Why I Treat My Questions Like a Learning Compass

This week, I’m going to circle back to a concept I mentioned in How I’m Making My Learning Actually Useful, and that’s the concept of 12 Favorite Questions.

I had mentioned that Richard Feynman liked to have a written list of his 12 favorite problems, so he’d always be on the lookout for things to support solving these problems.

People seemed to have some questions about the concept, as well as how I was going about solving these problems. I decided it was worth a deeper dive into how I view these questions, how I came up with my current 5, and how I’m going about trying to answer these questions.

Coming Up With My Questions

One of my favorite tools for self-discovery has been ChatGPT, in particular, a custom GTP I created called LifeCoachLens. It is designed not to offer advice but rather to analyze my writing and ask me follow-up questions, helping me dig deeper and identify gaps and biases on my own.

I started out with:

Help me identify “12 favorite problems” that I can keep in mind like Richard Feynman did.

This way, I could brainstorm what projects and topics I’m curious about, and LifeCoachLens will keep asking me follow-up questions and trying to get me to dig deeper and think about things differently. If you’re really interested in the nitty-gritty details, here’s the entire conversation.

What the Questions Represent

One thing that might be a little bit weird and potentially different than Feynman’s questions is that these questions represent my curiosities and interests, and I don’t expect them to ever have one specific answer.

I’ll briefly discuss each of my current five questions (I haven’t gotten to 12 yet) and explain what they mean and how I’m going about trying to find answers to them. Hopefully, by the time I’m finished, you’ll understand what I’m doing here, and maybe you’ll try to come up with a list of your own.

1. How do I focus on the work that matters most?

You’ll find that many of my questions have several layers to them. This is no exception. The origin of this question comes from projects like my SHELL Framework, where I’m ranking projects by different criteria to identify which are the most likely to generate a return on my investment of time, money, and effort.

As I get older, and my perceived future time dwindles, I feel the urge to not waste my time on frivolous projects. I should have some idea of why I’m working on the project and what I hope to get out of it. That’s not to say that there isn’t value in chasing inspiration, but I need to be aware that when I do that, I need to time-box it and not let it take up tons of time without any objective.

The other part of this is the “How do I focus” part. I am a fairly distractible person, and I need to develop discipline around focus. Some of my current reading projects have the benefit of helping me practice extended focus blocks, which is a skill I need to develop.

So I’d connect to this question projects like “Follow the Well Educated Mind process while reading the first 10 chapters of Don Quixote” as well as the development of frameworks like SHELL, so I can feel some confidence that I’m working on something that matters.

2. How can I uncover and influence hidden systems shaping my life?

On the surface, this connects with my lifelong interest in the occult (from Latin occultus ‘hidden, secret’), which can mean magical or mystical practices (e.g., tarot, pendulum divination, etc.) or real science behind many occult phenomena (e.g., reticular activating system, hypnagogia, default mode network, etc.)

On a deeper level, this connects to a lot of my self-reflection. Trying to understand my own motivations and biases. Tools like LifeCoachLens are very much part of answering this question.

3. How can I build invisible bridges that multiply existing value?

The origin of this question is that I like connecting people and connecting systems. I’ve founded meetup groups, participated in online communities, and enjoy federated wikis and open formats like RSS and ActivityPub. A key component of my day job is building API integrations.

I’m very driven to find existing groups and platforms and find ways to “multiply value” by connecting them, either socially, “Hey, have you seen this other person’s work?” or through technology (e.g., writing code that literally connects different systems), aka “invisible bridges”

One example is the federated wiki (fedwiki for short) community. There are a bunch of solo wikis where people write about various things. However, tracking down or following what people are working on is hard. I also do a lot of work with RSS and news aggregation.

My way of creating a bridge between these systems and writers was to build a platform (fedwikiriver.com and feeds.fedwikiriver.com) where people can follow and discover the interesting things happening across all the different wikis.

This site is a bridge between people writing on wikis, as well as a bridge between the fedwiki platform and RSS/Rivers of News, which I’ve been involved with in many different ways.

4. How do I maximize the applied value of what I learn?

This comes out of my frustration with reading books, listening to podcasts, and promptly forgetting everything I learned.

I’m in the middle of the iCanStudy course, where I’m learning new techniques that will allow me to remember and integrate what I’m learning with my day-to-day life.

Books like The Well Educated Mind and How To Read A Book are within the sphere of this question. Too much of my learning has been passive, so learning skills to make my learning more active and actionable are very important if I want to leverage what I’m learning in the future.

5. How do I design a meaningful life with momentum and alignment?

This newsletter is very much an investigation into this question. It also ties together many of the other questions. Why should I learn anything? What’s the point? What do I want to get out of life? These are all pieces of this question.

I want to feel like what I do is meaningful and not just a waste of time. I also want to feel like I’m building a flywheel where what I learn today feeds into the momentum of what I’ll learn tomorrow.

This connects to my desire to study philosophy and read classic literature. People have been thinking and writing about the search for meaning for a very long time.

I think even this exercise of trying to come up with 12 favorite questions is part of trying to understand what gives my life meaning, connecting to this question.

Summary

Hopefully, what you take away from this week’s issue is that it can be helpful to identify the underlying questions that motivate you. By reverse engineering what you’re curious about, you can start to connect seemingly disparate interests and threads in your life.

As someone who would like to someday figure out “my passion,” I think this is a very tangible artifact.

If you try out LifeCoachLens or take a shot at forming some of your own favorite questions, please share your results with me.