Build Your Curiosity Muscle

Author: Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

Curiosity is best defined as the motivation to learn, be open to new ideas, and explore novel environments and situations. With this meaning in mind, there are obvious reasons for one to harness and develop their curiosity.

First, curiosity is an important dimension of leadership effectiveness. If you want to manage or lead people, it helps to display curiosity, not least because this will help them harness their own curiosity.

Second, curiosity enables the ability to keep learning—essential if you want to future-proof your career and yourself. My book I, Human: AI, Automation, and the Quest to Reclaim What Makes Us Unique illustrates how the skills required to keep up with our changing work environment are evolving so quickly that honing our curiosity muscle is now a survival mechanism.

Third, employers are asking for it. Curiosity is frequently listed as one of the most critical and sought-after dimensions of talent, no matter what job, industry, and seniority level. For example, at ManpowerGroup, our recruiters and talent agents often hire on curiosity, which our clients appreciate. The reason is clear: While we may not know what tomorrow’s jobs will be, employees’ motivation and ability to upskill and reskill for those jobs will significantly increase if they’re curious.

So, what can you do to build and exercise your curiosity muscle?

Here are five science-based recommendations.

Ditch all excuses

Everybody wants to be curious, and few things are more intellectually fulfilling than harnessing our curiosity, whether for trivial or deep existential matters. However, too many things stand in the way of unleashing our hungry minds. Common barriers include being time-deprived, having to focus on predictable tasks and deliver “sure” results, and being in boring or unstimulating work environments.

Yet these are merely excuses. In reality, there’s nothing actually stopping us from harnessing our curiosity. It’s really just about picking the right priorities and making a deliberate effort to learn, having novel experiences, and closing the gap between what we know and want to know. This is why people in the same team or company will display very different levels of curiosity, even when they’re managed by the same boss.

So, don’t expect your manager to harness your curiosity—it’s your own responsibility. For practical examples that may help you increase your workplace curiosity, consider:

• Setting aside 20 to 30 minutes per day to be intentional about cultivating curiosity, even if it’s after hours or before your work shift starts

• Sharing ideas with colleagues, particularly around long-term strategic issues or how to improve existing processes and strategies

• Getting into the habit of asking why as often as you can so that you get to the nitty-gritty of things and start to explore things in-depth rather than superficially

Find the right angle

One of the most obvious issues we must address to boost our curiosity is the “what” question—that is, I’d love to be curious, but curious about what? Unsurprisingly, it’s a lot easier to display curiosity about things we’re already interested in. Identifying your intrinsic motivation will help. In the words of Charles Bukowski, “Find what you love and let it kill you.” (OK, not literally.) Ask yourself the following questions:

• What is it you’d love to know more about?

• In what area would you love to be an expert?

• What are the questions and topics that could occupy you for ages, that make you lose track of time?

Likewise, it’s important you find “white spaces”—times and places where you can avoid being distracted by work or mundane tasks and devote yourself to deep thinking. In essence, identifying the right problem, and falling in love with it, equate to winning half the battle. After that, your curiosity will be your fuel.

To be sure, there are many instances when discovering or nurturing curiosity about uninteresting things will also help. In such cases, the trick is to find an angle or dimension of the problem that matters more to you. For example, you may not be interested in technology, which can make working on a tech problem tedious and uninspiring. But with a little bit of thinking and exploration, you may find certain human or psychological angles that matter deeply to you that also connect to technology—how technology impacts productivity, morale, alienation, or well-being. Discovering the angle that matters turns extrinsic and mundane tasks into meaningful and useful activities and invites your curiosity to boost expertise.

Change your routine

Research shows that one of the most common habits of creative and curious individuals is that they are allergic to routine, which quickly elicits boredom and disengagement in them. Injecting changes into your typical routine will create novel experiences which can trigger new ideas and questions.

Think about changing the people you work with, deal with, or see on a typical day, switching when and how you perform your daily tasks, what route you take to work, where you eat, or what you do on the weekend. Even small changes to routine, such as where you place your laptop, who you go for lunch with, what virtual meetings you join (or stop joining), what new hobbies you start outside of work, can have a big impact on your mindset and curiosity.

Since the brain is fundamentally lazy, we tend to optimize our lives for familiarity and avoid novelty, which can create stress, anxiety, or more work. In a new situation, you have to work out what to do, as opposed to going into autopilot. Small changes to your daily routine will inject novelty and variety to your life, and even random variation can trigger your curiosity and result in novel interests.

Experiment

The main advantage of curiosity is that it’s usually fun. Indeed, curiosity enhances focus and concentration and creates a state of flow optimal for creativity and experimentation. See this as an opportunity to try things out, combine new ideas, and ask deeper, more meaningful questions, which can transport you to unknown places and develop niche expertise.

Interestingly, advances in AI, notably generative AI, have belittled the value of human knowledge, since AI will always know more answers to more questions than any human. And yet, AI still relies on humans to supply the questions or prompts. Even if, ultimately, it learns to prompt itself, AI will simply be replicating human prompts.

It’s clear that one of our unique, and exclusively human, qualities is our ability to experience free-floating curiosity—curiosity that is “agentic,” that comes from us, from our intuition or personal interests as well as from serendipity. Even when we know the starting point, we never quite know the end.

So, set yourself up for experimentation by going outside your comfort zone to inquire about new topics and understand stuff you’ve never thought about. Science shows that novelty seeking is one of the most consistent predictors of curiosity. Try things out, especially if they’re not obviously related to your values, preferences, and experiences. Discover the joys of new interests, guilty pleasures, and variety. And, as Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson notes in Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well, be curious enough to learn from your errors and turn them into smart failures.

When bored, just switch

Harnessing your curiosity muscle should be a pleasant experience, more like swimming than heavy weightlifting. If you find yourself stuck, losing interest, or satiated—much like when schoolkids are forced to finish repetitive boring homework—then switch tasks and give your mind the freedom to both wonder and wander. Your curiosity should propel you toward effortless learning and joyful concentration, as a wave propels a surfer or the wind propels a sailboat.

This is the difference between self-driven exploration and experimentation, which unleash your deep curiosity, and extrinsic-based learning, which tends to work against it. Instead of suppressing your genuine interests and passion for learning, let them guide you to the places you actually want to go.

A final point to consider: As with any psychological trait, curiosity is part nature, part nurture. This means that we all have a natural predisposition to be more (or less) curious, irrespective of where we are and the environment we’re in. That said, there’s a great deal of room for improvement. The best estimates indicate that curiosity is around 50% nature, meaning around 50% remains malleable—albeit much of that will cement in adulthood. Thus, while it’s unlikely someone who is naturally uncurious will suddenly achieve Einstein levels of curiosity (and vice versa), we can all strengthen or tweak whatever baseline level of curiosity we have. But, like all skills, it requires dedication.

Are you ready to flex?

TOMAS CHAMORRO-PREMUZIC is the chief innovation officer at ManpowerGroup, a professor of business psychology at University College London and Columbia University, cofounder of deepersignals.com, and an associate at Harvard’s Entrepreneurial Finance Lab. He is the author of Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? (Harvard Business Review Press, 2019), on which his TEDx talk was based. His latest book is I, Human: AI, Automation, and the Quest to Reclaim What Makes Us Unique (Harvard Business Review Press, 2023). Find him at www.drtomas.com.