Core Human Motivations: Thoughts Inspired by Kunal Shah

These images were inspired by Episode 141 of the Knowledge Project podcast (TKP), interviewing serial entrepreneur and incisive business thinker, Kunal Shah. The Knowledge Project is hosted by Shane Parrish and features interviews with renowned thinkers and doers who offer lessons “that never expire.”

Here are takeaways of the big ideas the podcast generated, both Kunal’s and our own.

: Trust does not form evenly across the world, but unevenly in dense clumps in the spaces between people. In business, there is no more precious resource than trust.

: The more something scales, the more cookie-cutter it becomes. Truly meaningful experiences, though wonderful, are extremely hard to scale. There is no good or bad extreme; it all depends on what your goals are.

: It can only be considered “insight” if you can act on it. Otherwise, it’s just an abstraction.

: Learning about entrepreneurship and learning about human nature go hand in hand. You can’t do the former without the latter.

: Entrepreneurs tend to be less worried than others about being embarrassed of failure, and more worried about having enough energy to move the necessary mountains. We should take note.

: People aren’t buying your product for the molecules, they’re buying it for the way it makes them feel. But it can easily take years to figure that out.

: Entrepreneurs love, love, love sharing business intel with their peers (at least, they do when it’s prudent to do so). It goes with the territory.

: No matter how you envision your business, you have to build it where the money is. Otherwise you will just get destroyed.

: Function is just the tiny part of what your business does. Emotion is always King.

: The more you grow, the more likely you are to leave others behind. Sad but true, perhaps, but this is the nature of things.

: If you can’t say it, you can’t see it.

: The margin you can charge for a product depends directly on how much extra social status it gives the user.

: Though technology makes everything cheaper (especially in the digital world), high status items- private schools, fancy houses, Rolex watches- are as expensive as ever, maybe even more so.