If we let curiosity compound

I wrote a message to Noah on LinkedIn in July. I followed Mountain Memories on Instagram and really enjoyed following his business journey on LinkedIn too. On a whim, I sent him a message saying I appreciated his genuine and personal way of showing up professionally. We had never talked, but I didn't think much about it. I sent it, and that was that.

A few days later I saw a post on Instagram announcing a collaboration between Mountain Memories and Grab Collective, asking for help to set up the new Grab House in Hokkaido, Japan for the upcoming winter season.

I am now writing this from the Mountain Memories lodge in Rusutsu, having just come home after a day of renovations at the future Grab House.

That's the thing about curiosity, it compounds.

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Although I have followed Mountain Memories and Grab Collective for a while, I usually never see their content in my feed. Until this day. Maybe because I talked to Noah on LinkedIn just days earlier, or maybe I just actually saw it this time instead of scrolling past

because it was at the forefront of my mind. Maybe it was the algorithm, maybe it was my own attention. Either way, I wouldn't have noticed it if I hadn't reached out first and I wouldn't have reached out if I wasn't genuinely curious about what he was building.

Because it is all about curiosity. It's about reaching out to the people that inspire you, not to get something back, but because they're interesting. It's about learning things that don't immediately fit into your career or your field, just because they catch your attention. It's about asking more questions than you answer, and staying open to where the answers lead.

You don't have to know where something is going, to start. You don't need an intention or an outcome you can imagine. Every interaction we have, every room we choose to be in, every message we send, every new thing we learn, creates unpredictable connections that we cannot plan for, but which might lead to something somewhere if we are open to them. Your web of knowledge and touch points grows denser and more complex the more you contribute to it. And it's the web as a whole that creates the opportunities, not the individual threads.

From a spontaneous message sent with the sole intention of giving praise to someone whose work I admired from across the world, I ended up spending my autumn surrounded by people with an insane work ethic and a never ending creative output. We're in different stages of life in some ways, but somehow in the same phase too, building companies, solving things as we go, figuring it out. And I get to surround myself with absolute pros in content and community building while writing my thesis about the exact same thing.

This is curiosity compounding in real time.