The Obsessive Focus of Most Successful People

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Most successful people are highly different to each other. They were willing to go through hell or high water to kind of get any kind of clarification and that thing. And I'm not entirely sure that that kind of obsessive analysis ability can withstand maybe a lot of fallow time times when you're not actually making much progress without there being something a little bit more intrinsic, perhaps incalculable that is kind of pushing you.

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How are curiosity and innovation connected? What's the most important problem in your field? And are you working on it? Why or why not? Is curiosity the best heuristic — either for an individual or for society at large — for finding valuable problems to work on? What mental models do people tend to use by default? How much is an academic degree worth these days? What are some alternatives to degrees that could count as valid credentials, i.e., as unfakeable (or very-hard-to-fake) signals of someone's level of skill in an area? Can people learn to fake any kind of signal, or are there some that are inherently unfakeable?

Rohit Krishnan is an essayist at Strange Loop Canon, where he writes about business, tech, and economics. He's been an entrepreneur and an investor and is very excited to see when crazy ideas meet the real world. Follow him on Twitter at @krishnanrohit.

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