Sometimes you can get really caught up in online research. The web is an attractive mistress who keeps seducing you to follow her down hyper linked pathways of discovery. I must have scuttled down my 10th hyper link tonight when I realised how much I had skewed my activity into online research and away from creationism.

By creationism I mean theorising and prototyping without research. You just use the knowledge you already have. You then create something wonderful only to later realise you weren’t the first to do it. However, sometimes you are! Sometimes you aren’t quite the first but you are early enough in the cycle that it still has legs as an idea.

I remember back when I was a young lad I was that way inclined because I didn’t have the internet, money to buy books or a uni degree. I was into learning by just doing it.

Back around 1983-84 (early high school) I was playing around with share market patterns that didn’t seem random. I worked out that some shares just went up everyday. Quite often more than 5 days in a row. The frequency with which this occurred wasn’t statistically normal. I new enough about coin toss probability to know that it wasn’t random and that I could probably trade those shares and make some money.

I enhanced this after I left school and it got me my first professional trader job in a bank trading futures (thanks James Benjamin and Tony Carr who believed in me). About 6 months into that job I realised I was not alone. Others in the USA had discovered my holy grail before me and they were called “Program Traders”. It already existed, but it was still early in the game

The point is I discovered it myself without help but by playing around with numbers and lines on some graph paper before washing it with some passion and interest to see if the ink stuck. I worked it out by doing it and not by watching others. The experience was invaluable. There have been other occasions where this has happened to me which I’ll save for another post.

I think we forget to do things in lieu of watching other people discover. We read about it in their blogs, watch it on Adventure 1 or reinvent their wheel but a better version of it. A little to often in this modern information rich society we engage in this armchair exploration.

So get of out of the stands and start playing the creation game.

Not one link in this post so that I don’t tempt you