I have always disliked the phrase “thinking out-of-the-box”. Yes, it’s seen as a good thing almost all the time. People put these things on resumes. And it seems to make sense, too. The “box” is a small set of assumptions and things you already have/know. So creative thinking means thinking outside of that box and coming up with completely new answers.
So why did I always dislike it? Why do I never really use the phrase myself?
Well, I’ve been a hypercreative person for a while now. Almost twenty years, I dare say? I’ve been doing it professionally for a while now too, earning what little income I have from creative pursuits.
And time and time again, I’ve realized the opposite is true.
Creativity is actually the opposite of out-of-the-box thinking.
What do you mean!?
Coming up with random things is easy! Very easy! If you ask me “how do I create a scrambled egg?”, I might respond with “ask a dinosaur to do it for you!” That’s very out of the box. It’s completely unexpected, blasting all assumptions about eggs and how to scramble them, very creative, right?
It’s also very useless. Almost all things you can imagine are not relevant to the problem at hand. Even if you try to open your mind so much that your brain falls out, you’re likely still thinking narrowly. Because actually considering all possible options would completely overwhelm you. Your brain would waste days on things that are just not related to your creative project.
If you want to cook something for dinner, considering if dinosaurs might cook your dinner is a waste of time.
This was just the first silly example I could come up with. So let’s give another example that’s more realistic and tied to creative work.
Say you’re writing a story. And you’re stuck. You have the first ten chapters, they seem good enough, but you don’t know where to go now.
There are problems. Maybe character A should be with character B in a scene … but you’ve written it so that they’re currently in different countries altogether. Maybe you intended for character C to find a sword, but you forgot to explain the sword exists at all, so you’re unsure if you shouldn’t wait.
It is very easy, no effort at all, to come up with random out-of-the-box solutions for this.
- “Have ninjas attack, always exciting!”
- “Just pretend teleportation exists now, somehow!”
- “Just end the book right there!”
- “Have you considered a scene in which dinosaurs cook scrambled eggs?”
Is this useful, though? Is this actually creative? Is this inspired writing?
I don’t think so. Completely random additions to the story are unlikely to be any good. Completely random acts are just as unhelpful. By the time you’re ten chapters into a story, some rules have been established. The main characters are known. The genre of the book is known, and thus its limits or general leanings. Your writing style is established, and deviating from it will cause whiplash.
The story is a “box” now. And the box dictates what can be contained. Most ideas outside of that box are just useless nonsense that won’t fit with anything else, and considering that is a momentous waste of time and energy. (Because the world outside of that box is 99,99999999% of all things. Even a 300-page book only uses a small set of words, and ideas, and types of scenes, etcetera.)
Restrictions Exist (And Are Good)
There’s a related saying about creativity that I’ve mentioned several times on this blog. Because I’ve seen its truth every single day. Because I think just realizing this will help anyone foster their creativity more. That saying is,
Restrictions breed creativity.
If I hand you an empty canvas and say “draw anything!”, you’ll probably be stumped. If I tell you “draw a bird”, you have more direction. You can still be very creative, picking which bird, picking how to draw it, etcetera. You can also still be very lazy and uninspired, and just copy an image from the internet.
If I tell you “draw an eagle using only two colors” … you have to start being creative. Most likely, you can’t find that image. You also can’t blindly copy an image of an eagle. You have to actually think about this, maybe try a few more times, until you find a way to draw a nice eagle and only use two colors. And the end result of that will be an inspired, unique, creative work of art.
That’s why I have the habit of creating “ground rules” or “principles” for every project. I’ve done it for years now, and it has helped a lot. When starting a new book, I have no fixed outline, or formula to follow, or specific points I must make. I simply have a list of self-inflicted restrictions. Such as what the writing style is and isn’t allowed to do. Or some random very specific thing like “we alternate between very long chapters and very short chapters”. There doesn’t even need to be a good reason for this. Just having restrictions forces me to be more creative, while making it easier to make decisions and get over problems.
In other words, to be at you most creative, I’d recommend you purposely use in-the-box thinking!
Real life has restrictions. There are things you physically can’t do. There are things your budget doesn’t allow. There are things that simply don’t sell in the current market, and time/energy to do creative work is very much at a premium for most.
It’s no use pretending restrictions aren’t there. And as I explained, it only hinders creativity and progress.
The truly creative people can see the restrictions, accept them, and come up with the best ideas within that box.
The truly creative people think inside the box, but they’re doing so in a way that explores absolutely every corner of that box. They take the rules and stretch them to their limit. Bend them like nobody bent them before, but the rules must hold.
The real problem, frankly, is that many people live their lives by a thousand and one wrong assumptions. People who struggle to be creative, to see new solutions, have usually just assumed some things without realizing. They’ve assumed something can’t be done, even though that might not be true. They’ve assumed a project has to be done this and this specific way, even though there’s no reason to think that. And so they not only think inside the box, they think inside one specific corner of the box and assume all the other corners are not worth visiting.
Either that, or, uncreative people think coming up with random shit that is way outside the box is equal to being creative ;) I’ve seen it happen too many times that any idea that is “strange and surprising” is automatically labeled “creative and good”. People are applauded for coming up with wildly speculative ideas in a meeting, just because it’s so “unexpected” and “new”. But as this article hopefully explained, that’s just wasting time on exploring a likely irrelevant space of the (creative) problem.
You can see this very clearly if you try to play (board) games with not-so-creative people. It boggles my mind, truly.
They can literally invent their own rules, no matter how often you explain that you never said that and it’s not a rule. They think they’re being “creative” and say things like “oh well I’m just really good at improving games”, but they’re not. They make random assumptions that ruin the game. And once made, you can’t convince them to let go of that anymore. They’ll even try to convince you that you’re insane and their assumption is the actual truth.
I explained a board game once that had the simple core loop of “play one card every turn, the game ends when everyone is out of cards”. SOMEHOW, multiple people assumed that you could just stall the game by never playing your last card. I never said that. I explicitly said “must play one card, ends when out of cards”. But they just assumed that playing a card was optional, and added some more assumptions, and they didn’t even recognize they were doing it.
And once people put their mind inside one tiny corner of a box, they often refuse to get out. Maybe they’re afraid of admitting they were wrong. Maybe they’re afraid of exploring new ideas, or just too tired to do it. Or maybe they truly can’t see the difference between assumption and reality. I don’t know.
On the other end of this spectrum, by the way, are those rare uncreative people who will simply do exactly as they’re told and nothing else. I just know that, if I give a specific example in my explanation, they will DO THAT EXACT TURN ONLY, for the rest of the game, never thinking for themselves. This just makes me … sad. But oh well.
Conclusion
Restrictions are everywhere by default. You have limited time, energy, money, space, devices, etcetera. The laws of physics surely like to stay around all the time. Companies have their policies, and goals, and targets to hit, and what not. Whatever you do, it’s already going to be inside a box. A mostly unchangeable box, not yours to choose.
And that’s good. Restrictions breed creativity. They force you to consider new options, because the “easy options” or the “default assumptions” are disallowed by the boundaries of the box. They force you to end at truly new places.
If you don’t have enough restrictions, actually invent a few. Make the box smaller. Because the smaller the box, the easier it is to explore all of it. Instead of sticking to one corner only, forever.
Out-of-the-box thinking is not creative. It’s easy, and useless. You can shout any random thing and it is “out of the box”. (And I think this is the part where AI struggles still with being truly creative. But that’s a topic for another time.)
In-the-box thinking is creative. As long as you define the box well and explore the entire contents. You are bound to discover some hidden gems in unexplored corners, if you stick to this plan. Whenever you’re stuck creatively, remind yourself of the rules you set on this project, and which of those you haven’t stretched to the limit yet. Don’t break rules, don’t remove them, don’t waste time considering completely random things. That’s what gets me unstuck very quickly every time, is my experience.
Anyway, those were my thoughts on creativity. And why I disliked that phrase and hope people stop saying it and pretending it means something good. At the very least, stop putting it on your resumes ;)
Until next time,
Tiamo
