The first time I did this was in May 2019, during the first cohort of Write of Passage. I’m retaking the course, as I type. I’ve updated my 12 favorite problems.
The problems over the past years have, as a majority, been the same. (previous post) This round, I have updated or replaced a few problems, and I added the first word that came to mind that is part characteristic of the problem.
Prompt:
Write a list of 12 Favorite Problems to serve as inspiration for your writing.
What are the areas of curiosity that you could ponder for months or years? These are hard problems and they don’t have simple answers. They are the questions that will captivate you and drive your reading and writing, both during and after the course.
my 12 favorite problems
How can trust and transparency be cultivated among the interplay of community, government, and businesses toward environmental justice (EJ)?
(trust)How can I self-regulate my reactions to those who are dishonest and hurtful to others?
(empathy)How can I help people understand the value of rolefulness rolefulness as I help them discover their ikigai or ikigai-kan through self-reflection/mental fitness, habits formation, applied improv, and movements and choices in life?
(awareness)How can workspaces shift toward cultures of belonging and fruitfulness, where "check-box DEI" type trainings do not mask insincere, performative behaviors?
(honesty)How can I continue to infuse my personal ethos throughout my work + leisure interactions, shared as my legacy PKM ?
(values)How can the value of workplace safety be better embedded, where behavior design and habit formation shapes human-centered/human performance EH&S practices?
(safety)What can emerge in a community of practice for food security, air quality/climate change, and philanthropy?
(innovate)How can people with disparate perspectives begin to engage in meaningful and fruitful conversation toward community, aligned objectives?
(peace)How can creating/having an improv habits mindset shape cultural shifts in workspaces?
(playfulness)What does it mean to be an environmentalist in the 21st century?
(perspective)Where grief is inevitable, how does its value enrich one’s life?
(mortality)How can people's creative expression (for me - sketch comedy, improv, personal essays, storytelling) be used as discourse mediums for race, bias, and colorism?
(creativity)
Share your own 12 (. . . or simply 2 or 3) favorites.
Other ORIGIN references
In posing and keeping favorite questions or problems, regularly attributed to Richard Feynman, others share include -
Gian-Carlo Rota, Ten Lessons I Wish I had Been Taught
“Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite 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 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 Hamming, You and Your Research
“Most great scientists know many important problems. They have something between 10 and 20 important problems for which they are looking for an attack. And when they see a new idea come up, one hears them say ``Well that bears on this problem.'' They drop all the other things and get after it. Now I can tell you a horror story that was told to me but I can't vouch for the truth of it. I was sitting in an airport talking to a friend of mine from Los Alamos about how it was lucky that the fission experiment occurred over in Europe when it did because that got us working on the atomic bomb here in the US. He said ``No; at Berkeley we had gathered a bunch of data; we didn't get around to reducing it because we were building some more equipment, but if we had reduced that data we would have found fission.'' They had it in their hands and they didn't pursue it. They came in second!”