Re-inventing the wheel is not such a bad thing because the wheel is worth re-inventing..
- Gayatri Spivak
One of those things that make you smile.
When I started off as a conceptualizer, quite a few people told me that I need to spend less time on common problems as sometimes hundreds or perhaps even thousands of people have already worked on it. Why do you want to re-invent the wheel? I was often asked.
It made sense on some level, because I was young and raw and what I needed to do was to first and foremost create things. I spent too much time on just thinking about problems at different levels.
But somehow, I still secretly liked to think of problems that everyone claims to have solved.
You see, maybe there is something better than the wheel. Maglevs for instance.
You cant limit human imagination. Trying to re-invent is an interesting mental exercise. First in trying to break your mental modals of what your familiar with and second in having the courage that you can crack a problem that thousands of people will quite likely resist because they may not be willing to break their mental modals. Its like a battle against all odds.
And like Spivak says, perhaps it is a worthy problem to plod with after all.
