It feels like problem selection is more important than ever before, yet as hard as ever. Choosing what to do and what not to do, choosing what influences to allow and what to disallow; a recurring act that is tremendously difficult to do well right now.

“In every discipline, you find people who have good taste in problems. They work on things that are important, with great opportunities, that have tremendous impact. That’s treated as a rare trait,” said Fischbach. “But I wondered: How could you teach this to someone who didn’t know how to start?”

How to pick – and solve – the next great problem | Stanford University School of Engineering ↗