Sometimes the problem isn’t your answer. It’s that you were handed the wrong question.

A great answer to the wrong question is still a dead end, and a particularly convincing one, because the work itself was good. Questions arrive with assumptions already loaded into them, and if you accept the frame you inherit the mistake. Most stuck situations are not failures of effort, they are failures to check what was being asked.

When you are grinding and getting nowhere, step back and interrogate the question itself. Ask what it assumes and who decided the framing. Sometimes the useful move is to answer a different question and explain why.