William James, the father of American pragmatism, made a strange observation: most people think curiosity is a precondition for learning, but he argued the opposite — that the *act* of sustained attention actually generates curiosity, not the other way around. This flips the standard leadership advice on its head. We tell people to 'stay curious,' as if it's a character trait you either have or lack. But James, and later the Indian philosopher Krishnamurti in his dialogues on attention, both pointed to attention as the practice itself — the thing that opens the mind rather than just signaling an already-open one. A leader who waits to feel curious before engaging fully with a problem has the sequence backwards. Today, pick one thing you've been half-attending to — a team member's idea, a nagging question, a piece of data you glossed over — and give it ten minutes of real, unguarded attention. The curiosity may well follow.

When you find yourself disengaged from something — a meeting, a person, a problem — do you treat that disengagement as information about the thing, or as information about where your attention has been?

Drawing from Pragmatism synthesized with Indian Philosophy — William James (synthesized with Jiddu Krishnamurti's philosophy of attention)