Groping Towards the Question

Seth Godin makes the following point in his blog:

Stuck?

It might not be because you can't find the right answer.

It's almost certainly because you're asking the wrong question. 

The more aggressively you redefine the problem, the more likely it is you're going to solve it.

The most successful people I know got that way by ignoring the race to find the elusive, there's-only-one-and-no-one-has-found-it right answer and instead had the guts to look at the infinite landscape of choices and pick a better problem instead.

So, how do we know when it is time to redefine the problem?


Even if one has the "right" question, fortitude will be necessary to answer it.

As a result, the line between necessary commitment and possibly fruitless masochism often isn't clear.

If the boundary was clear, the work wouldn't really be research or art, would it?

For that matter, if the boundary was clear, life wouldn't be life, would it?