some problems are uncrackable.

they’re the ones you can’t quite figure a good way around. whiteboard sessions with teammates, conversations with interested parties, one-on-ones with managers, and meetings with mentors—they don’t seem to get you any closer to an answer.

with incomplete data, you sit down to wrestle with the problem some more, and—right when you think you’ve cracked it—you realize everything you’ve done to this point has been wrong.

you go back to the drawing board and try it all again. and again. and still there’s no breakthrough.

so you do it all over again knowing this time will be different because some problems are uncrackable, but not all problems.