Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Curiosity beats intelligence and charisma
A World That Changes
Context keeps changing, and a business has to change with it. Mark Cuban's father used to say you don't live in the world you were born into. Even for someone in Gen Z, there were no iPhones the day they were born, and so much has changed since then that it will keep on changing.
Learning the Ripple Effects
Adapting takes being insanely curious about more than the changes themselves. The learning has to reach the n factorial of a change, meaning how it affects everything underneath it, around it, and through it.
Change is speeding up, and every change brings opportunity. The faster it goes, the less likely most people are to invest the time to keep up, or to be able to, so anyone who does gets a big edge.
How does one change ripple through everything?
The factorial of a number n, written n!, multiplies every whole number from n down to 1, and it counts the ways n items can be put in order. It grows faster than any exponential: 10! is 3,628,800, and 20! is about 2.4 quintillion. That explosive growth is why n factorial is a common shorthand for effects that branch and compound. Mathematicians have used the exclamation-mark notation since Christian Kramp introduced it in 1808.
How fast do new technologies spread?
A UBS analysis reported in early 2023 estimated that ChatGPT reached 100 million monthly users about two months after its November 2022 launch. The same report, citing data from Sensor Tower, said TikTok took about nine months to reach that mark and Instagram roughly two and a half years.
Why would curiosity show up in founders?
A 2006 meta-analysis by Hao Zhao and Scott Seibert in the Journal of Applied Psychology compared entrepreneurs with managers across the Big Five personality traits. Entrepreneurs scored higher on openness to experience and conscientiousness, and lower on neuroticism and agreeableness. Openness is the trait most associated with curiosity and a taste for new ideas.
More from 3 Takeaways
