Why Curiosity is our Superpower

There’s a quiet strength that often goes unnoticed. It doesn’t shout, it doesn’t demand attention, and it doesn’t come with a certificate or a job title. But it shapes everything. It opens doors, it connects dots, and it keeps the flame of original thought alive. That strength is curiosity.

We tend to celebrate intelligence, i.e. measurable, testable, rankable intelligence. We build entire systems around it. But intelligence without curiosity is like a powerful engine without fuel. It sits idle. It might impress in theory, but it doesn’t go anywhere new. Curiosity is what moves us forward.

It’s what drove humans to cross oceans, map stars, and crack the genetic code. It’s what led to jazz, to calculus, to GPS. And long before it became a slogan on startup walls, curiosity was simply a way of being. It was a way of looking at the world and wondering why it is the way it is, and how it might be otherwise.

In a world increasingly optimised for efficiency, curiosity remains gloriously inefficient. It wanders. It meanders. It doubles back. It gets distracted. But in those detours, new patterns emerge. Innovation rarely comes from staying on the path. It comes from the side quests, the seemingly pointless questions, the strange ideas that won’t let go.

If we study some of the world's most enduring breakthroughs, we realise they don't come from solving clearly defined problems, but from asking deeper questions. Google’s famous "20% time" policy (i.e. encouraging employees to spend a portion of their workweek exploring ideas unrelated to their core responsibilities) led to the creation of Gmail, AdSense, and Google News. None of these began with a business plan. They started with a question.

At Pixar, director Brad Bird was once asked to take over a struggling internal project. Instead of handing it to the A-team, he requested the so-called “black sheep” of the company, the rebels and misfits known for pushing boundaries. The result was The Incredibles, a film that broke new ground both technically and narratively. Pixar’s culture of creative curiosity didn’t just allow risk. It required it.

Universities like Stanford and MIT have invested heavily in cross-disciplinary programs, not because it’s efficient, but because they know innovation blooms at the edges. The MIT Media Lab famously describes itself as "anti-disciplinary," a place where engineers work with musicians, and scientists with designers. Their breakthroughs, from wearable tech to social robotics, often emerge from asking questions no single field can fully answer.

A 2014 study published in Harvard Business Review found that curiosity is correlated with better decision-making, reduced group conflict, and greater innovation. The researchers, led by Dr. Francesca Gino at Harvard Business School, showed that individuals and teams with high curiosity were more open to diverse perspectives and more accurate in assessing new information, even under pressure. In other words, curiosity doesn't just make us more interesting. It makes us more effective.

The trouble is, we’re building tools that answer questions faster than we can ask them. That’s not inherently bad. But when speed becomes the goal, inquiry suffers. If everything has an answer in 0.2 seconds, we forget how to linger in uncertainty, how to tolerate the unknown. Curiosity is not about answers. It’s about depth. About attention. About staying with a question long enough to let it change you.

AI can mimic curiosity. It can generate questions and simulate exploration. But it doesn’t need to understand. It doesn’t care if something is beautiful or heartbreaking or terrifying. It doesn’t wonder what it means to be alive. That kind of curiosity, i.e. the embodied, emotional, existential kind is uniquely ours.

We don’t need to compete with machines on speed or memory or scale. That’s a losing game. What we can do is lean into the capacities that make us human. Curiosity sharpens our thinking, but it also softens our judgments. It makes us better listeners, better collaborators, better leaders. It turns defensiveness into openness. It replaces certainty with possibility. In times of disruption, curiosity is a stabilising force. Not because it gives us clear answers, but because it keeps us engaged. It keeps us moving. It’s how we adapt, how we grow, how we stay alive in every sense of the word.

So if there’s one skill to protect, one habit to nurture, one mindset to model for the next generation, it’s this: Stay curious. Not because it’s trendy. Not because it will make you more productive. But because it is the source of all learning, all creativity, all progress. It is our quiet, essential superpower. And it always has been.

Sonam Pelden

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