If you follow your own path, you will later find various areas of overlap and intersection, but you may avoid sinking into the tar-pit as you would when starting out with ALL the dead weight. It takes tremendous effort to load your brain with all the existing knowledge, and once you do, you may find yourself only able to think in terms of it, having conditioned yourself to other people's failed modes of thinking.
Yes, learning by doing is good. But learning by doing involves feedback loops between reading about what others did and trying to do your own. Artists must both learn to appreciate art and keep practicing their own craft.
I'm not saying that you have to learn everything before doing anything. That's a strawman. I'm saying you shouldn't ignore any source of knowledge, that you should look everywhere taking the good and leaving out the bad. And that's a Bruce Lee quote as well.
The concern about contagion is valid; my attitude towards it is that it happens not so much from what you read but who you talk to and the social circles you move in. Keep those diverse and you should be fine.
> The idea that you have to learn everything before doing anything is a strawman.
If you don't learn everything, then you must have some independent criterion with which to pick and choose; and having such a facility, one may as well simply start down whichever path one feels is most appropriate anyway.
In other words, if you can somehow rule out large swaths of possibilities without even trying them, then you must have some intuitive feel for the problem (or at least, have an intuitive feel for what you think the solution is likely to resemble, whether or not you turn out to be correct). In such a case, you are investigating based on your own intimations and your efforts will develop from there, rather than from from a top-down view -- which has so far been amply demonstrated not to work.
Edit: The recommendation to look "everywhere" is untenable, because at some point you have to stop casting about if you are going to get anything done yourself.
I wasn't recommending looking everywhere, I was recommending being open to looking anywhere that catches your fancy.
The thing that is independent/unique about somebody isn't a static criterion that remains unchanging over time, it's more the trajectory you end up taking that's constantly evolving over time. All I'm saying is: don't exclude reading about past failures when you make your choices on what to do next. It's fine to say ok, let's stop reading for a while and try building this one thing my mind has settled on. That's a great habit to acquire.
The unpronounceable author of Flow:
http://www.amazon.com/Flow-Psychology-Experience-Mihaly-Csik...
says the most successful people alternate periods in closed states when they focus on a specific concrete project with periods in open states where they demonstrate huge appetite for new ideas.
I'm starting to think we're saying the same thing in different words and with slightly different emphasis. It is thus with most interesting conversations.
> I'm starting to think we're saying the same thing in different words and with slightly different emphasis. It is thus with most interesting conversations.
If you can get stuck in a mindset by following a specific trajectory of action then it doesn't matter whether you're following somebody deliberately or just blindly finding the same path.
In fact, reading what somebody did will often help you avoid going down a path. I've read of many many more algorithms, successful and unsuccessful, than I've ever implemented.
> You don't really understand something until you implement it.
Yup. We've already established that one has to prioritize what to implement. The priority clearly shouldn't always go towards doing something rather than reading what somebody else did. (Children would never learn to write that way.) Instead we prioritize differently at different times, and we try to have lots of feedback between reading and doing, by things like active reading.
