Big Problems | ThoughtfulAtlas

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2022-10-01 02:00:18

“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 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!”

Many people have written about this before, but it’s something I had been mulling over long before I ever came across this quote (not in a hipster ‘before it was cool’ way, mind).

It’s important to have Questions, with a capital Q. These are the questions that you come back to time and time again - the rabbit holes you go down, the links you click on (and actually read), not just the things the algorithm suggests but the things you unintentionally seek out.

Sometimes these questions appear very specific. Leonardo da Vinci had plenty of these. “Which nerve causes the eye to move so that the motion of one eye moves the other?” “Describe the tongue of the woodpecker.” “Ask Giannino the Bombardier about how the tower of Ferrara is walled.”