My 12 Favourite Problems (2021)

"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 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 a hit, and people will say, ‘How did he do it? He must be a genius!"

- Richard Feynman

I’m currently in the first week of the online course Write of Passage. It’s nice to see some familiar faces - either I already follow their work online, or I know them from communities such as Ness Labs.

One of the first assignments was to pick my 12 favourite problems.

Here are my 12 problems:

1. How do you increase your impact as a doctor?
2. What would medical school look like if it were easy?
3. How does one succeed in medical school and still do things they love?
4. How can we improve leadership and communication in healthcare?
5. How can we live happier, more productive lives?
6. How can you retain more of what you learn in less time and make learning something fun?
7. What are the habits that bring success? What are the bad habits to avoid? And how do we build them?
8. How can you improve health and wellbeing through writing?
9. How can we build workflows and systems for sustainable and consistent content creation?
10. How do we go from consumption to creation?
11. How can you design your environments to encourage good habits?
12. How do you sustain focus and stop getting distracted?

Thinking about my 12 problems made me think about how young and inexperienced I am. I’m not entirely satisfied with the quality of my issues. However, I trust that I can reiterate and upgrade the questions that live in my head rent-free.

“Quality questions create a quality life. Successful people ask better questions, and as a result, they get better answers.”

- Tony Robbins