Zooming in and out

I recently returned from Singapore and came across a book by a Singaporean author which I found very enlightening. It is a book about overcoming Maths difficulties. I particularly liked how this author explains the approach required to solve a maths problem.

He mentioned that we need to have the big picture understanding of a topic, as well as the details to logically solve a problem. He liken this to a camera zooming in and out. When we zoom out, that is the big picture view. The details are when we zoom in. Therefore, in order to solve a maths problem, we need to be able to first zoom out to see the big picture, before zooming in to work on the details.

I find this very true, since we need to identify what the topic is (which is the big picture), before we can apply our knowledge to solve the problem (which is the details).