What You Do Is Who You Are
Choose your problems
Choose your problems
Photo by Gentrit Sylejmani on Unsplash
Long back Ankur Bohra sent me a video of Richard Hamming, a world renowned researcher, who won Turing award — Nobel prize of computing.
The crux of the talk was — “People who make impact, select important problems to work with”.
What he didn’t explain in the talk is how to find important problems?
Recently, I was again having a similar discussion with him and 2 questions are troubling me now.
If you get paid proportional to the value you create, is your compensation proportional to the impact you create?
Which one should you select if working at Netflix recommender team and chest cancer detection team at Qure.ai pay the same?
Looking at people in the AI industry for cues, I see that the smartest people are working on
Suggesting ads(Google/Facebook)
Trading stocks(2 sigma, renaissance)
Suggesting videos(Netflix)
Education(Stanford, Harvard)
To find ways to do more impactful work, I am going to spend considerable time this year on these questions. Meanwhile, I am reading “What You Do Is Who You Are” by Ben Horowitz.