One of the most difficult things is to find the right problem to solve — a problem that matters, whose solution will have momentous impact, a problem you’re passionate about, and one that demands a particular skillset right at the edge of your capability (a true challenge). When all of these combine in one, to me, that’s when a person has found her North Star.

Finding this North Star, before anything else, is a search problem. It’s a search problem in the same way as finding the right partner, cofounder, talent, job, and so on. In our lives, more often than not, these things happen by accident; we don’t really look for them. You might meet your cofounder at university, your spouse at a library, a friend for life at a coffee shop. Most of these encounters aren’t planned. They just happen. Pasteur said chance favors the prepared mind, but he never said how long you’d have to wait.

Search problems are particularly hard to solve. One reason is simply that the search space is too big. One could spend an entire lifetime finding the right hire. Mathematicians came up with a theory, more of a pseudo-solution, that they call the secretary problem: observe the first 37% of your options, then commit to the next one that beats everything you’ve seen so far. My disagreement is that we usually find ourselves having to decide in limited time (less than what’s recommended), without the leverage to traverse the search space in the time we’re given. And it doesn’t account for the emotions involved in these decisions (relationships, for instance).

I genuinely feel this is one of the hardest, most impactful problems to solve. I don’t know how to solve it, yet.