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Why do you feel the need to work on a "Big Problem"? Do you feel the need to leave a legacy, or do you really want to make things better by working on paridgm
by dragonsky67 8y ago
Why do you feel the need to work on a "Big Problem"? Do you feel the need to leave a legacy, or do you really want to make things better by working on paridgm changing enabling technology?
I think there is a problem with trying to target your attention on world changing technology, in that it is very rare for the world to be changed in a big way by direct effort towards change. I think this is related to both the difficulty in identifying what will really provide benefit and also the difficulty in actually achieving anything beyond incremental change to mature technology. Ideas that really make a difference tend to come out of left field and are almost completely unexpected.
If you are looking for something to do that you will look back from your death bed and say "I did that", then you need to select something that you can actually achieve. This will not be the thing that everybody else is working on, because unless you are truely remarkable your effort will be lost in the noise of what everybody else is doing. You need to find something that your both enjoy, and after honest evaluation you have the ability to excel in and take to the next level.
If you were living in the early 1900's I would suggest working on the field effect produced when electricity is passed through centain types of silicon. No one will know your name, but transistors certainly changed the world. How in 2019 do you identify what will have a similar impact? Simply put, you can't. All you can do is pick something interesting and work at it. If you try to solve the big problem you will almost certainly get drowned in the problem, you need to work on something small that can be leveraged to make the big thing.
Sorry I ramble.
History is full of people who made big changes to the world. Those who made a positive contribution seem to mostly have emerged from obsecurity after spending years labouring at improving something small and succeeding in a remarkable way.
- selestify 8y ago> History is full of people who made big changes to the world. Those who made a positive contribution seem to mostly have emerged from obsecurity after spending years labouring at improving something small and succeeding in a remarkable way. Very interesting. Can you give a few specific examples of this for me to look into? How have you come to the conclusion that this is a trend?
- probe 8y agoThere’s a good book called Mastery (Robert Greene) on this topic
- diminoten 8y ago28 words written, with the expectation of many many orders of magnitude more in response. This is a social zip bomb, and it's not very nice. Don't spend other people's time like this, do some research yourself if this genuinely interests you.
- dogcomplex 8y agoWe got you covered. Or rather - other media has you covered. Just gotta link requests like these to some book/series/etc they might (but probably won't) read/watch ;)
- diminoten 8y agoYeah, and thanks, but it's sometimes hard to see comments like, "Hey cool, could you just give me a brief 10k word essay on what you're talking about?" and not get a little frustrated.
- selestify 8y agoWell it's not a thing with a particularly obvious term to search for -- "small thing worked on over long periods that brings great change" doesn't really provide good results on Google despite it being a rather specific idea. So I'm grateful for any pointers to resources I can look into further for this kind of thing. The other person's reply with an explicit book name doesn't seem to have taken up all that many words, and presumably they know what they're talking about and them dropping a book name like that would save me a lot of time compared to me searching around the internet based on a very vague phrase. Now granted, my Google-fu could stand to be a lot better.
- dogcomplex 8y agoJames Burke's "The Day the Universe Changed" series. A history of inventions, how one led to another, often in stupid tiny ways brought about by pure luck - or the right person working on the smallest thing at the right time. Fantastic series if you're into old british documentaries that you can put on in the background while tinkering btw.