Cognitive ability can be redirected from difficulty to problem selection

In school, picking an easy problem wastes your ability — your extra problem-solving capacity goes unused. That's why difficulty-seeking made sense there. But in the real world, the surplus doesn't have to go to waste. You can redirect it.

Redirection	What it looks like
Prioritization	Find the easiest problem whose solution is actually useful
Speed	Solve a simple problem as fast as possible
Multiplication	Build a team or system that solves easy problems faster than you could alone

All three produce more leverage than adding complexity to an unimportant problem. The intelligence doesn't disappear — it just aims at a different, higher-value target.

A trigram classifier to catch fraud in three hours. Closing the books with raw Postgres and janky Bootstrap UI. Neither is a "hard problem." Both mattered more than any custom database would have.

Source claim: The cognitive ability school trains toward difficulty can instead be redirected to problem selection, execution speed, or team-building — often with more impact.