Stay Curious. Always.
Why the best founders ask questions instead of chasing answers
Code V of The Twelve Codes • Quietly Disruptive®
The moment I stopped being curious about my business was the moment it started drifting from what I actually wanted it to be.
I don’t mean I stopped learning. I was still reading books, attending events, absorbing advice. But I’d stopped asking the uncomfortable questions. Why am I still working with this client? Why does this type of project drain me? Why do I feel resentful on Sunday evenings? I had all the answers I needed to keep the business running. I just didn’t have the curiosity to ask whether running it was still what I wanted.
Curiosity is what keeps a business genuinely yours. Not ambition, which can produce a business that delivers the revenue and costs you everything else. Not strategy, which can optimise something you’ve already quietly outgrown. Curiosity. The willingness to not know. The willingness to ask a question you might not like the answer to.
Curiosity as a business tool
Most business advice positions curiosity as a soft skill. Nice to have. Something creative people do. But for Quietly Disruptive founders, curiosity is the sharpest tool in the box.
Curiosity about your clients tells you who you should actually be working with, and who you’re serving out of habit or obligation. Curiosity about your energy tells you which work fuels you and which drains you, and those answers change over time. Curiosity about your patterns tells you where you start drifting from what you want and what tends to trigger it.
The best coaching conversations I have aren’t the ones where I provide answers. They’re the ones where I ask the right question and then sit in silence while the client discovers what they already know but haven’t let themselves see.
Following tangents
There’s a particular kind of curiosity that I’ve learned to trust completely: the tangent. The moment in a conversation where you veer off topic and land on something unexpected. The thing you keep thinking about at 2am that has nothing to do with your current business. The idea that won’t leave you alone even though it doesn’t fit your strategy.
Tangents are data. They’re your subconscious flagging something your conscious mind hasn’t caught up with yet. And the founders who follow them, carefully, with curiosity rather than impulsiveness, are often the ones who find their most aligned work.
My entire coaching practice started as a tangent. I was running a different business entirely, mentoring on the side because I couldn’t stop doing it, and one day the tangent became loud enough to listen to. If I’d been too committed to my existing path to follow the digression, I’d still be running the wrong business.
The danger of certainty
Certainty feels professional. Decisive. Confident. And in moderation, it’s useful, clients need to trust that you know what you’re doing. But too much certainty calcifies. It stops you from questioning whether the business you’re certain about is still the business you want.
The founders who wake up one day inside a business that no longer fits are often the most certain. They’re certain about their niche, their pricing, their model, their audience. They’ve answered all the questions and moved on. And the drift begins precisely in that space where the questions used to live.
The moment you stop asking questions about your business is the moment it starts drifting from what you actually want it to be.
Stay curious. About your market. About your methods. About your own patterns. About the questions you’ve stopped asking. The answers will change over time, and that’s not instability, it’s growth. A business that stops evolving is a business that’s dying. And curiosity is the thing that keeps it alive.
This is Code VI of The Twelve Codes: 12 Principles for Building Your Corner of the World. Read the full Twelve Codes or explore What is Quietly Disruptive®? for the definitive guide to this philosophy.
Onwards and Upwards,
Becky :-)
About the Author: Becky Benfield Humberstone partners with Quietly Disruptive founders to build businesses that change their corner of the world, on their terms. If you started your business because you believed things could be done differently, and you're ready to make that vision real, she gets it. Based in the UK and working globally via Zoom and in-person, she's done this work herself, more than once.
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