The Curiosity Gap

My twelve-year-old grandson Dax didn’t break eye contact with me for twenty minutes.

We’d been sitting at my kitchen table talking about consciousness - not the stuff they test in school, but the idea that only twenty percent of who we are operates consciously. The rest, that massive eighty percent, runs in the background. Processing. Recognizing patterns. Sending signals we’re barely aware of.

His mom had brought him up for the weekend after his annual competency tests came back. Math and English Language Arts - both at the twelfth-grade level. Remarkable scores. But I didn’t want to talk about what he’d achieved on paper. I wanted to discuss what no test can measure.

Twenty minutes. Complete engagement. Questions I hadn’t expected from a twelve-year-old.

And afterward, sitting there alone, something hit me. We test kids constantly on academic skills, celebrate when they excel, then kick them out at eighteen and say, “Good luck with everything else.” Nobody’s testing whether he can read a room. Trust that uncomfortable feeling in his stomach when something’s off. Access that eighty percent of himself that’s constantly learning things school never teaches.

The Homeschool Revelation

Maybe Dax’s indifference to test scores reveals something profound. He’s been homeschooled since kindergarten. Never marinated in the achievement anxiety culture that traditional schools create. To him, these are just measurements. Why would you have feelings about a ruler?

What if homeschooling accidentally created ideal conditions? He gets academic challenges without a toxic performance culture. He can engage with consciousness concepts for twenty minutes because learning hasn’t been weaponized into grades and rankings. Maybe the problem isn’t that schools don’t teach life skills. Maybe they teach kids to perform learning instead of actually learning.

We’ve created this massive educational cliff. Intensive learning until eighteen, maybe twenty-two if you go to college. Then, suddenly, “good luck, figure out the rest yourself.” We kick them out and expect them to fly without ever teaching them how their wings work.

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The Research Rabbit Hole

That curiosity sent me down a research rabbit hole. Thirty pages. Several weeks. One simple question: What should people actually know by certain ages? Not just academic knowledge. The stuff that helps you navigate being human.

The research sorted itself into twelve categories. Financial skills. Social skills. Emotional regulation. Risk assessment. Relationship dynamics. Each category had clear age-based learning that made total sense. Nobody was systematically teaching it.

A five-year-old should be able to read basic social cues on the playground. A teenager should understand that gut feelings are actually data. Someone in their thirties should’ve learned uncomfortable conversations about boundaries. By fifty, you should recognize your patterns well enough to interrupt the destructive ones.

I couldn’t find a single institution teaching this complete framework. Schools handle academics. Parents cover some basics. Work teaches job skills. No systematic approach to developing the full spectrum of life competencies when you actually need them.

Then it hit me.

Maybe the problem isn’t that we need to create a new kind of school. Maybe informal education - the stuff you learn from actually living - stays invisible until someone shows you how to see it. I’m not teaching new content. I’m just formalizing what’s already happening to you.

The Fish Market Lesson

I learned this lesson twenty-five years ago at a fish market in Tokyo.

My buddy Peter Goldie and I spent four hours wandering through Tsukiji at dawn. No Japanese. No map. Just exploration. Tuna auctions. Things we couldn’t identify but tasted anyway. Wonderfully lost in controlled chaos.

Standing on the waterfront waiting for our taxi, I said what I always say after experiences like that: “So what’d we learn?”

Peter laughed. “Why’s everything a lesson with you?” Not with resistance. With the timing question every curious person knows: “Can we savor this for thirty seconds before we dissect it?”

But then, because genuinely curious people can’t resist a good question, he dove in.

Five minutes of talking. We’d navigated a completely foreign environment without language or a map. Survived and got through it, but couldn’t get the most out of it because we couldn’t ask the right questions.

Then I made the connection. “That’s exactly what our customers experience with Alias|Wavefront software. They’re trying to navigate powerful computer animation technology, but they don’t know the language. All these new terms and concepts. We haven’t provided them a map through the landscape of tools. They’re surviving, but can’t get the most out of it because they can’t ask the right questions.”

That’s when I realized what’d just happened. We’d done what I call SODOTO - See One, Do One, Teach One. I learned this framework nine years ago from a medical professor I was working with. She observed how I learned things and said, “Oh, that’s called SODOTO. That’s how we teach in hospitals. You see someone suture a finger, then you suture a finger, then you teach someone how to suture a finger.”

She helped me realize this concept, broadly expanded, was how I’d been learning my whole life without knowing it had a name. We saw the fish market challenge, did our best to navigate it, then taught ourselves something that applied far beyond Tokyo. The ability to connect dots across different life experiences, to use metaphor to draw conclusions - that’s why this moment’s stuck with me for over twenty-five years.

What made it powerful? I wasn’t trying to teach Peter anything. I was genuinely curious about what we’d just experienced. The learning happened because we paused to ask one simple question: “What was that about?”

Already in School

That’s when I began to understand something. Peter and I weren’t just tourists having an adventure. We were students in the university of lived experience. We just didn’t know we were enrolled.

Most people walk through life having experiences without extracting the learning. They’re sitting in classes every day. The relationship reveals something about trust. The work challenge that teaches resilience. The moment of gut instinct that could teach risk assessment. But they never pause to ask what the lesson was.

They’re zooming through life at full speed, treating experiences as entertainment rather than education.

But you don’t need to go back to school to become a conscious student of your own life. You just need to develop the habit of that five-minute pause. The simple question: “What was that about?”

It’s not about adding more time to your day. It’s about adding awareness to the time you’re already living.

The Body Knows

Take my discovery of somatic knowledge. Body-based intelligence, which most people experience but rarely name. I felt those gut feelings for fifty years before I had the vocabulary for what was happening. It wasn’t until I started martial arts that I met people who were “more in their body,” as we say. They gave me the framework to understand something I’d been experiencing all along.

But what if I’d known about somatic awareness at fifteen? What if someone told me that uncomfortable feeling in my stomach when meeting certain people was actually my nervous system processing micro-expressions and energy I couldn’t consciously detect? What if I’d learned to trust that intelligence instead of dismissing it as “just anxiety”?

I can’t go back in time. But I can wonder: how many of us are missing signals our bodies constantly send because nobody taught us to listen?

Learning to Be Curious

My martial arts instructor, Master Dave, noticed something about me after a few months of training. He handed me a book: “How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci” by Michael Gelb.

The first chapter was about curiosity. Not just being curious about one thing. Being curious about everything. Leonardo developed a systematic approach to learning from life. He questioned assumptions, surrounded himself with people who challenged his thinking, and used mind mapping to get everything in his brain onto paper, allowing him to see the connections.

Leonardo wasn’t just talented. He was systematically curious about his own experience.

Dave didn’t lecture me about curiosity. Didn’t announce “here’s a teaching moment.” I've just recognized a pattern that has given me a framework to understand my own nature better. That’s how the seed of conscious learning gets planted. Not through instruction. Through authentic demonstration of what’s possible.

My friend Dr. Keith Witt talks about this beautifully. He describes us climbing these mountains of experience. You encounter obstacles, overcome them, reach the summit, and gain some knowledge or capability. Then you’re on a plateau.

Keith’s question is simple: Do you stay comfortable on the plateau, or start looking for the next mountain?

He identified early on that my wife, Kymberlee, and I are always scanning the horizon for the next learning challenge. We’re mountain climbers, not plateau settlers.

The difference between plateau people and mountain climbers isn’t intelligence or opportunity. It’s the simple habit of treating life as ongoing education rather than a series of random events.

Curious people ask, “What was that about?” Plateau people say, “Well, that happened,” and move on.

Both groups are in school. Only one group knows it.

What I’ve Noticed

I’m seventy-two years old. Been married four times, raised two kids, have three grandchildren. I genuinely consider myself an Elder (not older). Not the kind who tells people what to do. The kind who shares what he’s noticed in hopes it might be useful.

What I’m noticing is that we have an entire generation of young people being constantly tested on things that matter very little, while nobody’s measuring their ability to navigate what actually matters.

I worked three jobs for years when I was younger. The times I got three hours of sleep between shifts. I know what survival mode looks like. And I wonder now - what if someone’d given me just five minutes back then to pause and ask, “What am I learning from this struggle?” Not to add burden. To help me make meaning from the hardship instead of just enduring it.

Maybe I would’ve had less trauma. Maybe I would’ve seen patterns sooner. Maybe I would’ve learned the lessons without having to repeat the mistakes quite so many times.

I can’t know. But I can offer this to anyone willing to listen: You’re already in school. Life’s already teaching you. The question is whether you’re a conscious student or just letting the lessons wash over you without recognition.

Curiosity Finds a Way

I met a remarkable young woman last week. Twenty-seven, born and raised in Beijing, came to the United States at twenty to study. We were supposed to talk about business. The conversation evolved into something deeper.

She told me about growing up in a culture where you don’t stray out on your own, don’t have entrepreneurial thoughts, don’t be creative, and don’t be curious. “You do what your parents tell you,” she said. “You do what the state tells you. You don’t question.”

And yet there she sat across from me, having broken away from that entire system, pursuing her own path, asking her own questions.

What fascinated me most was this behavioral pattern: whenever she’d make a particularly thoughtful point, she’d point to her head and say “Think about it.” Not once or twice. Repeatedly throughout our conversation.

At first I thought it was just emphasis. Then I realized - she had to develop a conscious technique to get people to actually pause and process what they were hearing, instead of just letting it flow by. She learned through experience that people often don’t naturally stop to think. She had to cue them: “Stop. Process this. Don’t just let it go.”

She’s teaching people the five-minute pause in real-time during conversation. She formalized her own informal education technique.

Curiosity finds a way, even when entire systems are designed to suppress it. This young woman had enough spark inside her to break away, move to another country, actively fight for her right to wonder and question. Not everyone has that strength. Not everyone has those opportunities.

But for those who have even a small flicker of curiosity - even if they immediately dismiss their own wondering as unimportant - maybe there’s hope in recognizing that flicker’s valuable.

The Invitation

I’m not trying to create a generation of people exactly like me. That’d be exhausting for everyone involved, trust me. What I’m hoping is someone reads this story, recognizes themselves in it somewhere, thinks, “Huh. Maybe I am already learning from life. Maybe I just need to pay attention to what I’m noticing.”

Maybe you’re that person who has gut feelings you dismiss as anxiety. Maybe you’re someone who’s plateaued and can’t figure out why life feels flat. Maybe you’re raising kids and wondering what to actually teach them beyond homework help.

Or maybe you’re like Peter at the fish market. You enjoy experiences but you’ve never thought to pause afterward and ask what you learned from them.

Whatever category you’re in, take five minutes. Not five hours of deep journaling. Not a therapy session. Just five minutes to ask yourself: “What was that about?”

You might be surprised what you already know.

You might discover you’ve been in school all along, learning lessons you didn’t even realize were being taught. You might find your body’s been trying to tell you things, your experiences have been offering wisdom, your struggles have been creating resilience you didn’t know you possessed.

The curriculum’s already there. You’re already enrolled. The only question’s whether you want to become a conscious student of your own life.

Back to Dax

My grandson Dax’ll take his competency tests every year. I hope he does well on them. Math matters. Reading comprehension matters. I’m not dismissing academic achievement.

But I’m also gonna keep asking him questions. Not testing him. Just wondering with him. “What’d you notice about that?” “How’d that make you feel?” “What do you think that was about?”

Not because I’m trying to teach him anything specific. Because I want him to know his experiences contain wisdom, his instincts contain intelligence, his curiosity’s one of the most valuable things he possesses.

I want him to know he’s already in school. The best learning happens when you realize you’re a student.

The thing about mountains - there’s always another one. The thing about plateaus - you can always choose to leave them. The thing about curiosity - it doesn’t require permission. Just requires paying attention to what you’re already wondering about.

Maybe that’s what education really is. Not the transfer of information from expert to novice. The recognition that we’re all students, all the time, if we’re willing to notice what life’s teaching us.

You got five minutes?

What’d you just learn?

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