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.
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:
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:
There is also a concept of ikigai that has four elements:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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.