How can we keep up to date as a designer?

I feel a little miserable today because one of my team members said:"While many of your ideas are good, occasionally your ideas are not quite related to the problem at hand." And he recommends me to:"When brainstorming, it might be helpful to ask yourself after each of your ideas "how does this relate to the *** problem?", or in other words, how does this relate to the big picture. If you cannot think of how your idea is related to our project, then just move on to the next idea." This is a very good advice. However, I feel more miserable after I read this because, my team member totally lost when he heard my "news and new ideas" which I really believe that they are tightly related with the project.

This different perspective from me and my team member comes from the different goals in our mind. What is kept in my team member's mind is our current project--current solutions exactly. What in my mind is current project, and how can we broaden our knowledge scope from the current project--up to date news which related with current project (maybe not very tightly), and how can we enhance our current solutions-- are their good enough or can we further improve them?

We are in an information society. How can we keep up to date in the exploding information? -- We are human, and we can individually process information then share it, then we as a group keep up to date. I can say that a project at hand, no matter how big or how good it is, is not the most important thing for us. The most important thing is learning, improve us rather a project.
Obviously I expect to get much more than my team member does. I want to grow up with my every project rather than only do it. Our project is ahead of our time if only we are ahead of our time.