosity rather than blame. Fifth, share your curiosity with someone else. Ask them to bring one question from their own life to your next conversation and explore it together. If you do these five steps, you’ll have built a three-layer habit: attention, inquiry, and collaborative exploration.

I want to remind you of the radical simplicity here. Curiosity doesn’t require a special title, a fancy degree, or a dramatic event. It requires paying attention and choosing to suspend the urge to rush to a final answer. It requires a bit of humility too, the humility to admit you don’t know, and the humility to test your own ideas against the real world. When you treat curiosity as a daily practice rather than a momentary mood, you stop chasing novelty as a product launch and start chasing understanding as a way of life. That shift—from chasing novelty to pursuing understanding—changes how you learn, how you teach, and how you move through your day with a lighter, more generous sense of wonder.

As we head toward the end of today’s episode, I want you to think about curiosity not as a bolt-on skill but as a daily lens. The world is full of small mysteries. A coffee cup cools faster when you tilt it toward the air flow in your kitchen. A door hinge squeaks less when you oil it in a way that reaches the pivot. A commute feels shorter when you notice three things you hadn’t before: a construction crane in a distant skyline, the way a streetlight flickers in the rain, the rhythm of pedestrians as they move through a crosswalk. If you learn to notice, you’ll begin to notice how systems work, how people work, and how your own thinking works. And when you notice how these pieces fit together, you start to see opportunities for little improvements everywhere you go.

There’s a final thought I keep returning to: curiosity is not about being clever or fast. It’s about showing up. It’s about showing up to the messy, imperfect world with a willingness to be wrong, to revise your beliefs, and to walk forward with a looser grip and a more generous stance toward the unknown. If you cultivate that stance, your days become less about getting through and more about getting closer to something interesting, something useful, something true. That’s the kind of life curiosity makes possible—and it’s a life I suspect you’d want to live, too.

I’ll close with a gentle invitation. Next time you find yourself doom-scrolling or rushing through a familiar routine, pause for a moment and choose to be curious instead. Pick one small thing, ask one question, and give yourself permission to be wrong, to learn, and to try again. Treat your daily life as a patient, ongoing experiment. And if you want, tell me about what you discover. I read your messages, and I love hearing where your curiosity has taken you. If you’re listening to this episode with a friend, invite them into the practice, too. Share one question you generated today and see what new lines of thought open up when two minds wander together.

Thank you for spending your time with me today. I’m grateful for your curiosity and for this shared space where we can explore together. Keep showing up, keep questioning, and keep noticing the world in its small, stubborn details. The journey of curiosity is never truly finished, and that’s a wonderful thing. Until next time, take care of yourselves, take care of each other, and may your questions lead you to places you never expected to go. Goodbye for now, and I’ll see you in the next episode.