My thought (predating your post) is that there are two ways you can stay on the edge of your comfort zone; one of these is by expanding laterally into things yo

My thought (predating your post) is that there are two ways you can stay on the edge of your comfort zone; one of these is by expanding laterally into things you don't already know much about, and one is by expanding vertically into things you do already know about. The risk of expanding laterally is that you can pretty much surf on a fairly clean wave of documentation, examples, tutorials, SO q&a and github code to solve most of the "problems" you face (and many of these "problems" are shit like "learning an API" or "gotcha config files"). This isn't to say that this is how expanding laterally will work in every case, especially when you're picking up a lot of knew paradigms. The upside to expanding vertically is that you're eventually going to run into problems or questions that you can't just research your way out of. Not to denigrate all of the other learning we do, but I think these times when we have to go out into the wilderness and test ourselves against problems that, even if only by dearth of documentation, are effectively novel, are when a lot of growth happens. Of course, it's perfectly possible to work in one domain and never have to really stretch yourself. It's also possible to be perpetually expanding laterally into technology so new that you spend more time testing yourself in the wild than many who go "deep" on more thoroughly-trodded ground.