> With so few firsts available in life, take those that present themselves and have a crack, even if failure is always an option.<p>About two years ago I realized I was doing the opposite sort-of without realizing it. I'd <i>want</i> to do something given a set of constraints (say, create some app in some specific programming language or for some platform), google it, find that there was some loose chatter <i>around</i> the idea and I'd dismiss it thinking "well, 'The Internet' hasn't done it/doesn't think it's possible, so I shouldn't bother".<p>Maybe it's a form of imposter syndrome. For me, I think it's more complicated:<p>I'd reach a point in a framework/subset of "whatever stack/language I was focused on at that time" where I was running out of obvious "new things to try", so I'd Google and find the same list; 'The Internet' decided for me that there's really not anything else of use to do with these this framework, let's learn a new one.<p>I need to "do X with Y", I Google it and find "Y" nowhere, but find "Z" everywhere. It's a bad fit but that's how 'The Internet' does it.<p>The most common, and one I specifically guard against and it happens <i>consistently</i> with endeavors like this: I want to make "X" do "Y" knowing full well that "Y" is not designed for (or more frequently specifically designed to prevent me from) doing "Y". After wading through replies to countless other people daring to ask the question in a forum -- the usual: "You don't know what you're talking about, can't be done, you shouldn't try it", "Why would you even want to do that when you can get 'Y' for $.$$ on eBay?", "Google it" (I did, that's why I'm here after 4 pages of clicking). Lovely how every question has 3-4 unhelpful-non-answers in one of these categories.<p>I changed my approach more than a decade ago while trying to reverse engineer the obfuscation a large telecom vendor used for their mobile broadband password storage in the Windows Registry[0] and succeeded in writing an "obfuscator" in a day from first introduction to deployed solution. Ever since then, I trust my instinct when I have expertise. When I do not, I read a very positive signal when "a lot of are people asking if something can be done" IIF there isn't a good answer to why it "can't be done" and any reasons why it "shouldn't be done" don't apply to the issue at hand.<p>[0] I recall, at the time, most of the answers were some form of "IANAL... but..." -- our purpose was to assign a random password to a user's account, then install the client to the user's company-assigned laptop with that password pre-populated (I didn't come up with the idea, I just had to figure out how to do it). The remainder of the answers were variants of "you can't crack AES" and "IM L33t H4x0R - WiLl CrAcK 4U". It was <i>very clearly</i> not AES or anything resembling a hash. It took so little effort to figure out that I would have <i>saved</i> time by "Starting Before Googling". Nobody (searchable) had tried. Probably nobody had a (legitimate) reason to try. It was just surprising how many people had a reason to "not try" <i>while also</i> discouraging others from trying with either wrong information or no information at all.