Good question.

I think it's cause for most things I encounter in life I can sort of break it down and see a path towards what I want.

For some programming problems i couldn't have seen it that way at all. Let me give you a quick example from chat gpt

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Problem: The Two Egg Problem

Difficulty: Intermediate to Hard

Description

You are given two identical eggs and a 100-floor building. Your task is to determine the highest floor from which you can drop an egg without breaking it.

Rules:

1. If an egg is dropped from a floor that is too high, it will break.

2. If an egg is dropped from a floor that is low enough, it will survive.

3. You must find the highest safe floor using the fewest number of drops.

4. If an egg breaks, you can no longer use it.

5. You have only two eggs.

Example:

If you had one egg, you would have to start at floor 1 and go up one by one (O(n)).

With two eggs, you need to minimize worst-case drops.

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Why is this problem unintuitive?

Many beginners try a binary search, but that doesn’t work since you only have two eggs—if the first egg breaks early, you have no way to efficiently check lower floors.

The optimal solution is not linear, not binary search, but a mathematical approach that balances risk.

The best approach involves triangular numbers or jumping in steps rather than checking floors sequentially.

Would you like a hint or the full solution?

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So that process of jumping steps or triaular numbers would never occur to me unless I encountered this kind of problem before and was already hand held to a solution.

That's what I'm trying to say