Having jobs and personal projects really makes me think about engineering and it's fundamentals. Lots of my projects (whether at work, for a class, in a UROP, etc.) are often "(I want to) do this thing. I have no idea where to start. Let me learn some cool thing to make it work."
In general, engineers should be flexible: they should not only know their tools and know what they don't know, they should be able to learn whatever it is they need to know for a specific project, perfect it, maximize it, and use it in further projects.
It's interesting how many projects or ideas come out of not knowing a certain tool for a task. It is often easier to be the first one to make a tool or resource than edit or implement a better version of one. I suspect the reason for this is that when you make a tool for the first time, no one has any standards for what it should do. You hack something together to make it work for you, and probably slightly modify it to work for others. Whereas in the other scenario, you are trying to improve on a tool: you are intimately familiar with the venue in which the tool is used, and you are either trying to optimize the stream of that venue or trying to expand it. In either case, it is harder to do so, because others who are using your tool have certain expectations or suggestions for it's use.
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