The problem still waiting in Qena

In Qena, as in most towns, the young people who want to start something tend to start the same few things. Another page selling clothes. Another shop for phone accessories. Another courier for the same streets.

Each of these looks easy, and that is the warning. If a problem were genuine and also simple, someone would have solved it already, and usually someone has, several times over. What looks like an opening is mostly a crowd that has not yet noticed itself.

Meanwhile, in the villages around the town, a farmer whose irrigation pump breaks in the heat can wait days for the right part. It comes from Cairo, or from someone who knows someone, and every day it does not arrive his crop suffers. Everyone knows about this. Nobody has fixed it, because fixing it is hard. It needs knowing the machines, knowing the farmers, keeping stock that might sit for months, driving out at the wrong hour on bad roads, and being trusted by men who have been let down before.

That difficulty is exactly why it is still there. Hard problems are not solved by the many people looking for something quick. They wait, sometimes for years, until one person turns up who understands the problem properly and is prepared to stay with it.

It is tempting to read difficulty as a sign to look elsewhere. Most of us are taught to. But the hard problem has two things the easy one lacks: it is real, and nobody else is working on it.

Going looking for the difficult problem, and then committing to it, is not choosing the harder road. It is choosing the only road with room on it.