I remember my son when he was about two years old. He had seven words in his vocabulary.
Mama, Papa, olay, non, oui, umm, and pourquoi.

60% of the population speaks two languages in the part of Canada we live.
We raised our kids in French so they wouldn’t be lost. My wife’s mother tongue is French.
Olay was Soleil – a version of his big sister’s name, Marie-Soleil.
Non is no in English. Oui is yes.
Umm is a stretch of a word, but we knew what he meant.
Pourquoi is why.

The curiosity of a child is daunting but still beautiful.
He used to ask why about everything.

When he was four, he asked why the sky was blue. Why the grass was green.
Why birds could fly.

He could draw for hours using all the colours in the crayon box.
I brought him and his sister to my restaurant on a day off. The employees were busy. Customers were patiently waiting, but things were spiraling out of control. I gave him and his sister a page to colour. They sat in their chairs, drawing a picture for their daddy while he gave the team an extra hand to get back on track. I can still see them happily drawing away at Table 51.

Somewhere between rainbows and unicorns and TikTok, his creativity faded. He stopped asking me why. Instead, he asks the robot, Google.

Gases and particles in Earth’s atmosphere scatter sunlight in all directions. Blue light is scattered more than other colors because it travels as shorter, smaller waves. This is why we see a blue sky most of the time.

I used to tell him that blue is my second favorite colour. When I wake up in the morning, the sun splashes it across the sky to remind me it’s going to be a good day to be alive.

The key to cracking creativity is curiosity.

The opposite of a profound truth is another profound truth.

My answer, although unscientific, is still true despite not being the robot’s profound truth.

To find your creativity, dance with the cat in the moonlight.
The answers to the questions don’t have to be scientific. They don’t have to be absolute black or white.
The answers to your whys can paint new colour to an old problem.

Why will your company survive a hundred years?
Why will customers never switch to a competitor?
Why do some customers not buy from you?
Why do customers stop buying from you?
Why does my marketing activity work in short bursts but not long ones?

Curiosity didn’t kill the cat.
The old cliché was meant to scare kids from poking around other people’s business.

Curiosity makes the cat more interesting.
Now go dance by the moonlight. Lap up some vino and ask the sun to splash colour all over your canvas.

Be like that two-year-old and constantly ask why.
Forget the scientific approach.

It’s easy to answer why customers stop buying from you using the scientific brain. We let them down.

The poetic brain might say, we stopped hugging them, promising things would be ok.

Use your poetic brain.

Discover answers no one has before, and you’ll find profound truths to your whys.
All the answers are waiting for you in the part of the brain we forget to use.

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