Cultivating Curiosity When Your Beliefs Are Challenged

Arpit Bhayani

Arpit Bhayani

Mar 26, 2026 • 1 min read


When someone says something that challenges your beliefs, we often tend to push back or dismiss it. But what if instead, you got curious?

Next time, when something like this happens to you, try asking them: “How interesting. What made you believe that?” Then go a level deeper. What experiences shaped that view? What data points led them there? etc.

People do not form beliefs randomly. They are the output and outcome of experiences, patterns they noticed, and information they were exposed to. This disagreement is a way to understand “the other side”. This also paints you in a good light, btw.

The other side may be absolutely stupid, but that’s okay, at least you know what stupid looks like :) By the way, you do not have to agree with what they are saying or change your beliefs unnecessarily.

You just have to be genuinely curious.

Arpit Bhayani

Principal Engineer II at Razorpay - building Agent Studio, Ex-staff engg at GCP Memorystore & Dataproc, Creator of DiceDB, ex-Amazon Fast Data, ex-Director of Engg. SRE and Data Engineering at Unacademy. I spark engineering curiosity through my no-fluff engineering videos on YouTube and my courses