Got feedback?

I rarely post about my research. Not that I intend to keep what I'm currently working on secret but maybe more because it seems to me that PhD work is something you kinda do on your own, something you don't talk much about, and for which the only feedback you receive is the one your advisor or RE is giving you. And this is true that very few people actually talk about what they're doing and ideas they may have. Today, however, I got to present my work-in-progress (mainly some background research, a tentative modeling approach and some identified challenges) to a group of Masters and PhD students from my lab. We were a small group, about 8 people, no RE or advisors, just students. It was very interesting to see how things were coming across when introduced to persons who are not familiar with my work or research topic. But more importantly, I realized that the feedback I received from my peers this afternoon is as valuable, though sometimes different yet complementary, as the one I can get from my RE or advisor. So since the whole thing was totally informal I got some really immediate and frank comments about what I'm currently doing. My colleagues this afternoon got some really good points. And tonite I have a better feeling for the extent of the work down the road and where improvements or more thorough developments/explanations are needed. The main pieces of advice I received were to narrow down the scope of the problem I'm studying and to emphasize more on the methodology I'm coming with rather than the tool I'm trying to develop. I guess I tend to fall into the same pitfalls as everybody else, namely trying to boil the ocean water and develop a tool for the sake of having fun developing a tool. It's pretty frustrating when somebody tells you "well, this sounds very interesting but this is a different field of study by itself and there is just so much you can do within the PhD timeframe". And I know this is true, I can simply not address every single aspect of the problem (even in a lifetime) and there is just so much problem complexity I can deal with within 3 or 4 years. So it was good that somebody reminded me about this because I tend to get too enthusiastic sometimes and end up overwhelmed by all the things I want to study. And there is also the fact that I'm still having a hard-time being satisfied with the quality of the work I'm producing... But this is another story...
Anywaaaaayyyy, this is it for tonite. Need to sleep a bit. Tomorrow is going to be a long long day, starting with a neurologist appointment (you enjoyed the brain MRI, let send you to the spine MRI this time...) and followed by a bunch of meetings. But I wouldn't change it for anything else (except for the back pain/neuro thing obviously). Nite :)