Tell Me More

On curiosity, courage, and the pause before saying No

I was reading an article recently about small daily practices that support longevity. One in particular stopped me: stay curious. Pick one thing and dig in.

My first reaction was relief — because I spend a lot of my days being curious. But I've also been criticized for it. Others sometimes perceive curiosity as setting up for an attack. It makes me sad to think that we've arrived at a place where genuine interest in learning needs a disclaimer. Sometimes it feels like I'm living in a world increasingly uncomfortable with not-knowing. Where people don't just hold opinions — they hold verdicts. Where the question has been quietly replaced by the conclusion. Where someone can look you in the eye and tell you what your own experience was.

That happened to me recently. A friend and I were discussing something and I shared a memory from my distant past that countered the facts that were evident at this point in time. Rather than being met with curiosity, I was met with an immediate response challenging my memory recall. Worse, it seemed as if my honesty was being challenged.

As it turned out, I was right. But that's beside the point.

The point is that this is where we find ourselves. When someone's account doesn't align with our version of things, the assumption isn't hm, maybe there's something I don't know. It's that they must be wrong. Or worse — that they're not telling the truth.

The thing is, both could have been true. Things change. A memory from 35 years ago and the reality of today don't have to contradict each other — they can simply be different chapters of the same story. But that would have required a small willingness to stay open. Imagine the difference if instead of a retort, a statement is simply met with genuine interest.

Why do so many of us instantly lead with the "no" rather than "tell me more"?

That pause is curiosity. And it costs almost nothing.

Curiosity is how we stay in genuine contact. With our own experience. With the people we actually know. With a world that is always more complex than the loudest voice in the room is willing to admit.

It's not that we're incurious by nature. Watch a child encounter something unfamiliar and the first instinct is almost always to lean in, not away. Somewhere along the way that shifts. We start arriving at conversations already knowing — or needing to know — rather than wondering what we might discover.

Part of what crowds out that natural curiosity is the sheer volume of other people's certainty that we are willing to consume. What makes a stranger's confident take more credible than the lived experience of someone we actually know? Someone standing right in front of us. Someone whose history we share. And yet somewhere in all of that noise, we've been quietly trained to weigh the distant voice more heavily than the familiar one.

It's also simply easier to accept a confident answer than to do the harder work of sitting with "it depends." Nuance is uncomfortable. It requires us to hold more than one thing at once — and we've grown increasingly impatient with that particular ask.

And yet that discomfort is where the real answers tend to hide.

That takes a particular kind of courage — not the loud kind, but the quiet kind. The willingness to trust your own knowing enough that you don't need to defend it at every turn. And the willingness to trust someone else's knowing too — to let what they carry, what they've lived, what they remember, actually land before the verdict comes in.

The more grounded we become in both what we know and what we don't, the less threatening it feels to stay open. The door gets easier to leave open.

What curiosity offers isn't a lack of conviction. It isn't the absence of knowing. It's the willingness to consider that the story might have chapters you haven't read yet. That two things can be true at once without either one canceling the other out.

The longevity researchers were onto something — but I don't think it's just about keeping the brain fresh. Curiosity is how we stay in genuine contact. With our own experience. With the people we actually know. With a world that is always more complex than the loudest voice in the room is willing to admit.

It doesn't take much. A pause before the "no." A genuine "tell me more." The small courage of not needing the full picture before you let someone else speak.

That's it. That's the whole practice.

If this resonates, an earlier post goes deeper into whose knowing we've learned to trust — and what it costs when we stop: Believe What You Want And if you're not already subscribed to be notified on new posts, you can sign up here .