Most of us can’t answer that question as quickly as we should be able to.
There is a specific quality of experience that most adults haven’t felt in longer than they can remember.
Not happiness. Not success. Not the mild satisfaction of a productive day or a good meal or a deal that came together the way you hoped.
Something older than those things. Something that used to arrive without warning and now, for most of us, doesn’t arrive at all.
The experience of being genuinely stopped by something.
Not surprised in the way that an unexpected email surprises you. Not pleased in the way that good news pleases you. Stopped. The way a child stops in the middle of a busy sidewalk because something in a store window has caught their attention so completely that the rest of the world temporarily stops mattering. The way you stopped, once, at a piece of music or a view or a conversation that went somewhere you didn’t expect, and felt — just briefly, just for a moment — that the world was larger than you had been allowing it to be.
Try to locate the last time it happened. Really try.
For most people, the answer takes longer than it should.
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The Question I’ve Been Sitting With
I’ve spent the last few years thinking about why that is. Why a capacity that every one of us had as children — the capacity to be genuinely astonished by the world, to be stopped by it, to feel it as larger than our ability to contain it — becomes so hard to access in adult life.
The easy answer is that we get busy. That the demands of adult life — work, responsibility, the relentless forward motion of a life with things in it — leave no room for the kind of open, unhurried attention that astonishment requires.
That’s part of it. But I don’t think it’s the whole story.
Because the busiest people I know are sometimes the most alive to the world. And some of the least busy people I know have somehow made themselves completely unavailable to surprise. Busyness is a contributing factor. It isn’t the cause.
The cause is something more gradual and more interesting. Something that happens not in a single moment of loss but in the accumulation of a thousand small decisions to stop paying a certain kind of attention. Decisions that made sense at the time — that were, in fact, the decisions a functional adult is supposed to make — but that had a cost nobody told us about.
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What Leaders Know About This (Whether They Name It or Not)
Here is something I’ve noticed in the leaders I most admire, and in the leaders I’ve watched struggle.
The ones who sustain genuine effectiveness over a long career — not just competence, but the kind of leadership that actually changes something — almost always have a quality that is surprisingly hard to name. It’s not strategic brilliance, though many of them have that. It’s not emotional intelligence, though that matters too. It’s something more like a sustained capacity for genuine surprise.
They walk into rooms still actually wondering what they’ll find there. They ask questions they don’t already know the answer to. They encounter a piece of data or a person or a market shift and their first response is not to categorize it and file it away but to sit with it long enough to understand what it’s telling them.
The leaders who struggle — the ones who hit a wall after years of success, who find their organizations going stale around them, who can’t quite understand why the playbook that worked for a decade has stopped working — have almost always lost this. Not their skills. Not their experience. Their capacity to be genuinely surprised by what’s in front of them.
They’ve confused their model of the world with the world itself. And the world, being the world, has moved on without asking permission.
I’ve done this myself. Most leaders I know have. It’s not a character flaw. It’s what happens when you get very good at something. The expertise that makes you effective also makes you, if you’re not careful, progressively harder to surprise.
And a leader who can’t be surprised can’t learn. And a leader who can’t learn is, eventually, finished — even if the results haven’t shown it yet.
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The Distinction Nobody Talks About
We talk a lot about curiosity in leadership and personal development circles. Be curious. Ask questions. Stay open. It’s good advice and most of it is genuine.
But I’ve come to think that curiosity and the thing I’m describing are not the same thing.
Curiosity fills gaps. You have a question, you find the answer, the question closes. Curiosity is the thing that drives you to Google something, to read the article, to ask the follow-up question. It’s enormously useful. It’s how expertise gets built and problems get solved.
But the experience of being stopped — the specific quality of astonishment I’m pointing at — does something different. It doesn’t fill a gap. It reveals that the map you’ve been using is smaller than the territory. It doesn’t answer a question. It shows you that you were asking the wrong question, or a question too small for what’s actually out there.
Einstein didn’t look at a compass at age five and get curious about magnetic fields. He got stopped. He felt, in the wordless way a five-year-old feels things, that the world worked differently than he had assumed. That something was happening that no one had fully explained to him. That the universe was stranger and more interesting than the adults around him seemed to think.
He spent the rest of his life following that feeling.
Curiosity would have resolved the compass. The other thing — the thing that’s harder to name — kept the question open for decades until it produced a theory of relativity.
Most of us lead with curiosity. The leaders and thinkers and creators who produce something genuinely new have usually found a way to keep access to the other thing as well.
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What I’m Writing About in This Series
Over the next several months I’m going to be writing about this — about the specific capacity to be genuinely astonished by the world, what happens to it in adult life, and what it looks like to recover it.
Not as a self-help proposition. Not as a productivity hack or a wellness practice or a leadership framework, though it touches all of those things. As something more fundamental: an argument that the quality of your attention — the degree to which you are genuinely open to being surprised by the world — is one of the most important things about you. That it shapes your work, your relationships, your leadership, your creative life, and your experience of being alive in ways that most of us have never been explicitly invited to think about.
Each post will look at a specific aspect of this. How it gets suppressed — by expertise, by routine, by the distraction economy, by the very success that we’re all working toward. And what the return looks like — not as a dramatic transformation but as a daily, imperfect, renewable practice of approaching your own life with something closer to the attention it deserves.
Some of it will be research — neuroscience and psychology and philosophy that illuminates what’s actually happening when we feel this and why we stop feeling it. Some of it will be the stories of people who kept the capacity alive — or found their way back to it — in the middle of full and demanding adult lives. Some of it will be personal, because this is not a subject I can write about from a distance.
I’ll start here, with the question.
When did you last feel genuinely stopped by something?
If the answer came quickly — yesterday, last week, this morning on the way to work when the light did something unexpected — then you have something worth protecting. This series is about how to protect it.
If the answer took longer than you expected, or if you’re still looking for it — that’s worth paying attention to. This series is about that too.
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This is the first post in The Return, a series on recovering what adulthood costs us. If it resonated with you, subscribe to get the next one.
ABB