I think the point of the story may be that you can't wait for the hard problems to come to you. You have to go and look for them. Ashton waited at the furniture company hoping that one day he would be presented with a problem that would gain him recognition. After years of waiting, he decided he couldn't wait any longer and went to San Francisco to FIND a problem that would get him the recognition he wanted.
You nailed it. I was going to say 'if your work doesn't challenge you, you need to find a new job' or 'don't let your job stand in the way of your development'
It's interesting how people came up with different interpretations or 'take home points.' This thread has made me think about the essence of storytelling. I guess it's like
- people always do things for reasons
- when people do strange things, we tell stories about it
- the stories are interesting because we must reconcile the strangeness with the motivation (ie. its interesting because the motivation is not immediately obvious but we know it must be there unless the subject was insane)
- the job of fiction is to imagine new 'interesting' cases; the difficulty is keeping it 'true.' The author doesn't have the luxury of relating what did happen, he/she has to project what would happen, sort of like a machine plugging endless variables into an equation until an unusual/unexpected (but still valid) result crops up
Someone could teach a high school English class with Joel's SO post
