September 13, 2025
Every day I sit down to write these posts, I wrestle with two things: what’s worth saying, and how honest I can be when I say it. Today’s Thought of the Day and Question of the Day pull me right into that tension. The thought challenges me to lean into courage, and the question asks me to choose between two powerful forces, curiosity and intelligence.
Let’s unpack both and see where they meet in the messy, funny, sometimes frustrating, and always human parts of life.
Thought of the Day: Creativity Takes Courage
On the surface, that sentence looks like a bumper sticker you’d see on the back of a Subaru in a coffee shop parking lot. But live with it for a minute. Creativity isn’t just about painting something beautiful or writing a song, it’s about putting a piece of yourself into the world, knowing it can be rejected, ignored, or misunderstood. That takes guts.
I think about this every time I hit publish on one of these posts. There’s always a small part of me that wonders, what if no one reads it? Or worse, what if people read it and think it’s garbage? Yet I post anyway, because not posting would mean silencing that creative urge. And silencing yourself might feel safe, but it’s also a slow kind of suffocation.
Even at home, creativity takes courage. My kids will color a dragon bright pink or build a Lego spaceship that makes no sense to me. But they don’t hesitate, because they haven’t yet learned the fear of looking foolish. Meanwhile, I’ll second-guess myself over whether a sentence belongs in italics or not.
Courage isn’t about never feeling afraid, it’s about hitting “send,” walking on stage, or picking up the brush anyway. Creativity without courage is just daydreaming. Creativity with courage is what changes your life.
For another reflection on daring to push forward when the world seems resistant, you might like Do Your Job Even if Others Refuse to Do Theirs.
Question of the Day: What’s More Important, Curiosity or Intelligence?
Here’s the thing about intelligence: it can make you efficient, sharp, and impressive. But curiosity is the thing that makes life interesting. Intelligence can give you the answers, but curiosity asks the questions in the first place.
If I had to pick, I’d take curiosity every time. Intelligence can be capped, you know what you know, you play within your strengths. But curiosity is boundless. It will drag you down rabbit holes you didn’t even know existed. That’s where the growth happens.
Think about how many discoveries came from someone simply asking, what happens if I do this? Intelligence helps you solve problems. Curiosity helps you find them in the first place.
Even in my own life, curiosity beats intelligence daily. My kids don’t care how “smart” I am, they care if I’ll follow their weird questions: Why does the moon follow us? Do cats dream about us? Can you eat a cloud? Those questions make me laugh, but they also remind me intelligence without curiosity is a dull tool.
And if I’m being honest, curiosity is what fuels this whole Thought of the Day and Question of the Day project. Intelligence could help me craft tidy sentences, but curiosity keeps me asking, What’s worth thinking about today? What’s worth sharing?
For another take on questions that stretch your perspective, check out What Do You Love About the Night?.
Where the Thought and Question Meet
Here’s what struck me: creativity takes courage, but curiosity is what often sparks that creativity in the first place. The courage gets you to share it, the curiosity gives you something worth sharing, and maybe intelligence polishes it up along the way.
Life feels best when all three work together: courage, curiosity, and yes, intelligence. But if you had to choose, I’d say follow curiosity first. The rest has a way of catching up.
What about you—do you lean more on curiosity or intelligence? And how does courage play into your creativity? Leave a comment below or join the daily email list to get the Thought of the Day and Question of the Day delivered straight to your inbox.