3 ms·
You don't need to work on hard problems but in general, solving hard problems is usually more important than creating another TODO app or a bingo card website.
by Tomis02 7y ago
You don't need to work on hard problems but in general, solving hard problems is usually more important than creating another TODO app or a bingo card website. The latter is more likely to make you rich (for certain definitions of "rich"), and yet the former could, if successful, be fundamental for the progress of humanity; but, you know, it's hard.
- jfengel 7y agoIt depends on how you define "important". Fundamental shifts are great, and they advance humanity a lot all at once. But ordinary achievements that help a few people at a time, a little bit, take on a cumulative importance of their own. Even after the big "hard" problem gets solved, there's a gold rush of a huge amount of more ordinary work to pick the low-hanging fruit. Those aren't usually hard problems, but finding relatively obvious solutions for the first time. That wheel will be invented over and over for each sub-domain and specific set of requirements, and will gradually come to look like yet-another-TODO-app as everybody craves the next big leap. But until it comes, there remains a lot of room for making somebody's life just a little better by re-applying the last one for the 999th time.