Why should you work on hard problems?
I personally believe this is a really interesting question to answer. Because if you can convince yourself to work on hard problems without losing the zeal, you can do wonders. It is important because you have the opportunity to change the world.
It is understandable that a lot of people feel intimidated when presented with something hard. If you are already knowledgeable about the problem well enough, that’s called the curse of knowledge. This raises an important question: is it intuitive to learn why a problem is hard? It would start to feel that you want to give yourself reasons not to do it.
I work on hosting databases and it is quite a hard problem to solve, I think. Especially when you want to keep costs as low as possible for your clients while meeting your SLAs.
Initially, when I approached solving the hosting of a database I used to worry myself. And I did it by trying to list all the ways it could break. It may seem like a good approach but boy, it was a sure way to hold yourself back. A lot changed when I changed that approach to focus on hosting them first and iterate from there. Without ever worrying about what makes them “break”. With that attitude, we shipped almost four more databases within three months. I understand that the sunk-cost fallacy is often unproductive but these are the places where it really helps to keep going.
You do not have to blind yourself to the environment completely. Take enough feedback that helps you to see your upcoming challenges so that you can proactively work on them. So I’m still looking for ways to make it work without shutting myself off.
Usually people don’t understand the concept of irreversibility well. Very few things in life are irreversible, like death, time (yet), birth, words spoken to someone (if they don’t lose their memory), etc. You can make sense out of it that many things, although they seem irreversible at first, are quite malleable. Given enough reason and effort, all seemingly irreversible things will start to bend.
I wanted to start with convincing you that you can work on the hard problems. Because once you start doing that and have made some significant progress, a lot of doors open for you. There aren’t many people who are working like that, and if you are one of them you are in luck.
One door that opens is that you start attracting highly talented people. In a way, working on hard problems makes it easy for you to recruit smart people. They are the ones who are looking for a purposeful work environment and you can create a chance for them. If you had worked on unambitious problems, attracting such talent would be really hard.
And besides everything, working on the hard problem is fun. Even if you fail, just looking back at it you would feel so proud of yourself. Another benefit is that you get to learn a boatload of things that I’m pretty sure would be helpful to you in the future. That’s the nature of it: you become very useful to the environment around you.
Have you asked yourself what you could achieve if you could just shut off your inner monologue?