Why Curiosity Is My Favourite Professional Skill

When you look back at a decade-long career, there is a lot to reflect on. Your growth is a culmination of mistakes, learning, upskilling, observation and of course, your performance. In my run as a communications professional, there was a time when I thought the most important skill in my career would be writing.

Then I thought it was strategy, or the ability to communicate clearly under pressure. However, over time I've realised that almost everything I value professionally starts much earlier than any of that.

It starts with curiosity.

Not the kind that leads you down internet rabbit holes or fills your bookshelf faster than you can read it (although I'm guilty of both). It’s the quieter kind—the one that makes you ask that one more question, making it impossible for you to accept the first explanation as is.

Call it maturity or an epiphany, I am convinced that the most interesting stories rarely reveal themselves immediately. You have to dig. And sometimes you have to keep digging until you get to the core of the story. 

A market report might explain what happened, but it doesn't always explain why. A successful campaign might tell you the outcome, but not the conversations, assumptions, or decisions that shaped it. Even in everyday life, that first impression is often the least interesting one—unless you’re one of those people who believe in the “first impression is the last impression” cliche.

If you’re someone curious like me, you rarely take the first answer as the final one. 

It's probably why I enjoy travelling the way I do. I might start with ticking landmarks off a list, and it’s great…but it doesn’t satiate my curiosity, doesn’t feel memorable. I’d rather wander down a side street filled with paintings, browse a local bookshop because I saw a cat sitting on the shelf inside, spend an hour in a museum admiring the jewels from previous Islamic sultanates, aimlessly walk through a bustling bazaar, try and make sense of Google Maps directions when everything is labeled in Russian, or just sit in a café watching a city unfold around me. Now that’s where the stories are.

The same instinct follows me into work.

Some of the projects I'm most proud of didn't begin with a clever idea. They began with a question. 

What are we missing?

It then quickly avalanches into a series of questions: whose perspective we haven't heard yet? Where can we find the best insights? Is there a better way to explain this? Is this going to solve the issue we aim to tackle?

Often these questions lead to deeper research. Sometimes they uncover a more interesting story than the one we started with. Occasionally they change the entire direction of a piece of work—trust me, those are the best stories that come out. 

So what did ten years of professional curiosity teach me? It's that good communication strategies are almost always about asking better questions before you start writing, and  seldom about having all the answers. 

Perhaps that's why I still find this work so rewarding after all these years. It keeps me curious. It makes me continue to learn every single day. Every project is an opportunity to understand something I didn't fully understand yesterday. That’s a blessing.

And I hope I never lose that.