Benjamin Todd

A problem could be worth tackling if it's extremely big and neglected, even if it seems hard to solve.

Your personal fit and expertise There's no point working on a problem if you can't find any roles that are a good fit for you.

You won't be satisfied or have much impact.

So while it's a great idea to find a problem that has a good combination of being big, neglected and solvable, you'll also want to find a specific role that's a good fit for you.

As we'll cover in Chapter 8, personal fit is so important that it can easily be better to focus on an area you think is less pressing in general if it's a sufficiently good fit for you.

Early in your career, you only need to have a vague idea of what problems you might want to work on in the future.

Your main focus should be exploring to figure out what you're good at and building skills that will plausibly be useful, which we cover in the next two chapters.

Later, you can use those skills to tackle the most pressing problems at the time.

if you're already an expert in a certain skill, then your focus should be on finding a way to use that expertise to tackle a pressing problem.

It wouldn't make sense for, say, a great economist who's crushing it to go and become a biologist.

Rather, there is probably a way to apply economics to the issues you think are most pressing.

You can also use the framework above to narrow down subfields, for example, development economics versus employment policy.

So what are the world's most urgent problems?

What are the biggest problems in the world that no one is talking about and are possible to solve?

That's what we'll cover next.

The bottom line.

How can you find the world's most pressing problems?

The most pressing problems are likely to have a good combination of the following qualities.

1.

Big in scale.