A Genuinely Felt Problem is the Most Powerful Generator of Creative Problem-Solving that Exists

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

― Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Don't centralize the error-correction process. Instead, install a problem that people care about. A genuinely felt problem is the most powerful generator of creative problem-solving that exists. To yearn for the sea is to accept that the destination is not a fixed point but a permanent orientation toward the unknown.

June Huh in an interview said the following:

Q: What drives your passion for math?

June: In practice what motivates us to pursue our goals whatever that may be is the pursuit of beauty. So we usually do not have any practical applications in mind when we are constructing our theory. What motivates us instead is the internal beauty of the things that we create. These are so intricate and so unreal so that some people think that we are not creating these mathematical structures, instead we are discovering it from some sort of nature, and this is what gives us the pure joy, and I think the motivation is very similar to that those of artists.

The pursuit of beauty and the yearning for the vast and endless sea respresent the same thing, a problem so powerful it moves you forward.

"The best thing that can happen to a human being is to find a problem, to fall in love with that problem, and to live trying to solve that problem, unless another problem even more lovable appears".
- Karl Popper

See also:
Christopher Alexander - “Which Has More Life?” Questions
True Practice Makes Perfectly Fun
The Most Powerful Ideas For Progress

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Mental Health Depends on Knowing Which Problems to Reject