How to Think Outside the Box with 3 Creativity Exercises

Creativity exercises help you think outside the box

You know you have to think outside the box. Your boss tells you this. Blogs and bestselling books tell you. Your TV tells you.

But where are the walls of this box and how do you get your thinking outside of it?

You do it the same way you get to Carnegie Hall: Practice. Here are three creativity exercises that will make it a habit for you to think outside the box.

Difficulty:

Moderate

Instructions

1. First you have to set aside some time for these exercises. Fifteen minutes might be fine, but it has to be an uninterrupted fifteen minutes. No danger of phone calls, no co-workers, no family.

2. Creativity Exercise One: Look around you and pick a familiar object, and study it. Touch it, pick it up, smell it. Keep studying it until you have learned something about it that you didn't know before. Maybe it's the varied thickness of even the smoothest paper, or the fact that your cat only has four toes on each back foot.

   This is what it means to think outside the box. The box is what you know.

3. Creativity Exercise Two: Pick up a book, close your eyes, open it to a random page, and stab your finger at the page. Look and see which word your finger landed on. If you don't like the word, you get one do-over. Now get a paper and pen or pencil, or type at your computer, and come up with 25 ways that word relates to your life. If that's too easy, make it 50.

   When you do this exercise, you will come up with a few items right away. They are the obvious things you already know. When you get to the end of those, it will suddenly get very hard. That's the wall of the box. This is the place where you must press on. Think outside the box. When you get through that wall, those new ideas will come easier. You'll come up with things you never thought of before.

4. Creativity Exercise Three: This one will take longer than your fifteen minutes, but that's part of the point. Now you have to learn to think outside the box all the time, not just within your isolated creativity exercise. This time you have to come up with a list of 100 things to consider before making a certain decision. What decision is up to you -- it can be who to vote for, or whether to buy a new TV, or even where you want to take your spouse for a romantic dinner. An important decision will probably be easier, but not necessarily.

   You won't get this done in fifteen minutes, but get as far as you can. Then make it a hobby. Think about it each day. Try to come up with just one more consideration or reason when you're on your break, or in line at the store.

   You're not going to get to 100 without getting silly or ridiculous here and there. And that's okay, because the wall of the box here is made up of your assumptions of what is right and appropriate. To think outside the box, you have to start considering things you thought were wrong.

5. Once you get the hang of each of these creativity exercises, you can start applying them to your real projects and goals. Study an element of your project until you learn something new. Pick a random word and think deeply about how it relates to your goals. Make a hobby of thinking up new considerations to understanding the problems.