My experience with hard problems is that I stare blankly at the problem description for a while, seemingly not thinking of anything much, and then (usually some time later), an idea comes up. It’s a bit concerning, to be honest. It might be that I’m just lazy, and don’t push myself much? Of course, sometimes I do have an internal monologue of “if I do X will Y happen?”, but I don’t think it’s all that helpful, at least not in the early stages of problem solving. Also, I’m mostly talking about programming problems at work, I don’t really play chess, this might not work there, they might just be different kinds of problems.
My experience with hard problems is that I stare blankly at the problem description for a while, seemingly not thinking of anything much, and then (usually some time later), an idea comes up. It’s a bit concerning, to be honest. It might be that I’m just lazy, and don’t push myself much? Of course, sometimes I do have an internal monologue of “if I do X will Y happen?”, but I don’t think it’s all that helpful, at least not in the early stages of problem solving. Also, I’m mostly talking about programming problems at work, I don’t really play chess, this might not work there, they might just be different kinds of problems.