I had been burned out for a while by then, the kind that a weekend off does not touch, the kind where you keep working harder anyway because slowing down feels riskier than staying tired. A conference in Lisbon had come up, and Cascais, a small coastal town in Portugal about half an hour outside the city, felt like a reasonable place to disappear to for a few days afterward.

Where I was sitting, the Atlantic in front of me, the shoreline had cracked into strange stacked layers, dark rock split into long straight lines, like something got sliced instead of formed. Wildflowers grew right out of the cracks anyway, small and yellow, everywhere, indifferent to the rock. I remember feeling relaxed and exhausted at the same time, which should not be possible but was. Something felt off, or missing, even with all of that in front of me. I had already tried the version where a new environment fixes it. It had not.

At some point, looking at the horizon, I started picturing each question as something small with wings, landing on a windowsill inside my mind and tapping to be let in, the way a thought arrives except with enough presence that it felt less like thinking and more like being visited. Picturing the mind as a house is not a metaphor I reached for on purpose. It just arrived that way, fully formed, the way a room shows up in a dream already furnished before anyone decided what should be in it.

So that is the creature in the rest of this piece. Not a literal insect, just the shape I give to the feeling of a question landing somewhere it intends to stay. In my head, it looked something like this: about the size of a thumb, wings thin and layered like two dragonfly wings stacked on top of each other, catching light faintly blue one second and faintly gold the next. Its body soft and round, built for sitting rather than standing. And the eyes, enormous, dark, wet looking, the exact kind of look Puss in Boots is known for, the kind that wins an argument before a word gets said.

It was carrying something. A single cube of sugar, held against its chest with both arms, like it was bracing under a weight far too big for it, insisting on contributing something to the tea it was clearly hoping would get offered.

I let it in. I invited it for tea.

I do not know exactly when the questions actually started, if I am honest. Most likely before Cascais, probably somewhere in the middle of the burnout itself, quiet enough to mistake for exhaustion, for a bad mood, for needing a vacation. It is possible they had been there for a while and Cascais was just the first place still enough to notice them.

When I got back to the house I was staying in, three more were waiting.

They did not arrive politely, one after another. They came together, wings all beating at slightly different speeds, each carrying its own small sugar cube, all looking up with those same eyes like they had been discussing among themselves who would go first. I opened the window for all three.

After that there was no pattern to it. One showed up on a morning walk, landing on my shoulder without asking. Another arrived at around midnight while I was doomscrolling. A few came in pairs, which I had not expected, like they had agreed to travel together rather than risk being ignored alone.

I started writing them down so I would not lose track. Not on anything meant for it, just the back of a notebook I had with me for something else entirely. Within a few days I had filled almost twenty pages. Some of what I wrote was not even close to a full question yet, just the shape of one, a feeling with no sentence built around it. I crossed a lot of it out. I rewrote some of what I had crossed out a few days later.

By the time I left Cascais, the notebook had more of their handwriting in it than mine, in a manner of speaking. Not one of them ever really left after that. They just moved with me, wings and sugar cubes and all, and every so often, one I thought had gone quiet taps on a window again like no time has passed at all.

Mine now holds twelve, though it did not start out that tidy.

The idea of keeping a set of twelve favorite questions comes from Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize winning physicist. The exact quote is often traced back to a recollection by the mathematician Gian-Carlo Rota, who remembered Feynman’s advice on how to think like a genius. Feynman is remembered for saying that a person has to keep a dozen of their favorite problems constantly present in mind, even though most of them will sit dormant most of the time. Every new trick or result that crosses one’s path gets tested against each of the twelve to see whether it helps. Breakthroughs that look like sudden genius are often the result of a mind that has been quietly working on the same handful of questions for years.

My Twelve Questions

1. What is the end for which I am created?
2. Who am I becoming?
3. What is the place of the in-between person, fluent in many worlds but native to none?
4. What is my objective function?
5. Given any problem, how do I find the question actually worth answering?
6. When should I pivot from divergence to convergence?
7. How do I shape an idea so it is ready to be received?
8. How do I master beginning again?
9. How do I create and capture value?
10. What daily practices keep my mind sharp and my knowledge system trustworthy?
11. What do I owe the world?
12. Who are my people?

A question does not make this list just because it feels big enough. It has to hold up in two ways, though I did not sit down and invent these formally. They are just how I have caught myself sorting things over time.

The Standing Test. A genuine favorite question stays open. Question three can be reframed as “where does someone belong when they are shaped by many cultures, many disciplines, and more than one career?” It looks like a question that gets settled once a person picks a city or a field and stays there, but it does not work that way. The belonging keeps being renegotiated, and how to turn that in-betweenness into purpose is not something a single decision has ever closed out. Question eleven behaves the same way. It can also be read as “what is my ikigai, my reason for being?” It just keeps asking for a slightly different answer as the years change what I love, what I am good at, what I can get paid for, and what the world needs. A question that closes for good the day a satisfying answer arrives was never a favorite question. It was a task, and tasks are legitimate on their own terms, they simply do not behave this way once finished.

The Container Test. A favorite question resists being solved once and filed away. Question four, what is my objective function, could easily be mistaken for a single decision if it is not watched carefully. “Should this job be taken” looks like the real question in the moment, but the job is only a test case. The objective function is what the decision is actually being measured against, and it stays in play long after the job itself has been accepted or turned down or forgotten. Question two, who am I becoming, fails the same way if it is not watched. The person I was becoming at twenty five is not the person I became at thirty, and no single choice ever finished the question off. I have made this mistake more than once, spending weeks agonizing over one offer when the offer itself was never really the point.

The twelve are not twelve separate itches pulling in random directions. Grouped by what each one is actually asking, they settle into six clusters that build on each other in order.

Questions one and two are the North Star, the reason I exist and who I am becoming. Question three is Identity, where that reason meets a life lived between worlds. Question four is the Compass, the thing that tells signal from noise once direction is set.

Then comes Craft, questions five through eight, where the actual work happens. It quietly follows the shape of a project: finding the real question, committing to a direction, shaping it for others, starting over once it has, at least partly, failed.

Fuel is questions nine and ten, what keeps craft from running out of gas, money on one side and daily practice on the other. And Communion, questions eleven and twelve, is where all of it eventually has to land. What is owed, and who it is owed to. None of it means much if nobody is around to share it with.

A written list of questions becomes a filter. Something read, a conversation had, something noticed in the world, all of it can be tested against the list to see if it offers a new angle or a small piece of an answer. Curiosity gets a direction this way, without getting narrowed. There is no commitment to a single project or a single answer, only to a handful of long running inquiries that can absorb new information over months or years.

A list like this ends up being deeply personal, closer to a self portrait than a to do list. It used to look like a lack of focus. Now I can see each pull of interest is a question asking to be tested again.

Where This Practice Came From

The practice traces to Feynman’s own advice, though Feynman does not appear to have left behind a single definitive written list of his own twelve questions. What has been passed down is the advice itself, most durably through Rota’s recollection of it. In more recent years the practice has been popularized further by writers such as Tiago Forte, whose work on personal knowledge management helped turn a piece of oral advice into a repeatable practice.

Intellectual Honesty Note. The twelve favorite problems is a piece of inherited advice rather than a documented method with a fixed procedure. The six clusters, North Star, Identity, Compass, Craft, Fuel, and Communion, along with the reading of Craft as a hidden project lifecycle, are my own construction as well, fitted to this particular twelve rather than inherited from any source. The image running through this piece, of a question arriving as something small with wings and being let in rather than turned away, is my own construction as well, built for this particular telling rather than lifted from any one source.

The twelve are still at the table as this is being written, tea long gone cold, remaining sugar cubes stacked in a small uneven pile at the center, in no hurry to leave. That was always the point of letting them in.

References

Forte, T. (2022). Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize your Digital Life and Unlock your Creative Potential. Simon and Schuster.

Rota, G. C. (2008). Indiscrete Thoughts. Springer Science and Business Media.