Thinking Outside Your Box by Tyler

Thinking Outside Your Box by Tyler - October 2018 Scholarship Essay

What does it mean to “think outside the box?” This question owns multitudes of different meanings to vast amounts of people around the world. This includes myself, who also derives a personal meaning from what it means to think outside the box. My personal answer to this question happens to be a slightly complicated one. Thus, allow me to walk you through my answer to the simple, yet puzzling question of what it means to think outside the box.
The simple and most common answer to the meaning of the phrase “thinking outside the box” is that it means to think differently. In other words, to stop thinking simply and embrace wilder ideas and possibilities. Moreover, my personal answer to the question is quite similar to the common answer. From my point of view, the “box” in the phrase refers to one’s own mental barriers. I believe Every human being’s thought process is constricted by barriers that form a sort of hallway and keep one’s train of thought moving down the said hallway, thus constricting it to a single, grounded path. Within this hallway is our simple, regular mindset that is grounded in reality and made up of our already known knowledge. In other words, ideas that stay within this hallway could be considered “safe bets” or “definite possibilities.” Furthermore, the problem here is that the hallway is only considered safe and reliable because it is built on already previously known concepts. Humans are imperfect and, to be blunt, pretty stupid. We almost instinctively stray from ideas outside our mental hallway because they are “unsafe” and contradict the foundation of our hallway, without even considering that these foreign ideas could actually be correct. Yet, it is that gamble that causes our trains of thought to stay within the path formed by their narrow barriers.
To think outside the box is to break down the barriers making up our mental hallways. To demolish them an allow our trains of thought to escape and embrace new paths. When we think outside the box, we defy our instincts that demand that our minds be constricted by our pre-known laws and concepts. Once that is done, it is not difficult to star perceiving our mental hallway as more akin to a prison.