Since returning to Japan, I’ve started picking up books from fields I never cared about before. Spirit and Matter was one of them. I bought it because the author of another book I was reading for work kept quoting it non-stop, and I thought, Okay, this must be interesting.
It turned out to be far more fascinating than I expected. The book is essentially a long-form interview with Dr. Susumu Tonegawa, the molecular biologist who won the Nobel Prize on his own. And somehow, reading it pulled me straight into a world I’d never paid attention to—molecular biology, or more broadly, science itself.
That’s the fun part about reading. You think you’re stepping into a completely unrelated field, and suddenly you find ideas that feel surprisingly relevant to your own life. In my case, Tonegawa’s way of thinking overlapped beautifully with something I recently learned at work: issue decomposition—identifying the real problem before jumping into action.
One passage in particular hit me hard. When asked about what separates groundbreaking scientists from everyone else, Tonegawa said something like this:
“Too many people work on things that don’t really matter. They start researching without thoroughly examining whether the question is truly important. That’s why I tell my students: ‘Try not to do research.’ What you choose not to do is more important than what you do. A scientist’s research time is extremely limited. There are countless possible topics. If you pick something just because it seems a little interesting, your life will be over before you get to the truly important problems.”
ー〜ー現実にはとりわけどうでもいいようなことをやっている人が多すぎるんですよ。ー〜ー結局本当に重要なのかを十分見極めないうちに研究を始めちゃうからなんですね。ー〜ーだから僕は学生に「なるべく研究をやるな」と言っている。何をやるかより何をやらないかが大切だとよく言っている。だってそうでしょうそうでしょう。一人の科学者の一生の研究時間なんてごく限られている。研究テーマなんてごまんとある。ちょっと面白いなという程度でテーマを選んでいたら、本当に大切なことをやる暇がないうちに一生が終わってしまうんですよ。
When I read this, I immediately thought: This is exactly issue-finding.
It’s the discipline of squeezing your brain until you uncover the question that genuinely matters.
And if someone like Tonegawa—a Nobel laureate—was constantly scanning the world for meaningful problems to tackle, then someone like me definitely can’t rely on the first “good enough” issue that pops into my mind. It made me realize that improving the precision of my issue-finding might be the most important skill I can develop right now.
It’s not glamorous work, but sharpening that ability feels like it could change the quality of everything I do.
So—back to the grind. I’ll keep working on it.
