Whatrichard said

It usually starts with something small.

A word I half-remember from a case study. A throwaway line in a documentary. A question a student asks that has nothing to do with the syllabus. Two hours later I am reading about the etymology of a word, or the collapse of a shipping route in the 1600s, or how a specific enzyme works, and I could not, if you asked me under oath, explain why I needed to know any of it. I did not need to know it. I just could not stop until I did.

That is the honest version of my mind. Not the curated one from the lecture hall or the TEDx stage. The real one: obsessive, incontrollable, and permanently hungry for one more layer of the thing it just found. And for a long time I treated it as something to apologize for.

I am done apologizing for it. But I do think it is worth understanding.

What it actually looks like

It is not focus, exactly. Focus implies I chose the target. This is closer to a pull. Something catches, and a door opens, and behind that door is another door, and I go through it not because I decided to but because not going through it feels almost physically uncomfortable. It has nothing to do with importance. I have spent an evening on the history of a spice trade route with the same intensity I have spent on restructuring a supply chain. The subject does not matter. The pull is the same.

And here is the part that used to bother me: it is rarely useful. Nobody is paying me to know how a 400-year-old trade dispute was resolved. It does not become a slide in my crisis management course. Most of the time it just sits there, a small closed loop of satisfied curiosity that produces nothing anyone else will ever see.

So why do it? Why let a fully grown adult with a business to run, a course to teach, and a book to finish disappear down a hole about something that objectively does not matter?

The mind that reads variables cannot switch itself off

I have spent this entire year, on this blog, arguing that there is no fixed formula — that two plus two is never reliably four, that the real skill in business and in life is learning to read the variables in front of you instead of applying a model that worked somewhere else. I did not build that idea in a seminar. I built it by spending two decades doing exactly what I am describing here: refusing to stop at the first answer. Turning a problem over. Chasing the variable that everyone else decided was not worth chasing.

A crisis management brain, if it is any good, cannot afford to stay in its lane. The scenario that breaks a business is almost never the one in the textbook. It is the one nobody thought to ask about — the edge case, the improbable chain of events, the detail that seemed irrelevant right up until it was the only thing that mattered. Twenty years of building, breaking, and rebuilding Jolufoods taught me that the question you did not think to ask is usually the expensive one. So I ask. Constantly. About everything. Including things that have absolutely no bearing on the business.

I do not think that is a coincidence. I think the same wiring that makes me a decent crisis management professor is the wiring that makes me lose an evening to a spice route. It does not know how to tell the difference between a variable that matters to my P&L and a variable that matters to nothing at all. It just knows there is a variable, and it has to be read.

Look at what it has actually produced

If you look at what I have written on this site in the last few months alone, it should look scattered. Immigration policy. Thomas Paine. Capitalism versus democracy. The price of FOMO. What AI is doing to a classroom. Resting variables. None of it belongs to the same discipline. A tidier mind would have picked a lane and stayed in it.

But it is not scattered. It is the same mind, in the same mode, applied to whatever crossed its path that week. The rabbit hole is not a distraction from the work. Half the time it is where the work actually comes from. I did not sit down one day and decide to have opinions about Thomas Paine. I fell into him the way I fall into everything — sideways, out of pure curiosity, for the heck of it — and three weeks later there was a reason it mattered.

So the honest accounting is this: most rabbit holes produce nothing visible. A few, unpredictably, produce almost everything I am actually known for.

Why I am not trying to stop

Here is the question underneath the question: should I stop? And my honest answer is no — not because the curiosity is always productive, but because it is not costing me anything to let it run. It does not eat into my classes. It does not delay the book. It does not take anything away from the business or from my family. It happens in the margins, in the hour I would otherwise spend scrolling something designed to make me feel worse, not better.

I wrote a few weeks ago about finding your resting variables — the idea that rest is not a formula, it is specific to you, and the job is figuring out what actually refills you instead of copying someone else’s version of recovery. I think this is the other half of that same lesson. Some people rest by switching their brain off. I rest, in part, by letting mine run wherever it wants to run, with no agenda and no deadline attached. It is not procrastination. It is not avoidance. It is the mind doing, off the clock, exactly what it does on the clock — except here nobody is grading it, so it gets to enjoy itself.

If it ever started disturbing my day — missed classes, missed deadlines, relationships paying the price — that would be a different piece entirely, and a harder one to write. That is not where I am. Where I am is a grown man who will happily lose an hour to something with zero return on investment, and who has decided that is allowed.

The only justification I need

I have said on this blog that productiveness and usefulness are close to the only obligation I actually believe in. I still believe that. But I no longer think usefulness has to be immediate, or visible, or attached to a single afternoon to count. A mind that is constantly, voluntarily exercising itself — on anything, for no reason, just because the door was open — is not an idle mind. It is a mind staying sharp for the moment it actually needs to be.

So no, I am not going to try to fix this about myself. I am going to keep following the thread, wherever it goes, for no better reason than that it is there. Some of it will turn into a lecture. Some of it will turn into a chapter. Most of it will turn into nothing at all, and that is fine too.

That is not a flaw in the formula.

That is just how I read the variables.

Ricardo Jovani teaches Crisis Management, Operations & Supply Chain, and Family Business Management at Geneva Business School Madrid. He is the founder of Jolufoods S.L., author of The TriCore Method and the forthcoming 2+2 Is Never 4, and a TEDx speaker.