Meno asks Socrates (Plato 385 BC): > And how will you enquire, Socrates, into that which you do not know? What will you put forth as the subject of enquiry? And if you find what you want, how will you ever know that this is the thing which you did not know? Socrates rephrases the question, which has come to be the canonical statement of Meno's paradox or the paradox of inquiry: > Man cannot enquire either about that which he knows, or about that which he does not know; for if he knows, he has no need to enquire; and if not, he cannot; for he does not know the very subject about which he is to enquire. You cannot find what you're looking for and nothing else. Otherwise it would mean you already knew what you were looking for and wouldn't have been looking for it in the first place. The only way to find out if something is worth reading is by reading it. (Ahrens 2017) You cannot predict the future, therefore the only way to figure out something is worth doing is by doing it. You can speed up the discovery process with prototyping, which is the construction of toy models of what you want to find out as a proxy to understand if something is worth pursuing. It isn't the thing itself, but a decent enough proxy for decision making. For instance, while the only way to find out if a book is worth reading is by reading it, you can prototype what it's like reading a book by: 1. Pick extracts at random to see if the way the author writes resonates with you 2. Skim the book (read the table of contents, the introduction and the first sentences of each paragraph of the book) 3. Read the first chapter and allow yourself to discard it if you find out it's not worth your time after all