Champion curiosity, and you risk sounding like a kindergarten teacher or a journalism professor. We treat it as a trait for the young and unformed — something adults either already mastered or no longer require. After all, if experience is supposed to deliver answers, what’s left to be curious about?
Today’s culture rewards certainty, and many experts see that as a problem. They argue that admitting what we don’t know is one of the surest catalysts for learning, creativity, and real connection.
Kelly Corrigan — bestselling author, PBS host, and creator of the Kelly Corrigan Wonders podcast — has spent the past year probing this idea with people she calls “intellectual giants.” Her new six-part podcast series, Super Traits, distills the qualities she believes anchor a fulfilled and grounded life: curiosity, humility, and creativity.
In this Q&A, Corrigan explains why these traits matter more than ever — and how practicing them could lead to a more contented, meaningful life.
The Well: What made you want to explore humility and curiosity? Have these qualities been lost or forgotten in today’s age of certainty?
Corrigan: My starting place was this awe I have in people who make surprising sacrifices — high-profile, very successful people who could simply parade around being their famous selves, but who choose instead to invest deeply in something.
Bryan Stevenson at Equal Justice Initiative was one of the first interviews I did. Most people in his position — big bestselling book, big movie, the highest possible regard and endless speaking requests — could choose to put down the briefcase and just go around being Bryan Stevenson. Instead, he is still driving hours and hours to visit with the next person on death row, absorbing their whole story, making his life more complicated, repeatedly exposing himself to injustice, which has to be hard on the psyche.
Same thing with Jen Garner. She could just be Jennifer Garner. Why is she doing this Save the Children thing for 15 years? I feel humbled by this sort of person, which ignited my own curiosity.
The Well: What’s one way your own views on humility or curiosity changed over this past year?
Corrigan: People who do highly visible work have to be really careful about ego pollution. I want to put Jen Garner on a pedestal. I want to put Bryan on a pedestal. It’s part of my podcast — to platform world-positive people doing world-positive work. The ones who are really about the work are constantly decentering themselves, against considerable headwinds of people like me who want to make it about them. In our culture, we’re intrigued by the individual, the hero.
The Well: Your work is very visible. Do you ever struggle with ego pollution?
Corrigan: You’d have to ask my husband. My most common reaction to people giving me a lot of credit is, Oh my god, you think I’m so much more important or relevant than I am. You have this sense of me that’s just totally inaccurate.
The Well: That’s an ingrained humility. Is humility natural-born, or is it possible to build it?
“Sometimes the Aha! is on the back end of it.
I think it’s: Tell me more. What else? Go on. Just seven words.
And even if you don’t believe in your own curiosity, and you think you know which direction the conversation will go, the act [of those words] will drive the outcome.
I think it’s really easy to build humility. I really do…”
The Well: In talking to big thinkers about how to align our schedules and budgets with our values, did you look at your own calendar or bank statement and think, This doesn’t match what I say I care about?
Corrigan: It never matches. I’ve dipped my toe in effective altruism, and we’ve tried to give away 10 percent every year, but we’ve never achieved it. We give 6 or 7 percent, and in the back of my stupid head I know that the average person gives one or two percent. My Achilles heel is decor. I love wallpaper, and nothing could be more superfluous than wallpaper. It’s literally gluing something to a perfectly good wall.
But I have a strategy, which involves Montana, where we live most of the year. As humans, we’re highly suggestible. There’s so much cultural enthusiasm for making money and spending it. In Montana, I wear the same clothes every single day. I take them off and put them on the floor, and the next morning I wake up and put them back on. It doesn’t matter and nobody cares. I believe that we are the average of the five people we spend the most time with. So I surround myself with people who I think are better than I am.
The Well: Do you think humility is harder now, in the age of social media, when we’re all performing, watching, and being watched?
Corrigan: Perhaps. [The essayist] Pico Iyer, who we interviewed for the series, is the only person I know that doesn’t have a phone. Instead of being a mighty warrior against the influence of social media in his own heart and mind, he’s just taken it out of the equation. That stuck with me — you should be as opportunistic as possible about being unreachable. Every single day since my mom died in May of 2024, I spend the first hour of the day untethered. Often I walk in New York without a phone. Now I kind of can’t believe anybody would touch their phone before they absolutely have to. I look at my phone and think, I’m not going to let you tell me what to think about.
It allows for curiosity, because it opens a space where the quieter thoughts and emotions have a shot at bubbling up. A lot of times I end up feeling teary. It’s funny to wonder, Had I jumped on my phone, where would these thoughts and feelings have gone?
The Well: Can you share a story from your interviews that captures what genuine curiosity looks like when certainty would be easier?
Corrigan: Father Greg Boyle and I talked about this. He’s been running Homeboy Industries, an organization that supports people who are leaving gangs. These are people that have “FUCK THE WORLD” tattooed onto their foreheads — literally and metaphorically — and somehow they reach a breaking point and end up walking in the door of Homeboy and sitting across from Greg.
Let’s say it’s January, you’re the mom of a kindergartener, and you go to the doctor because you’re not feeling well. Before you’ve said a word, the doctor’s like, “Yeah, you have a cold” — because you have a 5-year-old, and the 5-year-old has a cold, and they’re smearing snot all over you, and now you are sick. There’s not really any curiosity there. The assumption is, I already know what’s going on.
It’s the same setup for Greg Boyle. This person is coming to him off the street. This is now the thousandth person who has come into his office. And I think it is such a feat, and such a testament to his character, that he consciously tries to start from ground zero with each person rather than very quickly coming to a conclusion about what their life was like — where they should start at Homeboy and what treatment plan they need let’s get them into AA and let’s get them over there to job training skills and let’s put them in the shower and let’s get that tattoo removed from their forehead, like boom-boom-boom-boom-boom. I just think it is kind of Herculean to stop that auto-process from starting. You’re showing the person that they are an individual.
That is really hard to do. It’s hard to do even with our children, where you see the tip of the iceberg and you think, Yeah, I know why she’s upset. She’s upset because Emma’s having a party and she didn’t get invited. But you could be wrong.
The Well: Your answer really illuminates how humility and curiosity are connected.
Corrigan: Totally. One begets the other. The state that allows for curiosity is humility, because it’s asking, What I don’t know? There must be things I don’t understand yet. I wonder what they are.
The Well: Across all these conversations, what’s a story that best shows how wonder or awe can expand someone’s view of life and reduce suffering?
“I think that suffering is almost always a result of being too big in the frame. I used to be a photographer, and I just think zooming in and out is such an easy way to remind myself, You are one of eight billion. Awe almost always involves resetting the scale where you go from big and significant and very important to small and insignificant and not that important.”
The Well: Any tips for resetting the scale, for accessing awe?
Corrigan: Ride the New York subway, put your phone down and just look around — from body to body, face to face. This is what is going on today, just on one subway car of this one train on this one track.
“If I’m ever feeling really full of my own problems, I close my eyes and fly around the city, lifting the roofs off the houses and apartments and looking down on the dioramas. I see the people getting in a fight or getting engaged, or the woman crying because her husband didn’t come home, or a kid struggling with their homework, or somebody who’s very hungry. I take a little tour of humanity.”
We interviewed Kelly Corrigan for The Well, a Big Think publication created in partnership with the John Templeton Foundation. Together, we’re exploring life’s biggest questions with the world’s brightest minds. Visit The Well to see more in this series.
This article What happens when we admit we don’t know? is featured on Big Think.