Comment by JustFinishedBSG

My experience may not be entirely representative because to be entirely honest I’m not exactly a great researcher and there are brilliant PhD students. That said it indeed was my experience that in the pre-PhD / early PhD period ( or even longer … ) your advisor proposes (gives) you pretty low hanging stuff that he mostly already knows how to solve, at least at a high level, with the expectation that it will teach you to use the mathematical tools you need.