The Corn on the Cob by Rebekah

The Corn on the Cob by Rebekah - October 2018 Scholarship Essay

When I entered my economics classroom for the first time, I didn’t really know what to expect. The teacher, a man with the stature of a stone figure, greeted us with his booming voice and pointed to a riddle that was scrawled across the whiteboard. The riddle stated, “First, I threw away the outside and cooked the inside. Then I ate the outside and threw away the inside. What did I eat?” Frankly, I was puzzled. My mind had twisted itself: how could something be thrown away on the outside and then eaten? I was perplexed.
The answer – a corn on the cob. The riddle was so simple and yet so complex. I couldn’t begin to wrap my head around it until I heard the answer. This riddle is a great example of what it means to think outside the box. Thinking outside the box is utilizing creativity and problem solving to understand how something works and how to solve the problem with non-traditional methods. This skill is increasingly important for newer generations seeking a career in the field due to occupations actively recruiting employees with this “out-of-the-box” style of thinking. They’re looking for employees who can find their way around an issue.
In this riddle, a problem arises when trying to follow a logical in-the-box method. First, imagine a man peeling the outside away from an object and then cooking the inside of it. From there, he retrieved the outside that he had thrown away and then tossed the cooked portion. This was my thought process, and as soon as this idea had entered my mind, I was stuck in the box. Various possibilities passed through my mind, and even if I had sat there for an hour contemplating, I would never have solved it because I didn’t know how to break the boundaries of my box.
In this situation, the students who correctly answered the riddles were able to understand the concept that the outer layer of an object isn’t always the outside layer. In this case, the outside layer is the husk. As soon as the husk is removed, it is no longer an outside layer on the corn – that job is left to the corn itself as the cob is now the newest inside. Thus, the outside on the corn cob is eaten and the cob itself is thrown away.
Thinking outside the box is to understand the concept that not everything remains the same and there’s always multiple ways to solve a problem. Since this moment, this teacher has become one of my favorites and has pushed our ability to problem-solve by introducing us to a handful of brain teasers that force an individual to process something differently.
Thinking outside the box is pinnacle for a society, because if we continue to follow the same baseless rules or method to solve a problem, it’ll never be done efficiently. Thinking outside of the box directly results in innovative and creative thinkers. Once individuals begin to think outside their box, more possibilities emerge. There is no longer a barrier to creativity.
It’s important for people to ask themselves “Is there any other way I can solve this problem?” If individuals are encouraged to use their minds and reroute themselves from mindless thinking, anything can be accomplished. It just correlates to the amount of effort someone is willing to put into a solution.