Curiosity is a practice, not a personality trait. It requires showing up to things with no obvious payoff.

People talk about curiosity as if it's something you either have or don't. I think that's wrong. Curiosity is something you practice — and like most practices, it atrophies when you stop.

Staying curious requires deliberately doing things that have no clear return. Reading about subjects adjacent to your work. Talking to people in different fields. Following questions that aren't on anyone's roadmap. The environment actively selects against this. Everything is optimized for relevance, for conversion, for measurable output.

I try to protect time for things I can't justify. Not because I think it'll pay off — I genuinely don't know if it will. But because the alternative is a kind of narrowing I find more frightening than the inefficiency.