The Importance of Creativity by Heidi

The Importance of Creativity by Heidi - October 2018 Scholarship Essay

Thinking outside the box is a metaphor for creativity. To think outside the box, one needs to use their imagination. Rather than coming up with the same, typical, boring solution to something, a person who thinks this way comes up with a more unconventional idea which contributes a new perspective. Unfortunately, thinking outside the box is uncommon and often discouraged in our society.
People tend to like structure and organization. Things are simplest and make the most sense when a specific path is kept in mind. Everyone has a tendency to keep a ton of goals in mind for their future. These same goals point us all in a very similar direction. While it is helpful to have some guidelines and something to work towards, we often get stuck in the mentality that we need to follow a specific direction to achieve our goal.
On top of this, a creative mindset is constantly discouraged in society, which further crushes the chances of someone being able to contribute a new perspective, different ideas and concepts. Unfortunately, thinking outside the box to be discouraged from a young age. It is simplest to use structure in everything because a process can then be standardized and used everywhere. Consequently, risk-taking and creativity are quickly discouraged. Starting in Elementary school, students take standardized testing, and the language arts category is a great example of how society tries to make everyone conform to a standard mindset. Everyone is expected to interpret writing in the exact same way, with only a couple of perspectives to chose from. The beauty of reading is that everyone has a slightly different perspective to contribute, which allows for discussion and deeper thinking. This, however, is challenging to measure on a large scale and as a result, schools often resort to standardizing everything instead. I think it is so strange that society claims to encourage thinking outside of the box, but at the same time, they train us to do the exact opposite.
Thinking outside the box involves working creatively to find solutions. Often times, we need to cast away the mentality we were trained to use by society in order to think more creatively and see new, different opportunities. To me, thinking outside the box means exploring new, unconventional opportunities in order to come up with different solutions.