Solve Small Problems

For many years, my big passion was to work on much larger ideas, big world-changing concepts. I really felt, for instance, that social media gave us an amazing platform where we could speak without needing a major media platform to decide we were worthy of anyone’s attention. It’s why I launched my first blog in 1998. Big ideas are tricky, though. It’s hard to figure out how to get paid for them, for one thing. It’s also hard because you have to explain to thousands (tens or hundreds of thousands) why the “thing” is important and why you know what you’re talking about.

I think the real win is in solving small problems that people will pay for you to fix.

Solve. Get Paid. Repeat

That’s the formula. It’s that easy. For instance, my kitchen faucet broke and needed replacing. It’s a really simple problem. It impacts one person, one part of the house, one technology.

You might not know this but plumbers are hard to come by these days. They either work on commercial projects only, or they’re so backlogged that they can’t come to your house until a cosmic event occurs.

But there’s a great tool for this: Taskrabbit. Man, I wish I’d invented Taskrabbit. It’s basically like “Uber for skilled humans.”

I have a small problem: broken faucet. I need one person to fix it. This person has skills. Oh look, a little bitty marketplace where I can read his reviews, he can read mine, and we can pay him easily through a system. Small problem. Solved. Paid.

Even Huge Companies Have Small Problems

The real win inside of your big company might be to find small problems and fix them within the walls of your organization. For instance, look for any sources of friction. Are there parts of the organization that are slowing down the rest of the company? Can you do anything about it?

Those problems are worth solving.

So many inventions come from this. I was thinking today about the Raspberry Pi, you know, those little computers that are basically the size of a cell phone (but aren’t a phone). It was designed to be a low-cost alternative to traditional computers. Who wants that? Students, hobbyists, people who might have a project idea but can’t risk wrecking their primary computer.

Maybe there’s something for you to solve out there. I know for me, I’m going to work on solving some more small problems in my own world, at work, and beyond.

Chris…