(but you always end up cooking alone.)

First find a great idea. Then, maybe by accident, drop it on the floor (make sure the floor is clean before doing so). It will shatter and you will need to sweep up the fragments. Know pick out a piece and take a long look. Study it in all its details. This ritual is quite like most undergraduate courses in maths. It´s not a frill, learning in this manner, but you were told that this is part of the"fine idea", so maybe you should just sweet it out? You lazy bum!
In truth though, its more motivating to solve problems we stumble on, trying to throw a rock at our enemies; this is what fires up our curiosity. In a metaphoric sense; if knowledge was some kind of nasty jagged mountain, while climbing it we´d prefer not to know what all the views are like before hand. Good climbers want tracks where there is no guide. Make their Own way to the top! (However, If you wanna rock’n roll, it’s a long way to the top). But of course, once at the top of knowledge, it´s a bit hard to get down. Ending, therefore, the coherence of this silly metaphor.
Dealing with fragments you see the end standing at the beginning, and then... it just seems pointless. Sure some “stuff” needs to be broken up sometimes, but then you should only look at the pieces when your gluing it back together.