What is the fallback result?

• The most ambitious dream
• The smallest real result
• The longest chapter

What should you turn a broad interest into?

• One question answerable either way, with a stated scope
• A longer list of interests
• A promise of a breakthrough

Most year-long projects fail on difficulty rather than scope.

The ambitious part fails. What saves the year?

• The smallest result stands alone
• A new ambitious part invented in panic
• A longer introduction

Apply the lesson: which is a well-narrowed question?

• Whether recommenders will ever be perfect
• Everything about ranking, everywhere, forever
• Whether one ranking change lifts one measure on one dataset in a year

A reader cannot find your claim. What went wrong?

• The claim was too true to state
• Not structured for a stranger
• Readers should have been there

A plan lists the ambitious goal with no fallback. What is missing?

• The smallest result worth writing and what it depends on
• More ambition and more adjectives
• A promise that nothing will fail

Two candidate questions: one answerable either way in a year, one huge and open-ended. Which do you pick, and why?

• The huge one: bigger is always better
• Neither: questions do not matter
• The first: both answers count