If you find this tip useful, you probably need to read the Gang of Four's Design Pattern book. Not every design pattern has been useful (omfg, decorators, visitor, and double-dispatch are messy as all hell. Singleton IMO is an anti-pattern, no better than a global variable... etc. etc.).
But a lot of the simpler patterns, like static factory methods, are very useful in day-to-day programming.
I use the visitor pattern in interpreters, parsers, and compilers all the time. Outside of the language domain, though, I've almost never reached for it.
Decorator is a cool idea, but I haven't found much use for it in practice.