physics taught me that, very often, the way you look at a problem determines how easy or hard it will be to think about it and solve it. When doing physics assignments, I would often spend about 3/4 of the time manipulating the problem statement to find a formulation that made its subsequent resolution straightforward. Very often the calculation ended up being trivial compared to what it would have been using a different representation. I challenged myself to make my weekly writeup fit comfortably on a single sheet of paper without cutting out detail, and I often succeeded.
