A few years ago I had an incident that illustrated the restrictions of my own curiosity. I’d begun attending life drawing classes as an exercise to broaden my observation skills. In one session I had a horrific time trying to draw a model’s shoulder. I asked the man next to me – a real artist – for help. Here was our conversation:
SDM: Hey, Ron. Can you help me please? Can you tell me how to think about drawing his shoulder?
Ron: Sure. Let’s see…. So what is it about your current sketch that you like?
SDM: Nothing.
Ron: If I put a gun to your head, what part would you like?
SDM: Nothing.
Ron: You’ve done a great job here, on his lower leg. Good line. Good proportion. That means you know how to do a lot of what you need on the shoulder.
SDM: I do? I didn’t know what I was doing. So how can I duplicate what I did unconsciously? I’m having an eye-hand-translation problem.
Ron: Let’s figure out how you drew that leg. Then we’ll break that down to mini actions, and see what you can use from what you already know. And I’ll teach you whatever you’re missing.
Ron’s brand of curiosity enabled me to make some unconscious skills conscious, and add new expertise where I was missing it in places I wouldn’t have looked. His curiosity had different biases from mine. He:
- entered our discussion assuming I already had all of the answers I needed;
- only added information specifically where I was missing some;
- helped me find my own answers and be available to add knowledge in the exact place I was missing it.
My own curiosity would have gotten me nowhere. Here was my internal dialogue:
How the hell do I draw a twisted shoulder? This sucks. Is this an eye/hand problem? Should I be looking differently? I need an anatomy class. Should I be holding my charcoal differently? Is it too big a piece? I can’t see a shadow near his shoulder. Should I put in a false shadow to help me get the proportions right?
Ron’s curiosity – based on me already possessing the skills I needed – opened a wide range of possibilities for me. I never, ever would have found that solution on my own because my automatic assumptions would have limited my curiosity to little more than an extension of my current knowledge and beliefs.
WHAT IS CURIOSITY?
Curiosity is a good thing, right? As you can see from my story, it’s far more restricted than we imagine it would be. But what is it? Wikipedia defines curiosity thus: a quality related to inquisitive thinking such as exploration, investigation, and learning, evident by observation in human and animal species.
What, exactly, does this mean? What’s ‘inquisitive thinking’? Does it matter that everyone’s inquisitiveness is subjective, unique, and limited by their biases? ‘Evident by observation’? Evident to whom? And by what/whose standards? And ‘observation’? Really?
In this article, I’ll explore what stops us from being curious (and why it’s so difficult to recognize or learn from the data we find), offer loads of questions that will take you beyond assumptions, and steps to follow to enhance our curiosity.
IT’S A BRAIN THING
We all see, hear, feel the world through our subjectivity. Our assumptions, what we notice, what we’re curious about, is largely automatic mostly outside our control. Even worse, adding new ideas when we seek out answers to what we’re curious about is not so simple as, well, adding new ideas; it’s a listening problem and a brain problem.
Listening: It’s hard for us to take in new information when it goes against what we take for granted. Because of the way our brain filters incoming words, we end up (unwittingly) restricting what we think we hear Others say according to our own beliefs and history, i.e. subjectively. As a result we may not readily accept new ideas that are different from what we currently believe because we ‘hear’ them through our own biases, even if they offer relevant data on what we’re curious about.
Neural Circuits (brains): We can only be as curious as our existing neural circuits allow. Said another way our curiosity is restricted to what we have stored in memory, and we can’t notice, think, etc. anything we don’t have representative circuitry for. Try as we might, our subjectivity rules our lives.
Since our exploration involves some unconscious ‘givens’, here are some questions to inspire a broader curiosity:
- How can we know that the information we retrieve is accurate, complete, or the most useful data available?
- Can we be certain that our data gathering was sufficiently broad?
- How do we know that a new piece of learning is important, even though it feels uncomfortable and we want to dismiss it?
- Can we supersede our biases that we judge all incoming data against?
Hence, I pose the question: can we really ever be entirely curious?
Part 2 will be published next Monday, 10/27/25. It explains how we’re curious and offers suggestions to enhance our curiosity.
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Sharon-Drew Morgen is a breakthrough innovator and original thinker, having developed new paradigms in sales (inventor Buying Facilitation®, listening/communication (What? Did you really say what I think I heard?), change management (The How of Change™), coaching, and leadership. She is the author of several books, including her new book HOW? Generating new neural circuits for learning, behavior change and decision making, the NYTimes Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and Dirty Little Secrets: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell). Sharon-Drew coaches and consults with companies seeking out of the box remedies for congruent, servant-leader-based change in leadership, healthcare, and sales. Her award-winning blog carries original articles with new thinking, weekly. www.sharon-drew.com, https://sharondrew1.substack.com/, and https://medium.com/@sharondrew_9898/. She can be reached at sharondrew@sharondrewmorgen.com.