Oscar Hong

My 12 Favourite Problems

This week I started taking Write of Passage, a cohort-based course for online writing. I’m grateful to have been awarded a grant for the course and intend to make the most of this opportunity.

As a warm-up exercise, we were asked to write out our “12 Favourite Problems”. The idea comes from Richard Feynman, the Nobel laureate atomic physicist and renowned teacher:

You have to keep a dozen of your favourite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read 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 hit, and people will say, "How did he do it? He must be a genius!"

After giving it some thought, I drafted the following 12 Favourite Problems:

Individual

  1. What matters to me and why?
  2. How do I become a more perfect instrument for making the impact that I seek in myself, my communities, and the world?
  3. What would it look like if my work tapped into both my curiosity for history and my excitement for a future world?
  4. How can I “live the old way” (e.g. family, ties to a place, be in nature) while earning money the new way (e.g. infinite leverage, being n of 1, global reach)?

Company-building

  1. How can we get this generation’s most ambitious and capable people excited about the challenges and opportunities ahead for semiconductors?
  2. What can businesses in the East & the West learn from each other?
  3. What role, if any, does pedigree play in talent identification and development?
  4. What preconditions and ongoing reinforcements sustain a culture of excellence?

Technology & society

  1. How do we create and adopt technology in harmony with our nature?
  2. How do we revitalise and repackage old stories in ways that will resonate in our time?
  3. What lessons can we draw from individuals who were undisputedly world-class, yet never made it to the pinnacle of their chosen fields?
  4. If we accept that most humans are mimetic and driven by status, how can we best exploit this “bug” to advance our most urgent and noble goals?

My hope is that these problems will the lens that focuses and directs my otherwise insatiable, yet scattered curiosity. I don’t yet have clear or complete solutions to any of them, which is I suppose what makes them interesting and worth further exploration. This list should be evergreen and reflect future changes in my interests, so I’ll probably look to update the list once a year or so.

What are your favourite problems right now?