Are you solving any problem?
Many a time the Problem is a situation, matter or person that is hard to deal with.
How often do you face problems?
What percentage of them do you solve by yourself?
A couple of months back, I raised a question: what should we do?
There must be a lot of people who can’t figure out the answer and still have the same state with the question.
In day-to-day lives, people solve a lot of problems by themselves or by taking help. Youths in their early twenties wonder about: what should they do? A couple of months back, I was standing on the balcony with my friend and was wondering about this. We saw a man cleaning cars at 2 AM. My friend was surprised to see somebody washing a car so late. I was more confused than surprised about whether he woke up so early or would be sleeping late. I also wondered: when do these people sleep? While a lot of people were sleeping at that time the guy was washing cars. First thing which comes in our mind was that he was doing it for money, isn’t he? And yes, some people are working for money but they are also providing services to car owners. Car owners would have the problem of needing to wash their cars and that’s why they hired somebody to do their work. Almost everybody needs to get a haircut or get some hairstyling done on a regular basis and not everyone can cut their own hair; so a barber comes into the picture. If people didn’t have the problem of needing to get a haircut, then there wouldn’t have been any occupation like that of a barber.
A few months back, my flight was delayed from Kolkata airport and I was talking to other passengers about our work lives and one of them said, “There is no work-life balance in startups.”
I replied, “Well, you are looking at it from a different perspective. They are solving a lot of problems. Cab service, online food ordering, packers and movers etc. are making our life easier.”
Each company is solving some problems in one or another way. For instance, it’s very difficult to carry a lot of physical books. Amazon kindle solves the problem, so now we don’t need to worry about the weight. Amazon kindle also provides the feature to read a book in the dark. We can save on electricity, as well.
When somebody starts a company, they just do their own work but, as they begin to expand the scope, they need a lot of resources and then they hire people, buy material commodities and proper amenities for the company.
There are a lot of problems spread around us and everybody is solving some kind if they are doing something. If we don’t know what we should do, we should look for interesting problems. Many problems can fascinate us, in some occasions we will use our existing skills while in others we may need to improvise. Eg: A frustrated engineer can become a stand up comedian if he/she has got good sense of humour, he/she would be then solving the problem of entertainment.
We should not beat ourselves up if we don’t know what to do or we don’t know what our passion is. It’s okay not to know the ultimate goal. We can look for the opportunity matching our expertise and carry on with it, we can find passion in numerous small things if not one large thing.
As Steve Jobs said to Walter Isaacson in one of the interviews for his biography, “Yeah, we’re always talking about following your passion, but we’re all part of the flow of history … you’ve got to put something back into the flow of history that’s going to help your community, help other people … so that 20, 30, 40 years from now … people will say, this person didn’t just have a passion, he cared about making something that other people could benefit from.” So life is not only about following your passion but sometimes it may be about solving problems which can be more significant than just following your passion.
