Problem-Solving Is the Easy Part

Find first. Then solve.

Problem-solving is one of the things humanity is best at. We have the scientific method. We have decades of methodology, training, courses, and frameworks. So why do so many smart people spend years working on things that don’t really matter?

Because finding the right problem is a different skill, and we don’t teach it.

Problem-finding is the art of identifying where your problem-solving skills will actually move something. The sweet spot is the overlap between two things: problems worth solving, and problems you’re particularly suited to solve. Miss either side and you can spend years executing well on the wrong target.

The harder thing is that there’s no agreed methodology for problem-finding. It’s a blind spot in most engineering and business education. The result is years of effort spent on things that, in the larger picture, barely moved the needle.

The default advice is “do what you know.” For early-career folks, this misfires for two reasons. The problems you can see in your immediate surroundings tend to be too personal to help many people, or the potential upside is too small to make them worth a multi-year bet. Meanwhile, the world’s biggest problems usually aren’t hidden, exactly. They’re sitting in plain sight, getting walked past every day.

A lot of important problems stay unsolved not because they’re too hard, but because people have stopped noticing them. They gave up. Or they accepted the situation as a fact of life and started routing around it. The hardest problems to see, sometimes, are the ones the people most affected have made peace with.

Every complex system has these. Healthcare. Education. Supply chains. Authorization. Any of them. Spotting the gaps takes a rare combination: enough exposure to know how the system actually works, plus enough distance to see what other people inside it have stopped questioning.

If you’re early in your career and trying to find that combination, the practical move is to embed yourself in something. Any industry will do, as long as you approach it with real curiosity. Learn the ropes. Do the work yourself. Feel the pain points firsthand. Stay observant about the inefficiencies that everyone around you has agreed to ignore. Keep branching out. Zoom out until you can see the whole system, not just your corner.

Most of the problems you’ll find at the start are small. That’s fine. The bigger insight, when it shows up, is that the individual problems aren’t the problem. The fact that they keep needing to be solved is.

The best problem to work on is the largest one you can actually tackle. The trick is that you can’t get to “tackle” until you’ve already done the work to find it. And before someone goes looking, they have to care enough to start.

If you find yourself frustrated by inefficiencies, overwhelmed by bureaucracy, or baffled that something obvious hasn’t been fixed, that’s the signal. You might have just found your problem.

Now go solve it.