“Novelty in Curiosity” is March 2026’s 30-day challenge for the Novelty Experiment.

There are a lot of definitions for curiosity. Merriam Webber basically boils it down to 1) want to know stuff, 2) don’t be ridiculous, 3) get into the weird stuff.

That’s going to be my very liberal interpretation anyway.

I’m okay with it anyway because I consider curiosity a top-tier skill.

When I was a kid, the Curious George series was some of my favorite books. It was like if Amelia Bedelia was a monkey, and there’s a lot to love about that (can you tell I’ve been spending quite some time with my young nieces recently?).

As adults, we start to lose some of this curiosity as we settle into the things we know.

There’s an incredible story about which generation is smartest that I tell in my book Being Human (Centric). Without spoiling it, I can confidently say that as we get older, our ability to solve problems based on our lived experiences significantly increases.

And this is a good thing! We need the wisdom of “been there, done that” to help us stop repeating avoidable mistakes, speed up decision making, strengthen intuition, and generally move forward in safety.

The unfortunate part is that many studies show we lose our innate desire to be curious as we age. This study suggests, that it’s correlated to what we think is worthy of our time, that “as future time becomes more limited with age, curiosity is less valued.”

However, we are also learning that it’s not inevitable, and that we can drive different outcomes. Choose to be curious. Part of this choice is in understanding two types of curiosity. This study talks about these as state and trait curiosity:

Trait curiosity is the skill we develop, part of us that finds many things interesting and is motivated to explore novelty simply to satisfy our own interests. This trait curiosity also exhibits the ongoing desire to actively seek knowledge and information. People who rank high with this tend to be excellent students, have high job performance, and experience more meaningful moments in life (don’t blame me, the study says it).

But the second kind, state curiosity, actually grows as we age. We become much more engaged in the information we hear, wanting to engage with what we’re hearing and actively pursue the topics that interest us. This curiosity can actually help offset or prevent Alzheimer’s disease and decrease dementia, it’s that extraordinary.

This is why Novelty in curiosity is so important. It’s the foundation of our whole experience as humans. Yes, some of us have the trait, but if we can learn to be curious at our age now (whatever that is), we can use it to thrive throughout all of our remaining years.

This is how we’re going to dive into novelty this month- as a way to explore all kinds of curiosity, big and small, for our health, starting a practice that can have long-reaching benefits.

Talk soon,

Rachel
Leadership trainer, novelty junkie, and human being

P.S. Do you want to hear more about what exactly this novelty experiment is? Check out this post and read more in-depth about the Novelty Experiment.