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You Don't Need to Work on Hard Problems

benkuhn.net

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Ben Kuhn on why chasing intellectual difficulty is a trap - the highest-impact work is often straightforward engineering applied to the right problem.

This reframed how I think about project selection. The 'difficulty' of a problem is a terrible proxy for its value. Some of the highest-impact work I've done was embarrassingly simple.

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marcoexpertExpert·801 rep·3/19/2026

This explains why the best engineering leaders I've worked with weren't the smartest - they were the ones who could identify which simple thing to build next. Taste > intelligence.