How to Choose Problems Worth Solving
For when you know you want more from your life but don’t know where to start
I’ve spent the last six months having conversations with hundreds of people about career confusion. The conversation usually starts with them explaining they want to do something meaningful, but they have no idea what that means or where to begin.
When I ask what problems interest them, I get blank stares. When I push further and ask what bothers them about the world, what they wish someone would fix, they list twenty things. Climate change, mental health access, education inequality, political polarisation, housing affordability. All legitimate. All overwhelming.
This is where most people get stuck. They know work should matter. They understand that solving real problems is how you build a meaningful career. But there are thousands of problems that need solving, and they have no framework for choosing which ones to focus on.
The answer requires two types of knowledge working together. You need to understand yourself: what you’re good at, what feels like play to you and work to others, what you find compelling enough to stick with when it gets difficult. But you also need to understand market reality: which problems people will pay to have solved, where the gaps are, what’s already being worked on.
Most career advice focuses entirely on the first part. Figure out your strengths, follow your interests, discover your passion. This is necessary but insufficient. Knowing yourself doesn’t tell you which problems to work on. You can be deeply interested in philosophy and great at explaining complex ideas, but if you don’t understand which philosophical problems the market cares about, you’ll stay confused.
The Scale Problem
If you want to optimise your career for social impact, the options become even more paralysing. William MacAskill and the effective altruism movement have spent years trying to quantify which causes matter most. How many quality-adjusted life years does this intervention save compared to that one? Where can your marginal contribution have the biggest effect?
This approach works if you’re allocating funding or choosing between established organisations to join. But most people trying to figure out their career aren’t choosing between pre-packaged options. They’re trying to work out which problem to orient their life around, often with no clear path for how to contribute.
Rutger Bregman, in his book Moral Ambition, offers a different framework. He calls it the Triple-S framework, and it evaluates problems based on three criteria:
Sizable. The problem must involve a large scale of impact. Many people affected, or high magnitude of harm. Problems that touch a handful of people or create minor inconvenience probably aren’t worth dedicating your career to.
Solvable. The problem should be tractable. There needs to be a realistic path to making a meaningful dent in it. Some issues are genuinely intractable with current technology or social structures. Others feel impossible but are just technically difficult.
Sorely Overlooked. The problem must be under-recognised or under-resourced. If everyone is already working on it, your contribution gets diluted. The overlooked problems often offer more room for your work to matter.
Put these together and you get what Bregman calls the sweet spot of moral ambition: work where using your talents can make a serious difference.
This is useful. It helps filter the overwhelming list of problems down to ones worth serious attention. But Bregman’s framework focuses entirely on the problem itself. It doesn’t account for you.