I remember the exact moment I decided to stop trying to keep up. It was about two years ago. I was sitting at my desk with forty-seven browser tabs open, three Slack workspaces pinging, two podcasts queued, and a newsletter backlog that could fill a small library. I was drowning in information and producing nothing.
That's when it clicked. Keeping up is a trap. The internet rewards the appearance of being informed. It punishes the slow, quiet work of actually understanding something. And I'd fallen for it.
I closed the tabs. All of them. And I went for a walk. That walk changed how I think about speed, about information, about what it actually means to stay curious in a world that moves this fast.
Speed Is Not the Problem
Let me be clear about something. The speed is real. AI is moving at a pace that makes the early internet look like a lazy river. New models every month. New tools every week. New capabilities that genuinely weren't possible ninety days ago. If you work anywhere near technology or creativity, the ground under your feet is shifting constantly.
But speed isn't the problem. Speed is just speed. The problem is what speed does to your brain if you let it. It turns you reactive. You start responding to every new thing instead of thinking about what actually matters. You mistake motion for progress. You read the headline, form an opinion, share it, and move on.. without ever sitting with the thing long enough to understand it.
That's not curiosity. That's anxiety wearing a curiosity costume.
What Curiosity Actually Looks Like
Real curiosity is slower than you'd think. It's not scanning headlines. It's not watching a two-minute demo and declaring something revolutionary. It's not having a take. Everyone has a take. Takes are cheap.
Real curiosity is sitting with something long enough to be confused by it. It's using a tool for a week before you decide if it's good. It's reading the paper, not the tweet about the paper. It's asking "why does this work?" instead of "what can I do with this?" Both questions matter, but the second one without the first is just opportunism.
I've spent a long time building things at the intersection of creativity and technology. And the most valuable skill I've developed isn't technical. It isn't strategic. It's the ability to stay genuinely curious about something without needing to immediately turn it into a product, a post, or an opinion.
That takes practice. More than you'd think.
Protect Unstructured Time
Here's something I do that sounds lazy and is actually the most productive thing in my week: I protect unstructured time. Religiously. Time with no agenda, no deliverable, no meeting, no purpose. Time where I'm allowed to follow whatever thread catches my attention, even if it leads nowhere.
Most of my best ideas have come from this time. Not from brainstorming sessions. Not from strategy offsites. From a Tuesday afternoon where I fell down a rabbit hole about something completely unrelated to my work and came out the other side with a connection nobody else had made.
The pressure to be productive every waking minute is enormous. Especially if you're a founder, especially if you're in tech, especially right now when everything feels urgent. But urgency is the enemy of curiosity. You can't be genuinely curious about something while simultaneously trying to monetise it.
Give yourself permission to waste time. Some of that waste will turn out to be the most important thinking you do all year.
Say Yes to Things You Don't Understand
I have a rule. When someone invites me to something and I don't fully understand what it is, I say yes. A conference in an industry I know nothing about? Yes. A dinner with people who do completely different work? Yes. A demo of something that sounds like it has nothing to do with my life? Yes.
Ninety percent of the time, it leads to nothing useful. But the other ten percent is where the magic lives. Those are the conversations that rewire your thinking. The ones where someone from a completely different world describes a problem and you realise it's the same problem you've been wrestling with, just wearing different clothes.
Curiosity dies in echo chambers. It thrives in weird rooms with unfamiliar people. If you spend all your time with people who think like you, you'll get really good at one way of thinking. If you spend some of your time with people who think nothing like you, you'll get good at thinking itself.
Surround Yourself with Challengers
Related point. The people I learn the most from are not the people who agree with me. They're the ones who push back. Who say "but have you considered.." Who ask the question I was hoping nobody would ask.
I actively seek those people out. Not contrarians for the sake of it.. that's just noise. I mean people with genuine expertise and genuine opinions who aren't afraid to tell me when I'm wrong. They're rare. And they're invaluable.
Thomas, who I work with closely, is one of those people. When I come to him with an idea, his first instinct isn't to praise it. It's to pressure-test it. "What about this? Have you thought about that? What happens when this breaks?" It's maddening sometimes. And it makes everything I build better.
If everyone around you thinks you're a genius, you're not learning. You're performing.
The Hot Take Economy
I want to talk about something that bothers me. The internet.. and LinkedIn specifically, since that's where I spend time.. has created what I think of as the hot take economy. Someone releases a new AI model. Within hours, there are a thousand posts telling you what it means, why it matters, who should be scared, who should be excited.
Most of those posts were written before the person actually used the thing. They read the announcement, maybe watched a demo, and raced to be first with an opinion. The opinion is the product. The understanding is optional.
I catch myself doing this too. The pull to be relevant, to be part of the conversation, to demonstrate that you're in the know.. it's strong. But every time I resist that pull and instead spend a week actually using the thing before I talk about it, my thinking is better. My writing is better. And the people who read it get something real instead of something fast.
Speed rewards the first take. Quality rewards the considered one. They're almost never the same take.
What I've Stopped Doing
I've stopped trying to read everything. I pick three or four things per week that seem genuinely important and I go deep on those. The rest can wait. If something is actually significant, it'll still be significant in a month.
I've stopped feeling guilty about not knowing things. The surface area of knowledge in 2026 is too wide for any one person. Admitting you don't know something isn't weakness. It's the beginning of actually learning it.
I've stopped chasing tools. There are hundreds of new AI tools every week. I don't need to try all of them. I need to go deep on the ones that matter to my work and ignore the rest. FOMO is a productivity killer disguised as ambition.
I've stopped confusing being busy with being curious. They're opposites. Busyness fills every gap. Curiosity needs the gaps.
What I Keep Doing
Walking. Seriously. Most of my best thinking happens on walks. There's something about moving through physical space that unsticks mental space. I don't listen to podcasts on walks. I don't take calls. I just walk and let my brain do whatever it's going to do.
Asking dumb questions. The older I get and the more experience I accumulate, the more valuable dumb questions become. "Why does it work this way?" "What would happen if we didn't?" "Says who?" Those questions have led to some of the best decisions of my career.
Making things with my hands. Not everything needs to be digital. I cook. I build physical things. I recently started sketching again after not doing it for years. Working with your hands activates a completely different kind of thinking. I always come back to the screen with fresher eyes.
Talking to people who aren't in tech. My brother, my kids, friends who work in completely different fields. They see the world without the assumptions I carry. That perspective is worth more than any newsletter.
The Practice
Staying curious isn't a personality trait. It's a practice. Like exercise or meditation. It requires active protection. The default mode of modern life is consumption and reaction. Curiosity requires you to step out of that mode deliberately and repeatedly.
Some days I'm great at it. Some days I catch myself doom-scrolling Twitter at midnight, absorbing opinions I didn't ask for about topics I don't care about. That's fine. The practice isn't about being perfect. It's about noticing when you've drifted and pulling yourself back.
The world is going to keep moving fast. Faster, probably. The people who thrive in it won't be the ones who keep up with everything. They'll be the ones who stay curious about the right things.. who give themselves permission to go deep instead of wide, to be confused instead of certain, to be slow when everyone else is fast.
That's not falling behind. That's building the kind of understanding that speed can never give you.
Simon Berg builds at the intersection of creativity and technology. He writes about what he's seeing, what he's building, and why creativity matters more than ever.