Is thinking becoming a lost art?

Today I showed someone a drawing. It wasn't tehnical or accurate, and it definitely wasn't to scale. It was something I just roughly sketched in 5 seconds in order to communicate an idea.

Their response upon looking at it was, "That can't be done."

Except .... it could. It couldn't be done if they were taking the drawing literally. However, if one part of the solution was shifted a mere few millimeters to the right, the whole thing would work perfectly.

But that wasn't really the point.

The point is that their response isn't out of the ordinary. Often times, the moment I encounter a problem, I stop thinking. It's as if I have blinkers on and all I can see is the problem .... when the solution is right there if only I would turn my head (or take the blinkers off).

It made me wonder: why am I so quick to identify things that won't work instead of asking, "How can I make this work?" Why am I so reluctant to look at things from different perspectives, when the solution may literally be just a few degrees (or in this case, millimeters) out of sight?

Why is it so hard to spend some time thinking?

Thinking isn't just noticing obstacles. It's exploring possibilities. It's being creative. It's being willing to hold an idea in my mind long enough to reshape it. To be flexible. To move things around. To test assumptions. To imagine alternatives. To ask, "What if this part changed?" before concluding that something is impossible.

The sketch wasn't wrong. It was simply unpolished and unfinished. It simply needed a bit of analysis to discover what's there and what isn't so that the full picture emerges.

As I reflected on this today, I remembered that the people who change the world aren't always the ones with the smartest ideas.

Often they're the ones willing to think for longer than everyone else. The ones who are willing to spend more time working through "impossible" labels and think their way through them.

And I realized .... I want to be one of them.