Dear Curiosity,

Cat-killer, conundrum-crusher. Constant companion.

Sometimes, it’s hard to tell if you make life easier or harder. You’re a persistent itch in my mind—scratching you with an answer is satisfying, but every answer leads to more questions. Maybe if I could just stop disappearing down rabbit holes, the day would pass easier. I’d be less concerned with things that don’t make sense, less drawn to invest energy where it’s not immediately needed, and less lost in the realization that I’m adrift in a sea of things I don’t know. Then again, maybe I’d have gotten nowhere. Without you, I’d have never learned the things that make me effective today, never would have stood out, and never would have learned how to operate in uncharted territory. If nothing else, you’ve always been the antidote to stagnation. As long as you keep pulling me forward, tomorrow will always look a little different from today.

A misunderstood creature.

You often get a bad rap: a mischief maker asking too many questions, digging where you don’t belong, creating uncertainty or doubt when it’s time for action. But it’s easy to mistake you for others. When people can’t move forward because they are constantly questioning which path is best, I say, “That’s not curiosity; that’s analysis paralysis, or possibly fear of failure.” When questions become too invasive, especially on matters of personal or sensitive information, I say, “Curiosity has never demanded we stop respecting boundaries, even if she sometimes pulls us out past our assumed limitations.”

As people, many of our needs for knowledge can stem from emotional roots. When those emotions are negative, unstable, or destructive, it can lead to a dysfunctional need for information. For instance, only wanting to know the parts of a policy manual that give cause to fire someone without also wanting to understand what those policies were actually created for. Or only wanting a selected set of data to bias a trusting audience toward a desired outcome instead of trying to present a more complete picture. Or asking constant questions of a supervisor to avoid accountability instead of learning what’s needed to make decisions worth standing by. That’s not being curious. That’s building a convenient narrative. To be curious means to desire knowledge, perspective, or insight for its own sake. That’s not to suggest there can’t be a specific purpose in mind—often there is—but the test you give us is even if we know the answers you lead us to might not be what we want to hear, are we still earnestly drawn to find out anyway?

An empathetic listener.

One of the pinch points for diversity, equity, and inclusion is that so many people want simple answers. They want a crib sheet for the correct things to do or say, as if there were a universal key to unlocking human interactions that could all be summed up in the space of a greeting card. Other times, they want countless sorties on human well-being to sum up neatly in a numeric data set. But the human experience isn’t something so neat and tidy. Learning to coexist and work with one another—to elevate one another and provide a safe and inclusive space for one another—is a lifelong process of learning about people. Without you, Curiosity, that process is little more than complication, inconvenience, and frustration. But when you pull us out of our comfort zones and into the messiness of human variability, we gradually learn to see people not as we need them to be, but as they actually are. And that’s a where trust resides.

Of course, you don’t just care about DEI. When we aren’t getting what we need from others and it frustrates us, you’re the voice wondering if maybe they aren’t just incompetent a-holes or out to get us. Maybe there is more to the story. Maybe those who can’t meet our needs aren’t getting their needs met either. Maybe they weren’t aware there was an issue, or maybe there is a reason things are done as they are. You’re the spark that shifts us from merely predicting behaviors through models and market data to truly anticipating them by understanding what people are actually communicating about their needs. You’re the one who actually calls on us to care when it seems inconvenient.

A connector of dots and a path forward.

‘Innovation’ is a fun word to toss around, but it’s not inherently useful. It might be innovative to replace all the toilet paper with strawberry jam, but that doesn’t mean it will go over well. While that example may seem absurd, it’s sadly common to create solutions in search of a problem hoping we can later convince people to buy. Often this happens because we don’t invest enough time in understanding what the problem actually is. It’s easy to mistake a correlation with a cause. If X happens, Y follows. If Y is bad, then X is the problem. If Y is good, then X is the answer. You are the voice that asks us to not only observe the relationship but to ask why there is a relationship, how it works, or if it’s even more than just coincidence or if it even actually exists at all. You are what prompts us to wonder, if Y is good, could it be better? If X is the answer, does it answer any question better.

In other words, you are what leads us to challenge assumptions about how we do things today. You are what calls us to move past assumption toward experimentation, iteration, knowledge, change, and ultimately innovation that actually changes things for the better.

If I’m being honest, there are times I’ve neglected you. Times where it felt like I had no time or energy to feed you—there were things to get done. Times where I was afraid you’d lead me to answers I didn’t want. Times where I was feeling too cynical or jaded to even have anything to feed you with because I had lost hope that things could be different. Take AI, for example. It’s been my latest rabbit hole, and while it’s clear that AI can save me 3-4 hours a day, the gold rush around it seems to mask how it can truly help or harm people. Is this real adoption or just hype? Will the disruption be positive? There’s nothing in my calendar right now that feels more overwhelming to learn about than AI. This skepticism isn’t just impacting me; it discourages others too.

But over time, I’ve realized that every day I starve you feels remarkably similar to the day before. Every day you aren’t fed becomes just a little more tedious. It becomes a day of functioning rather than learning or investing myself in possibilities. I’ve come to believe over time I would have not only stagnated; I would have fallen behind as the world marched on forward.

I guess at the end of the day, that’s the crux of the issue. I don’t always know where we’re going when I follow you, Curiosity, and sometimes that scares me. But I know where I’m going when I don’t follow you, and truthfully, it scares me more.

Love,

Nahal