Last night I had a nightmare that I had homework assignments due in a few hours and instead of working on them I was getting drunk at a bar. It was a nightmare in two senses. First, academically it’s bad decision making, and second, I don’t want to dream about school while I’m on break.

Some problems are common and have been thoroughly researched, so that when you learn about them in school, you also learn about solutions that have been developed over the years to deal with them. But a lot of these solutions are partial, which motivates further research into the problem in hopes of finally landing an all encompassing solution that doesn’t have any drawbacks. My concern is that exposure to the partial solutions could impede progress towards an all encompassing solution. Of course, there’s something to be said for learning from what other’s have done in the past, but I think there’s also the risk of seeing things in terms of the partial solutions you’ve learned about, so that any other solution you come up with is in the same vein as the others and partial as well.

Maybe a good strategy for coming up with a novel solution which doesn’t borrow from any existing solution is to only occupy your mind with the problem you’re trying to solve, and keep yourself from learning ways that others have tried to solve the problem themselves. You might come up with exactly what someone else did years ago, because you didn’t know about their work, but you might also come up with something unlike anything anyone had done before.