The Curiosity Ledger: How School Owners Keep Growing by Learning Outside Their Own Business

Updated November 7, 2026

Share one Puzzle per staff meeting. Spend five minutes. “I noticed this, here’s what I learned, here’s what we could try.”
Ask each instructor for a Payoff once a month. One idea from outside the school that they would like to test in their class. It builds ownership.
Reward tested ideas, not clever ones. Praise the instructor who ran a small experiment and reported honestly on a failure just as loudly as the one who got a win.

Schools become what their leaders pay attention to. If you ask about curiosity once a quarter, your school will look curious once a quarter.

What Curiosity Is Not

Curiosity is not an excuse to avoid the basics. I have seen owners who read widely and never fixed their phone scripts. Reading about brilliant strategies does not substitute for doing your intro conferences well. The order is: execute the fundamentals of enrollment, retention, and pricing, then use curiosity to find the edge. Curiosity is the second gear, not a replacement for the first.

It is also not an excuse to chase every shiny object. The 30-day test rule exists to keep you honest: one idea tested at a time, with a number attached.

This Week

Create the Ledger: three columns, one row per week. A spreadsheet or a paper page is fine.
Block 30 minutes daily on your calendar for outside reading, listening, or watching.
Start the “What I don’t understand” note on your phone and add three entries by Friday.
Write your first Payoff and schedule its test within 30 days.
Post the three-tier interrupt rule in the staff area.

For a broader look at how these habits connect to enrollment growth, see our school growth hub. The same curiosity applied to lead generation is covered in our marketing hub, and how it shapes your team is in our staff hub.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much time should a school owner spend on outside learning?

Thirty minutes a day is a workable standard. That is about 3.5 hours a week or roughly 180 hours a year. The point is consistency, not volume. Block it on your calendar like a class, and log one puzzle, one source, and one testable idea per week.

What should I read or watch if I only have time for a little?

Prioritize sources outside martial arts that solved a problem you face: premium pricing, follow-up systems, staff scripts, and customer experience. Behind-the-scenes business stories, books on negotiation and positioning, and practitioners in premium service businesses give you the most transferable ideas per hour.

How do I stop collecting ideas and start using them?

Apply the 30-day rule. Every idea must be small enough to test in one class or one week, tied to a number you will measure, and dated for review. If it cannot meet those three conditions, rewrite it or drop it. Interesting is not the same as useful until a test proves it.

Take the Next Step

Book your free Personal Evaluation, a $1,297 value. Bring your best Payoff idea and we will help you decide what to test first. Claim your free consultation here.

Free resource: Curious owners build curious teams, and that starts with how your instructors teach. Get our free Extraordinary Teaching at ExtraordinaryTeaching.com.

About the Author

Stephen Oliver, MBA and 10th Degree Black Belt, is the Founder and CEO of Mile High Karate and Martial Arts Wealth Mastery, CEO of NAPMA (National Association of Professional Martial Artists), and Publisher of Martial Arts Professional magazine. A martial arts school owner since 1975, he and his coaching team, including Grand Master Jeff Smith and Dr. Greg Moody, have helped owners build $1M+ schools.

Puzzle: Why do people who pay more for a service value it more? (I noticed families treat a premium dentist and a discount dentist very differently.)
Pull: A book on pricing psychology, plus a conversation with a friend who runs a premium practice.
Payoff: In the next two intro conferences, present the 12-month Trial Enrollment at $375 first, before mentioning any lower option. Measure how many of the next ten conferences accept the first presentation. Review on the 15th.

That row takes ten minutes to write and might change your tuition for good.

Curiosity Inside Your Own Walls

Your staff and your black belts also need curiosity, and they take their cue from you. Three practices that work:

Share one Puzzle per staff meeting. Spend five minutes. “I noticed this, here’s what I learned, here’s what we could try.”
Ask each instructor for a Payoff once a month. One idea from outside the school that they would like to test in their class. It builds ownership.
Reward tested ideas, not clever ones. Praise the instructor who ran a small experiment and reported honestly on a failure just as loudly as the one who got a win.

Schools become what their leaders pay attention to. If you ask about curiosity once a quarter, your school will look curious once a quarter.

What Curiosity Is Not

It is also not an excuse to chase every shiny object. The 30-day test rule exists to keep you honest: one idea tested at a time, with a number attached.

This Week

Create the Ledger: three columns, one row per week. A spreadsheet or a paper page is fine.
Block 30 minutes daily on your calendar for outside reading, listening, or watching.
Start the “What I don’t understand” note on your phone and add three entries by Friday.
Write your first Payoff and schedule its test within 30 days.
Post the three-tier interrupt rule in the staff area.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much time should a school owner spend on outside learning?

What should I read or watch if I only have time for a little?

How do I stop collecting ideas and start using them?

Take the Next Step

Book your free Personal Evaluation, a $1,297 value. Bring your best Payoff idea and we will help you decide what to test first. Claim your free consultation here.

Free resource: Curious owners build curious teams, and that starts with how your instructors teach. Get our free Extraordinary Teaching at ExtraordinaryTeaching.com.

About the Author

Small: Can you test it in one class, one week, one script, or one ad? If not, break it down.
Measured: What number will tell you whether it worked? Decide before you start.
Dated: On what day will you look at that number?

If a Payoff cannot pass all three, rewrite it until it can, or drop it. Ideas that wait for a perfect launch usually never launch. A small test that runs next Tuesday beats a grand plan that starts “when things calm down.”

A Sample Ledger Row

Puzzle: Why do people who pay more for a service value it more? (I noticed families treat a premium dentist and a discount dentist very differently.)
Pull: A book on pricing psychology, plus a conversation with a friend who runs a premium practice.
Payoff: In the next two intro conferences, present the 12-month Trial Enrollment at $375 first, before mentioning any lower option. Measure how many of the next ten conferences accept the first presentation. Review on the 15th.

That row takes ten minutes to write and might change your tuition for good.

Curiosity Inside Your Own Walls

Your staff and your black belts also need curiosity, and they take their cue from you. Three practices that work:

Share one Puzzle per staff meeting. Spend five minutes. “I noticed this, here’s what I learned, here’s what we could try.”
Ask each instructor for a Payoff once a month. One idea from outside the school that they would like to test in their class. It builds ownership.
Reward tested ideas, not clever ones. Praise the instructor who ran a small experiment and reported honestly on a failure just as loudly as the one who got a win.

Schools become what their leaders pay attention to. If you ask about curiosity once a quarter, your school will look curious once a quarter.

What Curiosity Is Not

It is also not an excuse to chase every shiny object. The 30-day test rule exists to keep you honest: one idea tested at a time, with a number attached.

This Week

Create the Ledger: three columns, one row per week. A spreadsheet or a paper page is fine.
Block 30 minutes daily on your calendar for outside reading, listening, or watching.
Start the “What I don’t understand” note on your phone and add three entries by Friday.
Write your first Payoff and schedule its test within 30 days.
Post the three-tier interrupt rule in the staff area.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much time should a school owner spend on outside learning?

What should I read or watch if I only have time for a little?

How do I stop collecting ideas and start using them?

Take the Next Step

Book your free Personal Evaluation, a $1,297 value. Bring your best Payoff idea and we will help you decide what to test first. Claim your free consultation here.

Free resource: Curious owners build curious teams, and that starts with how your instructors teach. Get our free Extraordinary Teaching at ExtraordinaryTeaching.com.

About the Author

Interrupt me now: Safety incidents, injuries, a facility problem that stops classes, or a legal or media matter.
Tell me today: A student cancellation request from a long-term or leadership student, a staff resignation, a complaint that mentions a refund or a chargeback.
Save it for the weekly meeting: Everything else, including routine cancellations from short-tenure students, schedule preferences, and “what do you think about” questions.

When a staff member pages you with a tier-three item at tier-one volume, the fix is not annoyance, it is training. Give them the three tiers on a laminated card and a script: “I have a tier-three item, I’m adding it to the weekly list.” Within a month your interrupt rate drops and your thinking time rises. That thinking time is where the Ledger’s Payoffs get designed.

Curiosity requires attention, and attention is the scarce resource. If a pager can eat half of it, so can a phone full of notifications.

Rule Five: Test Within 30 Days or Let It Go

The Ledger’s biggest failure mode is collecting. I have watched owners fill notebooks with ideas and implement none. Interesting is not the same as useful, and the only difference is a test.

Use this simple filter on every Payoff:

Small: Can you test it in one class, one week, one script, or one ad? If not, break it down.
Measured: What number will tell you whether it worked? Decide before you start.
Dated: On what day will you look at that number?

A Sample Ledger Row

Puzzle: Why do people who pay more for a service value it more? (I noticed families treat a premium dentist and a discount dentist very differently.)
Pull: A book on pricing psychology, plus a conversation with a friend who runs a premium practice.
Payoff: In the next two intro conferences, present the 12-month Trial Enrollment at $375 first, before mentioning any lower option. Measure how many of the next ten conferences accept the first presentation. Review on the 15th.

That row takes ten minutes to write and might change your tuition for good.

Curiosity Inside Your Own Walls

Your staff and your black belts also need curiosity, and they take their cue from you. Three practices that work:

Share one Puzzle per staff meeting. Spend five minutes. “I noticed this, here’s what I learned, here’s what we could try.”
Ask each instructor for a Payoff once a month. One idea from outside the school that they would like to test in their class. It builds ownership.
Reward tested ideas, not clever ones. Praise the instructor who ran a small experiment and reported honestly on a failure just as loudly as the one who got a win.

Schools become what their leaders pay attention to. If you ask about curiosity once a quarter, your school will look curious once a quarter.

What Curiosity Is Not

It is also not an excuse to chase every shiny object. The 30-day test rule exists to keep you honest: one idea tested at a time, with a number attached.

This Week

Create the Ledger: three columns, one row per week. A spreadsheet or a paper page is fine.
Block 30 minutes daily on your calendar for outside reading, listening, or watching.
Start the “What I don’t understand” note on your phone and add three entries by Friday.
Write your first Payoff and schedule its test within 30 days.
Post the three-tier interrupt rule in the staff area.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much time should a school owner spend on outside learning?

What should I read or watch if I only have time for a little?

How do I stop collecting ideas and start using them?

Take the Next Step

Book your free Personal Evaluation, a $1,297 value. Bring your best Payoff idea and we will help you decide what to test first. Claim your free consultation here.

Free resource: Curious owners build curious teams, and that starts with how your instructors teach. Get our free Extraordinary Teaching at ExtraordinaryTeaching.com.

About the Author

Puzzle. Something you saw this week that you did not understand. Not something you disagreed with, something you could not explain.
Pull. The source you used to understand it. A book, a long article, a documentary, a conversation with a person who knows more than you do.
Payoff. One idea from that source that you could test in your school, written as a specific action with a date.

That is it. A puzzle, a pull, a payoff. The discipline is in the third column. Most people stop at “that was interesting.” The Ledger forces you to translate interest into a test.

How to Run It

Put 30 minutes on your calendar every day, and treat it like a class you are teaching. Thirty minutes a day is about 3.5 hours a week and roughly 180 hours a year. Compare that with what a typical evening of passive screen time consumes: two or three hours a night of something that will not appear in your Ledger. You do not need to give up everything you enjoy. You need to move a fraction of the hours.

Fill the Ledger on Friday afternoon. Pick the single best Payoff of the week and schedule it. Review the whole sheet on the last day of each month and ask which payoffs you actually tested and what happened.

Rule One: Chase What Confuses You

The best place to look for your next idea is whatever you do not currently understand. When something is happening in the world and you cannot explain why, go investigate until you can. If there is a sudden spike in a behavior or trend, ask why it happened now and not five years ago. If a new platform is exploding and you cannot explain who uses it, find out.

This works in business because confusion marks the edge of your model of the world. Anything inside your model, you already optimize. Anything outside it is where a competitor, or an opportunity, can surprise you. I would rather be surprised in a library than in my billing report.

Practical version: keep a note on your phone called “What I don’t understand.” When you hear a term or see a trend you cannot explain, drop it in. Pick one entry per week for the Puzzle column.

Rule Two: Learn From Fields Unrelated to Yours

Not everything you educate yourself on has to be relevant to your business on day one. The story I tell here is about a famous founder who dropped out of college but kept sitting in on classes, including one on calligraphy. That class had no obvious commercial use at the time. Years later, the typography and design thinking shaped how a famous computer interface looked. The connection could not have been planned. It only appeared after the knowledge was already in his head.

For a school owner, translate that into habit. Read about hospitality. Read about orthodontics practices and how they run consultations. Read about how restaurants handle a rush. Read about how a dental practice builds a recall system. Every one of those industries has solved a problem you face: scheduling, follow-up, premium pricing, staff scripts, and getting people to return. You get ideas that no one in your local martial arts market is using, because none of your competitors are reading them.

One category I recommend specifically: behind-the-scenes business stories. There are television series and documentary-style programs built around how real businesses and personalities operate in real time, including the entertainment industry, sports management, and the origin story of a famous fast-food chain. They are entertaining, but if you watch them as an operator, you pick up pricing instincts, negotiation tactics, brand thinking, and the way leaders talk to their teams. Watch with a pen.

Rule Three: Be Suspicious of Anything Delivered as a Sound Bite

A few years ago I noticed something about how people form opinions on big public topics: most of what they hear arrives as sound bites, without definitions. One side says one thing, the other side says the opposite, nobody defines the terms, and nobody shows the underlying numbers. I would say the same about almost all news coverage, in any direction. I subscribe to publications and, honestly, often throw them away after skimming. I watch coverage and argue with it out loud, because I assume the version I am hearing is simplified and comes from a particular perspective.

The business application is direct. A school owner who accepts the first explanation of a trend will make the first, shallow decision about it. Before you accept a claim, ask three questions:

What is the definition? If the term is not defined, the claim is empty.
What are the numbers? Not a percentage in isolation. The actual figures and the baseline.
Who benefits if I believe this? Vendors, course sellers, and consultants (including me) all have incentives.

I include myself deliberately. Test what I teach. Run it in your school, measure it, and keep what works.

I also suggest not becoming a news junkie. Staying informed has value, but passively consuming a daily stream of outrage is a poor use of the mental energy a business owner needs for making good decisions. Choose a few reliable sources, read them on purpose, and move on. Pick economics-focused programming or business-focused commentary over general chatter if you need a daily feed.

Rule Four: Learn What to Ignore (The Pager Rule)

Return to the pager. I received dozens of pages and not one of them mattered. That experience taught me something that is still the first policy I install in any school: define what is allowed to interrupt the owner.

A good escalation rule has three tiers:

Interrupt me now: Safety incidents, injuries, a facility problem that stops classes, or a legal or media matter.
Tell me today: A student cancellation request from a long-term or leadership student, a staff resignation, a complaint that mentions a refund or a chargeback.
Save it for the weekly meeting: Everything else, including routine cancellations from short-tenure students, schedule preferences, and “what do you think about” questions.

Curiosity requires attention, and attention is the scarce resource. If a pager can eat half of it, so can a phone full of notifications.

Rule Five: Test Within 30 Days or Let It Go

The Ledger’s biggest failure mode is collecting. I have watched owners fill notebooks with ideas and implement none. Interesting is not the same as useful, and the only difference is a test.

Use this simple filter on every Payoff:

Small: Can you test it in one class, one week, one script, or one ad? If not, break it down.
Measured: What number will tell you whether it worked? Decide before you start.
Dated: On what day will you look at that number?

A Sample Ledger Row

Puzzle: Why do people who pay more for a service value it more? (I noticed families treat a premium dentist and a discount dentist very differently.)
Pull: A book on pricing psychology, plus a conversation with a friend who runs a premium practice.
Payoff: In the next two intro conferences, present the 12-month Trial Enrollment at $375 first, before mentioning any lower option. Measure how many of the next ten conferences accept the first presentation. Review on the 15th.

That row takes ten minutes to write and might change your tuition for good.

Curiosity Inside Your Own Walls

Your staff and your black belts also need curiosity, and they take their cue from you. Three practices that work:

Share one Puzzle per staff meeting. Spend five minutes. “I noticed this, here’s what I learned, here’s what we could try.”
Ask each instructor for a Payoff once a month. One idea from outside the school that they would like to test in their class. It builds ownership.
Reward tested ideas, not clever ones. Praise the instructor who ran a small experiment and reported honestly on a failure just as loudly as the one who got a win.

Schools become what their leaders pay attention to. If you ask about curiosity once a quarter, your school will look curious once a quarter.

What Curiosity Is Not

It is also not an excuse to chase every shiny object. The 30-day test rule exists to keep you honest: one idea tested at a time, with a number attached.

This Week

Create the Ledger: three columns, one row per week. A spreadsheet or a paper page is fine.
Block 30 minutes daily on your calendar for outside reading, listening, or watching.
Start the “What I don’t understand” note on your phone and add three entries by Friday.
Write your first Payoff and schedule its test within 30 days.
Post the three-tier interrupt rule in the staff area.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much time should a school owner spend on outside learning?

What should I read or watch if I only have time for a little?

How do I stop collecting ideas and start using them?

Take the Next Step

Book your free Personal Evaluation, a $1,297 value. Bring your best Payoff idea and we will help you decide what to test first. Claim your free consultation here.

Free resource: Curious owners build curious teams, and that starts with how your instructors teach. Get our free Extraordinary Teaching at ExtraordinaryTeaching.com.

About the Author

School owners stay ahead of plateaus by treating curiosity as a scheduled habit, not a personality trait. Spend 30 minutes a day on sources outside martial arts, log one puzzle, one source, and one testable idea each week, and run the best idea in your school within 30 days. That is the Curiosity Ledger, and it compounds like tuition.

I have owned schools since 1975, and the owners who keep growing share one trait that has nothing to do with martial arts technique or marketing tactics. They are curious. They see something they do not understand and they go find out why. The owners who stall tend to do the opposite: they consume whatever is put in front of them, repeat what they heard, and wonder why their business looks like everyone else’s. This article gives you a simple system for building the habit on purpose.

Why Curiosity Is a Business Asset, Not a Hobby

Let me start with a story about technology, because it shows how fast the ground moves under a school owner’s feet. When I opened my first Mile High Karate school in 1983, one of the best days I had in business was buying one of those early brick cell phones. The first thing I had was a bag phone, the kind with a shoulder strap and a battery the size of a lunch box that you carried around like luggage. The week I bought it, the smaller brick model hit the market, and I swapped.

Back then, if you had told me I could run an operation without sitting in an office all day paying attention to every person who walked in, I would have been amazed. Then came pagers, a primitive version of a text message. The trouble with a pager, as I learned on the highway in traffic, was that it fired off a 9-1-1 and a phone number, and I would pull over to call back. Half the time it was a staff member with an “emergency” that was not one. A student wanted to drop out, a minor schedule conflict, a question that could have waited until morning. I do not think I received a single important page in the entire time I carried one.

Two lessons in that story. The first: every tool that arrives in your business is a chance to be early or late, and being early almost always pays. The second, which I’ll return to: not every interruption is a signal. Curiosity includes learning what to ignore.

The Real Cost of Not Being Curious

If you are not curious, if you are not constantly looking for new material and you are not noticing things you do not understand, you will die on the vine somewhere. That is not a threat, it is arithmetic. The tools that fill your school change. The way families find a martial arts school changes. A lead source that produced a steady flow for years can vanish when a newspaper shrinks or a media habit shifts. The owners who spot the shift early and test a replacement lose a few months. The owners who find out late lose a year.

Here is the math on why this matters at the level of one idea. Suppose your school enrolls 20 new students a month and your current new-student tuition is $325. You learn something, from an unrelated industry, about how premium positioning changes the way buyers perceive value. You test a move to $375. The difference is $50 a month per student. Over a 12-month Trial Enrollment, that is $600 more per student. On 20 enrollments a month, a single month’s cohort produces $12,000 of extra first-year revenue. Run it for twelve cohorts and the school has an added annual run rate of $144,000, from one idea you encountered because you were reading something outside your field. For comparison, $1,000,000 a year is $83,333 a month. One well-chosen idea can be a meaningful slice of that.

I am not claiming every article you read is worth $144,000. I am saying you cannot predict which one will be, and that is the entire argument for curiosity.