> "The right way to deal with new ideas is to treat them as a challenge to your imagination — not just to have lower standards, but to switch polarity entirely,

> "The right way to deal with new ideas is to treat them as a challenge to your imagination — not just to have lower standards, but to switch polarity entirely, from listing the reasons an idea won't work to trying to think of ways it could." OK nothing happens without optimism and work and cynically excluding everything will leave you with nowhere to go, but the solution to that can't be optimistically including everything. If you want to lose lots of money, look at the penny stock market and think of all the ways those companies could become massive instead of looking for reasons they won't. Think of all the reasons alterntive cancer treatments could work, all the reasons UFOs could exist, all the reasons giving money to the local mega-church could be a good idea. It's way to easy for most of us to convince ourselves of the happy path of a bunch of nonsense, and it's cynicism which keeps us away from the worst excesses of woo and hype and being conned or abused. It's easy to think of reasons online grocery delivery "could work" during COVID19 in 2020, but if you were doing that in 1999 and investing in Webvan you'd have lost everything. Webvan "could work" and you could have thought of many reasons why, and you would have lost all your money. The people thinking why it couldn't work saved their bacon. Boo.com online fashion in 1999, the people thinking why it couldn't work saved their money and time and effort, even though online clothes shopping totally could work and does today. Or that thinking of reasons why you could learn painting is irrelevant if you don't want to spend your time painting. You may as well rule it out first instead of challenging yourself all the ways you could become good at it and fit it into your life.