To differentiate yourself, you don’t have to have an especially high IQ. No matter who you are or what your background or current circumstance is, one thing is certain: you can always learn, explore, and experiment in new arenas. You only need to be reasonably intelligent and insatiably curious. You can never know too much; and you can never have too much information and insight.
If you do not train yourself constantly to learn about humanity, business, places, and ideas, you are just asking for defeat. As some CEOs weighed in:
“I can find a lot of ambitious, hardworking people, but I want creativity, and that comes from curiosity. . . . It’s a huge turn-off to me if someone isn’t curious. It’s disorienting.”
“Even if you’re number one, you’d better learn something new, and you’d better keep challenging yourself, or they are going to forget about you.”
“I will fire a person who has no ambition to learn on his or her own.”
