Suspending Judgment
If you want to explore territory you've never crossed before, you have to be willing to hold off on judging it. That includes a readiness to change your mind. Most of us would rather keep the beliefs we already have and fold new information into them, which feels safer. The trouble is that you rarely learn anything that way. Fitting fresh material into old assumptions and actually mastering that material are two different things, and the second one asks you to loosen your grip on the first.
Letting go of quick verdicts is a big part of letting yourself have a genuinely new experience. Plenty of us are good at snap decisions, maybe too good. The faster we judge, the less room there is to look at something unfamiliar with any curiosity. I ran into this myself not long ago when I ate something with my hands that wasn't a sandwich or a piece of fried chicken. I paused. Looking back, the hesitation was a little absurd. The way people eat is just habit, and the habit shifts depending on who you're sitting with. I could have ruined a perfectly pleasant meal by fussing over how I was eating instead of paying attention to the person across from me.
Holding judgment in reserve is also where ideas outside the usual lines come from. Brainstorming falls apart the moment people start shooting down suggestions; it works when the goal is simply to generate possibilities and let the sorting happen later. A jury is asked to do the same thing, to wait until all the evidence has been presented before deciding anything. Attorneys selecting a jury often struggle to find people who haven't already made up their minds from whatever they picked up about the case beforehand. Coming into almost any situation open, with your conclusions on hold, tends to be the smarter opening move. The alternative can be humbling: realizing you've badly misjudged a person or a thing once facts surface that you never had in front of you.