Only one in five people confess to being curious. Adventurous souls stand out. And it’s not an easy path. Especially when you’re up against a wave of certainty, resistance, or the suffocating pressure to blend in or cave in. This episode is for the perceptive ones—the brave who explore the uncharted.The to-do list of the curious ones isn’t breezy: Listen to your opponents (even when it goes against your instincts), argue both sides of your own ideas so everyone feels safe arguing with you, inspire provocative questions, and dare to see things from new angles. Resist the pull of popular opinion and the trap of the “known.” Seek the unobvious in the obvious, be fascinated by views outside your own and lean on your tribe for camaraderie, not as a self-validating crutch.This episode is about diving deep into the ocean of curiosity, not just to understand one another, but to be socially perceptive. It’s about mind-reading, not surface-level skimming or guesswork. Being perceptive doesn’t require a flood of brilliant insights. It’s about sharpening your sight to see the overlooked, the hidden. It’s like walking into a dark room and lighting a candle; you’re not creating something new, you’re illuminating the unseen.Tune in as we explore how to make the uncomfortable comfortable, unsettle the settled, and cure the incurious. And that may mean you.You can get the first, full two chapters (PDF) of our new, upcoming book, I Am Gravity, plus a strengths and counterfeits fitness check, at https://schoolofgravity.com/. Just tap the purple button at the top of the home page.Learn more about the work we do and the elements of gravity at https://schoolofgravity.com/our-work. You can reach us at hello@schoolofgravity.com. Steven Titus Smith, coauthor of I Am Gravity, presented this episode. You can read more about the authors here.Here’s the episode transcript:Emily gets up one morning to hear that the White House revoked the credentials of a press member who wouldn’t sit down because the president wouldn’t answer his questions. The White House has a video. The news agency has a video. Both sides have a story. Emily swipes out of her newsfeed, works out, showers, dresses, grabs her coffee and jets out the door for work. Like every other day-in-the-life morning, she checks her email and Slack channels on the subway. She has scheduled interviews to hire a new product manager. Andrew, a member of her team, messages her. He sensed a little bit of friction with engineering in yesterday’s product launch meeting. No one said anything, it was just the vibe of the meeting. Emily isn’t about to let issues beneath the surface hurt a new launch timeline. She texts the engineering director, Gaige, and asks to talk it through. The subway is more crowded than usual. A political convention is in town, so outsiders with name badges occupy local seats. A little late for work, Emily takes her last sip of coffee and throws the cup in the recycle bin. Someone with a name badge throws a coffee cup in a garbage can, ignoring the recycle sign. Outsiders. Emily is momentarily irritated but reminds herself she can’t control everything. Rushing into work, she grabs a smoothie and enters the interview room. Andrew has started the first interview. She sits down on the only chair available (the hard plastic kind you remember from grade school), grabs a heavy-duty clipboard with the candidate’s résumé securely clipped on, and joins in. The first few candidates don’t impress her. They don’t seem collaborative, a little too independent. One strikes her as very competent but a little robotic. With more candidates to interview in the afternoon, Emily drops in on Gaige to see how things are going. Gaige, rushing out of his office for lunch, smirks when Emily mentions the perceived friction, saying that things are fine but that he’ll have to talk later. Making a note to connect with Gaige later, she checks a few more messages and heads to the meeting room for the second set of interviews. The room is double-booked. After 20 minutes of figuring out logistics, everyone grabs their clipboards and résumés and moves to a different room. The new room is better anyway. At least it has more comfortable chairs. And the candidates are better. They seem more socially intelligent, better conversationalists, more at ease with the team. Emily asks more questions. They click. Andrew notices, telling Emily she seemed more engaged in the interviews. She was. Later that day, Emily prepares to make one of the candidates an offer. It’s been kind of a normal day, except that Emily was living in a few illusions without a hint of knowing it. So were the people around her. Candidates were better and worse than she thought. There wasn’t friction with Gaige’s team as Andrew supposed. And the job offer she was about to make was to a good candidate, but not as good as one who interviewed earlier in the day. And just maybe it was ...
