Twelve Favorite Problems Thread

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman carried around 12 favorite problems at all times.

When he’d find a new idea, he’d try it against all of these problems to see if it would help.

Most of the time things wouldn’t match up, but occasionally he’d get a useful hit!

Carrying around 12 favorite problems is a great framework for organizing your information intake.

When you encounter content that resonates with you, hang it on one of these problems like it’s a hook!

As part of the Building a Second Brain course that I’m currently working through, Tiago Forte (@fortelabs) asked us to compile our own list of 12 favorite problems.

After brainstorming and combing through my notes and previous writing/presentations, I compiled this list:

Is there a perfect storm of techniques that will enable high-functioning teams to predictably and reliably build great software? #12favoriteproblems

What can we learn about how the real world evolves that will help us better evolve software? #12favoriteproblems

What does the future of society really look like? What should it look like? #12favoriteproblems

Can we draw parallels between all of the physical and social scientific disciplines and create a theory of everything? #12favoriteproblems

How do preserve the richness of American southern culture while eliminating hatred and poverty? #12favoriteproblems

How do we fix our political system? What would a political system designed today to deal with the challenges of now look like? #12favoriteproblems

How do we build programming languages and platforms that effectively model distributed systems of systems? #12favoriteproblems

What can we learn from innovation and enablers of innovation in other industries that will help us build and deliver better software? #12favoriteproblems

How do we solve the problem of software architecture language? Terms like application, service, component, and module are ill-defined and used to represent different things by different people, and this causes communication and collaboration challenges. #12favoriteproblems

As software and the Internet evolve into their next generation (Web 3, Smart Contracts, Decentralization, the Metaverse, etc.), what can we learn from the mistakes of the previous generations (and not repeat them!) #12favoriteproblems

How can we change education to prepare humans to be full-stack freelancers rather than prisoners of corporate work?#12favoriteproblems

How do we change the cultural perception, mechanisms, and practices of remote work and geographic distribution such that we broadly agree that it can be superior to colocation in offices? #12favoriteproblems

If you have any ideas, suggestions, content, or questions about any of these ideas, I’d love to hear from you!

If you’d like to hear more from me as I work through these problems, give me a follow here, on Medium (https://medium.com/@mstine), or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattstine).