The world is full of problems, puzzles and mysteries, and you should be solving puzzles.

(Unless it’s one of our Murder Mysteries, in which case, you should totally solve the mystery!)

But the rest of the time, you should be solving puzzles. Why puzzles? Why not problems?

Problems have solutions. That’s what makes them problems. A problem without a solution isn’t a problem, it’s simply a situation.

Seth Godin, The Practice

If the problem you’re facing has a solution, then you don’t need to solve it. Just look up the answer, or message a person who has the answer, or pay a professional who’s job is to know the answer. The answer is known, it’s just not known by you. Spending time solving something that’s already been solved by someone else is a waste of your time and a waste of your skill.

I regard it as a criminal waste of time to go through the slow and painful ordeal of ascertaining things for one’s self if these same things have already been ascertained and made available by others.

Thomas Edison

What’s a mystery? A mystery is puzzle to which nobody knows the answer, a puzzle that’s unsolvable (for at least as long as we’ll be alive). Is time travel possible – you can theorise, but it’s probably going to remain a mystery for a long time to come and you probably shouldn’t spend a lot of time trying to build a DeLorean so that you can go back in time and shoot your grandfather.

And that leaves us with puzzles. Puzzles are the interesting problems of our time, the problems that can be solved, but which haven’t been solved yet. Puzzles are what you should be working on.

Solving an interesting puzzle usually makes the world better. Solving an interesting puzzle is commercially pragmatic too. Covid. Covid is an interesting puzzle. If you can figure out a vaccine for Covid you’re going to make the world better, and you’ll also make a bunch of money. It’s worth your time and your skill to solve interesting puzzles.

If you’re only solving problems, problems that already have solutions, well then we’ll just choose the cheapest solution, because the solution is known and so we can get it from anyone.

But if you’re the impresario who gets a diverse group of people together to solve an interesting puzzle, a solution that wasn’t obvious, that wasn’t known, that makes things better – if you can do that, then you get a prize. The prize of working on something interesting, with the best people, that makes things better, and as a bonus, our culture and the market will thank you too.

Solve.Interesting.Puzzles.