Clearing out the easy parts helps to focus on what remains. Solving easier versions of the hard parts prepares the tools and intuition to overcome what couldn’t be confronted immediately. Experience with similar problems allows to navigate the many formulations of the problem that are importantly different from each other in ways that wouldn’t be apparent from the outset.
Yes, that is a good heuristic too, though I feel like one that does not conflict at all with the one proposed in the OP. Seem to me like they are complementary.
I think Richard Hamming would say something like “Identify the important problems of your field and then tackle those and make sure that you can actually solve them. It wouldn’t do any good thinking about the most important problems all the time that you then cannot solve.” This also seems to not contradict the OP and seems to be a technique that can be combined with the one in the OP.
Clearing out the easy parts helps to focus on what remains. Solving easier versions of the hard parts prepares the tools and intuition to overcome what couldn’t be confronted immediately. Experience with similar problems allows to navigate the many formulations of the problem that are importantly different from each other in ways that wouldn’t be apparent from the outset.
(In the spirit of balancing any advice with some advice in the opposite direction. Also, it’s not the consequence that makes a problem important, it is that you have a reasonable attack.)
Yes, that is a good heuristic too, though I feel like one that does not conflict at all with the one proposed in the OP. Seem to me like they are complementary.
I think Richard Hamming would say something like “Identify the important problems of your field and then tackle those and make sure that you can actually solve them. It wouldn’t do any good thinking about the most important problems all the time that you then cannot solve.” This also seems to not contradict the OP and seems to be a technique that can be combined with the one in the OP.