Somewhere along the way, I started to think about how I can be the best tool.
Nowadays everyone is pushing engineers to become an expert tool, someone that can leverage ML, Altium, whatever specific tool you need for the job.
However, foundationally, why engineering exists separately to physics is because we solve REAL problems. It came about when people started extracting general principles from the various real problems they solved.
Furthermore, with the past solutions, you are only able to solve the past problems to a certain extent. Understanding the patterns of thought used to solve problems is meaningful, but memorizing solutions will only help you solve problems that we know how to solve.
Using our current understanding of the world, we may only be able to comprehend a certain subset of problems; instead of finding the bigger problem, we may just be treating its symptoms.
I’m not an expert in biology, but imagine if someone were bleeding from his hand all the time. As a 5-year-old kid, you’ll say put a band-aid on it because that’s all you know, blood = band-aid. However, you need to go beyond the accepted solution of a band-aid and think about why his hand is bleeding all the time to figure out that he has some disease and then cure it.
Newton didn’t invent/find calculus because he wanted to be an expert in the math field (tool), but because he needed to follow the trajectory of the moon. Calculus was then generalized to solve many problems other problem but there is a limit to everything (pun), and if we want to keep moving past our conceived limits, there needs to be people who can build on top of accepted ideas and go beyond.
I hope I’m trying to do this, but it’s harder than it looks, and maybe I’m fully wrong about everything, and I still think I lack true conviction. I’m always looking for excuses, and I always quit my projects, but things are definitely going to change.
