My World’s Biggest Problems project is inspired by one of my favorite quotes:
“I started asking, “What are the important problems of your field?” And after a week or so, “What important problems are you working on?” And after some more time I came in one day and said, “If what you are doing is not important, and if you don’t think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?”
— Richard Hamming, You and Your Research (via Paul Graham)
I paraphrase this idea into two questions:
- “What are the world’s biggest problems?”
- “Which ones are you solving?
The answers to these two questions are in my World’s Biggest Problems project.
This idea is a work-in-progress. If you’d like to riff on it, hit me up @neilthanedar on Twitter.