The author writes >This past week I was faced with a difficult problem. A really difficult problem... I kept going and in another hour or two, I was getting e

The author writes >This past week I was faced with a difficult problem. A really difficult problem... I kept going and in another hour or two, I was getting epiphany. I had the solution to my really difficult problem. I am happy that he solved his problem, but was it really that difficult if it could be solved in just a few hours? How long would it take him to solve the most difficult problem in his domain? In my experience it might take as much as a week even to identify the relative difficulty level of hard problems, which tend to be refined, restated in a simplified context, expanded out to boundary cases etc. To me it seems like "just looking at it" is the very first step in a longer process.