Ask HN: Does being practical act as a hinderance to one’s imagination?
I&#x27;m not able to speak authoritatively on this subject (after who the heck am I? I&#x27;m creative in spurts but have no deep insight on the process), but as an observer of human nature, engineers do seem especially weak at divergent thinking -- they can&#x27;t help obsessing over how something might fail <i>almost as soon as as they hear an idea</i>.<p>This is a blocker. One of the ways to unblock this, I&#x27;m told, is the &quot;improv&quot; mantra of <i>&quot;yes, and&quot;</i> -- meaning, if someone states an idea, instead of saying &quot;yes, but&quot;, you say &quot;yes, and&quot; and build upon it. For instance, someone says &quot;I&#x27;m a unicorn fireman&quot;, you say, &quot;yes, and your horn is a nozzle for a high-pressure hose&quot;. And you keep building.<p>For years I could never quite figure out how this applied to engineering problems so I thought &quot;yes, and&quot; was mostly stupid and unworkable (except in the arts) -- because what if the other person&#x27;s wrong? How do I &quot;yes, and&quot; someone who says &quot;the earth is flat&quot;?<p>But one of Paul Graham&#x27;s tweets helped me reframe this in a way that is palatable to even engineer-types. He says (paraphrased):<p>&quot;Problem solving is <i>2 phase</i> approach: (1) idea generation &#x2F; mistake making, and then (2) aggressively fixing those mistakes &#x2F; editing. We often shortcut the process by editing too soon.&quot;<p>In other words: engineers are only good at &quot;yes, but&quot; (convergent thinking phase) and prematurely shut down the &quot;yes, and&quot; (divergent thinking phase). So how about we treat thinking as a two-phase problem and give divergent thinking some room? We can still apply pragmatism&#x2F;practicality ... but later, after we&#x27;ve &quot;yes, and&quot;ed.<p>Alls we&#x27;re saying is, give &quot;yes, and&quot; a chance.