Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius.
You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind,
although by and large they will lay in a dormant state.
Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result,
test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps.
Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say:
"How did he do it? He must be a genius!"
Gian-Carlo Rota, 1996 lecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
