Here's something cool I thought you might like.

Outside CIA headquarters sits a sculpture called Kryptos. It's covered in encrypted text and has become one of the most famous unsolved puzzles in the world. Three of its four sections have been cracked. The fourth, known as K4, resisted professional cryptographers, intelligence officers, mathematicians, and hobbyists for more than 35 years.

That's interesting enough on its own. But the part I love is about the first person to solve the earlier sections.

In 1999, computer scientist Jim Gillogly publicly announced solutions to the first three sections using computer analysis. It was a big deal — the puzzle had sat unsolved for nearly a decade. Then the CIA quietly revealed something surprising. One of their own analysts, David Stein, had already solved those same sections the year before.

By hand.

No powerful computers. No internet forums. No publicity. No bonus in his paycheck. Just pencil, paper, and persistence.

We tend to assume every hard problem gets solved by bigger technology, bigger teams, or bigger budgets. Sometimes it's just a person at a desk, patiently working through something because they find it interesting.

Stein wasn't trying to get famous. No one even knew he'd done it — the CIA classified his work. He wasn't building an audience. He wasn't selling a course on cryptography.

He simply enjoyed the puzzle.

There's something refreshing about that. A guy doing his craft because he loved the craft.

Happy running!

George