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Creative minds are seldom tidy
Even when they belong to engineers
Recently I wrote a review of Ford vs. Ferrari which you can find here. I really enjoyed the movie, partly because I identified with the main characters. I get what it’s like being a creative type frustrated by large corporate structures. That used to be me, once upon a time.
The problem for many engineers is that we are creative people. This is what originally drew us to engineering. We wanted to solve problems, yes, but we wanted to do it by designing something new.
People are deceived because engineers are often introverted. They are also often practical and logical, at least on the surface. They will do mathematical calculations to make sure that their solutions make sense. People get distracted by this grounded approach (see, I made a pun there!) and don’t see the whimsical humor or the romance within the engineering soul.
In this way engineers are like Germans. Maybe there is a reason that German engineering is so renowned. The character traits intrinsic to Germans, at least according to stereotype, are also those that seem endemic to engineers.
Yet brilliant engineers shine because of their creativity, not the way they can calculate flow rates or maximum power requirements. A truly beautiful circuit or machine is elegant. By…
