You and your Box

What's your relationship with your box? We all have one. You know the one we stay in when we are focused on something that is important to us or we are comfortable. The one we leave when we are bored or get in a rut and need to be exposed to something new. As you put your dream together you will need to spend time in both places - in the box and out-of-the-box. 

Being inside the box gets a lot of bad attention these days. We are all encouraged to be out-of-the-box thinkers, positioning ourselves for those eureka moments. But recent research shows that many well known creative people actually had a daily routine or creative ritual that looked pretty much the same from day to day. People like Picasso and Beethoven and Freud. Being inside the box is actually a good place for structured and disciplined creative work, especially for those who are constantly starting things but not finishing them. One quote I heard was that creative work requires both inspiration and perspiration. Inside the box is the perspiration part. 

But something happens when we have been inside our box for too long. There ceases to be sources of new inspiration and the healthy collision and recombination of new ideas and perspectives. The 'new' things we produce start to look awfully similar to what we have produced already. That is when it is time to get out of the box for a while.  Some creative people recommend taking a year off to cultivate new ideas. I wish...? But that is not necessary. Just try getting out of your routine, doing something you have never done before like reading a book on a topic you know nothing about or getting together with somebody and learning their story. You can even do this by observing through new eyes the things you see every day. I guarantee you that there is a rich array of details that you never noticed before. One overlooked aspect of being out-of-the-box is capturing the inspiration, the ideas, so you can recall them later. The moment of inspiration can be very fleeting and creative people often have a place to collect their ideas, never knowing when one of them will move onto the next step of the creative process. 

So where are you at with your box? I am definitely at the need to get out-of-the-box stage. And I need to challenge myself to capture the ideas as they come. For a while anyways...