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Key Takeaways Asking questions is more often a sign of enthusiasm than reluctance.
Formal training can blunt curiosity if you aren’t careful.
It’s not always easy to be curious — but it’s always worth it.
The poet Maya Angelou once claimed that courage is the most important virtue — because without courage, it becomes impossible to practice any other virtue consistently.
These are incredibly wise words, and they’ve repeatedly proven themselves to be true over the course of my career. I’ve often found that knowing the right thing to do in any given situation is only as valuable as my will to do it. That means courage has been necessary for every meaningful life or business decision I’ve ever made.
But courage is about more than plowing ahead blindly when confronted with a challenge. It’s also about the willingness to look closely at those challenges before leaping into action, especially when they intimidate us. This requires curiosity, which is a special type of courage all by itself.
Asking questions is more often a sign of enthusiasm than reluctance
I asked a lot of questions when I was young. Whenever my parents or teachers at school showed me how to do something, from pruning vines on my family’s concord grape farm to solving algebra problems in math class, I wanted to know why each step in the process mattered. Why was it necessary? How did it move me closer to the goal I was trying to achieve? Were there other, potentially more efficient ways of getting there?
One thing I learned very quickly from this was that most adults are short on time. My parents were, and still are, wonderful, patient people who made every effort to answer my questions. My teachers did the best they could. But when you’re trying to deliver a curriculum to a classroom of 20 or 30 students, you can’t always afford to stop and answer a dozen enthusiastic inquiries from the same overachiever in the front row. I was told more than once that I was overthinking things; that I simply had to follow the instructions I had been given instead of questioning the methods behind everything.
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