Many people are frustrated that they have a hard time coming up projects. Or even startup ideas they would like to work on. For me, I don’t know if I had this problem. Probably because I think everything can be better. My problem lies in with maintaining momentum on a project, sticking to it, and executing well. Which is what I’m thinking about in this new year. It’s all about the execution.
Here is a tip that can help you come up with your own idea.
Work backwards!
There are naysayers saying we already have everything we need, and should be satisfied with what we have now.
Bullshit.
The brilliant mathematician Carl Jacobi is famous for saying, “Invert, always invert.”
Start from an ideal world — every one is healthy, happy, and leads fulfilling lives. A world without car accidents, no hospital bills that destroy lives. A world without war. A world without orphans. Everyone lives a life of liberty and the pursuit of happiness. On their deathbed, they think “Ah, I’ve had such a fun and meaningful life. Totally worth it” Or who knows, maybe we never have to be on that bed!
This is the big picture world that team humanity wants. Imagine this utopia, and start working backwards. What steps are required for us to achieve paradise on earth?
Paul Graham mentions some great ideas.
Let me supplement the list here.
1. Health
The American healthcare system is broken. We all know it. During my first internship at a small business which worked in open source healthcare, my naive self asked my boss on why he thinks that the current healthcare industry is so broken. He laughed, and said, “It’s not just one thing that’s broken. It’s a combination of many other things.”
If we want to unravel this mess we created called healthcare, there’s a lot of work we need to do to fix these broken components one by one. First, we need greater transparency on our medical bills. Every time I’ve called to dispute my bill, I’ve always gotten it reduce by at least 30–40%. With one phone call. This leads me to believe that there is something seriously wrong. How am I supposed to know what they’ve charge is even real? I look at my medical bills - it’s as if they are trying to make something as complicated as possible so the average layman will never understand.
A value of a good or service can only be accurately priced if there is information flow available to the market participants. But for healthcare, it’s really lacking and things need to change because it’s not something customers understand, and it’s always a one time expense.
We need Google for Healthcare bills.
Second, the incentive system is broken Because charges are “personal”, consumers have no idea what all these items with fancy terms are supposed to cost.
The incentive are grossly misaligned. The healthcare providers usually charge the insurance company, which charges your employer. The common citizen doesn’t care if the bill is high, because it’s not coming out of their pocket. So the medical provider’s optimal strategy is to charge as high as possible for every service without triggering alarms from the insurance provider. Even if the insurance provider gets charged a lot - no worries, they will charge higher bulk plans to the employers, which will then pass that on to the average citizen.
It’s such a mess that not a lot of people are willing to tackle it. Health is also something that we all need to maintain through our lives, but this is incredibly hard to do so since many of us in the United States are in suburban and rural regions. Not everyone can afford a $2,000 dollar bike to get fit, nor have the space in their apartment to do so.
I really wonder if there is a better way. Maybe the only solution to this mess is to create some technology at such a reduced cost that wipes out the need for serious medical bills. If we put the smartest humans in charge of scrolling through endless feed that have marginal signal to noise, then can we do something to hack healthcare?
Everyone like playing games. How can we combine them together to create a fulfilling experience? How can we make games so addicting and feel good that, when you do a sit up, you think - just one more situp? Is it possible? Feel like a lot of things can be fleshed out here, and the design space huge.
2. Improve the Engineering Experience
In an ideal world, the invention process would be - “I think, and it is made”. We are nowhere near that. Instead, most of us are stuck with a keyboard layout that makes zero sense, and a tiny pointer to navigate boxes in front of our faces which constantly strain our eyes and make us cry. This is our workflow for most of our creative processes everybody. Is this the best that we can do?
I don’t know about you, but I’m getting so tired of micro mice manipulations. That happened in the 1980s. Now would be a time for new interfaces, so we don’t have to worry about all these mice manipulations and memorizing keyboard shortcuts.
3. Loneliness and Isolation
Why is it so hard to keep in touch with friends, and work on problems together? Why is it hard to make new friends as well? We’re connected to so many people via the Internet, but many of us feel like we’ve never been more alone.
I’ve thought a lot about this problem. Here are some things why I think it’s hard to make friends online:
- The me mentality. It’s all about sharing my happiness, my accomplishments, and my problems, and not about helping other people. No one is really honest about social media, or feel threatened to become vulnerable. We put on this facade.
- Online interactions are ephemeral. Friendships take an enormous amount of time to build. We make friends at school because we just spend a lot of time with our friends, but it’s hard to do that online.
- Low engagement and low degree of freedom in interactions. Like a post, put an emoji, write a comment. That’s really not enough expression or degrees of freedom to interact with other people.
- Social media also suffers from a fan out problem, where it’s always 1-to-huge n. What if we design systems so it’s 1 -to-very small n?
But most interactions with people on the Internet are ephemeral.
What kind of technology can we use to change this status quo? How can we be friends from people all over the world, teach them new things, and meet awesome people that change our lives?
4. Content on the Internet
I’m a little disillusioned by the amount of trash content on the Internet. Yes, we are generating information on a never before seen scale. But how much of that content is useful? Not much.
One good criteria that I used for movies, or any content after reading it is — what did I get out of this? Does the length justify the content? I read through an article, and think about delta. Is the essay large delta?
It’s also marred by people who want to make a quick buck (Can’t say this post isn’t one of them) How can we develop content collaboratively so that we due our due diligence to the English language, and produce quality content?We can’t keep drowning our readers in boredom and useless crap they don’t need.
There’s also one gatekeeper for the Internet. Google. Everyone has to go through Gatekeeper Google. Google is everyone’s best friend but unknown to them, they could be their worst enemy. And most people in tech, or any specialized domain, knows how Google can suck so much with anything remotely complex. Try looking up anything extremely specialized. There’s a high chance you won’t find a hit.
There’s a line of philosophical thought that doing everything means you do nothing. Does Google fit this narrative? It has to meet the demands of everyone. It has to deal with people who are trying to game the search engine, corporate interests, and everyone else on the planet. There’s something very wrong with this picture. But no one is willing to take a shot, and I don’t blame them.
Because it’s Google, who has an army of the best software engineers in the world. But are we overestimating their capability? Afterall, PageRank was a slight modification of Katz Centrality, and 20 years is a long time in the tech industry so the initial constraints that went into building Google no longer exist.
I would like to end with the fact that Google is still very far from the ideal information retrieval system. To me, the ideal state is thinking of a question, and I get the best answer that fits my needs which is the truth and nothing but the truth. The exact quanta of information I need, with everything removed. Can you really argue that this is Google?
And, let’s say you solve this information retrieval problem. It doesn’t end there. Then the question is — why am I even asking this question in the first place? Why couldn’t I have this information already with me, and why do I not know it? How can we make something so we already know what we have to ask?
5. Environment
We generate tons of trash, and as far as I know, there doesn’t seem to be any innovations on this trash generation process. In an ideal world, we would consume all of our foods, then throw out the packaging anywhere we want and it would disappear instantaneously. Or everyone cares enough to recycle. But that doesn’t happen. I once had to drive to an obscure place across town to recycle my used electronics battery. Shouldn’t there be a better way? Part of the reason is how incentives around recycling and environmental friendliness is structured. No one in their right mind would drive across town to recycle something for free without some monetary compensation in return. This is why me 5 cents on a beverage bottle is useless.
In high school, I thought making a recycling lottery was a great idea. This area definitely needs some fresh ideas.
6. Biotechnology
The next revolution in biotechnology could be something like Amazon Web Services for biotech. It seems like the biggest barrier for biotech is the extreme amount of capital required to get started. Hmm. That sounds eerily similar to what Amazon did to computer infrastructure. You rent out unused biotechnology equipment, design specific programs and rigorously test it to meet certain criteria, then deploy it instantaneously to people who need it. Maybe we’re decades away from this workflow.
Can you imagine a world where we could make our own fruits and design unicorns?
I know some people will say we are playing God, but still. What an exciting future if this could be true.
Conclusion
There is no shortage in the supply of problems for team humanity. The challenge is finding something you are passionate about working on, and having the drive to work on it for the long haul. Even me — I haven’t made so much progress on that due to a myriad of reasons, some which are on me and some that are not. I believe that there is a problem out there for everyone, and wish you the best of luck.