There's a really good NPR podcast about this very kind of thing, where there's a guy who's been hunting down a particular "musical tone" for more than a decade, and it talks both about how hard it is to be the kind of person that needs those answers, the process of arriving at an answer (including many, many false starts and red herrings), and the satisfaction that comes from figuring it out.

I don't want to spoil it, but the tremendous tragedy/irony is that a certain class of people within the IT industry could have answered the guy's question (or at least put him definitively on the right track) after hearing it just one time, which I think is actually a really important lesson to fully internalize: whatever thing that's been haunting/daunting you, if you get lucky enough to just mention it in front of that one right person you'll be immediately closer to an answer than if you spent literally ten years chasing it without their insight.

I'm not a huge podcast (or any audio/visual media) advocate, but this one is worth listening to if you're stuck in the car or something:

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/516/stuck-in-the-middle/act...