Men of great parts are often unfortunate in the management of public business, because they are apt to go out of the common road by the quickness of their imagination.

A quick imagination is a liability in work that depends on plain, repeatable competence. The clever mind sees the unusual route, gets bored by the obvious one, and produces solutions that are better in theory and worse in practice because they require everybody else to keep up. Shared undertakings run on predictability. Brilliance and reliability are different goods, and the second is what most public business actually needs.

Check whether the improvement you are proposing is actually needed, particularly if you are the inventive one. Take the common road once this week and notice how much easier everyone else finds it.