September 18, 2026Why Curiosity Is the Secret to Real Growth in Business and Life

There is a moment early in every job, every relationship, every new chapter of life, when curiosity runs the show. You notice things. You ask why. You wonder how something works before you’ve decided you already know.

Diana Kander has spent years studying what happens to that curiosity once the novelty wears off, and her answer is uncomfortable in the best way. Curiosity does not disappear because we run out of it. It disappears because we stop making room for it.

🎬 Watch and listen to the full interview with Diana Kander here

The Bear We Can’t Outrun

Diana opens with a claim that sounds almost too simple to be true: you cannot be scared and curious at the same time. Fear and curiosity are mutually exclusive states, and once you sit with that idea, it starts to explain a lot about why so many capable, intelligent people feel intellectually stuck even as they stay busy. What struck me most about this framing is how quietly it reframes the entire conversation about productivity. We tend to think the enemy of growth is laziness or distraction. Diana’s point is different. The real enemy is a nervous system that never gets the chance to relax long enough to wonder about anything.

She describes the modern inbox as a bear. Not metaphorically dramatic, just accurate. It is always coming, it never fully retreats, and the moment you clear it, it regenerates. Most of us spend our working hours in a low-grade state of outrunning that bear, and in that state, curiosity has nowhere to live. This is worth sitting with, because it reframes what “being busy” actually costs an organization. It is not just time. It is the mental space required for the kind of thinking that produces real innovation instead of maintenance.

Curiosity as the Space Between What We Know and What We Want to Know

Diana defines curiosity with unusual precision for a concept people usually describe in vague, inspirational terms. Curiosity, in her words, is the space between what we know today and what we want to know. It is not a personality trait some people have and others lack. It is a gap, and gaps have to be created and protected, because left alone, they close.

This definition matters because it shifts curiosity from something aspirational into something structural. If curiosity is a space, then the question every leader and every professional should be asking is not “how do I become more curious,” but “where in my week is there any space left for curiosity to exist.”

For most people, the honest answer is nowhere. The calendar is full. The inbox is full. The to-do list regenerates faster than it clears. There is no gap, so there is no curiosity, and without curiosity, Diana argues, there is no growth. That line deserves to be read twice. There is no growth without curiosity. It is the catalyst that makes growth possible in the first place, and without it, effort just becomes motion.

Why Execution Without Curiosity Becomes a Treadmill

One of the more quietly important distinctions in this conversation is the difference between working and thinking about how you work. Most professionals spend nearly all their energy executing: answering the message, finishing the task, closing the ticket. Very few spend meaningful time asking whether the schedule itself is designed to produce the outcomes they actually want.

Diana pushes on this directly, asking whether a business could grow ten times in the next year rather than incrementally, and then makes an observation that should reshape how any leader thinks about goal setting. If you never ask the bigger question, the business will not accidentally grow that much. But if you create the space to ask it, the odds shift dramatically in your favor.

This is where curiosity stops being a soft skill and starts becoming a strategic discipline. Businesses do not stumble into transformative growth through sheer output. They get there because someone, at some point, had the space to ask an uncomfortable question about what was actually possible, rather than what was merely next on the list. That kind of thinking sits at the intersection of curiosity and strategy, and it is exactly the terrain Diana has spent her career exploring as an innovation consultant.

The Day One Mindset

Diana introduces a concept that has clearly become central to how she operates, both personally and as an author. She calls it “Day One.” Think back to the first day of your current job. Remember the curiosity, the wonder, the constant internal questioning: I wonder if we could do this differently, I wonder why they do it that way, how does this actually work. That version of you was, in Diana’s words, at the highest point of personal and professional growth you may ever reach in that role, precisely because curiosity had not yet been replaced by certainty.

What happens next is familiar to almost everyone. Somewhere along the way, “I wonder why they do it like that” turns into “this is just how it works around here.” The questions stop. The rules calcify. And the person who once approached the job with open curiosity starts defending the very systems they used to question. Diana keeps a sticker on her computer that simply says “Day One,” a small physical reminder that she has, in her words, inherited her job from her previous self, and that every morning is an opportunity to re-approach it with the same energy she had before she knew all the answers.

I’ve seen this same pattern play out across organizations far beyond the one Diana describes. The employees who create the most value are rarely the ones with the most tenure or the most rigid expertise. They are the ones who never stopped treating their role as something worth questioning. That mindset connects directly to employee engagement, because engagement is really just sustained curiosity about the work itself, and it fades the moment people decide they already understand everything there is to know.

The Monday Reset and the Discipline of Making Space

Here is where the conversation moves from philosophy into something genuinely actionable. Diana does not treat curiosity as a mood she hopes to feel. She treats it as a practice with a fixed weekly appointment. Every Monday morning, before anything else claims her attention, she asks herself one question: what are the three best uses of my time this week, and are those things actually on my calendar?

If they are not on the calendar, she puts them there, before the inbox has a chance to fill the space instead. She does this with an accountability partner, which matters more than it might seem, because a private intention is easy to abandon and a shared commitment is not. What I find most instructive about this ritual is what it is not. It is not a to-do list. It is not time-blocking for efficiency’s sake. It is a deliberate act of asking whether the coming week is structured to produce the results that matter most, rather than simply to get through.

Diana describes two ways to approach this kind of audit, and both are worth understanding. One is bottom-up: looking at your existing schedule and identifying what she calls “zombie” projects, work that is technically still alive on the calendar but has long since stopped moving anything forward.

The other is top-down: starting fresh with the question of what the three best uses of your time would be, and building the week around those answers rather than around whatever already happened to be there.

The zombie-hunting metaphor is memorable, but the real insight underneath it is about productivity in its truest sense. Productivity is not doing more things. It is protecting enough space to keep doing the right things, and curiosity is often what surfaces which things those actually are.

Zombie Projects as a Mirror for Organizational Curiosity

It would be easy to treat the zombie project concept as a personal productivity tip and move on, but I think that undersells what it reveals about how organizations operate. Every company has zombie initiatives: the recurring meeting nobody remembers the original purpose of, the report generated because it always has been, the process that made sense under a previous leader and has simply never been questioned since. These things persist not because anyone actively decided they were worth keeping, but because nobody had the space to ask whether they still were.

This is the organizational version of the individual pattern Diana describes with Day One thinking. Just as a person stops asking “why do we do it like that” once they’ve been in a role long enough, an organization stops questioning its own systems once those systems become invisible furniture.

The antidote is the same at both scales: deliberately created space, protected on a recurring basis, dedicated to asking whether the current structure still serves the current goal. Leaders who build this kind of space into their organizations are not being indulgent. They are protecting the mechanism by which business growth actually happens, because growth rarely comes from doing the existing plan slightly better. It comes from someone having the room to notice the plan itself has stopped making sense.

Curiosity as a Leadership Discipline, Not a Personality Trait

One of the more freeing implications of Diana’s framework is that curiosity is not a fixed trait some leaders are born with and others are permanently without. It is a discipline, built through a recurring, almost mechanical practice: a Monday ritual, an accountability check-in, a calendar audit. This matters enormously for business leadership, because it means curiosity can be taught, scheduled, and protected rather than hoped for.

I’ve been thinking about how often leadership development programs focus on traits: vision, decisiveness, communication, all worthy but ultimately abstract. Diana’s approach offers something more useful, because it gives leaders an actual mechanism. Ask what curiosity requires. It requires space. Space requires protection. Protection requires a recurring, deliberate act, not a hopeful intention. That is a system leaders can actually build into their weeks and, eventually, into the culture of their teams. It is also, not incidentally, at the core of what makes Diana such a sought-after voice in corporate culture, because she is not describing curiosity as a nice-to-have. She is describing it as infrastructure.

From Refugee to Bestselling Author: Why Diana’s Perspective Carries Weight

It is worth pausing on who is delivering this message, because it shapes how it lands. Diana Kander arrived in the United States as a refugee at age eight and went on to build and sell multiple companies before becoming a New York Times best-selling author. Her first book, All In Startup, is now used in more than a hundred university innovation courses. Her second, The Curiosity Muscle, takes the exact framework she describes in this conversation and expands it into a methodology organizations can use to keep curiosity alive as they scale.

That trajectory matters because curiosity, as Diana describes it, is not a luxury reserved for people with margin in their lives. It is a discipline she has clearly had to build under real constraint, as an entrepreneur navigating uncertainty long before she had the resources or reputation she has now. Her work as an innovation consultant, and as one of the more compelling voices among women leaders in business today, is built on the premise that curiosity is available to anyone willing to protect it, not just to people whose circumstances hand it to them. You can learn more about her full body of work through her speaker profile.

What Elite Performers Understand About Curiosity That Others Miss

The more I think about this conversation, the more it seems to explain a pattern I’ve noticed among genuinely high performers across very different fields. The people who sustain excellence over long careers rarely do it by simply working harder than everyone else. They do it by protecting a habit of asking better questions long after most people around them have stopped asking any. That is what separates elite performance from mere consistency. Consistency repeats what already works. Elite performance keeps questioning whether what works today will still work tomorrow, and that questioning only happens where curiosity has room to breathe.

This is also, I’d argue, what separates organizations that stay relevant for decades from ones that quietly calcify. Diana’s larger body of work often points to brands that failed to keep innovating, not because they lacked talent or resources, but because they stopped being curious about their own customers and their own assumptions. Curiosity is not just a personal growth tool. It is a survival mechanism for anything built to last, whether that is a career, a team, or a company.

Building Curiosity Into the Architecture of a Career

Perhaps the most practical takeaway from this conversation is that curiosity cannot be left to chance, because chance almost always favors the bear. If you do not schedule space for curiosity, your inbox will fill that space instead, every single week, without exception. Diana’s Monday ritual works precisely because it does not rely on willpower or inspiration. It relies on structure: a recurring appointment with yourself, a specific question about the three best uses of your time, and a calendar that reflects the answer rather than whatever happened to arrive first.

This is a useful model for anyone thinking seriously about their own success, because it reframes success itself as downstream of curiosity rather than separate from it. You do not stumble into meaningfully better outcomes by executing the same plan more efficiently. You get there by periodically stepping back and asking, with real curiosity, whether the plan is still the right one. That single habit, repeated weekly, compounds into a career and a life built on continual reassessment rather than accumulated assumptions.

The Lesson That Stayed With Me

What makes this conversation especially interesting is how ordinary the practice sounds and how rarely anyone actually does it. Nobody disagrees that curiosity matters. Almost nobody protects space for it on a recurring basis. Diana’s contribution is not the insight that curiosity drives growth, which most thoughtful professionals already sense intuitively. Her contribution is the mechanism: a defined space, a specific weekly question, an accountability structure, and a willingness to treat every Monday as Day One rather than day one thousand of the same routine.

The lesson that stayed with me is simple but not easy. Curiosity is not something you either have or don’t have on a given day. It is something you build room for, on purpose, against the constant pull of a schedule that would happily consume every available minute without ever asking whether those minutes were spent well. The businesses, teams, and individuals who keep growing are rarely the ones with the most information. They are the ones who never stopped protecting the space to ask what they still don’t know.

Choosing Day One Over Day One Thousand

There is something quietly radical about treating every Monday as an opportunity to reset rather than simply continue. Most of us operate on inertia, carrying forward last week’s assumptions into this week’s schedule without ever stopping to check whether those assumptions still hold. Diana’s practice interrupts that inertia deliberately, and in doing so, protects the one resource that makes real growth possible: curiosity.

If there is a single idea worth carrying out of this conversation, it is that curiosity is not fragile because people lack it, but because life is structurally designed to crowd it out. The bear never stops running toward you. The only real defense is deciding, on a recurring basis, to make space anyway. That decision, repeated often enough, is what separates people and organizations that keep growing from those that simply keep busy. Curiosity, protected on purpose, is what makes the difference, and it starts with something as small as three questions written down before the week has a chance to fill itself in without you.

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