> Then learning the answer revealed that it's actually something that can be fixed --- as is always the case with these things if you think about them enough.
The author focuses on the consequent, thinking long and hard about something, but misses the antecedent, acquiring a deep understanding of a problem area.
I'd say the antecedent is as important as the consequent, if not more important. If you went to grad school you likely knew tons of brilliant people who worked long and hard on important and difficult problems and got nowhere. What they were missing was not some secret effortsauce, but that they picked a problem on which they didn't have an opening or insight into, so all their hard work was them spinning their wheels while standing still.
One thing I tell my students now is that they should always pick problems where they have something everybody else working in the same area doesn't. Like if you want to do formal verification but your background is years spent in industry as a kernel developer, you should avoid the temptation to chase the latest fad (e.g., adversarial machine learning or Spectre/Meltdown), and instead pick a poorly understood and validated module in the kernel and try to find out what you can do to make that module more secure.