Don't reinvent the wheel
Knowledge is more powerful and accessible than ever before. Use it.
If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
Isaac Newton
It takes decades for one person to discover something new, but only a moment for millions to use it in their own lives.
What were once novel discoveries become common knowledge. Problems are solved not just for the person who did the work, but the solutions become instantly accessible and valuable to everyone else.
We face hundreds of problems in our lives every day, but most of them have already been solved.
Despite this, we choose to do the hard work of solving the problems from scratch instead of leveraging solutions that already exist.
Blazing our own trail
Our instinct is to assume our struggles are unique and forge our own path instead of following in someone else’s footsteps.
Many of the challenges we face, like losing weight, progressing our careers, parenting, or mastering hobbies, have all been solved by someone else before.
There are existing blueprints that have worked for countless others, but we start from scratch and accept the struggle because leveraging someone else’s solution to solve our own problems feels like cheating.
Our brains confuse effort with progress. If something is hard, it feels like we’re making progress, but we need to differentiate between problems that are worth our time and those that are not.
The only time we should be blazing our own trail is solving problems that are truly groundbreaking or unique to our individual situation.
If we’re chasing something that has already been accomplished by someone else, our best option is to use what they’ve learned and accomplish the same thing with significantly less work.
It may not feel as rewarding, but this frees up our time to work on the problems that only we can solve.
Evolving the problems we solve
There should be no shame in leveraging existing knowledge or systems.
We shouldn’t be worried that we’re not working hard enough. We should be worried that we’re not working on the right problems.
Software engineers don’t write code if they don’t have to. If an existing library or product accomplishes what they need, they copy and paste that code and move on.
They are ruthlessly efficient, so they can focus on the one thing that truly matters: writing code that solves a problem no one else has solved before.
There is nothing noble or admirable about making things harder than they have to be.
Once a problem is solved, it creates a new block of human knowledge that anyone can leverage. This knowledge is more accessible today than ever before. We should use it.
If we want to become better and make an impact on the world, we need to leverage existing solutions to maximize the time and energy we spend on problems only we can solve.
Prompts
What solved problems are you working on from scratch?
What unique problems are you solving that will help those around you?
If all of your current problems were solved, what would the next level of problems look like?
Deep Dive
The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss
The manifesto for eliminating and outsourcing unimportant work.
Thanks for reading! I’ll see you next Sunday.
Kevin