It’s All About Thinking Outside the Box – Or Is It?

It’s All About Thinking Outside the Box – Or Is It?

Who’s tired of hearing, “Think Outside the Box?” I am. It’s become rather a cliché and has little meaning today. Whenever I see it or hear it, I think, what box? Really, what box?  

Today, I doubt the reasoning behind “think outside the box” works as well as it should. I prefer thinking inside the box myself.

How awesome were empty boxes to us when we were children?

It didn’t matter what was in the box; it only mattered that there was a box, and…its depths needed exploring! Yes, like cats, we saw the box as a toy.

Big boxes that once had small appliances in them, though the box itself was twice or three times the size of some of the appliances (unless it was a refrigerator; yes, they used to come in boxes!), or boxes that new furniture came in (from Ikea, to be assembled, of course). Just the sight of them got our brains creating fun ways to use them. Oh, and don’t forget the packing paper inside the box. The noise of it crinkling. The feel of it all crumpled up even before we touched it. How fun!

The joy of boxes doesn’t change. Even my grandchildren love big boxes. In their youth (they are all grown up now at 9 and 14), they made forts out of boxes and old blankets. They made secret hideaways. They used boxes as wagons and dragged each other around the house in them.

Let me share the wonderful things I found inside a box that was delivered to my house…

By the way, the box came in a delivery truck, which is wondrous in itself. Delivery trucks provide a simple distraction to the busy work of the day, and one begins to feel a tingle of excitement when one sees a delivery truck stopped in front of one’s house. The delivery trucks in our area make an ear-piercing, squeaky noise, telling me they’re here, and I admit I go to the window with great anticipation! “Is it something for me?” I squeal.

This particular box was larger than most. I’d say gigantic, but that would be an exaggeration. It felt gigantic, though.  It could have fit an old-fashioned typewriter; that’s how huge it was. That was my first thought. That someone had sent me an old-fashioned typewriter.  (How cool would that be?)

I tore it open, flipped the enormous flaps aside, and delved in. The box was overflowing with white, shredded paper. I was mesmerized. I’d never had anything delivered with shredded paper in it – nor have I ever since. No, it was an episode of the Twilight Zone.

I held the pieces of paper in my hands for a minute, then carefully divided them; they were stuck together in some places and almost falling apart in others until I was surrounded by so many tiny white slivers of paper with faded words on them, I felt like I was in a movie, a fantasy about books. For a few minutes, I pretended the slips of paper would arrange themselves into a story, the story they were before the paper they were typed on was shredded into these strings of wasted tree.

Was it a 20-page case study about the power of writing a book for your business? Was it a chapter from a literary novel? Was it the neglected chapters of someone’s novel? Was it part of a newspaper? Oh, remember those? (If you were born after 2000, ask an older relative what a newspaper is/was!)

After careful review, I decided it was a few chapters about early America—stories from the good old days. I caught a word here and a phrase there.

Those pieces of parchment covered with letters and words, torn apart by a shredding machine, invited me to explore the story within them.

I began to hear the story spoken in my head: the story of a shy little girl who was afraid of crowds, who loved animals, and who didn’t like to share with her younger brother. In the shadows, there was a ribbon – faded pink, wrapped around a parcel of letters. Letters I wrote to myself in the day. About what I wanted to be when I grew up.

I sat there on the floor and got lost in memory. Fond memory. Days of writing with a pencil on lined paper. Oh, no typewriter at my house. Instead, one wrote with a lead pencil that sported a handy eraser on the end to fix the errant word or phrase that flowed out of the pencil unbidden. Yes, even then, my fingers had a mind of their own and would write words that did not come from my brain. And I would have to go back and erase and erase and erase and wonder why my brain and my fingers had a hiccup at that point.

That day, I uncovered memories long forgotten. Long ago moments of my childhood – images of the beach on Sunday afternoons, ice cream on hot August evenings, my first dog, my first cat, my love of long walks in bare feet. I saw myself at the dining room table, writing my first novel, when I was in seventh grade. Whatever happened to that 300-page story? Goodness knows because I don’t.

For a few moments, with the paper from inside that box I found yesterday – that shadowy memory that is the prologue to today.

As I pulled the wrinkled bits of paper out, I squinted and tried to see the spring and summer of 2026- but my eyes could not find a marker. Tomorrow is not written yet. Not in pen, anyway.

I know that outside-of-the-box thinking is designed to spark creativity.

Yet, I find folks are not so happy with it these days. In this post by Lucy Gower on LinkedIn, she describes another way this phrase is not as useful as it seems. Lucy talks about fleas and how established norms become so ingrained in us that we can’t think outside the box. She recommends “practical tools” and time and space to tap into creativity.

There was a saying back in the early days of the internet when Jay Conrad Levinson wrote Guerilla Marketing – maybe he said it, Google doesn’t know, but it goes like this: “You can’t read the label when you’re inside the bottle.”

It means you have to step away from the problem and look at the big picture. It’s used in team settings to get folks thinking of the problem they have to solve and how to solve it as if they’re outside the bottle.

Or the box.

What if, though, the answer is inside the bottle or the box? What if you can tell what’s in the bottle by tasting what’s inside? Or if you can appreciate the contents of a box by sitting in it and just letting your imagination roam. What about the rules of haiku? There’s a box for you! And you must stay inside of it to successfully create your poem.

The Lure of Inside the Box…

My grandson, in the picture shown here, was a big believer in checking out what was inside the box. And he created his own fun with that.

That’s what I’m talking about. Create your own stories and fun by sitting inside the box for a while. Sit there and ignore what’s going on outside the box. Ignore the people talking. Ignore your phone. Ignore anything that will distract you from immersing yourself in this inviting space.

Close your eyes. Relax. Let the box comfort you; let it embrace you like a comfy chair on the back porch in July, with the birds chirruping, and the bees buzzing, and the sun shining on the trees and grass.

Let your mind wander. You’re inside the box because it’s a nice place to be. Find that voice that’s been susurrating in your mind for years saying, “Tell them the story.” Read my blog post for first-time authors: “Writing a book for beginners,” and I promise the voice in your head will thank you.

The box is not a scary thing. It’s a place to create what YOU want to create. Whether it’s your office box, your room box, your car box, or wherever it is you feel most inspired, don’t allow others to convince you it’s the wrong way to think.

I emptied my box (What was delivered? Oh, does it really matter?) and put it away. And today, I still think of what was in the box and not what was outside of the box. And I smile.

p.s. want to know the real story behind “think outside the box?” Check here.