How to Solve Big Problems

Drawing on Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Emperor of All Maladies, Clear tells how Sidney Farber — the "father of modern chemotherapy" — broke open cancer research by stopping the search for a universal cure and focusing exclusively on leukemia, with the resulting drugs and methods later generalizing across other cancers. He maps this small-to-large pattern onto Amazon (books first, then everything), creativity (take one great photo of a chair before becoming a great photographer), exercise (master one push-up), and nutrition (eat one vegetable today). The piece ends with the personal note that Clear's own sister was saved by the leukemia drugs Farber discovered.