For most of my career, I was advised to “think outside the box”. It’s a fun concept, a cute idea really! It’s a popular piece of advice, especially in the Silicon Valley culture, where I currently belong. The thing is though, I don’t really think the majority of us understand what the “box” is, let alone what thinking outside of it looks like! 

I don’t claim to fully understand it myself either. If I did, I would be now leading my white hot new startup, disrupting some industry, or even birthing a new one, while changing the world on the side! Obviously, I am not at this stage yet! But who knows, maybe one day I will, maybe I won’t.

You can tell from my glorious daydreams above that my definition of “thinking outside the box” is a bit extreme! But that’s me. Even though I don’t consider myself to be “outside the box” yet, I did form some opinions about what forms our boxes. This article is a collection of my thoughts about the topic.

Don’t mistake this article as a framework for raising above the box, or any kind of how-to guide! It’s an article, not a book, and I have already admitted that I am still learning myself 🙂 

Draw the borders of your box

We don’t live in a binary world. There is no one box. The phrase “thinking outside the box” means very different things from one person to another, because of the simple fact that the “box” differs from one person to another.  

Everyone of us has her or his box. Your box is not only dependent on your circumstances, but also your desires, as well as how people around you think. 

Understanding yourself, and what you really want, is vital. Let’s talk careers: Do you want to grow with your current employer, or do you want to work at a different employer? How about leading your current employer one day? Or maybe you want not to work for anyone at all? Do you care about money, or do you care more about having a purpose even if it makes you poor? Maybe you want money and purpose, which is also a very valid goal. The list can go on forever. Each one of us is different.

There is no magic recipe on how to get to know yourself, you will just have to think long and hard about it, self reflect as much as you can. You will also need to be very aware of the fact that many of your desires, needs, and wants evolve with you. So in other words, much of what you desire and seek today will likely change tomorrow. Training yourself to develop a longer vision of where you want to go pays off in the long run.

For our circumstances: Obviously, some of them can be controlled by us, while some of them can’t. Your family, your community growing up, your education as a child are all examples of factors that create circumstances not in our control. What we can control is what we do with our lives after our brains mature. Your circumstances come with their own bundles of advantages, and disadvantages. Sometimes, the disadvantages can turn into assets that no one expected. Other times they won’t, but hey, who said life is fair?  There is a lot of literature out there about the “power of the underdog” and “how adversity builds the greatest of people”. I read a lot of that literature. My take is that a good dosage of luck is needed, combined with natural intelligence and persistence for underdog success stories to happen.

Genghis Khan was born in a remote place, with a harsh environment, where small tribes used to raid one another for sustenance and sport. After he matured, he was able to use these realities to his advantage, when he started his quest to conquer the world. His armies were puzzling for the then civilized world, because of their flexible decentralized fighting techniques, and their ability to navigate difficult terrain to show up from where no one was expecting an attack.

How the people around you think, can greatly affect how you perceive things yourself, and how you define your box that encapsulates your thinking. Seeing things only based on how people around you see things, can lead you to aim to achieve goals that are impressive to your community, your family, or people around you in general. But not goals that can make you necessarily satisfied, or happy to achieve.  

Let’s pick on Genghis Khan again, people around him lived and died raiding other tribes to own things. Their children grew up thinking the same way. Their grandchildren grew up thinking the same way. All his family thought the same way. He on the other hand rose above that particular box, and started dreaming up a vision where tribes are working together towards bigger goals. In hindsight, you’d assume that’s an easy conclusion, but it must have been an excruciating learning journey for him to break free of the confines of his people’s perception of things, and reach the vision that ended up making him the feared and well known history figure of today.

There is a famous quote that is sometimes, but not conclusively, attributed to Henry Ford, who made modern cars a reality: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” This quote is typically used as a modern business anecdote against the old idea that the customer is always right. The same quote can also be used as a testament of how , in some cases , the collective opinions of people around you may be dead wrong, at least for you!!