Crystal Kranz

You won't come up with good ideas until you think outside the box. Several years ago, when I was studying at school, my math teacher asked me to solve a puzzle. I had to connect all nine dots using just four straight lines without lifting my pencils from the page. I have long thought about it and after a few dozen attempts still found a solution! If you have tried solving this puzzle, you can confirm that your first attempts usually involve sketching lines inside the imaginary square. The correct solution, however, requires you to draw lines that extend beyond the area defined by the dots. Solving this problem requires people to literally think outside the box. But many people can't solve this problem even when they were given specific instructions to do so. That is, direct and explicit instructions to think outside the box did not help. That this advice is useless when actually trying to solve a problem involving a real box should effectively have killed off the much widely disseminated—and therefore, much more dangerous—metaphor that out-of-the-box thinking spurs creativity. After all, with one simple yet brilliant experiment, researchers had proven that the conceptual link between thinking outside the box and creativity was a myth. Of course, in real life you won’t find boxes. But you will find numerous situations where a creative breakthrough is staring you in the face. They are much more common than you probably think. Thanks to this puzzle I became successful person and write a review about Thinking outside the Box for online essay writers service, where you can also find a lot of useful suggestions how to learn to think differently.