Join Center for Inspired Teaching in our campaign to make Curiosity the word of the year in 2025! Take the below Curiosity Challenge, share it with friends and family, and make every day a day full of curiosity.

Dare to Connect

Learn about someone you see all the time, but don’t actually know.

This is the grocery store cashier; neighbor who walks their dog while you walk yours; parking lot attendant; ticket collector on the subway; security guard or receptionist; postal worker who delivers your mail.

Who are they, really? And what’s on their mind?

Introduce yourself, then strike up a conversation and see what more you can learn about them. Starter questions to consider:

What’s your name?
Did you watch the game last night?
How’s your day going?

If their response invites a follow up question, ask it! Listen so fully to what they have to say that you can remember not only the color of the speaker’s eyes, but also their facial expression and the words they used.

See what it feels like to be curious about someone else’s reality, to be totally focused on their world, if only for a moment.

What can you learn about them in this short exchange?
What does that moment of curiosity make you wonder about their life, about your own?

Did You Know?

Talking to strangers is good for building your curiosity AND your mental health!

In 2023, Hanne Collins, a PhD student in organizational behavior at Harvard University, published a study of more than 50,000 people that found “over and above people’s total amount of social interaction and the diversity of activities they engage in, the relational diversity of their social portfolio is a unique predictor of well-being, both between individuals and within individuals over time.” Your “social portfolio” is the range of different kinds of relationships you have. Below are some examples from the study.

Here’s a curious question: What would you have to do to expand your own social portfolio?