Curiosity: The Fuel for Greatness

Hey curious mind,

Here’s today’s dose to become smarter in 5 minutes:

• The Growth Insight: Follow Your Curiosity

• Tools to Unlock Your Peak Potential

The Growth Insight 🌱

Curiosity: The Fuel for Greatness

Have you ever stumbled upon a profound idea buried deep within a lengthy essay or book? Well, Paul Graham's 12,000-word mega essay on how to do great work contains a small paragraph that packs a powerful punch:

"Curiosity is the best guide. Your curiosity never lies, and it knows more than you do about what's worth paying attention to."

This observation is incredibly underrated, my friends. To truly grasp its significance, we must first ask: what are the alternatives?

💡 You can follow prestige, money, or other mimetic forces. But let's be real, that path rarely ends well.

Instead, people find success by following their curiosity. But then, they start drifting away from that very thing that ignited their passion in the first place.

💡 Suddenly, ambition becomes the driver, or money, or doing something that sounds cool. And before you know it, things start going downhill.

As Shaan Puri says:

"If you don't know which path to choose, just choose the one that's most exciting. Just keep following that, and that will lead you to the right place. Excitement is the engine and the rudder, I think, is a really powerful idea."

💡 Another typical example of how this plays out is when people try to use elaborate spreadsheet-point-systems to decide what business idea to pursue. They come up with dozens of criteria, assign weights, and start ranking business ideas – unfair advantages, easy to sell, low friction asset production, recurring revenue, no crazy hours, income potential, and so on.

The problem? You'll always second-guess yourself since you know deep down that all your ratings are completely made up. You'll likely never start executing or stick to it, and you'll waste a ton of time researching that you could've spent executing.

💡 A top-down approach, masterplanning, doesn't work. Instead, what does work is a bottom-up approach where you follow your curiosity and connect the dots later.

As Steve Jobs noted, "You can't connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards. So, you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future."

Here's my theory on why following your curiosity works:

💡 When you use spreadsheets or rely on narratives like "this will sound so cool when I tell people about it," you're allowing your left brain to take charge. But your left brain is the Berlusconi of the Brain – loud, controlling the media (that voice in your head), and largely out of touch with reality.

💡 When you follow your curiosity, you give more power to your right brain, which is better connected to the whole around you. It's fine with ambiguity and doesn't need fully verbalized trains of thought to pattern match.

The excitement you feel when you follow your curiosity is your body's way of guiding you in the right direction without relying on Berlusconi's collaboration. That's why it leads to better outcomes and provides the necessary fuel for the journey.

💡 It's incredibly energizing to work on what truly excites you. If you work on an idea born out of a spreadsheet or left-brain narrative, you'll feel low energy and eventually get stuck.

Not only is the process of creation wildly different, but the output also reflects your state of mind. Readers can feel how you felt as you wrote something, and the same is true for any other type of project.

💡 When you follow your curiosity, you're naturally excited about the project. Your excitement is infectious, and marketing becomes a natural part of your excitement radiating outward.

The universe isn't conspiring to help you, and excitement isn't some mystical force. Instead, excitement is simply information – your body telling you that you're on the right track and that you should keep going.

💡 And the reason why this leads to great outcomes is that excitement is both a great source of energy and tends to point you in the right direction.

So, whenever you feel stuck or unsure what to do, ditch the spreadsheets, ignore what sounds cool or seems most promising in terms of monetary outcomes. Just follow your curiosity.

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