and you mimic him/her. How do they act during meetings? How do they write tech-specs, documentation? Look at their check-ins, how do they approach code? How deep can they dive into a discussion? Then ask yourself how do you act during meetings, how does your writing stack up, how would you would have written that, where does your knowledge end? Repeat.

There is something to be said about faking it until you make it. Great engineers (and I've seen several in my day) have found a way to balance--their time, customer requirements, dealing with management, and other engineers and combined it with deep knowledge. Little of what separates a decent engineer and a great one is know-how, though. What really separates them IMHO is their countenance when dealing with a massive, ambiguous problem, their delivery record and the trust that they've garnered from that, their effective use of time and their innate, almost magically ability to be aware of any trade-offs the team and organization may be making due to their deep understanding.

If you aren't around good engineers you probably won't be one.

Please, do tell what your three methods are. None of the commercially available industrial scanners have solved this problem this well. You would have made a lot of money if your solutions are anywhere near as effective as this one. Really. Even if it was 10x slower. I bet you've never dealt with large scale non-destructive scanning of books, and that your methods make assumptions that do not hold for all books, or require many fine-grained measurements that require the book to be perfectly placed. Not only is this method highly accurate, it is fast, and make little assumptions on the nature of the binding, book thickness, what page your on (page 3 curves way differently than page 530), etc. This method is near perfect as far as I can tell. You take two IR pictures, stitch them together the only way possible, and move on. It's a prime example of an elegant solution to an old, tricky problem.