Curiosity > Judgement

“It ain’t what we don’t know that gets us in trouble. It’s what we know for certain that just ain’t so.”— Mark Twain

Curiosity is our superpower. Judgment is our kryptonite. 

Curiosity is what drives us to grow and learn as individuals and as a collective. Judgement is what keeps us isolated and separate from each other, playing small in the confines of what we believe to be true.

Our innate human curiosity has driven all the innovation and progress of mankind. Our judgment of others—and our certainty in our own way of thinking—has driven every conflict in human history.

Shifting from judgment to curiosity not only has the power to transform our personal lives, but also holds the key to healing the divisions in our world.

The Evolutionary Roots of Judgment

Our brains are hardwired for judgment. It has been a feature of our evolutionary design, not a bug.

For most of our evolutionary history, the ability to quickly assess people, situations, and environments was a matter of life and death.

And survival is all that mattered. Happiness is not an evolutionary consideration. 

For context, humans have spent 99% of our evolutionary history in environments completely different from the modern world. Most of that time was spent as hunter-gatherers (2.5 million years ago to 10,000 BC).

The rate of social and technological change over the last 200 years has dramatically exceeded our biological evolution. That time span is literally less than 0.01% of all human existence.

It’s no surprise that life in 2025 can feel so overwhelming.

We continue to default to judgment in our lives because it’s what helped get us here!

But that default is what causes so much of our modern stress, anxiety, anger, and overwhelm.

Curiosity Is the Antidote. It’s what unlocks our personal growth. And our personal growth is what unlocks our growth as a species. 

If you want to change the world, start by changing yourself.

Why Is It So Hard?

Your brain is designed for energy efficiency. It will always default to the quickest answer. These are known as biases or heuristics. There are over 180 documented cognitive biases that influence how we think, feel, and make decisions.

One you’ve likely heard of—on display every day in our modern life, especially in politics—is confirmation bias. If we believe something to be true, we look for information that validates that belief and filter out information that contradicts it.

Social media has become so problematic because it puts that bias on steroids.

These biases are part of our autopilot programming that has served us for millennia—and still serves us in many ways today.

But modern life is complex. Little is black and white.

Yet we still default to that same certainty to navigate our lives. 

Mostly because black-and-white thinking is easy—it’s automatic. And honestly, it feels good. It gives us a sense of control in a world full of gray.

It’s easier to blame and judge than to face the discomfort of understanding someone who thinks or believes differently from us.

Judgement Starts with Ourselves

Watch how often you talk and think about yourself in certain terms… “I am this type of person. I’m not that type of person.” 

We can also be certain of the ways in which we are inadequate and not enough.

That certainty draws boundaries we feel comfortable in. We don’t like to be uncomfortable. 

But the only thing we can be certain about ourselves is that we live most of our lives on a subconscious autopilot we had no control over when creating the programming.

When the comfort of that certainty gives way to the inevitable suffering of this uncertain existence, the door to change opens up.

But it takes real courage, especially in the absence of acute trauma or events,  to embrace that curiosity. To say:

“Why am I this way? In what ways am I actually contributing to the circumstances of my life that I say I don’t want?”

The Road Inward

This is the road inward that we all must travel if we truly want to change. And it’s hard to find that motivation without a real catalyst.

It’s like stepping off a cliff—off the edge of your known way of being. It’s terrifying at first. You can’t believe anything but plummeting straight down will happen.

And then you realize you don’t fall. You rise up. You enlarge. You start to understand and tap into the potential you’ve always had but didn’t really believe in.

You begin to feel a sense of connection to something bigger than the story of yourself that you were once so certain of.

And curiosity is the key that unlocks the door that helps you see the world differently. 

Curiosity increases Connection

When you see yourself in this new way, you begin to see everything in a new way. You begin to question the certainties about other people and the circumstances of the world are thrown into question.

When you become aware of your own default to judgment, you can create a space between that reflexive response and ask:

“What else might be true?”

Your curiosity can begin to outweigh your judgement. 

You find a new way to relate to other people. Even if they believe things you are adamantly opposed to, you’ll never convince them they are wrong by telling them they are wrong.

You can’t take away someone’s agency to believe what they believe. That agency is our identity. 

Questioning someone else’s ability to control their own life and way of thinking is the fastest way to separation.

This doesn't mean we agree with other people. It’s important to stand for what we believe in. 

But we can build our curiosity muscle instead of reflexively making assumptions and dismissing other points of view. 

You begin to see that other people are dealing with their own autopilot programming, and for reasons you can’t possibly know, they have come to believe certain things you do not.

Now, having a difference of opinion on the best flavor of ice cream, preferred way of vacationing or the merits of modern pop music are one thing.

Being genuinely curious about  more deeply held beliefs—religion and politics - is at the far end of the spectrum.

But it’s the same mental muscle. 

It’s just one is a 5lb dumbbell curl, the other is a 200lb. Change is a long process of growing those muscles.

It’s enough to start by getting stronger for ourselves and the people we love and care about that have contrasting beliefs. 

History as Inspiration 

The same curiosity that has driven humanity’s biggest breakthroughs is the key to transforming ourselves. 

History proves that questioning what seems certain doesn’t just reshape our world—it reshapes us.

The Earth was flat for a long time. That’s what it looked like, so that’s what we believed. You were a fool to think otherwise.

It took great thinkers from Ancient Greece up until Christopher Columbus to help us finally understand that our eyes were playing tricks on us. That something invisible to our senses was true.

The Sun revolved around the Earth for an even longer time—until Copernicus and Galileo started to chip away at this belief with their experiments that proved otherwise.

Talk about the courage to be curious. To question the certainty of what the Church taught in the 17th century meant literal heresy and potential death.

Yet again, we learned that this fundamental belief we held tightly was untrue, and we accepted a new understanding.

Just as humanity evolved by challenging the certainty that the Earth was flat, we grow by questioning the certainties we hold about ourselves and the people around us. 

Every step toward personal insight mirrors the leaps humanity has taken toward collective understanding.

The New Frontier of Curiosity

We are now standing on the precipice of another enormous series of scientific discoveries that will alter everything we believe to be fundamentally true.

For most of the last 300 years, Newtonian (classical) physics has explained everything in the world and universe around us. Humans had cracked the code on how this great machine of a universe works.

Until Max Planck came along in 1900, and the introduction of quantum physics—the behavior of the subatomic world—upended everything we thought we knew.

Again.

Notice the pattern. Certainty and absolutes about the world around us undone by curiosity about what else might be true.

Questioning what our brains know with certainty to be true because we see it reveals miracles of new understanding hidden from our five senses.

Just as quantum physics is shattering our understanding of the physical world, embracing curiosity can shatter the false certainties we hold about ourselves and others.

When we question the ‘rules’ we believe govern our lives, we unlock entirely new dimensions of potential.

The scales are different but the pattern is the same. 

It Start with Awareness 

Change always begins with awareness.  Zooming out to a bigger picture of what it means to be human, outside the drama of our own daily lives. 

Awareness of these larger truths about how our existence has unfolded can give us the humility to accept how little we know about anything or anyone around us.

Awareness that our brains are wired to keep us playing small. That our subconscious programming confines us to our certainties that, as Twain said up top, “just ain’t so.”

Awareness that there’s the voice of a Judge in all of our minds that shouts through a megaphone that we’re not as good as we think. That people who think differently than us are idiots—or worse. That the circumstances of our lives are to blame for the condition we’re in.

We all have that voice. But it’s not the voice of our true self. Because it limits us from being curious and keeps us stuck in energy that doesn’t move us forward.

Curiosity is the power of the Sage voice in all of us that opens the door to realizing our full potential.

One that can harness these new understandings to create any reality we wish to experience.

Curiosity doesn’t just change what we know—it changes who we are. And that change can ripple outwards to help change everything.

-Coach Kris

P.S. Understanding the Judge in all of our own minds is the foundation of a groundbreaking program I have learned called Positive Intelligence.

It was created by Shirzad Chamine who speaks so beautifully about how this awareness can turn into transformative growth.