Part 2 / Trait 1: Openness

Why Curiosity Built My Career, Saved My Life, and Almost Derailed Both

My score for Openness to Experience came back at 85.

That means I score higher than roughly 85% of the population in curiosity, imagination, interest in ideas, learning, and exploration.

The score didn't surprise me.

It explained me.

Looking backward, I can see openness written all over my life.

Professional baseball.

Scouting.

Photography.

Recovery.

Psychology.

Human behaviour.

Leadership.

Performance.

Writing.

Business.

For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated by what sits underneath things.

The mechanics underneath the swing.

The psychology underneath behaviour.

The nervous system underneath emotion.

The belief underneath action.

The pattern underneath the result.

Most people stop once they find an answer.

I've always been more interested in the next question.

And that curiosity has been one of the greatest gifts of my life.

It has also caused some of my biggest problems.

Because every strength carries a shadow.

And openness is no exception.

What Is Openness?

Openness is your relationship with the unknown.

Not intelligence.

Not talent.

Not knowledge.

The unknown.

When something challenges what you believe, what happens?

Do you become curious?

Or defensive?

Do you lean in?

Or pull away?

Do you explore?

Or protect what you already know?

That's openness.

And baseball has a way of exposing it.

Because baseball constantly asks the same question:

Can you change?

The Baseball Player Who Cannot Change

Think about the player who struggles with a certain pitch.

The player who keeps making the same mistake.

The player who continues chasing the same outcome using the same approach.

Eventually, every coach arrives at the same realization.

The problem isn't talent.

The problem is adaptation.

The athlete isn't stuck because they lack ability.

They're stuck because they're attached.

Attached to an identity.

Attached to an approach.

Attached to a belief.

Attached to a story.

And the older I get, the more convinced I become that most development problems are not physical problems.

They're awareness problems.

The athlete cannot see what is happening.

Or worse.

They can see it.

And refuse to acknowledge it.

Long Exposure Photography Taught Me Something Baseball Couldn't

Years ago I became obsessed with long exposure photography.

Not photography.

Long exposure photography.

Some of my work ended up displayed publicly, including in art galleries, airports, home staging and commercial sales. That’s when it all stopped being about the process, though.

Most people saw beaches.

Clouds.

Water.

Landscapes.

I saw time.

The process fascinated me.

The waiting.

The observation.

The patience.

The fact that when you leave the shutter open long enough, reality begins to reveal things your eyes normally miss.

Water becomes glass.

Clouds become movement.

Chaos becomes patterns.

Noise disappears.

Structure emerges.

And without realizing it, I was learning one of the most important lessons in performance psychology.

Most people evaluate moments.

The best coaches evaluate patterns.

Most parents react to outcomes.

The best parents pay attention to behaviours.

Most athletes obsess over results.

The best athletes become students of process.

That's what long exposure photography taught me.

Not how to see pictures.

How to see patterns.

And that's ultimately what awareness is.

The ability to see what others miss.

Including yourself.

Recovery Forced Me To Confront The Dark Side Of Openness

Recovery is often portrayed as a story about addiction.

I don't think that's entirely true.

At least not for me.

Recovery was a confrontation with reality.

And reality has a nasty habit of refusing to negotiate.

For years I believed intelligence could solve my problems.

If I understood enough.

Learned enough.

Read enough.

Studied enough.

Eventually everything would make sense.

The problem is that life doesn't care what you understand.

Life cares what you do.

There is a painful realization that eventually arrives for every highly curious person.

Knowledge and transformation are not the same thing.

Understanding and action are not the same thing.

You can understand why you're miserable and remain miserable.

You can understand why you're failing and continue failing.

You can understand exactly what needs to change and never change at all.

Recovery forced me to confront that.

Not intellectually.

Behaviourally.

The truth became impossible to ignore.

I didn't need another answer.

I needed courage.

The courage to live the answers I already had.

That's a very different challenge.

And it's one many athletes face every day.

Most players don't need more information.

They need more honesty.

A Question Worth Sitting With

What do you already know that you continue pretending you don't know?

Read that again.

What do you already know that you continue pretending you don't know?

And before you answer, understand something important.

This can be about baseball.

But it doesn't have to be.

This question applies to every part of life.

Marriage.

Parenting.

Leadership.

Business.

Health.

Recovery.

Relationships.

Money.

Identity.

Anywhere reality and responsibility intersect, this question is waiting.

Because most people are not suffering from a lack of information.

They're suffering from a lack of honesty.

Deep down, most athletes already know.

They know they don't prepare consistently enough.

They know they spend too much time on their phone.

They know they're avoiding something.

They know they're chasing outcomes instead of building systems.

They know they aren't holding themselves accountable.

They know they're blaming circumstances.

They know they're looking for shortcuts.

They know.

The problem isn't awareness.

The problem is willingness.

The willingness to stop negotiating with reality.

The willingness to stop arguing with evidence.

The willingness to tell the truth even when the truth damages the story you've been telling yourself.

And here's where things get serious.

You cannot ask this question casually.

You cannot ask it because it sounds deep.

You cannot ask it hoping you'll get an answer that protects your ego.

You have to genuinely want to know.

You have to be willing to discover something you may not like.

Something inconvenient.

Something uncomfortable.

Something that destroys the explanation you've been using.

Because if you're not willing to hear the answer, don't ask the question.

Most people ask questions looking for confirmation.

Very few ask questions looking for truth.

Those are completely different activities.

And the truth has a cost.

Because once you become aware of something, responsibility shows up.

You no longer get to hide behind ignorance.

Now you have a choice.

You either act on what you know.

Or you consciously choose not to.

And those are very different things.

The answer to that question contains more growth than another lesson.

Another camp.

Another YouTube video.

Another social media coach.

Another book.

Another podcast.

Another expert.

Because the truth is that most development problems are not information problems.

They're ownership problems.

But awareness alone is not enough.

That's where people get stuck.

They finally tell themselves the truth.

Then they treat it like an interesting observation.

They nod.

Agree.

Maybe even write it down.

Then go right back to doing what they've always done.

Nothing changes.

Because awareness is not the finish line.

Awareness is the invitation.

The real question is:

Once you discover the truth, are you willing to build your life around it?

Are you willing to reorganize your behaviour around it?

Are you willing to sacrifice for it?

Are you willing to commit to it when the excitement disappears?

Because real growth begins the moment you stop asking:

"What do I want to be true?"

And start asking:

"What is true?"

Then having the courage to live accordingly.

Awareness begins where excuses end.

Transformation begins where commitment starts.

The High Openness Athlete

These athletes are usually easy to spot.

They ask questions.

They love learning.

They study the game.

They seek feedback.

They enjoy development.

They often love mental performance work.

The upside is obvious.

They adapt quickly.

They evolve quickly.

They often improve quickly.

But there is a shadow.

They can become addicted to possibility.

Always searching.

Always exploring.

Always tweaking.

Always changing.

Never committing.

The athlete becomes a collector of information instead of a builder of skill.

The danger isn't ignorance.

The danger is distraction.

Another Question

How many things are you currently trying to improve?

Now ask yourself something harder.

How many are you actually improving?

Those are rarely the same number.

The Low Openness Athlete

These athletes often prefer simplicity.

Structure.

Routine.

Repetition.

The upside is consistency.

The downside is rigidity.

At some point, baseball demands adaptation.

The game changes.

Competition changes.

Technology changes.

The athlete must change too.

The question isn't whether your current system works.

The question is whether it will continue working.

Those are different questions.

Parents

This trait shows up everywhere in parenting.

Highly open parents are usually deeply invested.

They read.

Research.

Study.

Listen.

Learn.

The problem is that curiosity sometimes becomes anxiety wearing a disguise.

Every week there is a new expert.

A new hitting coach.

A new training method.

A new podcast.

A new answer.

What begins as curiosity slowly becomes a search for certainty.

And certainty doesn't exist.

Not in baseball.

Not in parenting.

Not in life.

So the search continues.

The athlete gets dragged from program to program.

Coach to coach.

System to system.

The family spends years collecting answers while avoiding the harder question.

Are we actually executing anything long enough to know whether it works?

Development isn't complicated.

It's difficult.

Complicated problems require answers.

Difficult problems require discipline.

The baseball world is overflowing with answers.

What's rare is commitment.

Coaches

The best coaches I know are relentless students.

Not because they're insecure.

Because they're humble.

Humility isn't thinking less of yourself.

Humility is recognizing reality is more complicated than you are.

The dangerous coach is not the coach who doesn't know.

The dangerous coach is the coach who believes there is nothing left to learn.

The moment a coach stops learning, he begins coaching the game he remembers instead of the game that exists.

And baseball keeps moving.

Whether we move with it or not.

Front Offices

The history of baseball is largely a history of openness.

Every major competitive advantage began with somebody asking a dangerous question:

"What if we're wrong?"

Not:

"What if we're right?"

Not:

"How do we defend what we've always done?"

Not:

"How do we preserve the current system?"

The dangerous question is always:

"What if we're wrong?"

Because that question threatens identity.

It threatens certainty.

It threatens tradition.

And human beings do not like having their certainty threatened.

Baseball certainly doesn't.

For most of its history, baseball has been a deeply traditional game.

Tradition has value.

But tradition also creates blind spots.

Every breakthrough in baseball started when somebody became willing to challenge an assumption everybody else accepted.

Moneyball wasn't really a statistics story.

It was an openness story.

Someone looked at decades of accepted wisdom and asked:

"What if we're measuring the wrong things?"

Sports science wasn't a technology story.

It was an openness story.

Someone asked:

"What if recovery matters more than we thought?"

Mental performance wasn't a psychology story.

It was an openness story.

Someone asked:

"What if the space between the ears matters as much as the space between the foul lines?"

Every innovation begins with somebody becoming willing to question something everybody else assumes is true.

And that's harder than it sounds.

Because the moment you challenge an assumption, you threaten the people whose identities are built around that assumption.

That's true in baseball.

That's true in business.

That's true in leadership.

That's true in families.

That's true in recovery.

Human beings become attached to stories.

Sometimes those stories are accurate.

Sometimes they are not.

The problem is that once a story becomes part of your identity, changing your mind feels like losing a piece of yourself.

Which is why openness matters.

Because openness allows a person to say:

"I may be wrong."

And that sentence is far more powerful than most people realize.

The older I get, the more convinced I become that growth starts there.

Not with intelligence.

Not with talent.

Not with resources.

With humility.

The humility to admit that reality may be more complicated than your current understanding of it.

The organizations that continue evolving are not necessarily the smartest.

They're the most curious.

They're the organizations willing to challenge themselves before reality is forced to do it for them.

Because reality always wins eventually.

The market wins.

The game wins.

The results win.

The scoreboard wins.

Reality has no obligation to respect your beliefs.

That's why awareness matters.

And that's why openness matters.

Because the organizations that survive longest are often the organizations most willing to continuously update their understanding of reality.

The same is true for athletes.

The same is true for coaches.

The same is true for parents.

And the same is true for people.

A question worth asking is:

Where in your life are you defending an assumption instead of testing it?

Because that might be the exact place where growth is waiting.

The EQ-OS Connection

One of the foundational ideas behind EQ-OS is simple:

Pressure doesn't create problems.

Pressure exposes them.

Openness determines what happens next.

When pressure exposes a weakness:

Do you become defensive?

Or curious?

Do you blame?

Or learn?

Do you protect your ego?

Or pursue truth?

The answer determines growth.

Not talent.

Not potential.

Growth.

Final Thoughts

Carl Jung believed that much of human suffering comes from what remains unconscious.

What we refuse to see controls us.

What we become aware of gives us a chance to change.

That's why this trait matters.

Not because openness predicts success.

Because awareness creates options.

And options create freedom.

My openness score helped explain why I've spent my life asking questions.

Baseball taught me something equally important.

Eventually questions stop helping.

At some point the athlete must swing.

At some point the coach must coach.

At some point the parent must trust.

At some point the person must act.

Curiosity opens doors.

Discipline walks through them.

And that's where we're going next.

Conscientiousness.

The trait most strongly associated with execution, accountability, consistency, and long-term success.