Encouraging Words:Get Out of the Box

A parent once asked a millionaire how he could ensure that his son would have the best chance to become a millionaire? He surprised the parent by saying he should immediately let his son drop out of school. Did he mean that education was not good? No, I don’t think that was the implication. Education is always valuable, even trivia education. However, our western educational system is fraught with many problems. One of the shortcomings is that it has become an indoctrination system that creates clones rather than educational. I know the basic nature of teaching is that, however, the doctrines now dispensed have become doctrines of self-fulfillment and self-preservation. Kind of a laissez-faire mentality where if one fails then one finds someone to blame and if you perceive you’ve been done wrong, you can repay that debt to anyone who happens to be handy. Another primary problem is that it encourages students to work toward grades as if grades were the ultimate measure of success. In one Master’s Degree level course, I reduced all the information to note cards. The night before and the morning of a test, I memorized the information on the note cards and made A’s. Then I promptly forgot it, and even though I worked in that field for 25 years, today I can’t remember anything I had in the course. Bottom line, if you can memorize, you can make A’s in most of the high school and college courses. Our educational system is great in sharpening our short term memory skills, but woefully lacking in helping us to think, apply and manipulate the data that we memorized. In other words, it puts students into a box and says, “Everything you need to succeed and have a good life is in the box.” The ancient Greeks had a word for that, “Baloney!”

A man was born with deformed legs and feet. Because his parents thought he would never be able to walk, they built a box and put him in it. They put wheels on it in the warmer times and runners on it when it snowed. Sometimes, he would tip the box over and get out, and his parents would scolded him and put him back into the box. Eventually he got out enough that he learned to walk. The point is, if you want to expand your horizon and walk instead of crawl, get out of the box.

The same is true in other areas of life. If you want to be a leader and achieve new things, you must “think outside the box.” As someone said, “You cannot blaze new trails if you follow in the footsteps of others.” We need to become a kid again, lie in the grass and look up at the clouds. Let the mind wonder where it will, dreaming and imagining all the possibilities. Keep asking “What if” in all areas, even those that are the sacred cows in your life.

My undergraduate degree in college was in art. I often looked at the famous artists who are revered and whose work is so valuable. Why did they suffer with the miserable life that many had? Why didn’t they get a job and paint after work and on weekends? Then it dawned on me. Creativity does not fall into quick hands. There is no microwave recipe for it. It is a crockpot dish that takes time. Sometimes it happens at eight o’clock in the morning and at other time at four in the afternoon. And then sometimes it strikes at four in the morning. Creativity takes time and they knew large blocks of time were necessary to nurture and cultivate the creativity within them. Don’t discard ideas before they’ve had time to seep and morph into what they can become. Let them cook and simmer in that creative crockpot until they’re done.

And whatever you do, get outside your box.