Ever since I was a kid, I’ve wanted to be a hero.
It all started with 5-year-old me wanting to be the first person to actually dress up and fight crime like Batman. After all, I thought, why couldn't someone do that?
As I grew older though, I realised that real heros were people like Norman Borlaug and Yuan Longping. People who spent their entire lives working in the hope that they may be able to improve the lives of millions by solving important problems.
Sure, it isn't as sexy as punching bad guys in the face, but to achieve the moral equivalent of stopping someone from drowning in a pond every few minutes would have to feel pretty amazing.
While working on my PhD, I was lucky enough to have a lot of time to think seriously about how I could best try to do this. In this time I came across a few frameworks for identifying good problems that I've really come to like. My favourite is the 80,000 hours framework which, in short advocates working on:
In my next post, I'll lay out my reasoning for why I think our mission at FLUX - to supercharge universities - meets the criteria above.