Standing on the shoulders of giants

With the knowledge of humanity expanding at an ever increasing pace it is safe to assume that you know only a fraction of what is possible to know, even within a very specific field. With ever increasing access to information and knowledge created and shared by others there are two key aspects I think are worth while to remember in a world where there is an abundance of knowledge.

Recognize what you got for free

Few things are nicer than a humble mindset, and as for any virtue it takes practice. There are many words written about nurturing a team culture that can do the (almost) impossible, and we do love stories about heroes. As we learn from many stories about heroes they are frequently about teams or persons who saw something in a new way and learned from it, or faced opposition and used it to become better, few things are as powerful for enabling learning as humbleness.

In reality most work requires many fundamental pieces in a giant puzzle, which of those pieces can you adopt easily at low cost and what do you need to invent internally, and at what cost? In any complex puzzle laying the last few pieces is the easy part, getting the first clusters of pieces right is much more demanding. In any well designed product you are likely to reuse thousands of well known technologies or patterns and only very small amounts of what you are adding is something that is truly unique.

Keep focus

Being honest with what is well known and separate it from what generates value allows you to keep focus, if you digress from that focus there must be something of higher value for your effort to be worth while. If you spend effort on something that is widely well established within your field you will most likely not get a high leverage from your spending. At any point you need to look at what you are doing and evaluate if your competition can do something similar easily, if you can benefit from copying/using something that is widely available or if you can innovate to gain advantage.

Enjoy this clip from Life of Brian on the theme: