I love hiking. There’s a certain joy in the physical grind of climbing and crushing through elevation, weather, bad surface to reach a place on earth that gives me unique views and no one else is around to witness it. The most recent one I did is a really popular one - Angel’s Landing - and I was surprised to find not more than 4 people at the top!
I have recently started thinking of problems to solve as hikes to finish. The summit is the accomplished goal. Doing the hike to get to it is the path to solution you walk.
Some problems are well known and well studied and the solutions are super simple too.
I think of these as low elevation gain hikes that have a well mapped trail you can find on maps. Maybe a national park shuttle even runs along it. The summit is well explored. Lot’s of crowds all along.
Example in education - ability to read and write.
Everyone knows this is important. Kids wouldn't gain the skills to read or write if not put into formal education. Well known low barrier solution - send kids to school to train them on this. Almost all adults know how to read and write because they walked this solution path.Example in lifestyle - eating fruits for vitamins.
Not everyone does it, but of people who care about the problem (getting vitamins) >50% will clearly do this as a first step. It's easily available in a grocery store near you. You're taught in elementary school which fruit gives what vitamin.Example in profession - using Claude for web searches.
Low barrier solution to enhance your ability to get more information quickly.Example in AI - keeping the test set independent of the train set.
Foundational to ensure your model / solution is appropriately benchmarked. Well known well studied easy to implement.Some problems are well known and well studied but the solution is hard.
Think of these as high elevation gain long mileage hard hikes. You’ll still find a map of the solution path but walking it is still actually really hard and takes real endurance, stamina and determination. You won’t find many people at the top and that’s mainly because it’s harder to do it than not. It’s surprising but most problems in life IMO are these and even doing just this is a great way to differentiate as an adult.
Example in education - getting into a great school for undergrad (ex - Standford or IIT Bombay).
It is well known what exactly is needed to actually achieve this. Nevertheless it's hard to do because it takes a lot of focused practice, hard work and determination to actually breakout. The path is crowded at the start but thin at the top, meaning lots of people attempt it but rarely many accomplish.Example in lifestyle - getting fit.
Well known problem and solution - workout everyday, eat healthy, don't drink or smoke. That's it. Hard enough to actually follow on a day-to-day basis, so much so that most people are indeed unhealthy because the hard part is doing it consistently over long periods of time without slipping.Example in profession - upskilling on new technology.
The gains are clear in terms of career growth and expanding your depth or width and yet the median person does not do it.Example in AI - using Skills.
AI users will choose to reopen chats from scratch on repeated workflows instead of invest some of their time in building skills for their repeatable workflows that slows them down in the short term but expands them a lot more in the longer term.Some problems are well known but no one knows a path to solution.
I think of these as summits you can see with you eyes but there is no know trail to reach there. You will highly likely be wandering into the raw forest to find a path for yourself to reach the summit. You have no clue what to expect and what difficulties you might face on the way. You may even find it’s impossible and might need to backtrack multiple times before you advance in any meaningful way. I have rarely seen people even attempt these kinds of problems and hence the reward of achieving or even attempting is a significant differentiator.
Example in education - doing a PhD.
There is no known singular path and your journey is unique. You may not make it or lose stamina mid way. Your funding or motivation might run out midway forcing you to quit.Example in lifestyle - finding happiness.
Known problem, no known reliable path to solution. Any solution is a sample size of 1 and only applicable to you and your circumstances. Not walking it is easy but terrible, like scrolling social media which keeps you safely away from feeling sad at the cost of a noisy dopamine dependent brain that can't hold any meaningful thought. Attempting to walk it can be hard and terrible and bring you face to face with your internal demons which you may not wish to accept, like going to therapy or actually accepting that you are wrong about things in life and wanting to meaningfully change yourself and your thoughts. Reaching the summit is invaluably worthy.Example in profession - founding a startup on a known problem.
YC will each quarter publish a list of ideas and GOATs like Andrej Karpathy will openly share knowledge about what needs to be tackled, so the summit is known. No one actually knows a good path to reach it and attempting it means entering a life of fighting for survival each day.Then of course there are unknown problems, summits which no one has even seen yet but do exist.
Some extremely rare people, probably countable on fingers in the history of humanity, would fathom these problems through the sheer genius of the kind of people they are and have the grit in them to persevere to reach the summit, all in a single lifetime.
Example in education - Albert Einstein.
Rethought what gravitation is by imagining himself accelerating in thought experimented elevators. Hypothesized gravity as geometry, built the mathematical foundation from scratch to be able to translate his thought soup into equations and rest is generally relative history.Example in profession - Steve Jobs.
Imagined a new kind of device with no known demand. Designed it, got it built and Apple is one of the most valuable companies with one of the biggest defensible moats in the history of humanity - edge devices.With this reframe, I feel so much more positively attracted to doing hard work when I know the problem I’m trying to solve is worth it.
As Rachel Entrekin, the legendary winner of Cocodona250 2026, a 250 miler race through the hot Arizona desserts and trails said - ” ‘Hard’ is why I’m doing this. I’m doing runs like Cocodona to see if I like the person I emerge as when things get hard”.
For context, Rachel won the overall race (women+men included) and beat the runner up by a blasphemous 90 minutes!