Think Outside the Box

“Thinking outside the box” has become part of our business lexicon and is an idiom used to describe an idea or a person who is innovative, creative, or a thought leader.  It’s sometimes thrown down as a challenge to others, a way to give recognition, and is even used in job descriptions.  

To look at this in a literal way, thinking outside the box gets harder and harder to accomplish over time because an idea that was new and innovative eventually ends up inside the box.  To put it more succinctly: the size of the box continues to expand as once groundbreaking ideas become mainstream.  

It would make sense, then, that someone who was thinking outside of the box yesterday is likely thinking inside the box today and to continue to be an outside of the box thinker requires evolution of intelligence, universal awareness, and self-improvement. 

The good news is that as the box expands to envelop groundbreaking ideas, it also acquires new information and data that is nearby.  The newest contents of the box, be they ideas, information, data, or concepts, eventually become part of the mainstream collective consciousness which then enables us to expand our thoughts outside the box once again, if not just barely.  

I suppose this is one of the things that excites me about being a thought leader:  the excitement and anticipation of what is just outside our grasp.  I think of it as the Hubble telescope looking deep into space (and into time, really) to reveal things just outside our awareness.

Beyond this ever expanding box, just outside our reach, is an abyss full of strange, new things.  Some of them will be wonderful and others will be frightening but, someday, they will all be mainstream and the box will have expanded again.  

Can you imagine the possibilities?