I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about what I want to be doing with my life recently. It feels like we are in a special moment in time where anything is possible — and when anything is possible, the opportunity cost of not working on important things is almost unbearable. The title of this piece comes from two related ideas presented by two different thinkers in two different contexts. Ultimately, both highlight the importance of deliberately working on things that matter.

The first comes from a well-known seminar given by Richard Hamming titled “You and your research”. It is a great piece and worth watching/reading if you are unfamiliar with it, but the two key takeaways for me are:

I have to get you to drop modesty and say to yourself, “Yes, I would like to do first-class work.” Our society frowns on people who set out to do really good work. You’re not supposed to; luck is supposed to descend on you and you do great things by chance. Well, that’s a kind of dumb thing to say. I say, why shouldn’t you set out to do something significant. You don’t have to tell other people, but shouldn’t you say to yourself, “Yes, I would like to do something significant.”

“What are the important problems of your field?” And after a week or so, “What important problems are you working on?” And after some more time I came in one day and said, “If what you are doing is not important, and if you don’t think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?”

Hamming dares you to do great work — not in the sense of doing a great job at whatever task is in front of you, but in the sense of putting yourself in a position to work on tasks that matter. The second quote I’ve lifted is an anecdote he gives about lunchtime discussions with various people across various departments within Bell Labs. I’m sure many people would have been unfazed by this line of questioning, but simply reading about it planted the seeds of an identity crisis in my mind. I can only imagine it would have been worse to be confronted directly with such questions at an institution like Bell Labs.

In isolation, the challenge Hamming presents is quite difficult. What are the important problems in your field? What even is “my field”? As a non-researcher, it can be tricky to know what your field is. Many of the people Hamming was dealing with were certainly polymaths with a wide range of interests and expertise, but at least their research was nominally in a fairly well-defined field. How does someone outside of such an environment begin to think about this question?

You might think answering this question is easy — Twitter (X), podcasts, VCs, and the media are full of public discourse about the big, important questions of the day. There appears to be an endless sea of possibilities and important problems to work on — but how many are actually important? From my point of view, technological progress is only good insofar as it expands the feasible set of meaningful human lives. When you look at the technological progress of the last 20 years, it’s not always clear how much of that technology has actually meaningfully enriched the lives of people and promoted human flourishing. Much of the public discourse is biased towards the pursuit of goals that are optimising for money or status.

This brings us to the next writer and an idea that layers on top of Hamming’s question. Here is a passage from Chesterton’s Orthodoxy that has stuck with me since I first read it:

… let us suppose a man wanted a particular kind of world; say, a blue world. He would have no cause to complain of the slightness or swiftness of his task; he might toil for a long time at the transformation; he could work away (in every sense) until all was blue. He could have heroic adventures; the putting of the last touches to a blue tiger. He could have fairy dreams; the dawn of a blue moon. But if he worked hard, that high-minded reformer would certainly (from his own point of view) leave the world better and bluer than he found it. If he altered a blade of grass to his favourite colour every day, he would get on slowly. But if he altered his favourite colour every day, he would not get on at all.

Chesterton asks us to consider what kind of world we want. Is our desire durable enough to organise our work and lives around it? He paints a picture of the value of persistence — of working towards a single goal every day. There are many interesting problems to work on, but if you jump around, always captivated by the next shiny thing whenever problems become difficult or unfashionable, you will never get on at all. Perhaps the more subtle point in Chesterton’s picture is that changing your mind about what world you want is not much different from not having a picture of the world you want at all.

And this brings us to the idea behind the title: you and your blue search. What is my blue? What is it that I personally care about? What problems are worth chipping away at, piece by piece, leaving the world more “blue” each day? I’ve spent the better part of three months thinking about this. Nearly every waking moment is spent digesting this question at some level — and it is a surprisingly elusive one.

At the macro level, it is fairly easy to articulate the things that are important, but when you start trying to narrow that down to concrete actions, it becomes surprisingly difficult. Hamming makes the point that the important problems must be ones that are tractable — problems on which you can actually make progress. That is a big part of what makes them important. It is easy to mistake this for a criterion of intellectual capacity or sufficient experience in a field. You (and specifically you — not in the abstract) must also be able to marshal and co-ordinate all the resources required to solve the problem.

I mentioned that I’ve spent many months consumed by these questions. Unfortunately, I have gone down many paths and have not found the right one yet — but what are months in comparison to a lifetime’s work? It can be disheartening and disorienting to be consumed by these questions for so long. It’s easy to feel lost and untethered. But there is comfort in knowing that an earnest and introspective search will lead to a place, where with full confidence in your direction, will let you go down the path like a thunderbolt.