Locating Valuable Problems
The bottleneck isn't intelligence. For most people, most of the time, it's what they aim their intelligence at.
“A successful person isn’t necessarily better than her less successful peers at solving problems; her pattern-recognition facilities have just learned what problems are worth solving.” — Ray Kurzweil
The bottleneck isn’t intelligence. For most people, most of the time, it’s what they aim their intelligence at.
Attention is finite. As Herbert Simon observed, “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” What you attend to gets worked on. What you don’t, doesn’t. This makes choosing your problems the highest-leverage cognitive act available to you — more important than how hard you work on any individual one.
What makes a problem worth solving?
Not all problems are equal. The ones worth your finite attention tend to share a few properties.
They scale. Some problems, when solved, produce compounding returns. Building a network is the clearest case — relationships and reputation accumulate, and each new connection increases the value of the ones you already have. You solve the problem once. The returns keep arriving.
They potentiate. Some problems, when solved, make every other problem easier. Health and fitness are the obvious example. Energy, focus, emotional stability, confidence — these are not separate problems. They are downstream of one. Fix the physical foundation and you raise the ceiling on everything built on top of it.
They can be leveraged in multiple ways. Money is the clearest example — not a goal but a tool with broad optionality. The same applies to certain skills: writing, communication, and clear thinking each open many doors rather than one. Solving for these gives you a resource you can redeploy across domains.
They position you for serendipity. Some problems don’t have direct, predictable payoffs — but solving them puts you in the path of luck. Building a public presence, developing a reputation, putting work into the world — none of these guarantee any specific outcome, but they expand the surface area across which good things can happen.
Everything you want is already a problem
Whatever you want — more money, better relationships, a stronger body, a clearer mind — is already, in cognitive terms, a problem your brain is working on. The question is whether you’ve given it the right problems to work on.
Most people haven’t. Cognitive energy drains into low-stakes distractions — passive scrolling, status anxiety, the trivial obligations that always seem urgent — and then there is surprise when the bigger things don’t move. The brain is doing its job. It just got handed the wrong brief.
This is part of why contemplative practices — meditation among them — appear consistently in the lives of people operating at a high level. Fewer active problems means more resources per problem. The signal gets louder when the noise is reduced. There is more to say on this, and I will.
The work is upstream of execution. Before the question of how to solve something comes the question of whether it’s worth solving at all. Get that right, and the rest has a chance.