Hard problems seem to crop up whenever you get far enough along doing something. At some point you’re not a beginner any more, you’ve reached the bleeding edge

Hard problems seem to crop up whenever you get far enough along doing something. At some point you’re not a beginner any more, you’ve reached the bleeding edge of whatever your domain is, and hard problems just start presenting themselves and you have to solve them to progress. So I agree with TFA that there is no need to go explicitly looking for them .. just do something well enough and keep progressing for a long time, and the hard problems will come to you. (A canonical example of this might be something like Facebook .. most CS undergrads could easily write the first version of FB, while years later it takes many, many CS PhDs to keep building what FB is now) A corollary is that if you just start on day one with the hardest problem you can think of, solving it is probably not very useful (there are exceptions). The more useful hard problems to solve come up when you’re trying to accomplish something else.