An expert is someone good at closing doors,
a dreamer is someone good at opening them

Minh Tan

Other quotes by me

You can take this quote in two ways:

1. The expert is someone who knows from experience and will close doors to keep you from bad options. However, the expert may also be so closed minded so as to consider anything that looks the least bit not familiar to be a bad option, when it may not be. That’s even if it were just one in many that may not be. The expert may open some doors that are good, too, of course. But, usually, they are about narrowing options and sticking to what they know, not opening them and trying completely new things.
2. The dreamer, on the other hand, sees possibilities. The dreamer will open many doors, representing many possibilities. The problem is the dreamer may not realize some doors lead to bad options that the experts would have easily identified to close. However, the occasional one may be quite good that the expert may have shut in poor judgement in being closed-minded. But because those “magic” solutions of dreamers are rare rather than common, dreamers will tend to open many bad doors relative to the number of good ones.

Either way, an expert is someone who is good at closing doors, and a dreamer is someone good at opening them.