ПостWhat should you do if you are young and ambitious but dont know what to work on?

What should you do if you are young and ambitious but dont know what to work on? What you should not do is drift along passively, assuming the problem will solve itself. You need to take action. But there is no systematic procedure you can follow. When you read biographies of people who have done great work, its remarkable how much luck is involved. They discover what to work on as a result of a chance meeting, or by reading a book they happen to pick up. So you need to make yourself a big target for luck, and the way to do that is to be curious. Try lots of things, meet lots of people, read lots of books, ask lots of questions. When in doubt, optimize for interestingness. Fields change as you learn more about them. What mathematicians do, for example, is very different from what you do in high school math classes. So you need to give different types of work a chance to show you what they are like. But a field should become increasingly interesting as you learn more about it. If it doesn't, its probably not for you. Dont worry if you find you are interested in different things than other people. The stranger your tastes in interestingness, the better. Stranger tastes are often strong ones, and a strong taste for work means you will be productive. And you are more likely to find new things if you are looking where few have looked before. YC @CodeGrinder