Are you a can or a can’t engineer?

Or: Knowledge; what is it good for?
If you have not seen it yet, then take a moment to watch this excerpt of an interview with Barack Obama on how to get things done.

He starts off by saying that getting things done is what’s important. He seems a bit flippant at first - surely that’s a motherhood statement: you need to get things done. But then he digs deeper into the attitude common to those who do get things done.
He notes that there are people who look for reasons why things can’t be done. And that there are those who look for ways to overcome the challenge.
What’s interesting is that he notes the people in the former group are smart and well-educated.
What’s also interesting is that he notes those who can make things happen do not see the solution straight away - instead, they say “leave it with me.”
The reason why all this is interesting is that as engineers, we are typically well-educated. That means we could easily fall into the first group. Where we use all our knowledge to identify all the challenges that would make a proposed goal unattainable.
However, as engineers, we should be in the second group. We should have confidence in our ability to explore the problem with first principles to better understand it, find opportunities through systemic thinking, and then reframe the challenge so it becomes something we can solve.
Given that as engineers we could fall into either group, the thing that determines the group you fall into is your attitude.
In my book I talk about how sometimes the negative attitude can help you find risks. But you still need to have that attitudinal shift to the positive - especially in the face of uncertainty that many engineering problems can exhibit. To use Edward de Bono’s hat paradigm, you need to take the black hat off.
So be mindful of your attitude when you are presented with a problem. That way you can be an engineer who does indeed get things done - and be known as such.