At what point in your career did you become the person who's supposed to already know the answer? Chances are, being right often stops you from asking what else might be true.

The more expertise you build, the more it costs to say "I don't know" out loud. So you don't. You defer the question or quietly look it up on the side. Anything but ask it out loud.

In fact, while 95 percent of US workers describe themselves as curious, 44 percent say asking too many questions can make someone look incompetent. There’s the paradox: We’re curious, but we’re not always comfortable being seen in the act of not knowing.

Here's what nobody tells you: curiosity requires us to spend more time in the unknown.

That can feel counterintuitive when an answer is almost always within reach. But curiosity asks us to resist closing the gap quite so quickly. To notice what we don’t understand before reaching for the explanation, and to stay there long enough to wonder what else might be true.

Curious people get ahead because they've turned it into a skill –– they’ve turned their curiosity into a lifelong habit. Here are five ways to turn yours into a superpower, too:

1. Don't rush to close the gap — sit in it a little longer

What happens when none of the existing answers are good enough?

Orthopedic surgeon Kevin B. Jones treats sarcoma, a rare cancer that often forces doctors to make high-stakes calls without all the answers. When one of his patients was facing the loss of her knee, Jones and his team refused to settle for the obvious fix. They kept asking what else might work, and found a solution nobody in the room expected.

It’s called rotationplasty. The cancerous portion of the leg, including the knee, is removed, then the lower leg is rotated and reattached so the ankle can function as a knee with a prosthetic. It sounds almost impossible until you see it. And Jones and his team didn’t arrive at the answer alone; finding another option meant looking beyond what they already knew and working with doctors elsewhere.

Most of us aren’t making decisions in an operating room, but expertise can create the same temptation: reach for the answer you already know works. The longer you’ve been doing something, the easier it becomes to mistake experience for certainty.

The next time you hit the edge of what you know, ask one more question first. Find the person who knows the thing you don't.

2. Chase what fascinates you

Mark Rober turned 16 billion views into a $60 million bet: kids learn fastest when something makes them desperate to see what happens next, not when they're handed the facts upfront. That’s why he decided to launch his brand new program for science educators for free — to unlock the barriers of access to the next generation of curious humans.

Rober has built an audience by turning science into something people want to see through. One of his most popular experiments transformed his backyard into an elaborate obstacle course for squirrels. Suddenly, physics and engineering had a plot: Would the squirrel make the jump? The science gets pulled along by the question.

That’s the idea behind his $60 million experiment, too. Before you can teach someone something, you have to make them care enough to want to know what happens next. Rober calls it igniting a “brain fire” of curiosity — creating that itch to understand something before delivering the explanation.

And don’t be too quick to dismiss a question because it falls outside your expertise or has no obvious payoff. Some of the best rabbit holes start with something that simply catches your attention. Remember, curiosity doesn’t always need a business case.

The next time something makes you want to know what happens next, follow it, even if it has nothing to do with your job. You never know what you might uncover – or where it will lead!

3. Say the questions out loud, not just to yourself

Standing in front of the pyramids of Teotihuacan, Harini Bhat realized she had no idea what she was looking at. Earlier in her career, not knowing had felt uncomfortable — she was used to being the expert. This time, she followed the questions instead. That night she researched what had stopped her, made a video about it, and woke up to 40,000 new followers. Her audience has since grown into the millions.

"People don't make discoveries because they already know things," Bhat says. "They make discoveries because they get obsessed with the stuff they don't know."

Bhat calls what happened next “shared curiosity.” Instead of waiting until she had mastered a subject to talk about it, she invited other people into the process of figuring it out. Her questions became something other people could respond to and build on.

That’s harder than it sounds when you’re used to being the person with the answers. We tend to share what we know and privately investigate what we don’t. But a question kept to yourself can only travel so far.

The next time you're curious about something, say it out loud to a colleague, on a call or in a post. Curiosity spreads. Someone else's answer, or their own question back, might take you somewhere you wouldn't have gotten alone.

4. Question the exceptions

What do you do when the evidence doesn’t match what you thought you knew?

Kevin B. Jones points to a familiar example: gravity. Isaac Newton helped explain why objects fall toward Earth. But birds could still rise into the air. That didn’t mean gravity was wrong — it meant there were other forces at work worth understanding.

“The test failures, the exceptions, the outliers teach us what we don't know and lead us to something new,” Jones says. “This is how science moves forward. This is how science learns.”

It’s easy to embrace that logic in science. It can be harder when the thing being challenged is your own expertise.

Experience gives us useful rules for how things work. But eventually something doesn’t fit: the expected result never materializes, or a piece of evidence contradicts what you were sure would happen. The instinct is often to explain away the exception and move on.

Instead, get curious about it. Why is this result different? What changed? You don’t have to abandon everything you know because of one outlier. But you might learn something by asking why it’s there.

The next time something refuses to fit the pattern, don’t force it to. Follow the exception and see what it knows that you don’t.

5. Let different perspectives surprise you

You’ve followed a question as far as you can. What happens when you put it in front of someone who sees it completely differently?

Mary Walshok, a board member of the Prebys Foundation, describes what can happen when different kinds of expertise collide: “It’s crossing boundaries between disciplines, experience and geographies that we find the most exciting opportunities. It’s like a rainforest.”

That exchange can start with something simple. You might be focused on how to solve a problem while someone else questions why the problem exists in the first place. You’re working from years of experience; they’re new enough to challenge an assumption you stopped noticing. The value isn’t just another opinion. It’s seeing your own question through a different lens.

And they don’t need to have the answer. A different perspective can change the question itself, revealing an angle you hadn’t considered or a connection you couldn’t see from where you were standing.

The next time you’ve taken a question as far as you can, give it to someone who sees the world differently. Don’t just ask for their answer. See what they do to the question.

Put yourself in the room built for curiosity

Imagine being in a room where sitting in the gap isn't awkward. It's expected. A room where chasing what fascinates you doesn't need justification. Where the person next to you sees your question completely differently than you do, and pulls you even deeper into it. Where curiosity isn't something you have to explain. It's the reason everyone is there. 

Imagine saying "I don't know" out loud and watching people lean in, excited to tell you more.

That room exists. It’s built and curated for people who turn curiosity into their superpower. You’re invited to join us at TED2027 in San Diego, where some of the world's most inquisitive minds will spend four days asking, chasing, connecting and leaving with better questions than the ones they arrived with. Be there when it happens.