I don't know anything about cars. A business is a business, and I think I can learn about cars. I'm not that old, and I think the business principles are the same. ↗
I tried to fit it in with some previous broad conceptual understanding of some part of mathematics that would clarify the particular problem I was thinking about. ↗
Then when I reached college I realized that many people had thought about the problem during the 18th and 19th centuries and so I studied those methods. ↗
There's also a sense of freedom. I was so obsessed by this problem that I was thinking about if all the time - when I woke up in the morning, when I went to sleep at night, and that went on for eight years. ↗
I'm just a landscape painter. I look out the window and I see what's going on, and I paint it. While I'm painting it, I also write thoughts about what I see going on out there. ↗