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My 12 Favorite Problems - by Ted Gioia - The Honest Broker

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There are exceptions. Physicist Richard Feynman, for example, liked to keep a list of his dozen favorite problems. These were big open-ended questions that could guide his life’s work. “Every time you hear a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, ‘How did he do it? He must be a genius!.’” Feynman realized that genius is not having all the answers. Everything starts with asking the right questions. I’ve benefited in my own life by asking the same questions over and over—for a period of decades. Maybe that sounds like futility to you, but it’s energizing for me. So I will share a dozen of my favorite problems, and they cover a wide range. I don’t claim to have final answers on any of these. But I think about them every day. And—this is the key—I have better answers to each of them now than I did 20 or 30 years ago. The progress I’ve made on my favorite problems has en

Most people look for solutions. But few seek out problems. There are exceptions. Physicist Richard Feynman, for example, liked to keep a list of his dozen favorite problems. These were big open-ended questions that could guide his life’s work. “Every time you hear a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, ‘How did he do it? He must be a genius!.’” Feynman realized that genius is not having all the answers. Everything starts with asking the right questions. I’ve…

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