This one resonates
Ok, a lot of the previously posted link resonates.
If you want to think new thoughts that are different, then do what a lot of creative people do - get the problem reasonably clear and then refuse to look at any answers until you’ve thought the problem through carefully how you would do it, how you could slightly change the problem to be the correct one.
I think about this as it applies to my programming experience, as recently as the SudokuSolver.
I started writing a Sudoku Solver in java, based on Sheepcow’s suggestion that a sudoku problem should be logically solvable. I came up with the problem and started writing a couple classes with all of the logic built into them. All I needed to do was write a frontend of some sort of another to test it.
Then I hit google on a whim, and found about 2 dozen sudoku solvers, mostly java applets. And just like that, because I had looked briefly for an answer, I lost interest in finishing the solution I was working on, totally abandoning it.
It’s so easy to fall into the solved-problem trap. If the problem is already solved, approximately, then it feels like there’s no point in solving it again. But that’s something of a fallacy. While there’s probably no fame in solving a solved problem, that doesn’t mean there’s no value in reexamining it. Further, in the context of not yet being an expert at the edge of the field, finishing that would have served as a good learning experience, not to mention good practice.
I’m thinking about my life right now. As a sysadmin, I’m not on the cutting edge of anything. I’m essentially a really good user, inasmuch as I’m not developing anything, not making anything new. I mean, besides random shellscripts, that is. Will I be happy with that in 10 years? 20? When I’m too old and too embedded to change the path I’m on?
Maybe I’m in the wrong place. Maybe I chose the place I’m in right now because it came easily, because it let me have my life of relative leisure. Is my job the avatar of that insidious foe, complacence, grasping at the core of my being, lulling me into a position where I can’t or won’t create?