[dmit]

Only tangentially related, but this article reminded me of Edward Kmett's presentation from YOW! 2014:

https://yow.eventer.com/yow-2014-1222/stop-treading-water-le... (~40min)

(slides: http://yowconference.com.au/slides/yow2014/Kmett-StopTreadin...)

One of the topics he touched upon is Richard Feynman's approach to "being a genius":

  You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems
  constantly present in your mind, although by and large
  they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or
  read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of
  your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once
  in a while there will be a hit, and people will say,
  “How did he do it? He must be a genius!”

[marcosdumay]

As time passes, free time gets rarer, problems get more complex, and it gets harder and harder to keep many open problems on my mind.

What you quoted is probably a genius not aware what limitation is the bottleneck for most people.

[closed]

Something that may be related is that the further you get in an area, the less structured coaching available (through textbooks, academic advisors, etc..). In this sense, a new problem pops up, which is learning to decompose complex problems into simpler pieces. Something that is often done for people in the early stages of learning (and I find super difficult without collaborating with others).

[eli_gottlieb]

>What you quoted is probably a genius not aware what limitation is the bottleneck for most people.

While Ed Kmett is in fact a Time Lord, that's largely because he doesn't seem to require sleep the way the rest of us do.

(I know him IRL.)