When you're in a snowstorm, approaching each instance as a special snowflake is a mistake.

What's most important is not how each individual instance precisely differs.

What's most important is that there will be an unending stream of pretty-similar snowflakes you need to deal with.

When you squint and take a more systems level view you see how each flake is unique, but in ways that don't matter that much.

How can you factor out things that many snow flakes seem to share, so when you deal with the next snowflake you're more likely to have already built solutions that partially help with it?

When you focus on the snowstorm and not the snowflake, the intuition to continually accrete useful infrastructure to deal with the kinds of snowflakes you stochastically expect to deal with becomes a no-brainer.