posted about 3 weeks ago
Your PhD doesn't need to be a single question.
It can be a series of related problems which overall form a body of work in a specific area.
For example, I started out by taking on ideas from my supervisor and then expanding them as I did the work and saw other opportunities. By the end I was making up my own ideas and implementing them.
This method is much less risky than looking for a single massive question to work on and you get lots of smaller wins along the way. It could allow you to quickly implement some very narrow and specific ideas of your su-pervisor before gradually moving on to take over yourself.
You could perhaps adopt this method.