Work On Unimportant Problems

If you hold yourself to an impossibly high standard when you’re deciding what to work on, blogger Yossi Kreinin suggests removing “importance” from your limiting factors, noting how many “important” things are born from “unimportant” beginnings.

Working on unimportant problems can create important side-effects. A whole lot of mission-critical, world-changing and even life-saving tech is a by-product of “unimportant” things — time-wasting infotainment products, or personal pet projects started without a grand noble cause.

For instance, GPU hardware was developed to run first-person shooters with increasingly fancier graphics. Today, it powers some of the largest high-performance computing clusters where “important” science is done.

Kreinin’s post is particularly tech-focused, but the idea easily transfers to a lot of work, and it’s worth keeping in mind: If you’re passionate about what you’re doing, you may have a considerably greater impact in your work when you focus on “unimportant” things.

Work on unimportant problems [Proper Fixation]