Ask HN: Does being practical act as a hinderance to one’s imagination?

Maybe I'm missing what you mean. Sometimes a flight of fancy is fine, eg while brainstorming or creating fiction!

But the world values grounded workable solutions to real problems too. Being practical is good for these.

I find myself exasperated when, given a practical and an impractical solution, some people turn their nose up at the former as uninteresting.

One can be a level headed person and can be completely outrageous when coming up with ideas. I think both of them are not interwined, but it could be if you think it is, like a paradox.

One immediate example that springs to my mind is Albert Einstein. You could say that his ideas are outrageous that space and time are same and they are bent etc. Even people (like the Nazis) publicly called it outrageous and blasphemy. But if you think about his ideas, he clearly followed through with a rigourous mathematical proof which I think might be indicative of height of level headedness. In fact, if you skim through his process of explaining relativity to general public through his book [0], you cannot distinguish when he is being level headed and when he suddenly jumps into a bizarre thought experiment.

[0] - https://archive.org/details/cu31924011804774/page/n10

Practicality is a choice whereas creativity is a poorly-understood synthesis process. If you're very level headed, it just means that you are quick to discard ideas that sounds risky, difficult, or improbable. If you are looking for more creative solutions, try allowing yourself to day-dream a little more or to work on some ideas that you immediately feel are impractical. It will take time to create a pattern of habit where you can suspend your critical side long enough to explore imaginative ideas. The fastest route to this is chemical. But. You know. That's not for everyone.

Oh! Also try allowing your brain some breathing room. Walk away from the problem and do something else. Your brain will work on it in the background. The more you dwell on it in your conscious mind, the more you will focus your existing solutions down.

Edit: You must learn to trust your subconscious to help you with keeping an active eye on it. Just as you must trust employees to do their work without micromanaging them and breathing down their necks the whole time.

https://youtu.be/iHcxkmwBOJY

As a personality trait? No. As a mode of thought? Yes.

You can learn a new mode of thought. You have to be open, and not dismiss things early, which means allowing yourself to follow ideas which have obvious flaws or which totally impractical. It helps to have confidence that you'll use your practical, analytical, and more closed mode of thought later. But first you've gotta jump out of the local maxima and try to find something new. Generate ideas as if you're high; highdeas are usually bad and that's ok, your sober self will be around to check it out later. Maybe the idea will be thrown away then, and maybe it won't.

There's a great John Cleese talk on open vs closed thinking that you could look up on YouTube. A good book on the subject is A Whack On The Side Of The Head.

Edit: That said, there's also something to working with another person, and each focusing on one of these roles more than the other. Like author and editor. Lots of things follow this pattern of splitting these roles up among people.