Why We Work on the Wrong Things

And how to choose what actually matters

Some ideas find you before you’re ready for them. Then one day, they don’t let go.

I read widely. Probably too widely, if you ask my wife Jessica. From history and philosophy, to business and science, I follow threads wherever they lead. I trust that the pattern will reveal itself eventually, even when I can’t see it yet. And sometimes I circle back.

Paul Graham, the co-founder of Y Combinator and a longtime observer of how great work actually happens, has a habit of pointing people toward things that matter. When he recently resurfaced a talk from 1986, one I had read before, I went back to it.

This time, it landed.

Richard Hamming’s talk, You and Your Research, delivered at Bell Labs nearly forty years ago, carries a simple but uncomfortable question: why do so many talented people never quite become who they could have been?

Hamming was a mathematician who spent decades at Bell Labs surrounded by some of the most capable minds of the twentieth century. His answer has nothing to do with talent. It comes down to choices. Small, daily, cumulative choices that add up, over a lifetime, to either a body of work or a long list of almost.

Work on What Matters. Or Don’t Bother.

Hamming was blunt about this. He used to walk up to colleagues at lunch and ask: What are the most important problems in your field? Are you working on one of them?

He was rarely invited back to the same table.

Most of us, if we’re honest, spend our time on what is safe. What fits in the available time. What doesn’t require us to risk failing at something that actually matters.

His distinction is one of the most clarifying I’ve encountered. An important problem is not just one with large consequences. It is one for which you have a reasonable line of attack. If you have no method, no entry point, no angle, it’s not an important problem. It’s a wish.

Important problems live at the intersection of consequence and tractability. The two are often closer than they appear.

The problems that matter most are often the ones you’re already circling. The ones your experience has quietly prepared you to take on.

The Four-Part Test

How do you know if you’ve chosen the right problem?

Over time, I’ve come to rely on a simple four-part test.

The first is the return test. Does the problem keep coming back? The idea you can’t shake. The one you put down on Monday and find waiting for you on Thursday. Important problems are stubborn that way. They don’t ask for your attention politely.

The second is the asymmetry test. Are you uniquely positioned to work on this, by experience, vantage point, or the trust people have placed in you? If a million other people could do it just as well, that’s worth noticing. It doesn’t disqualify the problem. But it should make you pause.

The third is the regret test. If you look back years from now, will you regret not having tried? Not because you failed, but because you never engaged.

The fourth is the body test. Do you feel something? Not anxiety, but a low, persistent hum. A quiet tension that doesn’t go away. It’s often the body’s way of signaling: this matters, and you know it.

Where Luck Comes From

Hamming didn’t let people hide behind luck. He didn’t deny it, but he treated it differently. Preparation is what turns random exposure into meaningful discovery.

He quoted the French scientist Louis Pasteur: “Luck favors the prepared mind.”

This doesn’t mean work hard and you’ll get lucky. It means that when the mind is saturated with a problem, living with it, carrying it, turning it over in quiet moments, it recognizes the answer when it passes by. The unprepared mind sees the same moment and keeps moving.

The best ideas rarely arrive on command. They come after patient groundwork. The question is not just what matters. It’s whether you are willing to let it inhabit you.

The Open Door

Hamming noticed that people who kept their doors open didn’t just stay connected. They stayed calibrated. Interruptions aren’t inefficiencies. They’re how you stay oriented to what matters.

I’ve been fortunate to have many people in my life who operate the same way. Jessica and our kids and their families are obvious examples. There’s a constant connection and interruption, and they become what I think of as “mattering agents.” I’ve mentioned many others on these pages, such as Eric Becker, Dov Seidman, Avy Stein, Steve Fader, Anders Söderlund, Michael Bronner, Raymond, Steve Mendell, Rich Carroll, Commissioner Vickar, Larry Lessans, Suzanne and David, and so many more who continually remind me of what matters. Recently, on mothers day, I also celebrated all the women in my life, and before my life, who has helped shape how I navigate in this world.

Jim Cantalupo, the former McDonald’s CEO who brought me to America, was one of them. He had a particular gift: the ability to ask a single question that could reroute your entire week. No lecture. No formal meeting. If something mattered, you could walk in. That access changed how I understood operating leadership.

Steve Ells at Chipotle was a different kind of open door. His was insistent. Persistent. Never easily satisfied. Always questioning. Focused on making things better. Working with him reinforced something I’ve come to believe: the people most capable of building something extraordinary are often the least willing to accept what already exists.

Happy talk is not a good ground for fixing problems.

And then there is my father, who died two years ago. He was the original door opener. He brought me into meetings from a young age and treated experiences the way Hamming treated the lunch table: as an invitation to be challenged. Through that, I learned how he thought, what he valued, and how he moved through the world.

It’s still calibrating me.

The Door I Didn’t Notice Closing

Hamming also pointed to the opposite pattern. The closed door. The protected calendar. The week that fills with urgent work and never quite makes room for the question of whether the work is the right work.

It’s easy to recognize in other people. It’s much harder to see in yourself. From the inside, it doesn’t feel like the wrong direction. It simply feels like work.

I have lived this pattern up close. Working hard. Making progress. Just not always on what matters most.

Sometimes I was building something that made sense on paper, but my gut didn’t agree. Looking back, I can see what was happening. I hadn’t chosen the problem. I had inherited it. Someone else had a vision, they wanted my help, and I wanted to give it.

That’s not a flaw; but it could be a trap hindering you from working on what truly matters. To you.

I confused loyalty to people with commitment to problems. They’re not the same thing. And the distinction matters more than we think.

The Constraint Is the Clue

During Hamming’s career, he was often handed what looked like a limitation and turned it into an advantage. He couldn’t get the programmers he needed, so he built systems that reduced the need for them. He didn’t have the computing capacity he wanted, so he learned to do more with less.

He could have spent his career focused on what was missing. Instead, he kept asking: given what I have, what becomes possible that wasn’t before?

In the early years at Chipotle, we had effectively no marketing budget. We couldn’t outspend McDonald’s, Burger King, or Taco Bell. Not even close. Most teams in that position do one of two things. They complain, or they try to mimic the bigger players on a smaller scale.

We did neither.

Instead, we treated the constraint as clarifying. If we couldn’t buy attention, we had to earn it. The food, the architecture, the line, the visible making of the burrito in front of you, all had to carry the message. “Food with integrity” wasn’t a slogan. It was a forcing function.

The constraint made us radical, because anything safe would have been invisible.

The absence of advertising dollars is one of the reasons Chipotle became Chipotle. With more, we would have done what everyone else did. With less, we had to do what only we could.

As Hamming put it, “What appears to be a fault, by a change of viewpoint, turns out to be one of the greatest assets you can have.”

Guard the Conditions

Hamming scheduled time to think about important problems. Every Friday afternoon he had “Great Thoughts Time.” He would explore big questions only. And he protected it the way other people protect their most important meetings.

The point wasn’t reflection for its own sake. It was correction. Like most people, he spent his week solving whatever was in front of him. Urgent problems. Local problems. And yet, when he stepped back, those weren’t always the problems he believed actually mattered.

So he built a ritual. Time where he wasn’t allowed to be productive in the usual sense. Time where the only job was to ask: am I working on the most important problems in my field? That hour wasn’t about thinking harder. It was about thinking in the right direction.

Without that space, the drift is almost automatic. You become efficient, even successful, at solving the wrong problems.

In my work life, as my roles grew, I started to see the same pattern. The urgent crowds out the important, quietly and without apology. If you don’t protect the conditions for thinking, they disappear.

So I started protecting them deliberately. Not as an afterthought, but as part of the work itself. A walk before the day starts. Reading that isn’t always useful to what I’m solving, but useful in ways that are harder to name.

I’ve also learned to distinguish between thinking and reflecting. You can think at your desk, but reflection requires distance.

The further you see, the deeper you think. I feel this most near the ocean. Something about the uninterrupted horizon opens the mind in a way a screen never does.

Writing these newsletters has become part of that discipline. I don’t know how much you, the reader, benefit from them. I hope you do. What I do know is that the habit of reading and writing helps me question what matters and, often, let go of what doesn’t.

The Value Is in the Struggle

Near the end of his talk, Hamming said something that stayed with me after an hour of rigorous analysis of success and failure.

He said: “The value is in the struggle more than it is in the result. The success and fame are sort of dividends.”

If you are working on something that genuinely matters, to you and beyond you, then the engagement itself is the reward. The recognition is a dividend. What happens in the work, the thinking, the failing, the trying again, is life.

This isn’t a consolation prize for those who don’t succeed. It’s a different way of understanding success. A person who works seriously on important things, with courage and commitment, has already lived well, regardless of what the prizes say.

I believe that.

I’m still learning to act on it.

Your Turn

What are you circling? What is the thing, in your work or your life, that you already know matters but have not yet had the courage to fully commit to? Or, as my friend Eric often reminds me, what are you tolerating that you shouldn’t be?

You don’t need better luck. You may not need more talent. You might need a prepared mind, an open door, and the willingness to let something inhabit you.

Your work is waiting.

Alongside this piece is a song I wrote called “Tell Me What Matters Most.” It explores the same question at the heart of this essay: when the noise fades, the striving slows, and life strips away distraction, what truly matters, and whether we had the courage to give ourselves fully to it.

If this resonated, consider sharing it with someone who might need it.

* You can also read Richard Hamming’s talk, “You and Your Research,” here.