Why Curiosity Is Good For Business

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Being successful at business requires many things: courage, creativity, people skills, and so forth.  However, there is one character trait whose importance is sometimes neglected: curiosity.

Curiosity helps you in:

  • Building customer relationships.  People are drawn to those who show interest in them.  Having an abiding fascination in others give you the opportunity to learn new things about them, thereby making a deeper connection.
  • Increasing your business acumen. Being curious about your own industry and the industries of your prospects drives you to learn more.  As you satisfy your curiosity, you’re augmenting your ability to add value to your customers’ business.
  • Solving customer problems.  It’s a truism that customers are looking for solutions to their problems.  It’s only possible to create a meaningful solution if you’re motivated by true curiosity about what’s actually going on and why those problems recur.
  • Negotiating win/win contracts.  Your ability to understand the positions of the other party are directly dependent upon your ability to feel true curiosity about them.  If you’re not curious, you’ll end up arguing about issues that aren’t important.
  • Correcting sales errors.  When a customer buys from somebody else (or doesn’t buy from anyone at all), if you’re not curious about what that happened, you won’t bother to find out why, and therefore can’t learn from your failures.
  • Creating great products.  Would-be innovators who aren’t curious about what makes people tick and why technology works (or doesn’t) can’t possibly create workable products or services that people want buy.
  • Motivating your employees. Some bosses think of employees as cogs in a corporate machine. However, if you want to get the best out of people, you must be curious about their dreams and desires.

Curiosity is about adopting an attitude of inquisitiveness and being open-minded about learning new things, without any preconceptions clouding your understanding.  If you don’t have curiosity, you can’t expect to be successful in business.