Excellent meditation to grok,
L~R. I tend to place "success" in a social organism in a context of "What behavior, if encouraged, leads to more
individual success / satisfaction / survivability." Current learning theory uses a helical spiral as a metaphor, but I'd expand that to use a spring in resonant motion as a representation because it's also wise to back up and re-examine your basic assumptions. I cheer for
Detonite as he digs around for all kinds of different things to chew on.
Your example of selectively enabling/disabling tools is a good one in that it provides an action framework on a very basic and incrementally useful level. I'd suggest also using huge leaps, i.e., reading up on Feynman's life and then learning to program a microcontroller in assembly language, and then reading something by David Friedman on economics in practice. Then come back to Perl with a whole new perspective. Life becomes more juicy when you make it big, IMHO.
The breadth of one's association nets is the key to both creativity and survivabilty in this non-deterministic, non-zero-sum world.