We’ve all been trained to think in a way that’s limiting. Nobody is at fault for this. It just seems to come with the territory of being a human being. We’re boxed in by beliefs, rules and assumptions.
There were years of conditioning from our parents, some of which was probably necessary just to keep us safe. Then there was massive molding and conditioning from our school system – designed to make us tow the line. And now the media, friends, family, business associates and society in general, all do their conditioning job on us every single day.
Some people break loose from their conditioning. These are the ones who successfully come up with the innovative new ideas that we all benefit from. They are the pioneers who discover new ways of doing things and solving personal, environmental and world problems. They make our lives easier and more pleasurable and they become successful in the process.
Most of the time we take these beneficial innovations for granted, but sometimes we say to ourselves, how did they do that? How could they imagine such a thing as Velcro, polartec, post-it notes, a personal computer, Amazon.com, or Ebay? How did they think of it?
Fred Smith wrote up his innovative idea for FedEx in a term paper. His professor gave him a bad grade and marked on the paper that it would never work. That didn’t stop Fred. He created FedEx anyway and it did work. But, at that time, his idea sounded so outrageous that his professor couldn’t even imagine it.
Coming up with unusual ways of solving usual problems requires us to look past our conditioning. It demands a breakthrough of imaginative thinking. We have to open the mental blinds that limit our vision and blind us from seeing new possibilities. To be creative, innovative and highly successful, we must find our way through the limitations that we’ve accepted, resigned ourselves to and learned to live with.
If you don’t believe you’re restricted by all kinds of unnecessary rules, suppositions and limited thinking, then try this old favorite puzzle.
Instructions: Find a way to connect all nine dots in the box using four consecutive straight lines, without repeating a line or lifting your pencil.
Print a copy of this article and read the above instructions carefully. Play with the puzzle for a while and see if you can find a way to solve it. The answer is in Thinking Outside the Box - The Solution and we'll post it here next week. In the meantime, give the solution a creative shot on your own.
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