My favorite part is from Ed Witten, a leading theoretical physicist, and also a Fields’ Medalist, who replied:
“There isn’t a clear task. If you are a researcher you are trying to figure out what the question is as well as what the answer is.
You want to find the question that is sufficiently easy that you might be able to answer it, and sufficiently hard that the answer is interesting. You spend a lot of time thinking and you spend a lot of time floundering around.”