So you want to advance human progress. And you’re wondering, what should you, personally, do? Say you have talent, ambition, and drive—how do you choose a project or career?
There are a few frameworks for making this decision. Recently, though, I’ve started to see pitfalls with some of them, and I have a new variation to suggest.
Passion, competence, need
In Good to Great, Jim Collins says that great companies choose something to focus on at the intersection of:
what they are deeply passionate about
what they can be the best in the world at
what drives their economic or resource engine
This maps naturally onto an individual life/career, if we understand “drives your economic engine” to mean something there is a market need for, that you can make a living at.
You can understand this model by seeing the failure modes if you have only two out of three:
If you can’t be best in the world at it, then you’re just an amateur
If you can’t make a living at it, then it’s just a hobby
If you’re not passionate about it, then why bother?
There is also a concept of ikigai that has four elements:
what you love
what you are good at
what the world needs
what you can be paid for
This is pretty much the same thing, except breaking out the “economic engine” into two elements of “world needs it” and “you can get paid for it.” I prefer the simpler, three-element version.
I like this framework and have recommended it, but I now see a couple of ways you can mis-apply it:
One is to assume that you can’t be world-class at something, especially if you have no background, training, credentials, or experience. None of those are necessary. If you are talented, passionate, and disciplined, you can often become world-class quickly—in a matter of years.
Another is to assume that there’s no market for something, no way to make a living. If something is important, if the world needs it, then there is often a way to get paid to do it. You just have to find the revenue model. (If necessary, this might be a nonprofit model.)
Important, tractable, neglected
Another model I like comes from the effective altruist community: find things that are important, tractable, and neglected. Again, we can negate each one to see why all three are needed:
If a problem isn’t tractable, then you’ll never make progress on it
If it isn’t neglected, then you can’t contribute anything new
If it isn’t important, again, why bother?
This framework was developed for cause prioritization in charitable giving, but it can also be naturally applied to choice of project or career.
Again, though, I think this framework can be mis-applied:
It’s easy to think that a problem isn’t tractable just because it seems hard. But if it’s sufficiently important, it’s worth a lot of effort to crack the nut. And often things seem impossible right up until the moment before they’re solved.
Sometimes a problem is not literally neglected, but everyone working on it is going about it the wrong way: they have the wrong approach, or the efforts just aren’t high-quality. Sometimes a crowded field needs a new entrant with a different background or viewpoint, or just higher standards and better judgment.
The other problem with applying this framework to yourself is that it’s impersonal. Maybe this is good for portfolio management (which, again, was the original context for it), but in choosing a career you need to find a personal fit—a fit with your talents and passions. (Even EAs recommend this.)
Ignore legibility, embrace intuition
One other way you can go wrong in applying any of these frameworks is if you have a sense that something is important, that you could be great at it, etc.—but you can’t fully articulate why, and can’t explain it in a convincing way to most other people. “On paper” it seems like a bad opportunity, yet you can’t shake the feeling that there’s gold in those hills.
The greatest opportunities often have this quality—in part because if they looked good on paper, someone would already have seized them. Don’t filter for legibility, or you will miss these chances.
My framework
If we discard the problematic elements from the frameworks above, I think we’re left with something like the following.
Pick something that:
you are obsessed with—an idea that you can’t stop thinking about, one that won’t leave you alone; even when you go work on other things for a while, you keep coming back to it
you believe is important—even if (or especially if!) you can’t fully explain it to the satisfaction of others
you don’t see other people approaching in the way that you would do it—even if the opportunity is not literally neglected
Ideally, you are downright confused why no one is already doing what you want to do, because it seems so obvious to you—and (this is important) if that feeling persists or even grows the more you learn about the area.
This was how I ended up writing The Roots of Progress. I was obsessed with understanding progress, it seemed obviously one of the most important things in the world, and when I went to find a book on the topic, I couldn’t find anything written the way I wanted to read it, even though there is of course a vast literature on the topic. I ignored the fact that I have no credentials to do this kind of work, and that I had no plans to make a living from it. It has worked out pretty well.
This is also how I chose my last tech startup, Fieldbook, in 2013. I was obsessed with the idea of building a hybrid spreadsheet-database as a modern SaaS app, it seemed obviously valuable for many use cases, and nothing like it existed, even though there were some competitors that had been around for a while. Although Fieldbook failed as a startup, it was the right idea at the right time (as Airtable and Notion have proved).
So, trust your intuition and follow your obsession.
Thanks for the summary of various models of how to figure out what to work on. While reading it, I couldn’t help but focus on my frustration about the “getting paid for it” part. Personally, I want to create a new programming language. I think we are still in the dark age of computer programming and that programming languages suck. I can’t make a perfect language, but I can take a solid step in the right direction. The world could sure use a better programming language if you ask me. I’m passionate about this project. I’m a skilled software developer with a longer career than all the young guns I see. I think I’ve proved with my work so far that I am a top-tier language designer capable of writing a compiler and standard library. But...… this is almost the definition of something you can’t and won’t be paid for. At least not until you’ve already published a successful language. That fact greatly contributes to why we can’t have better programming languages. No one can afford to let them incubate as long as needed. Because of limited resources, everyone has to push to release it as fast as possible. Unlike other software, languages have very strict backward compatibility requirements, so improving them is a challenge and inevitably leads to real issues as the language grows over time. However, they can never fix previous mistakes or address design changes needed to support new features.
Yeah, for someone with good skills, “getting paid” is the most difficult part. The fact that it does not exist yet probably suggests that it’s not so easy to figure out how to get paid for that—otherwise someone else probably would be already doing it.
(That is, “getting paid” is difficult if you condition on the work being meaningful. If you have skills, you can always get paid for designing one more way how to give people more ads they don’t need, or something similarly meaningless.)
Sometimes, Patreon or Kickstarter works, but then you need to be good at marketing. You would probably also need a blog or youtube channel where you would talk about your previous work and your new ideas.
This seems like an example of something you can in fact get paid for if you are as good as you claim. In the past 15 years Flutter/Dart, Rust, Kotlin were created and if you can build a language that is as good as that you will be able to get income via consulting, working at companies, and donations. Most start ups/new projects will not get you paid immediately but you need to have a plan for how you will get paid (and the tolerance to work long enough to see that outcome).
Nice post. It prompts two questions, which you may or may not be the right person to answer:
How do you find good obsessions? Is it “just” a matter of being curious and widely-read? What is the combination of life practice and psychological orientation that leads a person to become obsessed with one or more ideas in the way that you became obsessed with progress studies and with Fieldbook?
On your path to world-class status, how do you avoid the “middle-competence trap” (analogy to the middle-income trap)? How do you handle having something you love that you’ve gotten damn good at, better than most people will ever get, but can’t seem to break through to the level of the achievers who really make their mark on the field? Maybe this is more of an issue for me than for others—maybe for example it is “just” a matter of being willing to burrow deep into something to the exclusion of your other interests in life, and I’m too much of a generalist to do that—but it’s been a problem for me twice now, and I really wonder if it might be a common failure mode of this kind of questing process.
1. Maybe for everyone it would be different. It might be hard to have a standard formula to find obsessions. Sometimes it may come naturally through life events/observations/experiences. If no such experience exists yet, or one seems to be interested in multiple things, I have received an advice to try different things, and see what you would like (I agree with it). Now that I think about it, it would also be fun to survey people and ask them how they got their passion/do what they do (and to derive some standard formula/common elements if possible)!
2. I think maybe we can approach with ” the best of one’s ability”, and when we reach that, the rest may depend a lot on luck and other things too. Maybe through time, we could get better eventually, or maybe some observations/insights accidentally happened, and we found a breakthrough point, with the right accumulation of previous experience/knowledge.
There are things that are economic engines of things that world doesn’t quite need (getting people addicted, rent seeking, threats of violence).