On Curiosity

February 2026

Think about the most curious person you know. The person who will spend hours on a question that offers no immediate advantage. Who challenges weak assumptions without being prompted. Who can say, 'I don't know yet,' and mean it.

Most highly educated people I know are sharp, informed, and reliable. They read widely. They ship fast. They make good calls at every turn. For the longest time, I treated that competence as the definition of intellectual adulthood and organized my life to become that person.

Across most of my career, I learned to converge quickly—absorbing the relevant literature, forming positions that create value, and pushing ahead. Gradually, though, as I became more senior, juggling more than ever, I stopped lingering over questions that offered no near-term return. My experience narrowed. Opinions optimized. Patience compressed. I defaulted to existing frameworks for answers.

The better I got at my job, the less I looked beyond it.

Since I was young, I believed learning was something you did intensively in the first third of life so you could operate efficiently in the remaining two-thirds. You acquired tools, passed tests, earned legitimacy, and voila. Only later—alone at my desk during my sabbatical, watching Professor Gilbert Strang teach linear algebra—did I realize what that model had quietly trained out of me. Not intelligence. Not discipline. Curiosity.

Strang, decades into his career, worked through problems that were surely elementary to him with visible care—as if encountering them for the first time. Not performing mastery. Not compressing complexity for speed. He was rebuilding understanding from the ground up, in public, without any pretense of finality. What I saw wasn’t expertise on display so much as intellectual honesty in motion. It was vaguely reminiscent of something in me I didn't know I missed.

My formal education had rarely modeled this. It treated knowledge as stable, testable, and finishable. You moved from prerequisite to prerequisite, checkpoint to checkpoint, until a diploma gave you that stamp of approval. The system rewarded closure. It taught you—quietly but persistently—that good thinking ends in answers.

Reality works differently. Outside classrooms and credentials, knowledge is provisional. Explanations compete. Models improve asymptotically. Confidence is useful, but never sufficient. Every real-world field—science, engineering, medicine, economics, entrepreneurship—advances through error correction, not accumulation. Progress depends less on having the right answers than on maintaining the right questions.

Curiosity, in this sense, is not an appetite for novelty or a personality trait. It is a form of agency: the decision to begin and to stay invested long after external incentives fade. When you choose the question, difficulty ceases to be an obstacle and becomes the terrain of work.

This is where modern education falls short. Discipline can push you through material you don't care about. Curiosity only works if something is pulling you in. Too often, we climb ladders of prerequisites without ever thinking about what we're climbing toward. Not because we lack ability, but because we're rarely shown the meaning before the methods.

As a child, I was top of my class in mathematics—largely because I had teachers who made the thinking feel alive. I also had a professor who taught calculus as if it were paperwork, and I lost interest almost immediately. Same student. Same discipline. Completely different outcome.

But even with good teachers, the structure could still work against curiosity. You solved problem sets on Newtonian mechanics with no sense of how they connected to relativity, quantum theory, or cosmology. The promise was always the same: keep going, the picture will come together. The picture only comes together far enough in that most people never get there.

The fundamentals do need to come first—you obviously can't do quantum mechanics without linear algebra. The problem isn't the sequence. It's that the meaning of the sequence is withheld. You could teach classical theories while showing how these seemingly isolated branches connect, why they matter, and what they're building toward. Most programs simply don't.

As a result, many of us leave education well-trained but not curious. Equipped to perform, but not to inquire. When work fills the hours and competence becomes comfortable, it's easy to let curiosity slip—and I did. It took a sabbatical and a career in technology before I circled back.

If returning to serious inquiry required what it required of me—time, financial stability, and luck—how many people never get the chance? Left unexamined, education becomes a gatekeeper rather than a bridge. And what a society stops asking of its adults, it eventually stops modeling for its children.

This is why educators like Strang matter. He teaches as if thinking out loud with you. The internet gave me access to others: Andrej Karpathy, who breaks complexity into pieces you can hold. Kian Katanforoosh, who grounds concepts in real-world application. David Deutsch, working at a different altitude, asks not just how things work but how we know what we know. His theories reshaped how I see nearly everything.

Different approaches, same effect: they're each democratizing the epiphany. And they all made me want to keep going.

Since my sabbatical, I've been learning again—no longer toward mastery, but toward revision—of how I think, what I assume, and what I think I know. Each encounter with complexity strips away a layer of certainty and replaces it with better questions. After years of optimizing for clarity and conviction, learning from scratch felt like moving backward. Somehow it was the most invigorating thing I'd done in years.

Learning, at its core, is a humbling act. You cannot bluff your way through a derivation. You cannot career-path your way through a proof. You must be wrong—repeatedly, precisely, and often publicly—until you are less wrong. Every explanation is a draft. Every conclusion is conditional. Humility is not a moral accessory. It is operationally necessary. I have yet to find a more grounding way of living than this.

Seen this way, curiosity is no longer a phase of life or a tool of ambition. It is a commitment to live inside unfinished questions. To remain intellectually mobile as the terrain shifts. Even when everything around you rewards having answers.

As I step back into the professional world, that pull doesn't disappear. Clear positions, fast decisions, defensible opinions still carry the weight. But something has shifted. Where I once optimized for answers, I now try to hold some questions a little longer. Where I once defaulted to frameworks, I now look for what they miss.

This tension may never resolve. I've come to think that's the point. Curiosity without the pull to converge is just wandering. It's the choice to stay open that makes it a practice, not a destination.

If something or someone ever changed how you learn, I'd love to hear about it.