“If you can trust yourself”, you can think outside any boxes

The truth is that most of us spend our lives making someone else’s dreams happen and we march to the beat of someone else’s drum. When we follow established patterns we are safe, but by following them, we also get a predictable result. Not following established patterns led to the idea of Amazon.com back in mid 1990s. What if you’d used “out of the box” thinking to resolve your marriage conflict, rekindle the flame, and avoid your divorce with your ex-spouse? Our lives are littered with the shards of opportunities dashed because we were stuck in our established patterns of thinking; we weren’t able to “think outside of the box” when it really mattered.

Of course there are things that cannot or should not be done, but we often restrain our imagination for no reason at all. Here is an old puzzle that can illustrate how you tend to box yourself in. Do your best to solve it – this puzzle demonstrates how you can move “outside of the box”:

Connect the nine dots above with four straight pencil strokes without lifting the pencil. Going back over a line counts as another stroke (in other words, one stroke on top of another counts as a separate stroke).

Scroll down further to find a clue. However, before you scroll down or start looking for the answer on Google or Yahoo, ask yourself:

Are you always this quick to give up on yourself and follow what others tell you? Do you look for “the” answer without giving your mind time to consider other solutions to a problem and see all the possibilities? Maybe you have missed a great many things in your life because you didn’t give yourself time to see them? Doing things in a new way isn’t easy or automatic—you need to develop the habit of looking at things a new way. Give yourself 10 minutes and you may find the answer for yourself. If you run out of patience, click here for the clue to solving the puzzle and the rest of the article:

The clue is to think outside of the box literally! Look at where you drew all your lines. Are they within the boundaries of the box? Why did you decide that the lines had to stay within the boundaries of the box that the nine dots seemed to create? Nothing in the instructions said that the lines couldn’t extend beyond those boundaries! Give yourself several minutes to look at the puzzle a new way and find the answer. If your patience has run out or you just want to check your answer and read the rest of the article, click here:

As you can see, the solution is to extend your the lines outside of the box – literally. Most of us impose upon ourselves the apparent limitation of the borders of those nine dots, a limitation that doesn’t exist! So it often is in other areas of our lives – we needlessly impose upon ourselves limitations that don’t exist. There are plenty of real restrictions that we have to deal with without our imposing more on ourselves!

If you have never seen this puzzle before and have actually solved it by yourself (even if you used the clue!), then you have just experienced the feeling of the “light coming on”. This is how it feels when you take time to wrap your mind around a problem, find where the limitations are, and where they are self-imposed. Most importantly you’ve had that ‘Aha!” moment when you saw a solution where a moment earlier there had been none. Finding and realizing these hidden possibilities sometimes takes minutes, weeks, or years and you may have to do some work to get better at looking at things in new ways. Seeing past initial limitations takes practice, but there’s nothing better than dreaming a worthwhile dream, finding a way for this dream to come true, and then doing what it takes to see your dream become a reality. It all starts with thinking outside of the box.