Tie one arm behind your back.

Try to do the stuff you've been doing but without the resources that have been at your disposal. Build a simple Twitter clone API using only C APIs. Roll your own HTML layout renderer in Open GL. What if NGINX and Apache didn't exist? What would you do then?

Watch "Halt and Catch Fire" as an engineer. Listen to the problems they're solving and try to solve them yourself.

At the end of the day, hacking is about creative problem solving.