Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Spend three months on one topic
Wide but Shallow
Early in his career, one investor realized he was a couple of inches deep and a mile wide. He wanted to know about physics, biology, and plenty more, but when he was tested he found he lacked a first-principles understanding of those topics. He could pass as knowledgeable, but that wasn't the level he wanted.
Three-Month Stretches
So he set aside three-month stretches to go very deep on one subject. The habit clicked because he enjoyed it, and he started connecting one field to the next. He also had a place in his mind to store the information, so it had a longer shelf life than when knowledge was just in and out.
A Learning Flywheel
Seeing it work made him hone the habit, which created a flywheel. The same patience shapes a long-only, concentrated portfolio, where a team gets to know each company really well on a journey expected to last decades. Subjects stop being subjects and turn into embodied learnings that become part of you.
Why does deep study stick better than skimming?
Psychologists Fergus Craik and Robert Lockhart proposed in 1972 that memory depends on how deeply information is processed. Thinking about meaning, such as how an idea connects to others, leaves a stronger trace than attending to surface features like wording. In a 1975 experiment by Craik and Endel Tulving, people who judged the meaning of words remembered far more of them than people who judged only how the words looked.
How does prior knowledge speed up new learning?
William Chase and Herbert Simon found in 1973 that chess masters could recall real game positions from a brief glance far better than beginners could. When the pieces were placed randomly, the masters' advantage mostly vanished. The difference came from stored patterns, which let experts group many pieces into a single chunk.
Where does first-principles thinking come from?
Aristotle used the term in his Metaphysics for the first basis from which a thing is known. Physics applies the idea when it derives results from basic laws instead of from analogy to earlier cases. Euclid's Elements, which built all of geometry from a small set of postulates and common notions, is the classic example.
More from We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network
