What will make you great at your business is the same thing that made Leonardo Da Vinci and Albert Einstein great at their businesses—a deep seated, insatiable, absolutely have-to-know, fanatical form of curiosity.

I’ve noted an interesting phenomenon about the curious and the incurious. The curious know that every person and every situation is unique in some way and will dig to find out why and how. The incurious assume that most people and situations are alike and assume to know what they are speaking into. They couldn’t be more wrong. When I meet someone who is trying very hard to be interesting and not trying at all to be interested I, like most people, become very wary. Curiosity, when genuinely expressed, is an act of humility as well as of inquisitiveness. It reminds me of a great C.S. Lewis line about humility, “Humility isn’t thinking less of yourself, it’s thinking of yourself less.”

Those who practice genuine curiosity do just that. Their appetite to know overwhelms the instinct to be known.