You take out the garbage every day.
You've done it for years. Maybe decades. It's just a thing you do. Part of the routine. You grab the bag, walk outside, toss it in the bin. Done. Never think about it twice.
But what if you stopped for 10 seconds and asked: "Does it have to be this way?"
What if the garbage could take itself out?
That sounds ridiculous. And that's exactly the point. Because most people never ask the ridiculous question. They never get curious enough to wonder if the thing they've always done could be done differently. Or not done at all.
And right now, in 2026, that lack of curiosity is the single biggest thing holding people back.
The Curiosity Gap Is the New Skills Gap
Traditional businesses sitting on decades of manual processes. The pattern I see over and over is not a technology gap. It's a curiosity gap.
The tools are here. AI can write, analyze, build, automate, reason. It gets better every month. But most people interact with these tools the way they interact with their garbage routine. They accept the default. They don't question the process. They don't get curious about what's underneath.
Adam Grant, organizational psychologist at Wharton, studied what he calls "originals." People who drive creativity and change. His research found something surprising. The biggest difference between originals and everyone else wasn't talent or intelligence. It was that originals were more afraid of not trying than of failing. They generated massive volumes of ideas. Most were bad. But the volume itself created the conditions for breakthroughs.
That's curiosity in action. Not passive wondering. Active experimentation.
Why Your Brain Fights Curiosity
Your brain is actually wired to avoid curiosity.
Psychiatrist Judson Brewer at Brown University has spent over 20 years studying how the brain forms habits. His research shows that our brains run on a reward-based learning loop. Trigger, behavior, reward. See garbage bag full. Pick it up. Take it out. Feel good that the task is done. Loop complete. Brain moves on.
The problem is that this same loop applies to how we think. We encounter a problem. We reach for the familiar solution. We get the small reward of "done." And we never question whether the problem itself was the right one to solve.
Brewer's key insight is that curiosity is actually more powerful than willpower for breaking these loops. When you get genuinely curious about a habit or pattern, your brain's reward system updates. You start seeing the actual results of your default behaviors instead of running on autopilot.
This is why curiosity isn't just nice to have. It's a mechanism for rewiring how you operate.
The Garbage Test
I use something I call the Garbage Test with teams I work with. It's simple.
Pick one thing you do every single day that you've never questioned. Something so routine it's invisible. Now get curious about it. Not "how do I optimize this?" That's efficiency thinking. Instead ask:
"Why does this exist at all?"
When you ask that question about enough things, you start finding entire categories of work that shouldn't exist. Reports nobody reads. Meetings that could be async messages. Manual data entry that an API could handle. Approval workflows that exist because someone got burned once in 2017.
The garbage doesn't need a faster route to the bin. The garbage needs to stop being generated in the first place.
Curiosity Is Not a Personality Trait. It's a Practice.
People tell me they're "not the curious type." That's like saying you're not the breathing type. Curiosity is a human default. Kids ask somewhere around 300 questions a day. By adulthood, that number drops to almost nothing.
What happened? We got trained out of it. Schools rewarded correct answers over good questions. Workplaces rewarded execution over exploration. We learned that asking "why" makes you look like you don't know what you're doing.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff, who spoke at SXSW EDU 2025 on the experimental mindset, put it well. She argues that by middle school, most kids have already shifted from the excitement of discovery to the pressure of getting things right. And we carry that pressure into our careers, our businesses, our relationship with technology.
The fix is not some grand mindset overhaul. It's small experiments.
The Curiosity Protocol
This is what I've used across engagements with teams adopting AI and building new workflows.
1. Pick one friction point. Something that bothers you. Something tedious. Something you complain about but accept. Start there.
2. Shut everything down for 15 minutes. No Slack. No email. No music. Just you and the question: "What is actually happening here? What's underneath this?"
3. Get weird with it. Ask the dumb question. "What if this didn't exist?" "What if I did the opposite?" "What if a five-year-old designed this?" The value isn't in the answer. It's in breaking the default pattern your brain is stuck in.
4. Run one micro-experiment. Don't plan. Don't strategize. Don't build a deck. Just try something. One small test. See what happens. The goal isn't to succeed. The goal is to learn something you didn't know 30 minutes ago.
5. Record what you found. Not a formal report. A single sentence. "I tried X and learned Y." That's it. Stack enough of those sentences and you have a roadmap that no consultant could have built for you.
What This Looks Like With AI
Say you spend 45 minutes every morning reading through Slack messages, emails, and project updates to figure out what needs your attention. You've done this for years. It's just the morning routine.
The Garbage Test: "Why does this exist?"
Because information is scattered. Because there's no single source of truth. Because everyone communicates differently.
The curious question: "What if I didn't do this at all? What if something did it for me?"
The micro-experiment: Spend one hour building a simple AI workflow that summarizes your channels and flags what actually needs you. Not a perfect system. A prototype. A test.
Maybe it works. Maybe it doesn't. But now you've learned something about what AI can do, what your actual information bottlenecks are, and where you should focus next. That's more progress than most people make in a month of "meaning to look into AI."
The Real Competitive Advantage
Research from ISG found that curiosity is becoming one of the most critical organizational capabilities in the AI era. Not because curious people are smarter. But because curious people experiment. And experimentation is the only way to figure out how AI actually fits into your specific context.
No blog post, course, or consultant can tell you exactly how AI will transform your work. That answer only comes from getting curious enough to try things. To break things. To ask the question nobody else is asking.
Google built their innovation culture on this. They gave employees 20% of their time for self-directed projects. Not because they knew what would come out of it. But because they understood that curiosity at scale produces outcomes you can't predict or plan for.
You don't need Google's budget to do this. You need 15 minutes and one dumb question.
The Part Nobody Wants to Do
Curiosity requires something most people avoid: sitting with not knowing.
We live in an era of instant answers. Google it. Ask ChatGPT. Get the solution. Move on. But curiosity isn't about getting answers faster. It's about asking better questions. And better questions come from the discomfort of not knowing. From staying in that space long enough to see what's really there.
Stuart Firestein, a neuroscientist at Columbia, gave a TED Talk called "The Pursuit of Ignorance" where he argued that knowledge actually generates more ignorance, not less. Every answer opens new questions. The people who thrive are the ones who see that as exciting, not threatening.
That's the mindset shift. Not "I need to learn AI." But "I wonder what would happen if..."
Start Today
Don't bookmark this article and forget about it. That's the old pattern. The default loop. Instead, do this:
Before you close this tab, pick one thing in your life or work that you've never questioned. One thing that's "just how it is." Write it down. Then spend 15 minutes getting curious about it.
Not tomorrow. Right now.
The garbage is waiting. But maybe it doesn't have to be.
I help companies figure out where AI actually fits in their business. Not the hype version. The version that makes your team's daily work better. If you're sitting on processes that feel like they shouldn't exist in 2026, let's talk.
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