Tendencies to Re-Invent The Wheel

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Is this a quirk of mine or am I not alone? I always have to do my projects from scratch, see the ins and outs and take responsibility/shame when it is wrong. Tedious and annoying to other but it is a method to my own madness.

You?

Yes. I like to do things from scratch and it causes me a lot of grief in graduate school. I have to re-visit the wheel a lot when writing code and doing calculations. I feel I have to understand where all the code and formulae come from even if I don’t have to write them myself.

Ha, I do the same thing, though probably under different circumstances. One of the big things in my life at the moment is learning watchmaking and I've been designing (in my head, at least) a hand-turned gear-cutter. It seems I'd rather do things the least efficient way possible than buy someone else's design. I've also made my own bicycle repair tools in the past and have a shirt with a statement to that effect on it. I guess I've just always thought that if someone else can do it, so can I - maybe worse, but maybe better. Never know 'till you try.

Uh, by the way: Hi. I'm kinda new around here.

Yes, I would say that I have a tendancy to do this as well. I will see my own manner of solving a problem (sometimes inovative and brilliant, sometimes not). I will then try to do things my own way.

This is one of the reasons that I would rather design rather than repair. If I design it, I understand how the various parts are functioning, and how they relate. However, if I am repairing, I have to discover first, how someone else decided to accomplish the task.

Over the years I have created some bizarre manners of solving simple problems (though to be fair, sometimes this was intentional).

Yep, reinventing the wheel is always my first instinct. To do otherwise, I have to consciously think about it and carefully avert...

Yep.

I always think that if it's my own, then I've actually done something right.

Why right I don't know it's just a strange idea I have.

I'm the same way.

There is method to the madness but it is almost instinctive. For me its like all angles and aspects of the problem at hand just pop in my mind and I work it out in my head before narrowing it down to a dozen or so possibilities.

Yeah, I tend to be the same way in my job as an analytical chemist. When I am given a project to do, I will break it apart into a million pieces and analyze every piece untill I find a solution that I am comfortable with.

I see one advantage with this process, I tend to come up with solutions that no one else would have thought of.

But there is one thing though, I get very annoyed with someone is watching me and they don't understand my process, then they critic me on my methods, that is why I tend to be very secrective about my work.

I'm moving away from that tendency, albeit slowly. Still, progress is progress.

While the tedious labour of trying to do everything myself instead of using previously perfected methods does occasionally yield unique insights, it in no way makes up for time lost due to inefficiency.