You have to have some kind of a drive, some kind of a desire to find out the answer, a desire to find out what makes things tick. If you don’t have that, you may have all the training and intelligence in the world, but you won’t have questions and you won’t just find answers.

[Have a sense of dissatisfaction]. By this I don’t mean a pessimistic dissatisfaction of the world, you don’t like the way things are. I mean a constructive dissatisfaction, you think it’s okay but it could be done better.

Eliminate everything from the problem except the essentials. Almost every problem that you come across is befuddled with all kinds of extraneous data. If you can bring it into the main issues, you can see more clearly what you’re trying to do and perhaps find a solution.

If you have experience, you may know of a similar problem which have already been solved. All you need to do is find the analogy in order to get back to the solution of the given problem. This is the reason why experience in a field is so important.

Restate the problem in just as many different forms as you can. Change the words. Change the viewpoint. Look at it from every possible angle. Then, you can look at it from several angles and perhaps get an insight into the real basic issues of the problem.

The minute you’ve found an answer to something, the next thing to do is to ask yourself if you can generalize it anymore. Can you apply the same principle in more general ways?

What you can try to do is to break down the jump into a large number of small jumps. After you’ve got something you can get a grip on, you can start cutting out components you didn’t need in the first place.

Assume that the solution was the problem. Then you will find it is relatively easy to solve the problem in that direction. You’ll find a fairly direct route.

[You must get] pleasure in seeing methods of arriving at results needed. If I’ve been trying to prove a mathematical theorem for a week and I finally find the solution, I get a big bang out of it.

You should probably have an extremely strong drive to want to find out the answers, so strong a drive that you don’t care whether it is 5pm, you’re willing to work all night to find out the answers, and all weekend if necessary.