The Importance of Great Questions

While reading Paul Graham's What You'll Wish You'd Known, I came across a sentence that was thought provoking.

"People who do great things look at the same world everyone else does, but notice some odd detail that's compellingly mysterious." — Paul Graham

After thinking about it for a bit, it's abundantly clear that this is true for all of the visionaries that you see and hear about today (Musk, Thiel, Jobs, Altman, Zuckerberg, etc). But what made them see these "compellingly mysterious" things in our world? As Paul Graham writes in his essay, it's their ability to zero in on a question that they have a great curiosity in answering.

In the spirit of trying to understand how great people think, below I have cultivated a set of questions that have changed the world.

• Patrick Collison: How can payments be processed through the internet easier?
• Steve Jobs: How can we build a user friendly, beautiful looking computer?
• Sergei Brin: Why is it so difficult to find and organize the world's information?
• Alexandr Wang: How can we make it easier to train ML models?
• Peter Thiel: How can sending and receiving money through the internet be made easier?
• Jeff Bezos: How can we sell books online?
• Elon Musk: How can we transition from gas to electric based transportation? How can humans become an interplanetary species?
• Sam Altman: How can we ensure AGI is developed safely?
• Mark Zuckerberg: How can we bring students at Harvard together online?
• Reid Hoffman: How can we make it easier for people to network online?

Asking questions and exploring your interests are the only ways you'll find your life's work. Humans are all curious by nature, yet we suppress this feeling because we feel our questions are too "crazy" or too "stupid". Don't be trapped by dogma and the results of other people's thinking, do what interests you in the present and trust that the dots will connect in your future.

So get out there. Learn, tinker, create - and most importantly - stay curious.