Think Outside The Box
A psychologist named J.P Guildford, in 1970’s came up with a tricky puzzle. He gave attendants a piece of paper on which were marked nine dots, and asked them to join all nine without lifting their pencil from the paper. 80% of his subjects couldn’t do it. The 20% who could do so by drawing lines that extended out from the nine-dot ‘box’ and into the white space beyond. The solution, and the creative thinking it displayed, became known as “ thinking outside the box “.
What does it mean to think out of the box?
When you step into something new, mostly you need to make decisions and solve problems. In this case you need more than standard thinking. You need to think outside the box and find a solution for your problem when the quality of ideas and solutions starts to decrease.
Basically thinking outside the box would mean to step out of the box, so just leave all your mindsets and attitudes and start viewing things with a different perspective.
The ability to think outside the box requires creativity above all. For thinking outside the box you need to follow the things given below:
Define the box:
In other words, defining the box means that you just need to understand the problem and the way to find the solution to that problem. This means you should be focusing on your problem’s solution instead of thinking how to get there. As your brain look on things in term of their making rather than what it think should be there.
Part of finding creative solutions to a problem is looking it in a different way. It will help you find new possible solutions to your problem.
Set parameters:
Sometimes if you’re having difficulty thinking outside the box, then you should set some basic parameters. This sounds a bit unconvincing that how can parameters help you think outside the box? This may seems to be stopping you from creativity, but if you set the right parameters you’ll find that it can actually open things up for you.
For example, you want to buy a new bicycle to avoid your daily bus travel. Set the parameter that you will not borrow money from anyone, and start thinking how you will you buy the bicycle. Can you cut your expenditures or you can earn from your skills? Planning to achieve what you want is an art that everyone should know.
Try not to think too broad because it can put too much pressure on you. This will help you come up with more specific solutions to your problem.
Surround yourself with creative people:
It’s said that you become who you stay with and who you set your mind to be. Always surround yourself with the type of people you want to be. Relationships with those you admire and whose creative paths you hope to follow, will bring you a lot of creativeness.
If you surround yourself with people having creative mind then you’ll find yourself doing it naturally. You can find out those creative people in places around you that would attract creative people, try attending the conferences, a co-working space, or if you don’t find creative people near you then try moving to another city.
Don’t think that you will get these creative people naturally like it did in school, you’ve to put in the effort to find them out to change your life.
Step into another world:
You can simply be creative by using “out of the box thinking” approach, by stepping into another world.
Stepping into another world is one of the most effective ways to change your perspective about anything.
There are so many ways to step into another world, for example by going to a library, finding a new hobby, meeting new people or even by studying a new language; you can gather so much knowledge by doing all this.
Stepping into another world allows you to look at problems with different perspective, which will give you all the possible solutions to your problems.
Knowledge is power. Information is liberating. Education is the premise of progress, in every society, in every family
Your ideas of thinking outside the box:
Trying out new things does not only require courage but also the inner readiness to make a mistake. Mistakes are another great way to view and learn things and make us think out of the box.
Thinking outside the box requires a certain level of bravery because you will be presenting ideas that might be outside of “normal”
With every brilliant idea comes one that flops. So it’s also good to keep in mind that your ideas aren’t always going to work because it’s a part of learning. That’s why always remember to consider the worst case when you’re coming up with an idea.
Originally published at https://blog.chalchalen.com on September 27, 2016.
