Stay Curious.
Updated: Oct 15
Somewhere along the way, we may have started confusing faster and more with better.
There is enormous pressure to move faster. Read faster. Decide faster. Respond faster. Produce more. Reach more people. Finish the meeting, clear the inbox, move to the next thing. Technology has made us remarkably good at it.
Today, we can summarize an annual report in seconds. We can research a company before our coffee gets cold, learn about an unfamiliar industry, find articles written by its leaders, review customer stories, understand recent events, discover what's coming next, and develop a pretty good picture of where an organization has been, where it is today, and where it might be headed.
That's incredible. But somewhere along the way, we may have started confusing faster and more with better.
There is something worth protecting in the middle of all that speed: curiosity.
Curious people ask another question. Why? How? What happened before this? What happens next? What am I missing? What does this person know that I don't?
Those questions take time, and that's part of what makes curiosity so interesting in a world increasingly built around efficiency.
Curiosity can make us temporarily less efficient. It sends us down paths we weren't planning to explore. It makes us consider another possibility when it would be easier to accept the first answer and move on. Yet that apparent inefficiency can lead to learning, adaptability, creativity, and sometimes an entirely different way of seeing a problem.
Maybe slowing down isn't the opposite of progress. Sometimes it's how we figure out where we're actually going.
Curiosity also changes the way we learn. When we're genuinely interested in something, we engage differently. We remember more. We make connections. One question leads to another, and suddenly we've learned something we weren't even looking for in the first place.
That brings us to something we believe pretty strongly at BRICK: learning is winning.
Not every conversation needs to become an opportunity. Not every article needs to produce an action plan. Not every question needs an immediate business case attached to it. Sometimes discovering a company you didn't know existed is valuable. So is learning about a new person, product, market, idea, or perspective.
Knowledge has a funny way of becoming useful long after we acquire it.
Curiosity in the age of AI
AI makes all of this even more interesting. It may be one of the greatest research tools we've ever had. A question that once required hours of searching can now lead us toward relevant information in seconds. We can enter an unfamiliar subject without starting from zero, find connections we may not have noticed
ourselves, and consolidate enormous amounts of information before deciding where we want to dig deeper.
Used that way, AI doesn't replace curiosity. It gives curiosity a bigger playground.
But getting information faster isn't the same as understanding it.
AI can bring the research to us. We still have to read it, question it, check the original source, understand the context, connect it to what we already know, and occasionally discover that the answer we received wasn't quite right.
The opportunity isn't to copy, paste, and pray faster. It's to understand more.
Stay curious about people, too.
Curiosity matters just as much when another person is involved.
Think about the conversations you enjoy most. They're rarely the ones where someone is simply waiting for their turn to speak. They're the ones where someone listens to your answer and asks another question because they actually want to know more.
A genuine follow-up question communicates something simple: I heard you. I'm interested. Tell me more.
Maybe one of the healthiest habits we can carry into our work and our lives is becoming less afraid to ask why and how.
Curiosity requires some humility. Asking why acknowledges that we might not completely understand. Asking how admits that someone else may know something we don't. Asking another question means resisting the comfortable assumption that we've already figured everything out.
Two things make that increasingly difficult: laziness and pressure.
Laziness tells us we've learned enough. Pressure tells us we don't have time to learn more.
Technology can feed either one. It can make it incredibly easy to accept the first summary, copy the first answer, and move on. Or it can eliminate hours of tedious searching and give us more time to explore the interesting part.
The technology is the same. What we do with the time it gives back to us is the difference.
There's another side to curiosity worth considering on a Sunday: the attention we give other people.
We've become very good at protecting our attention, and understandably so. Our inboxes are crowded. Our phones constantly ask for us. There's always another meeting, notification, message, or task competing for a piece of the day.
But curiosity occasionally asks us to give someone a few minutes we hadn't planned to give them. Listen to the person who calls. Have a conversation without knowing exactly where it will lead. Read the article someone sends you. Talk to someone outside your industry. Make a new connection.
They may have absolutely nothing for you. Or they may introduce you to a person, idea, product, opportunity, or perspective you didn't know existed yesterday.
You can't know without being curious.
Something to Build On
Maybe that's a good thought to carry into the week ahead.
Faster isn't automatically better. More isn't automatically better. And not every worthwhile interaction has an immediately measurable outcome.
What if we occasionally used a much simpler standard?
Did we leave the interaction in a better position than we entered it?
Maybe you learned something. Maybe they did. Maybe an assumption changed. Maybe a new idea emerged. Maybe there wasn't a fit at all, but both people discovered that respectfully. Maybe someone simply felt heard.
So today, don't turn curiosity into another productivity exercise. Just follow something interesting. Read beyond the headline. Look up the company you've wondered about. Learn about someone you'll meet this week. Ask somebody why. Ask them how. Listen to the answer.
And when something unexpected catches your attention, resist the urge to immediately move on. Follow it for a while.
You have no idea what you might build from it tomorrow.
STAY CURIOUS. LEARNING IS WINNING.
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