In this episode of the Curious Cult, I am excited to chat with Michael Smollan about how living in Shanghai changed his life, how working in the family business has made him more hungry for curiosity and how making sure a business operates according to the purpose is crucial.

Mike is the Chief Growth & Innovation Officer of the Smollan Group, he heads up marketing, growth, and innovation in the firm after growing up in operations. With offices across 56 different countries in the world, one of the core focuses of the Smollan Group is to help improve lives and reduce their environmental impact.

Key take-aways from the episode

• Travelling and getting out of your comfort zone is trajectory changing

After spending six years (after what was going to be two years), Mike lived in Shanghai. Shattering the “normal” and what was taken for granted as a shared perspective in culture, there’s a tremendous amount to learn through experiencing something that contrasts what you know.

• In your mental library of the world, there are things that need to be there

Taking a deep dive into particular things - specialising in certain information - is important to find a niche and to develop interesting insights. But there are broad aspects of the world that are important to know about. As Mike puts it, it’s important to have a better-informed perspective on things (such as political opinions) to make sure you’re believing your own truth.

• Increase your alternatives - decrease your dependencies

Working in a family business, Mike has made sure to build his own experience so that he can offer the business his best through diverse insight. In any company or in any opportunity in life, if you’ve got the well-rounded experience you’ve got the best bet for success.

• If you’re green you grow, if you’re ripe you rot

Knowledge is nourishment for curiosity and if you’re feeding it with new insight and new perspective, you’re growing. 

• Fascinating, useless information has its space

Curiosity can be incredibly inefficient, but it’s vital for innovation. A need to feed obsessive curiosity is a drive forward to challenge the status quo and find better methods of doing something.

• Purpose-driven business is the only way to market your business as such

There’s no such thing as purpose-driven marketing. If you’re a purpose-driven business, the marketing will follow. Otherwise, the marketing is pushing an inauthentic narrative. A purpose-driven business is one of the easiest ways to maintain sincerity in the reason for building and operating.

For more information or to chat with Mike, find him on LinkedIn and check out the purpose story of the Smollan Group. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it far and wide and let’s start changing the world with curiosity.