Some problems come to us demanding to be solved, John Psmith notes, like an invading army or a looming bankruptcy:
But others we go hunting for because they are economically or intellectually valuable. Or for sport. An entrepreneur and an academic are both a kind of truffle-pig for good problems, and it pays to develop a nose for them. Eventually you learn to notice its spoor, the rank taste in the air, “a problem has passed by this way, moving downwind, two days ago.” One of the many ways school fails us is by actively harming this capacity, it lies and lies to us for decades, teaching us that good problems will be delivered on a silver platter. This is why so many people who do well in school never amount to anything. They never develop a taste for the hunt, never learn that this, actually, is the most important part of the entire site survey: “is this problem worth solving by anybody?”, “am I uniquely well-positioned to solve it?”, “can I amass the resources to solve it?”, “do I have any chance of success?”, “is there some other problem that it is more valuable for me to solve?” The greatest lie that textbooks teach is that the hard part is coming up with an answer. No, the hard part is usually coming up with a worthwhile question.
“…so many people who do well in school never amount to anything.”
I have the feeling that this is by design.
Oh man, this is not even close.
Worthwhile questions are a dime a dozen.
The hard part is the transmission step: Selling the solution. One must be a shameless self-marketer, and also psychologically sturdy — perhaps even truly aggressive — for this always seems to invite conflict with dour critics, bureaucratic red tape wielders, opportunistic scammers, and the schoolmarmish gatekeepers of the status quo whose first reaction is always “what do you mean you solved that problem? Are you licensed to solve that problem!?”
The world’s most common type of great-problem-solver is the man who languishes in obscurity because he’s a poor self-marketer or don’t have the stomach for conflict or controversy.
This also, in part, explains why high-IQ/high-social-conformity nations seem to punch below their weight, why the best scientists always seem to have a chip on one shoulder, and why the greatest inventors always seem to be the greatest marketers and salesmen.
I wanted to know how Relativity worked. Along the way, I realized that was the wrong question. So I came up with and eventually solved my own question:
“What causes motion?”
https://vixra.org/abs/2509.0012