Extracubic Thought by Ethan

Extracubic Thought by Ethan - October 2018 Scholarship Essay

To me, the phrase “thinking outside the box” means defying the conventional and traditional; being presented with a problem, and engineering a creative, unique solution. When Alexander Nikolayevich Lodygin invented the modern light bulb in 1872, seven years before Thomas Edison had his first successful experiment, he was exploring a completely new field. The light bulb had been tested on a limited scale since the 1830s, but Lodygin’s design was far ahead of his time. In fact, he was the first scientist to use a tungsten filament; at the time, it was deemed expensive and impractical, but today tungsten is the only filament used in light bulbs. He actively defied those who claimed he would fail, but he also avoided hubris; he experimented with dozens of materials before he presented his design at the 1900 Paris World’s Fair. To me, that is the definition of thinking outside the box: coming up with a new solution and pursuing it, but also being able to acknowledge when you were wrong. A creative thinker should be a subscriber to that timeless directive, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”
Outside-the-box thinking is an incredibly important skill. If everyone were to simply continue doing things the “old-fashioned” way, without striving for ingenuity or creative solutions, we would stagnate. Almost everyone is born this way. There was that story a few years ago of a scientist’s young daughter playing with models of atoms, and ended up inspiring chemists to synthesize a new molecule they had simply never thought of before. Creative thinking is a skill that can inspire the greatest human achievements. That is, to me, the meaning of “thinking outside the box.”