“Think outside of the box” is a cliche phrase used to refer to looking at a problem from a fresh perspective. It has a strong message, but why is it that so many people become obsessed with it? Almost everyone has the “think outside of the box” advice ready to fire at someone else – and by doing so they’re not really thinking outside of the box themselves.Be aware that this is not your usual article about the benefits of thinking outside of the box.

Origins of “the box”

The origins of this catchphrase can be found in the nine dots puzzle. This puzzle first appeared in Sam Loyd’s 1914 Cyclopedia of Puzzles and then in the 1951 compilation The Puzzle-Mine: Puzzles Collected from the Works of the Late Henry Ernest Dudeney.

Lexicographer David Barnhart reports that he first encountered the “think outside of the box” phrase in 1975.

(the nine dots puzzle)

What’s the nine dots puzzle? It is a puzzle game where you are presented with a square made of 9 dots (picture above) and you have to connect all the dots by drawing four straight, continuous lines without lifting the pencil from the paper. To solve the puzzle, you have to literally think outside of the box.

The box

Of course that “thinking outside of the box” is used mostly in a metaphorical sense, but what if this metaphorical box doesn’t exist at all? After all, “there is no spoon.”

There is no spoon

Here I am, with yet another connection to The Matrix movie. Let’s take a look at the “there is no spoon” scene.

After his initial training, Neo, the main character of the movie, is taken to the “Oracle,” an old lady who seems to be able to see the future. While he was waiting to see her we have an important scene. Neo is left in a room with a group of children who appear to be adepts of doing impossible things. One is also reading a book in Chinese. One young boy, who is dressed and groomed like Mahâtmâ Gandhi, is calmly sitting in a Lotus position making spoons bend through telekinesis. The extraordinary thing about the world of The Matrix is that we have no difficulty understanding how this is possible. Paranormal abilities are no longer miraculous when we know that they are just computer simulations. But Neo, actually living in this world, of course, has a little more difficulty grasping exactly how to do it. So the boy explains with perhaps the most important line of the movie, “There is no spoon.” Now, this is a great philosophical phrase.

The idea originates in Buddhism. The spoon is “empty,” it has “no self nature,” no essence or enduring reality. The spoon exists only relative to everything else.

There is no box

Just like there is no spoon to bend, there is no box to think outside of. The box which creates boundaries for our mind is a mere illusion that we ourselves have built and maintained. It is a sum of wrong concepts about reality picked up from the people with which we came in contact. The box building process starts early with school, and some people live within the boundaries of this imaginary fake box their entire lives.

Like the spoon, “the box” exists only relative to everything else. It doesn’t exist as such.

Copyblogger‘s Brian Clark writes in one of his articles:

“You create your own imaginary boxes simply by living life and accepting certain things as “real” when they are just as illusory as the beliefs of a paranoid delusional. The difference is, enough people agree that certain man-made concepts are “real,” so you’re viewed as “normal.”

One of the many real concepts that most people agree with is that these boxes that we have to think outside of are real… If you believe in that philosophy you’re viewed as normal. But the price to pay for believing in this mis-belief is enormous. It can cost you your dreams, your happiness, your creativity and your happy life.

In the end, what matters is not to think outside of an illusional box, but to have the courage to be different than the rest of the crowd – if you are different.

Don’t think outside of the box, thinking will suffice.

Second-hand concepts create more victims than second-hand smoke.

Are you obsessed with work? Is work dominating your life, replacing family, friends and outside interests? Are you that workaholic type who spends all of his free time at the office?

Clearly, the possible risk of work obsession is high, especially if one absolutely loves his work. Many people have probably been encouraged to love their work. There is a line to be drawn, however, between healthy, ambitious work habits and workaholism.

You see, there’s nothing wrong with loving your work! I always suggest to people to do what they love and to love what they do. In some cases I would even dare to suggest an obsession towards the goals of the work. But there is a fine and blurry line between the useful side of this suggestion and the dangers it might bring about.

You see, the danger consists in mistaking the purposes with the means (i.e. becoming obsessed with work itself, rather than the its goals). If you dream of having a house on beautiful sunny ocean beach, there’s nothing wrong if you become obsessed with that dream; it will help you take the necessary actions and recognize the opportunities that can get you closer to it. But when you start becoming obsessed with those actions themselves, you have to stop for a moment, analyze yourself, remember and / or redefine the goal that you were going for.

Let’s take blogging for instance. It’s a well-known fact for most bloggers that they should engage in marketing activities and create as many loyal readers as they can if they want their blog to be successful. But the mistake that most bloggers make is that they slowly and unconsciously become obsessed with marketing and attracting visitors (the means) and forget why it is they wanted to do that in the first place (the vision).

Why does that happen? Poor vision, maybe a complete lack of one.

VISION

What is this vision? For every business, every manager and every person in this world, there’s nearly always a distance between ‘where we stand‘ and ‘where we want to stand’. The vision is the destination, the point towards which we’re heading from the point where we are now. Lack of a proper vision leaves us vulnerable to a lot of confusing thoughts, such as the confusion of the vision with the actions that get us there.

A clear and well-defined vision enables one to clearly see his destination point and to feel the feelings associated with reaching it even before it actually happens in the material reality.

VISION OBSESSION VS WORK OBSESSION

The main difference between these two kinds of obsessions is the fact that one is mostly productive and the other is mostly counter-productive. The productive one is the vision obsession.

Reasons why vision obsession is productive:

• it enables the creation of strong positive feelings that help in sustaining positive mental attitudes;
• it doesn’t interfere so much in the relations with other people – like work obsession does;
• it is a fertile ground for great ideas;
• it allows one to recognize and use most of the opportunities encoutered in life when they appear;
• it is a passive skill. It cretes clear material results but doesn’t require a conscious effort to maintain it – obsessions reside in the subconscious;
• since it happens inside your mind, it doesn’t violate the rights of others – as opposed to work obsession;
• it doesn’t tire you. Work, as much as you would love doing it, can’t be done continuously without serious health consequences;

There are probably more strong positive sides to it but these are the most important ones that I could think of.
On the other hand, being obsessed with work also has some very important positive points to it, but there are certain fixed conditions that must be met in order for those strong points to be useful (no family, strong mental abilities to resist stress, mint health, etc). Here’s a real short story about the downside of being a workaholic:

“The long hours I spent at the office frequently included evenings and weekends. This left Norma alone a great deal of the time in the trenches with our three endlessly energetic kids.

When I was home, my mind was filled with all things work, which again, left little time for our marriage. Understandably, Norma would tell me. She’d point out that I wasn’t there for her needs or to help with the parenting. But to me, it sounded more like nagging, so I ignored her — as many men do!”

WHAT IS THERE TO DO?

Research has found a strong link between long and unpredictable work hours (workaholism) and the breakdown of family and other relationships. These work patterns are making people unhealthy, putting relationships under extreme stress, creating angry, inconsistent parents and reducing the well-being of children.

One possible solution is to become a “visionholic,” a person obsessed with vision and ideas rather than work. Let your vision govern your actions and your feelings and place your work on a lower level. It would be best for both you and those around you and ultimately it would clothe your dreams into material form sooner than you would expect!

These are the words with which Zora Neale Hurston starts her most famous novel, “Their Eyes Were Watching God.”

Zora Neale Hurston (January 7, 1891 – January 28, 1960) was an American folklorist and author during the time of the Harlem Renaissance. Her work slid into obscurity for decades for a number of reasons, both cultural and political.

Many readers objected to the representation of African American dialect in Hurston’s novels. Thinking like a folklorist, Hurston strove to represent speech patterns of the period which she documented through ethnographic research.

Some critics during her time felt that Hurston’s decision to render language in this way caricatured black culture. However, in recent times, critics have praised Hurston for her artful capture of the actual spoken idiom of the day.

Regardless of how much criticism her work encountered, the first line of Their Eyes Were Watching God remains a memorable and thought-provoking phrase.

In the famous sci-fi movie “The Matrix,” there’s a scene where the female heroine, Trinity, learns to fly a helicopter by uploading instructions straight to her brain. Neuro-scientists would have to master that trick so that they could help patients suffering from brain injuries and diseases.

Scientific progress already allows scientists to tackle all the aspects of brain repair and enhancement in animals. Using electronic implants and biological techniques scientists are able to boost the memory and other functions in animals. There have even been a few lab tests where human subjects were given the opportunity to control a computer cursor with their thoughts.

(click on image for full-size view)

There’s no telling how today’s research will shape the world in the next 10 or 20 years, but once the tools and techniques are perfected, there’s little question competitive individuals will get swept up in a race to expand their brain capacity.

It’s been said that a Sunday edition of The New York Times contains more information than the average 19th-century citizen accessed in his entire life. We now wonder at that… But it’s possible that the electronically augumented person of 2025 will be able to absorb whole new fields of information – the knowledge we now accumulate in a lifetime – by beaming it, Matrix-style, to the circuits in his modified cortex. All that in a just a few short moments. Those people will say: “a single memory chip of ours carries twice as much information than one expert from two decades ago encountered in his entire life.”

If you think Wi-Fi, blogs, social networks, BlackBerries, Google, and Second Life are changing the way we work and think, wait until you see what enhanced cognitive equipment can do. It’s so beautiful that it becomes scary. But I’m not sure about the order.

Even if the development of this field has therapeutic purposes at it’s foundation, strong and troublesome ethical issues are raised by the prospect.

Many people are put off by the notion of physically battering the brain – the root of thought, personality, individuality and human nature itself. And not just that, but some ethicists question the wisdom of handing new brain tools over to society so that privileged individuals can exploit them to get even further ahead of everyone else.

There are of course other people that don’t see any harm in it.

The truth is that if the cost of advanced brain technologies drops quickly and the surgical risks become less dire, people may request brain chips as casual as they receive a shot of Botox or an anti-flu vaccine.

We must keep up with the times but remember to stay true to our personal and moral values.

Now, want to learn how to fly that plane that I was talking about in the title? Just hang around in this world for a little longer.

Can you stand out as a well defined brand that the rest of us can define in 15 words or less? If you do, congratulations, you’ve created a strong personal brand around yourself! If you don’t …well, you may be wondering, “what’s a brand?”

A brand is a symbolic embodiment of all the information connected to a product, service or person and the brand’s purpose is to create associations and expectations around it. A product brand often includes a logo, fonts, color schemes, symbols, and sound, which may be developed to represent implicit values, ideas, and even personality. A personal brand is essentially the same as a product brand, the only difference being that instead of a logo, fonts and symbols you associate your person with certain habits, looks, sayings, nicknames and causes.

There have been lots of books written on the personal branding subject and for most people the idea of self-branding sounds irresistible. But what most of us seem to ignore is the fact that “most people aren’t equipped to be brands, they don’t have it – and they think they do” (Donald Trump). The result: people with annoying behavior. But I won’t talk about that here.

Having a strong personal brand is useful when marketing yourself in this Google, MySpace, YouTube and blogging era, but you must first know how to create your personal brand.

1. Develop – or “borrow” – a Saying

Jim Cramer cemented his brand on CNBC’s Mad Money with his “Boo Ya’s!“. Other famous sayings include “You’re fired!” and “It’s a good thing.” New York Post’s Cindy Adams ends her gossip columns with “Only in New York kids, only in New York.” She didn’t invent it? Well, who cares? She made it her own! You can do that too.