Collapse Hide
Evolve it
What new idea does this inspire?

Ideas Inspired by This (0)

More Questions in this Theme

 

There seem to be special talents useful in many important areas; what are the more unusual kinds of "genius"?

 

problem finders are the trail guides to important achievements

Some people are able to choose great projects. Richard Hamming talked about this in a famous paper "You and Your Research", quoted below.

I find this skill in high-demand in my engineering career. In all the positions I've had from engineer to manager to entrepreneur, the truly valuable moments come when someone discovers a great problem to work on.

It's a bit odd that we don't formalize the search for meaningful work as a skill and teach it as a very important piece of every career. Perhaps current genernations are more in need of this skill, particularly the entrepreneurial types that have the problem of choosing their own goals... maybe we'll see a course like this soon. Perhaps something like "Choosing Meaningful Work".

Attachments

  1. http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/dahlin/bookshelf/hamming.html
    In all the 30 years I spent at Bell Telephone Laboratories (before it was broken up) no one to my knowledge worked on time travel, teleportation, or anti-gravity. Why? Because they had no attack on the problem. Thus an important aspect of any problem is that you have a good attack, a good starting place, some reasonable idea of how to begin.
| posted by seemore | to human achievement