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Welcome to the "The Catalyst," Kevin Noble's weekly newsletter about becoming a more effective leader.
I remember numbers more easily than, say, people's names or even some of my own life experiences. A high school friend went to college with me, and he'd tell me stories about things I did that I just didn't recall.
Phone numbers, addresses, stats from a given work initiative; they just get lodged in my brain pretty readily. It's how I'm wired.
It's this love of numbers that causes me to get into flow in spreadsheets and modeling. Hours can fly by and I don't even realize it.
I love that I'm also living in the age of AI with this passion of mine. I can take my existing expertise and deep experience and get a boost from AI when working in Excel / Google Sheets.
I use ChatGPT to help me brainstorm, troubleshoot advanced formulas, or to seek quality of life tweaks. For example, I've learned about little automations, like ARRAYFORMULA.
This little guy helps when you're using a database and have common formulas you want to apply down the rows. For example, if you have a date, but you want to convert that day to a common form in another column.
You can use an IF statement inside an ARRAYFORMULA, and now every time you enter a date on a new row, your modified date in the other column will automatically populate. You can even hide this column in the background and just know it's working.
(Cells in column B are empty until I enter a date in column C, at which point it generates the month. A similar formula is in A for the year.)
ARRAYFORMULA can be used anywhere you have a consistent formula you want to apply vertically.
Knowing this saves me multiple seconds, multiple times per day, from now until forever. One less thing to remember. One less thing to break. The database is clean. Ahhhh.... 😌
Just about every business runs something on Excel or Google Sheets. Do you have any favorite time savers or techniques? Or how about the inverse; something that annoys you or takes up time? Tell me about either one at heykev@kevinnoble.xyz.
Kevin 🧮
A Quote
“
Colleagues don't just affect your work, though; they also affect you. So work with people you want to become like, because you will.
— Paul Graham in "How to do Great Work"
Three Things
1 - 🧃 LunchClub.ai - LunchClub is a free networking platform I’ve used several times. You describe yourself, what you’re interested in, and they’ll facilitate connections according to interests and your availability. You use their platform for the calls. I’ve met some really interesting people!
2 - 🐬 Flipper Zero - Here’s a “multi-tool for geeks.” It has NFC, Bluetooth, RFID, and even hardware debugging. I don’t live in this world, but it seems really cool. Some things you can do with it; interact with your garage door opener and other household devices, emulate your RFID access cards (for backups), and test networks. It’s open source, so people build applications on top of the hardware. Here’s Adam Savage (of MythBusters fame) exploring the tool (video).
3 - 🎸 If System of a Down Were from India - Here’s a potential little rabbit hole for you to dive into; this guy, Andre Antunes, creates heavy metal soundtracks to play alongside other content. The music is good! I love people finding their creative pursuits like this.
(Enjoy this 5️⃣ minute read)
Deep Dive into Curiosity
Have you ever been super curious about something, only to share it with someone else and have them be like…“meh”?
WTF? How can they not be curious about that?!
It happens a lot in hiring. I’ve been assessing candidates on curiosity in hiring for more than a decade.
I’ve assessed people in the interview process as having curiosity, it’s not there like I thought. They’ll be curious about some things, but not others.
Those experiences made me curious about curiosity. 🤨
As with many things, curiosity is not black and white. You don’t have curiosity or not.
There’s a spectrum of curiosity. And there is more than one kind of curiosity.
Curious about curiosity?
There are a lot of formal models or frameworks of curiosity in academic research, but there’s no canonical agreed-upon single framework.
That’s cool, though - we’re not academics, so we don’t need to search for a single “right” model. We can take all of them together to form a holistic understanding of curiosity. We can take this holistic understanding and be more aware and sensitive to the world around us.
Here’s the big list of curiosity types:
Epistemic - A quest for knowledge and understanding.
Perceptual - Immediate intrigue caused by strange things in the environment.
Diversive - The attraction to everything novel.
Specific - Solving a specific problem or knowledge gap.
Social - Interested in people’s actions, behaviors, and social interactions.
Moral - Exploring ethical questions, values, and social justice.
Empathic - Understanding others’ emotions, feelings, and perspectives.
Existential - Curiosity about life’s ultimate questions: Why are we here? What is the meaning of existence?
Here’s a quick table to get a little bit more detail (be sure to zoom in 😁)
Were any of those new to you? How did you assess yourself on each one?
I think I’m relatively high on epistemic, specific, and empathic curiosity. I’m pretty low on moral on existential.
Each one of us will have a different curiosity signature. I’ve met people with really high epistemic and perceptual curiosity, but almost zero empathic.
Then there are people with high empathic and moral, but zero epistemic.
I’m curious to know your curiosity signature 😁
What curiosity do you need in your team?
If you’re hiring, instead of just looking for “curiosity,” understand what kinds of curiosity help people to be successful in that role, and look for that.
You may want someone with high social curiosity to diagnose interpersonal relationships. Or high emphatic curiosity to understand other people and develop deeper connections.
If you’re running a physical environment, you may want someone with high perceptual curiosity so they’ll notice and investigate things that look off.
Whatever it is, it will help your hiring success if you better understand what curiosity you’re looking for and then test for it.
Curiosity is also situation-dependent
What makes understanding curiosity even harder is the fact that not only are there many types of curiosity, with different levels of intensity, but curiosity is dependent on the situation!
If I’m driving a vehicle my perceptual curiosity may be higher than normal because I’m alert to my environment.
If I’m entering a new people environment, my social curiosity will be higher than normal, and my epistemic curiosity will take a back seat for a bit.
If you take someone out to dinner and they don’t exhibit one particular dimension of curiosity, don’t write off that dimension forever. That just might not be the environment where it shines for them.
"Oh you thought this was a chill dinner? It's actually a curiosity test! Bwahahahaha!"
Cultivating Curiosity
Curiosity levels are not fixed and genetic. Curiosity is a skill that can be cultivated. It just takes awareness and intention.
As your curiosity pulls you in different directions, you learn and experience new things. This new understanding can itself drive you to new things.
“Want to prime your mind for curiosity? Expose yourself to something new once in a while. The more knowledge you get, the more questions it sparks. Those questions pull in more knowledge, which sparks more questions, and on and on and on.”
For example, I was recently listening to a podcast talking about something called sovereign child parenting, that I’d never heard of. I could tell I resisted some of the message based on their description (kids decide whether they go to school, brush their teeth, or learn to read).
Instead of turning off the podcast (which I was tempted to do!), I got curious. What is this? How does it work? What are the benefits?
I listened to the whole thing and learned a lot! It caused me to rethink a few things I do as a parent.
Cultivating curiosity is not just for topics such as sovereign child parenting, but for types of curiosity as well.
As a fun experiment, you should try to open up to a type of curiosity you’re typically low on.
If your diversive curiosity is low in regards to meals, get curious and branch out into something you don't normally try.
If your epistemic curiosity is low, pick up a book on a new topic just to check it out.
If your empathic curiosity it low, try to understand what someone is feeling and why.
You get the idea 😀
“When someone gets interested or bored, we tend to praise or blame the object that interests or bores them. But some people are just better than others at “making interest” in the world. It is a talent, or, rather, an art.”
Put on your curious glasses and see the world in a new light. What can you explore this week? Give yourself permission to try something new and go down a path you don’t typically go down.
Have fun! As always, I’m very curious what you’ll get up to! Tell me about your curiosity experiment by writing me at heykev@kevinnoble.xyz 💌
“Try investigating something today. Be curious. Stretch yourself. Take on a problem for which the answer is shrouded in mystery. Don’t just think about it – actually investigate it. Be the Lewis and Clark of broken coffeemakers, or the Jonas Salk of setting up a new website. Exploration brings excitement as well as anxiety. They are really two sides of the same coin. Don’t let the expedition leave without you. Venture into the unknown.”
