This might also be of interest: https://karpathy.github.io/2016/09/07/phd/
If you asked a bunch of researchers working on the “boring” stuff to predict what the hot papers of the year will be about, do we really think they’ll be that far off base? I’m not talking about groundbreaking or truly novel ideas that seem to come out of nowhere, but rather the high impact research that’s more typical of a field.
Even in big tech companies, it’s quite obvious what the interesting stuff to work on is. But there are limited spots and many more people who want those spots than are available.
There are a few kinds of important research. One is solving a well-defined, well-known problem everyone wants to solve but nobody knows how. Another is proposing a new problem, or a new formulation of it, that people didn't realize was important.
There is also highly-cited research that isn't necessarily important, such as being the next paper to slightly lower a benchmark through some tweaks (you get cited by all the subsequent papers that slightly lower the benchmark even further).
In a way, it was a sidetrack of the book, but for me the attitude speaking from that text was interesting and inspiring. When I could pull it off, it tended to work.
How does one approach collaborators in this situation? Like, hey, I have this idea that solves the problem you have been trying to solve in a fundamentally different way that invalidates all the legacy approaches you have invested in, BTW. My emails that follow this spirit tend to get ghosted.