you don't need to be genius level smart to succeed in life. you just need to have good taste in the problems you want to solve. this taste develops from repeatedly picking low hanging fruit that might become leverage points for bigger opportunities. you see this pattern everywhere you look but it's especially clear in mathematical breakthroughts. when wiles cracked fermat's last theorem he didn't dive headfirst into the main problem but he had the taste to see that taniyama-shimura was the real leverage point. when perelman cracked the poincaré conjecture he saw that ricci flow was the backdoor in. these are examples of taste, of knowing which smaller problems will unlock the bigger ones.
you don't need to be genius level smart to succeed in life. you just need to have good taste in the problems you want to solve. this taste develops from repeatedly picking low hanging fruit that might become leverage points for bigger opportunities. you see this pattern everywhere you look but it's especially clear in mathematical breakthroughts. when wiles cracked fermat's last theorem he didn't dive headfirst into the main problem but he had the taste to see that taniyama-shimura was the real leverage point. when perelman cracked the poincaré conjecture he saw that ricci flow was the backdoor in. these are examples of taste, of knowing which smaller problems will unlock the bigger ones.
I think of finding high-leverage work as having two interrelated components:
- Agency: i.e. some combination of the initiative/proactiveness to try to make things happen, and relentlessness and resourcefulness to make sure you’ll succeed.
- Taste: you need a good intuition for what things will and won’t work well to try. Taste is important both “in the
Ben Kuhn • Impact, agency, and taste
The best people in both groups spend a lot of time reflecting on some version of the Hamming question—"what are the most important problems in your field, and why aren’t you working on them?” In general, no one reflects on this question enough, but the best people do it the most, and have the best ‘problem taste’, which is some combination of learn... See more