The One Mindset Shift That Separates People Who Use AI From People Who Get Left Behind
Source: Dev.to
The Garbage Analogy
You take out the garbage every day.
You’ve done it for years—maybe decades. It’s just a thing you do, part of the routine. You grab the bag, walk outside, toss it in the bin. Done. You never think about it twice.
But what if you stopped for 10 seconds and asked, “Does it have to be this way?”
What if the garbage could take itself out? That sounds ridiculous, and that’s exactly the point. Most people never ask the ridiculous question. They never get curious enough to wonder if a habit they’ve always followed could be done differently—or not at all.
In 2026, that lack of curiosity is the single biggest thing holding people back.
The Curiosity Gap
Traditional businesses sit on decades of manual processes. The pattern repeats: it isn’t a technology gap; it’s a curiosity gap.
The tools are here—AI can write, analyze, build, automate, reason—and they improve every month. Yet most people interact with these tools the way they interact with their garbage routine: they accept the default, don’t question the process, and stay uncurious about what’s underneath.
Originals vs. Everyone Else
Adam Grant, organizational psychologist at Wharton, studied “originals”—people who drive creativity and change. His research found that the biggest difference between originals and everyone else wasn’t talent or intelligence. It was that originals were more afraid of not trying than of failing. They generated massive volumes of ideas, most of which were bad, but the sheer volume created conditions for breakthroughs. That’s curiosity in action: active experimentation, not passive wondering.
Why Our Brains Resist Curiosity
Psychiatrist Judson Brewer (Brown University) spent over 20 years studying habit formation. He shows that our brains run on a reward‑based learning loop: trigger → behavior → reward.
- See a full garbage bag → pick it up → feel good that the task is done → loop complete → brain moves on.
The same loop applies to thinking: we encounter a problem, reach for the familiar solution, get the small reward of “done,” and never question whether the problem itself was the right one to solve.
Brewer’s key insight: curiosity is more powerful than willpower for breaking these loops. When you become genuinely curious about a habit or pattern, the brain’s reward system updates, letting you see the actual results of default behaviors instead of operating on autopilot. Curiosity isn’t just nice to have; it’s a mechanism for rewiring how you operate.
The Garbage Test
I use something I call the Garbage Test with teams. It’s simple:
- Pick a daily habit you’ve never questioned—something so routine it’s invisible.
- Get curious about it, not about optimizing it. Ask: “Why does this exist at all?”
When you ask that question enough times, you start uncovering entire categories of work that shouldn’t exist: unread reports, meetings that could be async messages, manual data entry that an API could handle, approval workflows that persist because someone got burned once in 2017.
The garbage doesn’t need a faster route to the bin. The garbage needs to stop being generated in the first place.
Why Many Say “I’m Not Curious”
People often claim they’re “not the curious type.” That’s like saying you’re not the breathing type. Curiosity is a human default. Kids ask around 300 questions a day; by adulthood that number drops to almost nothing.
What happened? We were trained out of it. Schools rewarded correct answers over good questions. Workplaces rewarded execution over exploration. Asking “why” began to look like you didn’t know what you were doing.
Anne‑Laure Le Cunff, speaking at SXSW EDU 2025 on the experimental mindset, noted that by middle school most kids shift from the excitement of discovery to the pressure of getting things right—and we carry that pressure into our careers, businesses, and relationship with technology.
Small Experiments, Not Grand Overhauls
The fix isn’t a massive mindset overhaul; it’s a series of small experiments. Here’s a framework I’ve used with teams adopting AI and building new workflows:
- Identify a friction point—something that bothers you, something tedious you accept.
- Shut everything down for 15 minutes—no Slack, no email, no music. Just you and the question: “What is actually happening here? What’s underneath this?”
- Get weird—ask the dumb questions:
- “What if this didn’t exist?”
- “What if I did the opposite?”
- “What if a five‑year‑old designed this?”
The value lies in breaking the default pattern, not in the answer.
- Run one micro‑experiment—no planning, no deck, just try something small. The goal isn’t to succeed; it’s to learn something you didn’t know 30 minutes ago.
- Record what you found—a single sentence: “I tried X and learned Y.” Stack enough of these sentences and you have a roadmap no consultant could have built for you.
Example: The Morning Information Scan
- Current habit: Spend 45 minutes each morning reading Slack messages, emails, and project updates to figure out what needs attention.
- Garbage Test question: “Why does this exist?”
- Because information is scattered.
- Because there’s no single source of truth.
- Because everyone communicates differently.
- Curious question: “What if I didn’t do this at all? What if something did it for me?”
- Micro‑experiment: Spend one hour building a simple AI workflow that summarizes your channels and flags what actually needs you. Not a perfect system—just a prototype.
- Result: You learn what AI can do, where your real information bottlenecks are, and where to focus next.
That’s more progress than most people make in a month of “meaning to look into AI.”
Research: Curiosity as a Critical Capability
Research from ISG found that curiosity is becoming one of the most critical organizational capabilities in the AI era. Not because curious people are smarter, but because they experiment—and experimentation is the only way to figure out how AI fits into a specific context.
No blog post, course, or consultant can tell you exactly how AI will transform your work. That answer only comes from getting curious enough to try things, to break things, to ask the question nobody else is asking.
Google built its innovation culture on this principle: employees get 20 % of their time for self‑directed projects—not because they know what will emerge, but because they understand that curiosity at scale produces unpredictable outcomes.
You don’t need Google’s budget. You need 15 minutes and one dumb question.
Embracing the Discomfort of Not Knowing
Curiosity requires something most people avoid: sitting with not knowing. We live in an era of instant answers—Google it, ask ChatGPT, move on. But curiosity isn’t about getting answers faster; it’s about asking better questions. Better questions arise from the discomfort of not knowing, from staying in that space long enough to see what’s really there.
Neuroscientist Stuart Firestein (TED Talk “The Pursuit of Ignorance”) argues that knowledge actually generates more ignorance, not less. Every answer opens new questions. The people who thrive are those who find that exciting, not threatening.
A Final Call to Action
That’s the mindset shift: not “I need to learn AI,” but “I wonder what would happen if…”
Don’t bookmark this article and forget about it. That’s the old pattern—the default loop. Instead:
- Before you close this tab, pick one thing in your life or work that you’ve never questioned. Something that’s just “how it is.”
- Write it down.
- Spend 15 minutes getting curious about it.
Not tomorrow. Right now.
The garbage is waiting. But maybe it doesn’t have to be.
I help companies figure out where AI actually fits in their business—not the hype version, but the version that makes your team’s daily work better. If you’re sitting on processes that feel like they shouldn’t exist in 2026, let’s talk.