What's your problem?

I've read that instead of asking children what they want to be when they grow up you should ask them what problem do they want to solve. Children should identify with the work rather than the identity of the job title. Doing so gives them the passion we yearn for.

We put far too much emphasis on that anyway job titles, anyway.

*Mission and job title aren't always aligned.*

For those of us with a liberal arts degree and a white-collar job, job titles aren't useful shorthand to even explain what we do.

They are even worse at explaining what we care about.

I usually tell people that I am a problem solver because that is the part of my job that I enjoy most. Working with people to make things better is a simple description for an interesting activity.

Finding Your Problem

People are generally looking for answers, but these days I find myself in search of better problems.

It's not driven by an attempt to solve every interesting problem. But I want to the time I spend on problems to be a worthwhile effort to make something better.

It's easy to fall into trivial. It's much harder to direct your efforts to something significant.

There is no objective measure of what is significant, you should, at least, know when something isn't (to you).

*Building good skills makes it possible for you to tackle important problems.*

Step 1: Get Better at the Things that Make You Better

For me, in the short-term, I think it will be finding a way to make people think better so that they can do more meaningful work.

These meta-challenges are interesting to me. When you do it right, you build a foundation that frees you to do more, better.