What Publishing a Book Taught Me About Staying Curious

By Natalie Brown, Senior Account Executive

Three months ago, I knew nothing about publishing a book.

Today, The Rasor SHARP Method^™: Marketing Communications Strategy to Build Genuine, Trustworthy Brands is live on Amazon. In between, I Googled things like “do eBooks need a different ISBN than paperbacks?” and “how do I add extra images to a KDP product page?” (spoiler: it’s not where you’d expect). I learned what metadata actually does for discoverability, why pre-orders matter and how a back-cover blurb is a really important positioning exercise.

The book itself is about building a marketing communications strategy that earns trust. Getting into the world of self-publishing taught me something adjacent: the quiet power of being willing to not know yet.

Curiosity is a Practice, Not a Personality Trait

We tend to talk about curiosity like it’s a fixed trait. You’re either a “curious person” or you’re not. But curiosity isn’t a personality trait. It’s a practice. It’s the small, repeatable choice to ask one more question, open one more tab, try one thing slightly outside your comfort zone. To say “I want to know how that works” and then actually go find out.

The good news is practices can be built. The better news is that this one pays compound interest. And it pays off in three ways most people underestimate.

Mind

Learning something new isn’t just enriching, it’s structurally good for your brain. Novelty triggers dopamine which sharpens attention, priming the brain to absorb more, and makes whatever you’re learning easier to remember. A 2014 study by Gruber and colleagues at UC Davis found that when people were curious about a topic, the brain’s reward circuitry lit up and they were better at remembering not just that answer but unrelated information they encountered at the same time. So curiosity doesn’t just help you learn the thing in front of you, it also helps you to absorb everything around it.

Over a lifetime, this mechanism of widening the aperture of your brain, or neuroplasticity, is one of the strongest protective factors against cognitive decline. Brains that keep learning, keep working.

Social

Curiosity is also one of the most underrated social skills. Psychologist Todd Kashdan’s research on curious people consistently finds they form deeper relationships, faster. Why? Because curiosity reads as genuine interest, and genuine interest is rare. Asking good questions almost always builds more trust than displaying expertise. People don’t feel close to you because you’re impressive. They feel close to you because you were genuinely interested in them.

Physical

The mind-body link is real, too. Novelty and learning are mild, healthy stressors in the same category as exercise. They’ve been linked to better sleep, better stress regulation, and a longer health span in older adults. The MacArthur Study of Successful Aging found that engagement with new activities was one of the strongest predictors of physical resilience later in life. Trying new things is a longevity habit.

The Compounding Part

Here’s the part I didn’t expect: learning something new makes you better at what you already do.

Working on publishing a book forced me back into beginner mode – reading documentation, asking “dumb” questions, sitting with not-knowing. That experience sharpened how I think about clients who are beginners in their own categories. It gave me new analogies for explaining strategy. It surfaced assumptions I’d stopped noticing.

New skills don’t sit in a separate drawer in your head. They reach over and upgrade the old ones.

Why This Matters at Rasor

This is also, not coincidentally, how the team at Rasor works.

Building genuine, trustworthy brands — the subject of the SHARP Method book — requires staying current, asking better questions than the brief, and being willing to learn a client’s world from the inside. Trustworthy brands aren’t built by people who think they already have all the answers. They’re built by people who keep asking better questions, on behalf of the brands they serve. Curiosity isn’t a soft skill here. It’s the operating system.

What’s something you’ve been curious about but haven’t started yet?

Rasor is an award-winning marketing agency in Cincinnati, delivering communications, design and public relations strategies to industries including healthcare, municipal and infrastructure and B2B/B2C. Want to learn more about how Rasor can help you reach your marketing and communications goals? Contact us at info@gorasor.com or 513-793-1234.