"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." ~ G.B. Shaw

To make progress, you have to keep the optimism of a neophyte.

When going about the unreasonable, I tend to ask myself 3 questions:

1. Has this area recently been unlocked by progress elsewhere? e.g. ML with cheap GPUs

2. Have I built skills that make me uniquely suited to tackle this?

3. Is this problem relatively unsexy? Everyone wants to build a better javascript framework, no one wants to wear the pager.

I find the most promising areas to be unlocked when I can answer yes to all three things.