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Overview

People have no idea how much their minds are betraying them. Their minds might make hasty decisions that they regret just a few minutes later, or block all the good ideas out. It feels like their minds are working against them sometimes!

Thankfully, most of our mind’s evil tricks can be controlled and turned into advantages. Most people have the same tripwires as you do, so knowing how to overcome yours is key to understanding others.

Most people have trouble thinking outside the box. It’s a well-known phrase that refers to how we think about things in our minds.

In this article, you’ll learn how to avoid tunnel vision by thinking outside the box. You’ll also learn that the world is not round and why pens almost killed Bic.

Big Idea #1: Like it or not, you can’t escape thinking in boxes.

How many times have you been asked to think outside the box? It’s a common phrase, but it turns out that it’s really hard to do. The reason is because of how we think.

We use mental models to help us understand the world around us. These are boxes that we put our information into so that we can process it more easily. We also develop rules and paradigms, which are very helpful in making sense of things. If there were no models, then we would be unable to think efficiently or reason at all.

If you live in Germany, for example, you’ve learned to associate light beige cars with taxis. You can rule out other vehicles of that color when looking for a ride from point A to point B because they’re not taxis.

If you travel to New York City, however, you won’t linger in a boxless void for long. Almost instantly, your brain will recognize that yellow cars are taxis and make sure to look out for them in order to get around the city quickly.

There are more than just one box. You can be a combination of several boxes, for example, an IT specialist and an Australian. That means there’s also a lot of other people who have their own unique boxes that don’t include your identity or worldview.

Boxes are the foundation of our thinking. Once we step outside of a box, we’ll simply find ourselves in another one.

Big Idea #2: Revolutionary ideas come in new boxes.

So if you just enter a new box, then you haven’t really thought outside the box. You need to create entirely new boxes that no one has ever entered before.

If you don’t develop new ways of thinking, you run the risk of being trapped by your old ways. You might lose sight of how those old ways are just opinions and not reality itself. Your perceptions about something are based on a subjective sample, so they’re only your perception and not the real thing. If you think that what you see is right, then it limits what else could be out there.

For example, one of the most recent theories about Earth is that it’s a potato-shaped object. It took people a long time to accept this theory even though they could see with their own eyes that the Earth was flat. However, now we know better and have accepted another round model for our planet.

Tunnel vision can be a huge problem for creativity. If we don’t break free of that, we’ll only see the world through one box—the flat Earth box. People will think it’s impossible to fall off the Earth, and they won’t try sailing around the globe or exploring other continents.

Bic realized that it wasn’t just a pen company, but could branch out into other products. It was able to do this by changing its self-perception from a pen producer to a plastic product manufacturer. If we want to break free of conventional thinking and build new boxes, we can use the following key points as guides: