June 27, 2026 | Read online
I had a few conversations on the podcast this week that kept circling back to the same topic - curiosity.
It reminded me of the famous darts scene in Ted Lasso.
Ted gets challenged by Rupert, who's arrogant and assumes Ted doesn't know what he's doing. As Ted lines up his final throw, he talks about how people have underestimated him his entire life. He references a quote from Walt Whitman about being curious, not judgmental.
Then he says if Rupert had been curious enough to ask whether Ted played darts, he would have told him he played every weekend with his dad growing up and then he throws a bullseye.
Rupert lost because he assumed instead of asking. He judged instead of getting curious. I see this in Sales constantly. Reps walk into meetings with assumptions about the prospect, the company, what they need. They pitch before they understand and even answer questions nobody asked. They’re not curious.
I personally think that curiosity always has been one of my superpowers and I believe now, with AI, curiosity is THE superpower.
The question I always ask on my podcast is - is genuine curiosity something you’re born with or can it be learned/taught?
Here's where I've landed. I think genuine, across-the-board curiosity is something you're born with. But I do believe you can teach people to be curious about specific things. And the key is interest.
If you can get someone interested in something, curiosity follows. Interest is the on-ramp. Nobody has to force you to research a company you actually find fascinating. Nobody has to remind you to prep for a meeting with a prospect whose product you genuinely want to understand. The curiosity shows up on its own when the interest is real.
However, this is my opinion based on conversations I’ve had with others, not exactly based on facts. So, guess what? I got curious and used AI to learn about whether or not you can teach and learn curiocity.
Here's what it came back with (the content written by AI is italicized).
George Loewenstein, a professor at Carnegie Mellon, developed something called the information gap theory back in 1994. His research showed that curiosity gets triggered when we recognize a gap between what we know and what we want to know. That gap creates a psychological itch. The bigger the gap, the more motivated you become to go scratch it.
This is why interest matters so much. When you have zero interest in a prospect, you do zero research. There's no gap because you don't know what you don't know so nothing really bothers you and you tend to walk in and wing it.
But when you find something that interests you about the account, you start digging. And the more you dig, the more gaps you find. Those gaps become questions. And those questions are what make you sound like someone worth talking to instead of another rep running a script.
Researchers at UC Davis (Gruber, Gelman, and Ranganath) published a study in the journal Neuron that showed when people are in a state of curiosity, their hippocampus activates more aggressively. That's the part of the brain responsible for memory. When you are genuinely curious, you retain MORE of what you hear. Not only about the thing you're curious about, but about everything happening around it. They called it a "vortex effect."
In Sales, a curious rep catches the throwaway comment about a leadership change or notices the slight hesitation when the prospect mentions their current vendor. They pick up on the offhand remark about a stalled initiative from last quarter. A disinterested rep misses all of it.
Those details are where deals live.
So if curiosity starts with interest, how do you build interest when you're staring at a list of 200 accounts you've never heard of?
Here's what I do and teach. Take your ICP, and pick your top 25 Tier1 accounts. Then do something most reps skip entirely, try to find a personal connection to each one.
Maybe you use their product. Maybe you know someone who works there. Maybe you read their CEO's last earnings call and a specific line stuck with you. Maybe their mission and/or values connect to something you actually care about.
When you create that personal connection, the interest shows up. And when the interest shows up, Loewenstein's gap kicks in. You start wanting to know more. The research stops feeling like homework and starts feeling like pulling a thread you're genuinely interested in. Your outreach gets specific because your curiosity is specific.
AI accelerates every step of this. I used Claude to research the science of curiosity for this newsletter. One question led to Loewenstein's theory, the UC Davis study, and a half dozen data points I never would have found on my own. That's the pattern. Get curious. Use AI to go deeper. Show up with better questions, not better scripts.
If you want to try the Top 25 exercise, reply to this email and I'll send you the ICP prompt pack I built. It walks you through identifying your ideal customer profile using AI. It's the starting point. You can't build interest in an account if you don't know which accounts you should be interested in.
Curiosity might be something you're born with. But interest? Interest can be built. And in a world where AI is replacing everyone who phones it in, building interest in your accounts isn't optional anymore. It's the thing that keeps you in the game.
Rupert assumed. Ted asked.
Get curious.
#MakeItHappen
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