Are you solving the right problem?

“Am I solving the right problem?” - a question that runs in the back of my mind that is filled with potential and if diagnosed properly like any sickness may reveal weak spots needed to be addressed or habits to be improved or removed… when one is solving the wrong problem, there is a high likelihood that one will waste energy, effort and money..but learn in the process..

Studying climate science in a broader sense made an impact in my perspectives.

Soaking up information in the past three weeks allowed me to reflect further into how things are going on to playout..the global economy, the world and our role as humans as the most dominant species in history.. Figuring out the right questions to ponder on as I felt that creating software projects with unclear directions or pursuit of entrepreneurship leads me to the wrong directions. This blog post will cover my attempt to tackle a the question I think everybody should think about asking themselves..Are we solving the right problems?

Entrepreneurship is an act of risking your own resources and credibility in pursuit of adding value and earning a profit in the process.

This requires tremendous independent thinking and convert assets, sustain continuity. I failed to realize the hidden cost that we humans create in entreprenurial projects that we exhaust natural resources. The world we live in is old (4.567 billions of years ago) and provides a rich collection of benefits that we (humans) will never be able to create even with the best of our current technologies (eg. trees, forests, corals, oxygen, etc.). This is the idea that caused me to dial down my pursuit of freedom and profit as it will invariably affect the biosphere in some way if not done properly.

Software development is hard. It’s an exercise of breaking down problems to subsets of actions that a computer or mobile device can act upon in a predetermined manner.

That’s why companies pay a lot of money to developers that create solutions to the world’s problems. Learning how to tinker code in the past few months and communicate information through the web became a light-weight superpower, comparable to a swiss-army-knife. I now offer my skills to companies solving global warming resulting to the climate change problem for free and while creating a tech stack for projects that may help improve awareness for conserving the biosphere.

I haven’t found an exact answer to the question. I’m still figuring out what should I spend my remaining finite lifetime with considering all the unique talents and experiences I was able to acquire. What I know is I will continue to study fundamental concepts of science and philosphy like what I did with web development, classical mechanics for physics, ecology and climate science. Learning is my ultimate antidote to complexity and unending chaos. I want to make the world better in accordance to mutual co-existence with the biosphere..which is very difficult to do…but it is still worth to trying to do it as I grow faster in the process of pushing my own limits, the problem is so daunting as it requires all of me to synchronize and act.

So.. are you solving the right problem? or solving a problem that create bigger problems further in the future?

I hope this question will help you the same way it did to me..