Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software tells us to forget the shortest path to an objective as it is often a distraction and other times a mirage.
His example of sailing reads like an existential philosophy and something I can really relate to.
The cool lesson from this fact of sailing life is that by merely changing your position in any direction you may alter the viability of your goal from the impossible to the possible.
I guess you have to read the article to appreciate what he’s saying but in essence, there’s more than one way to skin a cat and it’s not about whether you can choose the shortest path but about choosing the shortest possible path and being able to recognise the difference. In Networking, this is how I always thought of the OSPF protocol. Through creative use of path weights (the price a network packet has to pay to move through the network along a certain path), you could force packets down one route or another.
Using a million tons of dynamite to brute-force your way through the mountain to get to your destination may actually be the worst possible approach.