Three Cool Questions . . .
From an amazing talk given by Richard Hamming in 1986. I came across this a few months ago, but only sat down to read it today. VERY cool.
The three questions:
1. What are you working on?
2. What’s the most important open problem in your area?
3. Why aren’t they the same? (Ouch!)
Makes you think . . .
Talking of thinking, someone (sorry, can't remember who) recently turned me onto a blog by Reg Braithwaite that I would thoroughly recommend to anyone. It was his blog that indirectly reminded me of this talk - follow the link to the slides by a presentation from Todd Proebsting.
I think the same question is good for companies to ask themselves. All too often we do what it takes to stay in business, but how often do we take that extra step, consistently trying to solve the hardest open problems in our business area (in the case of web design I believe they are perfecting the specification process and creating an agile generator that allows you to change code as quickly as your clients change your mind - which is why those are the problems I'm working on at SystemsForge.
Paul Graham said that when he was back at Viaweb, he would "always run uphill". He meant that when he could solve either a regular problem or a hard problem he'd always solve the harder problem as if he found it hard, his competitors would find it almost impossible. Seems to me like quite a plan!!!