drwex | How do I teach this kind of skill?

I'm feeling sort of pleased with myself for coming up with an answer to a problem at work. The challenge? How do I teach this kind of thinking to anyone, particularly my kids.

At work there was a massive fire drill this morning. It could have cost us a LOT of money; the assignment for the tech folks was "Help! How bad is it?" Determining how bad it was in the end involved processing a lot of log/text files to extract the key information. Several of us were attacking different aspects of the problem. In the end, I got to a solution before someone whose day job it is to munge these kinds of things.

I got there faster not because I'm a command-line whiz kid (I'm not, he is) but because I was able to understand that the problem was, essentially, do a set difference on those two lists. I then Googled "linux command line set diff" and sure enough there's a way to do that. When I explained my solution to the tech whiz he agreed it was a good solution, but noted he never would have conceived of the problem as "find the set difference."

I don't think I'm all that much brighter than anyone else, nor am I especially creative. But I am good at this: seeing problems, analyzing them quickly, recognizing patterns, and getting rapidly to solutions. Except I haven't the foggiest idea how I do it, how I learned to do it, or how I would go about teaching that kind of skill.

Comments, thoughts, share-your-own-story all welcome.