No Problem too Small

Back in the 1980’s, when Apple was still a small company making personal computers(!),  Steve Jobs famously tried to lure John Sculley from Pepsi saying:

“Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?”

Change the world. Make a dent in the universe. Everyone graduates hoping to do those things. And then we feel very disappointed with the work we actually do.

But we shouldn’t feel that way, wrote Richard Feynman to a former student, Koichi Manom in a letter dated February 3rd, 1966. Manom had written to Feynman that he was working on “a humble and down-to-earth type of problem”. To which Feynman replied:

“It seems that the influence of your teacher has been to give you a false idea of what are worthwhile problems.”

Feynman acknowleges that the aura around him might have put pressure on his students to set unrealistic goals for themselves:

“You met me at the peak of my career when I seemed to you to be concerned with problems close to the gods... (But) I have worked on innumerable problems that you would call humble, but which I enjoyed and felt very good about because I sometimes could partially succeed.”

At times, Feynman says he enjoyed working on problems that he didn’t even solve!

“For example, experiments on the coefficient of friction on highly polished surfaces, to try to learn something about how friction worked (failure).”

Feynman goes on to define what’s a “worthwhile problem”:

“A problem is grand in science if it lies before us unsolved and we see some way for us to make some headway into it. I would advise you to take even simpler, or as you say, humbler, problems until you find some you can really solve easily, no matter how trivial. You will get the pleasure of success, and of helping your fellow man, even if it is only to answer a question in the mind of a colleague less able than you. You must not take away from yourself these pleasures because you have some erroneous idea of what is worthwhile.”

Because ultimately:

“No problem is too small or too trivial if we can really do something about it.”

And he advises his ex-student to not judge himself too critically:

“You are not nameless to me. Do not remain nameless to yourself – it is too sad a way to be. Know your place in the world and evaluate yourself fairly, not in terms of your naïve ideals of your own youth, nor in terms of what you erroneously imagine your teacher’s ideals are.”

Somehow I never thought of Feynman as a people person…