People think of these eureka moments and my feeling is that they tend to be little things, a little realisation and then a little realisation built on that.
And these little things may not seem like much but after a while they take you off on a direction where you may be a long way off from what other people have been thinking about.
Well, I don't know if I can comment on Kant or Hegel because I'm no real philosopher in the sense of knowing what these people have said in any detail so let me not comment on that too much.