During graduate school, my advisor had a structured way to approach our work together. We’d pick a bite-sized problem to start with. If we could make progress there, we’d apply our learnings to a bigger piece of the problem.

The lessons I learned from applying this approach continue to help me focus my work. Starting small is a key strategy for accomplishing big things.

His approach was a variation on the idiom “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” Unlike the idiom however, we didn’t really know which direction to head in. The problem we started with would set us down a path, and we could reach somewhere far away if we just kept walking long enough.

The key lesson was not about imagining the destination and then trying to work towards it. It wasn’t always clear whether we were going on an afternoon stroll, or that thousand-mile journey. But we started from an interesting spot – a problem which seemed worth solving – to see where it took us.

Sometimes this approach would run into standard challenges. During my PhD I learned to recognize and react to them. The two main categories were how to make the problem smaller if you’re stuck, and how to make the problem bigger when you’re done.

When starting to work with a problem, we guessed what the solution would be. In my field that meant generating equations and algorithms that would answer specific questions. We would have a set of factors and were interested in how those factors should be combined to get the answer.

If you have too many factors, it can be hard to do the math. So we always tried to start small. If you were still overwhelmed, the lesson was “don’t worry, just make it smaller.”