Follow the Fun
Work only on the problem that already looms largest in your own mind
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 72%
Deutsch collapses the two questions 'how do I make a better world?' and 'how do I live a better life?' into one, and answers both the same way. You will want to improve the world if the state of the world genuinely figures large in your own problem situation, as it did for Norman Borlaug, whose problem literally was agricultural productivity. But most world-changing work does not start that way. Faraday was not trying to save civilisation; he was trying to understand electricity and magnetism, and could not have conceived that generators would be life and death a century later. Newton described himself as a boy picking up pebbles that looked nice to him. The mechanism is simple: creative solutions only emerge from a real problem situation, so borrowing someone else's problem, or adopting one because a field ranks it highly, starves the process of the only input it runs on.
Origin
Deutsch names the fun criterion as one of the principles that falls out of the four strands of the fabric of reality, alongside taking children seriously and universal explainers. Extracted from Naval.
Core principles
- 01You solve problems you actually have, not problems you have been handed.
- 02A problem that figures large in your own mind is the only reliable fuel for creative work.
- 03Working on someone else's problem, or on a problem chosen for its importance, is dangerous.
- 04Nothing is guaranteed; following the fun is not a promise of happiness or success.
- 05World-scale impact is usually a side effect, not the target.
How to run it
- 1
Inventory the problems you already have
Write down what your mind returns to when nobody is asking. These are the problems that genuinely figure large in your problem situation.
Pro tip Note which ones you keep thinking about while doing something else entirely; that is the strongest signal.
- 2
Delete the borrowed ones
Remove every problem on the list that you adopted because a mentor, a field, a funder or a scoreboard rated it important. Importance you have merely been told about is not a problem situation.
Watch out Deutsch calls following someone else's problem dangerous, and the danger applies equally to a problem you talked yourself into because it looked significant.
- 3
Test whether the world-scale version is really yours
Some people genuinely have world problems: for Borlaug, making agriculture more productive was inherently a world problem, so he had to reason about cost and disease resistance as part of solving it. Check whether the global framing is doing real work in your thinking or is just decoration.
Pro tip If the global framing changes what you would actually work on tomorrow, it is real. If it only changes how you describe the work, it is not.
- 4
Go flat out at the one problem
Commit to the surviving problem and pursue it at full effort because it interests you, not because you have forecast its future significance.
Watch out Do not first hunt for the most important problem of the age and then try to make yourself care about it; Deutsch says that is not how any of the examples went.
- 5
Accept that nothing is guaranteed
Following the fun is not insurance. You can do the right thing and still have a disaster, or do the wrong thing and succeed. Judge the method by the process it makes possible, not by outcome guarantees.
In the wild
Deutsch points out that Faraday, who arguably saved the world by inventing electromagnetic induction, was not attempting anything of the sort. He was trying to solve problems about electricity, magnetism and how the different strands of the world affect each other, at a level of fundamental physics. He could not have conceived that electrical generators would be a matter of life and death a hundred years later. He achieved it without intending it, going flat out at a problem that happened, incidentally, to be one of the most important scientific problems of the age.
→ The civilisational payoff arrived as a side effect of a problem chosen purely because it gripped him.
Norman Borlaug is Deutsch's case of someone for whom the goodness of the world genuinely figured large in his own problem situation. His problem was to make agriculture more productive, and that is inherently a world problem, so the world-scale constraints were also his personal constraints: whether a plant modification would be expensive or cheap, whether it would be susceptible to disease. He was not adopting a cause, he was solving the problem in front of him, which happened to be global in shape.
→ Deutsch counts Borlaug as following the fun too, alongside Faraday and Newton, because the world problem was his own problem rather than an imported one.
Common mistakes
Ranking problems by importance first
Choosing the most scientifically or commercially significant problem and then assigning yourself to it inverts the process. Deutsch is explicit that Faraday, Borlaug and Newton did not work that way.
Reading fun as triviality
The fun criterion is not about doing easy or amusing work. It is about whether the problem genuinely occupies your mind, which is what makes years of hard effort possible.
Expecting the method to guarantee happiness
Deutsch says explicitly that neither doing the right thing nor following the fun is guaranteed to produce a good outcome. Treating it as a promise sets up a false disappointment.
Is it for you?
Best for
Researchers, founders and creators choosing which problem to spend years on when several look defensible on paper.
Not ideal for
Salaried or contracted roles where the problem set is fixed by someone else and the job is execution rather than problem selection.
From the transcript
“it's dangerous to follow someone else's problem”
“following the fun is what Norman bog did it's what Faraday did it's what Newton did”
“he didn't set out to say first I'll find the most scientifically interesting problem of the age and then I'll devote myself to it”
From the episode
The Deutsch Files II