You can tell someone's a geek if they first describe a menu using the words file, edit, and view instead of breakfast, lunch, and dinner. One of the great things about the World of Robert is that I get to dip my fingers in lots of different projects that give me enough variety to make me somewhat of a Jack-of-all-trades and master-of-none. I've learned, almost invariably, that I need to listen to everyone (they probably know something you can learn), and there's probably a better way (if you spend enough time). Unfortunately, you usually need to complete designs without a complete knowledge or adequate research, and you can usually get a design 80% of the way to perfect in 20% of the time, and spend the rest of forever fine-tuning those last undesirables out of the design.
You can save yourself a lot of heartache when your design is based around concepts and structures that already exist in other products, even if those products don't directly relate to what you are doing