There are a lot of problems with the world today. There have been, are, and always will be problems with the world; this is unavoidable. By nature, humans are emotional at the core, which severely inhibits our decision making, and leads us to make poor choices.

The question is, how can we make the world a better place? By ‘make the world a better place’, I simply mean improve every aspect of life. This can mean things like:

• Less war.
• Higher standards of living.
• More environmentally friendly practices.
• More caring and supportive communities.
• etc.

The only way to make the world a better place is to consciously analyze a situation, think of ways to improve the situation, and then make the necessary changes to improve the situation.

Now, let’s say that the situation you consciously think about and plan on improving is large and generic, something like ‘make my neighborhood nicer’. There is not a direct path to making your neighborhood nicer, so you’ll need to break the situation into smaller, sub-situations which are more easily managed.

For instance, to make your neighborhood nicer, you could:

• Increase the average income of residents of your community.
• Provide better education for community members.
• Have better support programs to help residents.
• Re-pave the roads.
• Re-model buildings.

And for any one of those sub-problems, you can break it down further. Let’s say we decide to re-pave the roads, this could be accomplished by:

• Raising taxes to get more money for road paving.
• Paving the roads yourself.
• Raising donated monies for road paving.
• Elect new city counsel members who pledge to pave the roads.
• Run for city counsel yourself, and make sure that the roads are paved.
• etc.

This logical mentality of analyzing a problem, breaking it into smaller problems, and then solving the most minimal problem is a typical trait of a hacker. That is what hackers do. They solve problems, step-by-step.

Our society needs more hackers. We need more people who will consciously look for problems, break them into smaller components, and then solve each component.

Imagine if an entire city of 10,000 people all consciously decided to look for ways to make their community a nicer place. With 10,000 individuals, each tackling a small problem, big things would begin to happen very quickly.

The problem with our world is that there are very few hackers. Most people do not like solving problems, and prefer to let others solve problems for them. I think this is a mistake.

The next time you see a problem, think of ways to break it into smaller pieces, and then think of ways to solve each piece. Anything can be achieved by simply putting conscious thought into it, and when enough people begin to analyze their surroundings, and actively participate in their community, amazing things happen.