Ep. 32: Halfway There: Reflections on the Year So Far

All right, so I guess I'll just start.

Go for it.

My first reflection on the podcast and on the year so far is curiosity as a professional superpower.

You know, we start this podcast every other week saying it is a curiosity podcast.

And I felt like it only made sense for us to really shine a light on curiosity.

Now, we've done that over the course of the past.

Well, over the course of the past years.

But we've especially done that in recent episodes around critical thinking.

around getting to the root of problems when we talk about root cause analysis and the value of taking that moment to reflect back on why something happened and making sure we're asking enough why questions to really get to the root.

We talked about this also in a recent episode that we called Out of the Echo Chamber, which was an effort to make sure that we had a real grasp on what's happening in our profession or what's happening within our companies.

And so when I say curiosity as a professional superpower, it is critical thinking to to the nth degree it's making sure that we are asking better questions it's making sure that we're resisting assumptions it's making sure that we're avoiding simplistic explanations and maybe better said avoiding the explanation that feels most comfortable or the one that may be most readily available or the one that we want to go and share with our stakeholders.

It's ultimately also about thinking critically before reacting.

We crafted this podcast as a curiosity podcast because we are innately curious people.

And I think we feel sometimes like there's not enough curiosity in our profession.

There's not enough of those asking better questions and seeking better ways.

And so I felt like if we're gonna reflect, that was the best place to start.

Oh, my gosh.

I just love that.

And I'll tell you, I was recently reading something that was talking about on the topic of curiosity.

And I find myself arguing with the paper, which I do sometimes.

I read a paper and I say, well, but that's not entirely true.

That

feels like curiosity and critical thinking at play right there.

Yes.

So I was reading this thing that says curiosity is this, it describes curiosity as the series of feeling there is a problem or a question and the desire to know and find the answer.