Curiosity Is a Competitive Advantage

Why the people willing to keep asking questions often find the routes nobody else can see.

I should probably start by admitting that I’m not curious about everything.

My son walked past a public bin recently and wanted to know how the bin fit inside the little enclosure around it. How did they get it out? Where was the door? How did the garbage truck empty it?

I realised I had walked past probably ten thousand versions of that bin in my life and never once wondered.

I also don’t particularly need to understand how a plane stays in the sky. I’m very happy to get on one, order a coffee and trust that someone much more interested in aerodynamics has taken care of it.

So when I say that curiosity has been one of the greatest competitive advantages of my life, I don’t mean that I’m endlessly fascinated by everything.

My curiosity has always been more directed than that.

There are two questions, in particular, that seem to follow me everywhere.

How far could I take this?

And:

How did they do that?

The first has shaped a lot of my life. I’m endlessly curious about my own capacity. Could I build that? Could I learn that? What would happen if I tried this? Where is my ceiling? Is that actually my ceiling, or have I just decided it is? Why did I react like that? What’s underneath that feeling? What would happen if I changed it?

The second is how I tend to look at the world.

When I see something win, I immediately need to figure out why.

A brand blows up. A cultural phenomenon seems to appear from nowhere. A person builds an extraordinary business. A product develops an almost irrational emotional hold over people.

My brain immediately starts pulling at it.

And I think that instinct - to pull at things - has unlocked more for me than almost anything else.

I don’t take winning at face value.

Take Rhode for example.

It’s very easy to look at its success and say: Hailey Bieber.

And, obviously, Hailey Bieber matters enormously.

But my brain immediately goes somewhere else.

Sure. But what else?

Why did that celebrity brand become culturally significant when countless others didn’t? Why did the products resonate? Why did the phone case become a phenomenon? Why did the visual world spread so effectively? What did they understand about their customer? What happened at exactly the right cultural moment? Which decisions compounded into the outcome we’re now summarising with a single explanation?

Or take Labubu…

You can say TikTok. Scarcity. Collectibles. Celebrity adoption. All probably true.

But why that slightly strange little monster?

Why now?

Why did grown adults suddenly want one hanging from a $10,000 handbag?

That’s the bit I find interesting.

I think we have a tendency to explain success retrospectively in ways that make it seem much simpler than it was. Once something has won, the story of why it won becomes neat.

But winning is rarely neat.

It’s usually a strange combination of timing, decisions, cultural forces, positioning, instinct, luck, execution and a dozen other things that are much harder to fit into a headline.

Curious people don’t necessarily reject the obvious explanation.

They just don’t assume it’s the whole explanation.

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This became particularly useful to me when I was running Smack Bang.

One of my favourite parts of the job was running brand strategy workshops. They were usually my first meaningful interaction with a client and, perhaps controversially, I never prepared for them.

I didn’t want to enter the room already knowing where we were going.

Of course there were things we needed to uncover, but I found that the most useful conversations almost never happened because I’d asked the perfect question from a beautifully prepared workshop template.

They happened because somebody said something interesting.

And I followed it, like Alice down the rabbit hole.

One question would become another. We’d disappear down a tangent that appeared to have absolutely nothing to do with the brief. Someone would tell me a story about why they’d started the business, or something their customer had said once, or an opinion they held about their industry that had never made it onto their website.

And there it was.

The thing.

The little pot of gold we’d probably never have found if I’d been more interested in getting through my agenda than responding to what was actually in front of me.

Those tangents became positioning ideas. Brand stories. Campaigns. Sometimes entire strategic directions.

What I know to be true is that the shortest route to the answer isn’t always the most interesting route to the answer.

Over time, I realised that curiosity was doing something else in those rooms too.

It made people feel understood.

I wasn’t simply extracting information from them so I could go away and do my job. I was participating in their problem. I wanted to understand it with them. And genuine curiosity has an energy to it; people can tell when you’re actually interested.

I think that’s one of the less discussed advantages of curiosity.

It’s relational.

Being deeply interested in another person is one of the most generous forms of attention you can give them.

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Curiosity has also made me unusually comfortable with being wrong.

At Land Lab, this happens to me constantly.

I’ll become convinced that a particular marketing angle will work, or that customers will respond to something in a certain way. We’ll test it.

And sometimes...

Nothing.

Meanwhile, the thing I was considerably less excited about performs brilliantly.

I’ve been humbled enough times now to find this quite exciting. Because the point isn’t to prove that my original theory was right. The point is to figure out what is right.

There’s an important distinction there.

If you’re deeply attached to a particular outcome, every piece of information becomes evidence to either defend or attack your position.

If you’re curious, information is simply information.

Oh. Interesting.

Why did that happen?

What does that tell us?

What should we try next?

I think this is why curiosity and humility are so innately connected.

To remain curious, you have to remain open to the possibility that you just don’t know.

That your first idea likely isn’t the best one.

That the market knows something you don’t.

That someone younger, less experienced or completely outside your field might see something you’ve missed.

That the route you were certain would take you there might not be the route at all.

Certainty closes the loop. Curiosity keeps it open.

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I’ve realised that my favourite place in life is probably the bottom of a mountain.

Not literally. Although I’m partial to a solid hike.

I mean that moment when I can see something I want to understand, build or become, but I have absolutely no idea how I’m going to get there yet.

That feeling lights me up.

Could I do that?

How the fuck would I do that?

Who already has?

What do they know that I don’t?

There’s a humility in being a rookie that I find incredibly freeing. Nobody expects you to know everything yet. You get to ask stupid questions. Experiment. Change direction. Learn quickly. Everything feels expansive because almost everything is still ahead of you.

I think this was part of why I eventually sold Smack Bang.

After building the business for so many years, I no longer felt like the rookie.

There were obviously still things I could have improved and places I could have taken it, but I understood the mountain. I knew the terrain. I knew the problems. I could roughly predict what was around the next corner.

And I’ve learned something important about myself:

I need another mountain.

Not because I need endless achievement, but because I need somewhere for my curiosity to go.

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I think this is also why I’d hire an extraordinarily curious person over an extraordinarily intelligent one almost every time.

Intelligence is incredibly useful.

But curiosity is hunger. And hunger is a force to be reckoned with.

A curious person will find the thing they don’t know and go after it. They’ll ask another question. Look somewhere unexpected. Challenge the assumption everyone else accepted. They’ll learn beyond the boundaries of their job because they actually want to understand how the pieces fit together.

And eventually, all of that curiosity starts to compound.

One question introduces you to an idea.

That idea leads you into another field.

That field gives you a reference.

Years later, you’re sitting with a completely unrelated problem and suddenly the reference returns.

You make a connection.

Everyone else calls it instinct.

But instinct rarely arrives from nowhere.

What looks like intuition in the moment may simply be curiosity compounded over time.

Perhaps that’s why curious people often become more interesting thinkers as they get older. They’re not simply accumulating information, they’re building an increasingly dense web of connections between things.

The more dots you collect, the more unusual the lines you can draw between them.

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Of course, curiosity has a shadow side.

Mine certainly does.

The same voice that asks how far could I take this? can become very interested in finding out how far I could take something else.

And something else.

And - oh, that looks interesting - maybe that too.

Curiosity without direction can quickly become distraction.

Which is why I’ve realised mine is relatively pragmatic. I’m not particularly interested in collecting knowledge for the sake of knowing things. I tend to want to understand how the information relates to somewhere I’m trying to go.

That might be a business problem.

A creative idea.

My own psychology.

Something I want to become better at.

I like curiosity with a destination.

But I don’t want to become so attached to the destination that I stop noticing other routes. Because that’s the paradox. You need enough direction to know what you’re looking for.

And enough openness to discover something you weren’t.

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I think we lose some of this as we get older.

Children seem to live almost entirely inside questions.

Why? Why? Why?

Then slowly we accumulate answers. We develop expertise. Opinions. Routines. Responsibilities. Calendars that don’t leave much room for following an interesting thought for an hour.

We become busy. We become certain. And sometimes we become very invested in appearing knowledgeable.

And curiosity starts disappearing underneath all that competence.

I think that’s a shame.

The moment we stop leaning towards the world and decide we understand enough of it already, is a kind of death I hope to never experience.

Curiosity keeps us participating in the world.

It keeps us testing ourselves against what might be possible. It keeps us open to changing our minds. It keeps us interested in other people. It gives us permission to be beginners again and again and again.

And yes, I think that makes us better at business.

Better strategists.

Better creatives.

Better problem solvers.

Probably more intelligent over time.

But I’m not sure that’s its greatest advantage.

I think curiosity makes life bigger.

There is always another question. Another connection. Another thing you haven’t understood yet. Another version of yourself you haven’t met. Another path you hadn’t considered.

Another mountain.

And perhaps that’s the real competitive advantage.

While everyone else is busy proving what they already know, the curious person is still looking for what everyone might have missed.

Stay interested. There’s always another door.