About Curious By Default

Curious By Default is a blog about learning hard things in public, written by me, Isaiah Adams.

Here's the honest origin story. When I was younger, I was the kid spamming niches. Memorizing pi, learning where every country and state was, solving Rubik's cubes, chasing whatever new thing caught my attention. I couldn't sit still on one interest, and I didn't want to. Once I felt like I'd conquered something, I was already looking for the next thing.

I wasn't the smartest kid at my high school, and my road to Harvard wasn't the traditional one. What I had was obsession. I did hard things because they were hard, for the challenge of it, and I found that my stubborn curiosity took me further than being naturally gifted ever would have. If you take one thing from this site, let it be that. You don't have to be the smartest person in the room. You have to be the one who's willing to take on the challenge that everyone else walks away from.

I'm older now, and spend most of my time working with AI, but that wiring never left. I still can't stay in one lane. I'm into machine learning and agentic AI, but also chess, guitar, calisthenics, math, and whatever else I stumble upon. For a long time I treated that as a problem. Every guide for social media tells you to pick a niche and stay there. But I've decided that my restlessness isn't a bug to fix. It's the whole point. So this is the place where I plan to stop fighting it.

Curious By Default is my public record of staying curious on purpose. Some posts will be build logs from whatever I'm making. Some will be the explainer I wish I'd had right after I finally understood something. Some will be an engineer's attempt to learn a thing that has nothing to do with engineering. The topics will jump around. The through-line is me, figuring things out in the open, keeping myself honest to the curious kid I used to be.

If any of that resonates, subscribe. It's free. You'll get new posts straight to your inbox, no algorithm deciding whether you see them, and you'll be part of the reason I keep showing up and writing. That accountability is half of why this exists.

Thanks for being here. Let's go learn something.

Isaiah