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Sometime ago, I made a MVP for a video game that captured the attention of my peers. They liked playing it, I liked coding it, and I felt very much that it cont
by hitekker 6y ago
Sometime ago, I made a MVP for a video game that captured the attention of my peers. They liked playing it, I liked coding it, and I felt very much that it contained a story that deserved to be heard.
But I let grandiosity distract me. “This is just a video game, isn’t it? I mean, it's really cool but shouldn’t I be spending my spare time on something, I don’t know, bigger?”
So I decided to stop and apply myself onto bigger & better (& vaguer) problems whatever they may be. A year passes and, surprise, I found no problem worth my time, and nothing that was fascinating to me as the fruit of that silly little side-project.
The OP’s letter clarifies the lesson I learned: “No problem is too small or too trivial if we can really do something about it”. The video game may have been small, but not only did I care for it, I could also solve it. And If I want to get better at problem-solving. I have to actually solve problems. To paraphrase Feymann, that means figuring out the problems I _can_ solve, not just care to solve, first and then building up the meta-skill from there.
A simple lesson that took me a long, long time to learn.
- eris_agx 6y agoI appreciate the example. Often times I find myself in this thought pattern as well: is this problem beneath me?