“As soon as you open your mind to doing things differently, the doors of opportunity practically fly off their hinges.”
― Jay Abraham
Part 1. Thinking Outside The Box
Open your eyes. Look. What do you see? Do you only see words printed on a screen? What if I told you that while all these things are indeed in front of you, there is so much more in front of you that you should be seeing. What if I told you that what you are seeing at this very moment, is not the whole picture.
What if I told you that what you think you see is, is in fact, a simplified version of actual reality and that any idea, opinion, or piece of information that enters your line of sight is first put into a Box and categorized into logical order, and what’s placed at the top to continue clouding your subconscious are only the ideas which could logically fit into the Box.
Now I know you're probably thinking, ‘What else could I possibly see that I don’t see already’.
Well, what if I told you that there is a whole other unseen world. That beyond your walls of rational thought, there is another world out there, and if you were to somehow gain access to that world, you’d see that right in front of you there would be an unending string of opportunities, roads, and paths that this book would have just now put in front of you.
What if I also told you that the reason that you cannot see this extraordinary world of opportunity is because society has unintentionally structured itself to weaken your mind and the minds of anyone else who goes through it, leaving nobody able to think outside of this subconscious mind, or as many others and I like to call it ‘the Box’.
Let me tell you a story that should make your understanding of this imaginary box a little bit more vivid.
Imagine a world where all the newborn kids were given some crayons and told to draw whatever they desire. There would be some drawings that are out of this world, that not even the smartest people yet thought of. Now imagine that those kids the next day are rounded up and put into a really big box.
Now the kids have been told by their parents for years that this box is good and will provide them with endless opportunities for success. In this box, the kids are told to do the same thing they had done the previous day, color. The kids are once again given crayons and told to draw whatever it is they desire, but only this time their paper already has lines printed on it forming a pirate.
The kids are told to start and they once again take their crayons and use them to color the paper in whichever way, and with whatever colors best expressed both their emotions and imagination at the time. Now when it comes time for the kids to turn in their paper, the Box Leaders tell them that they had all just wasted their time and what they had done was just scribble on the paper.
The kids were told to stay within the lines and that a pirate could only be certain colors, in certain places.
The next day the kids are given the same task, they once again receive crayons and paper, decorated with the same image of a pirate, and then told to start. However, that day proved to be different, the kids had learned and decided to do what the instructor had said to do the previous day.
This time, by the time the instructor came around to collect everyone’s paper, the instructor was ecstatic to see that most of the children had learned from the previous day's lesson and this time colored the image of the pirate with all the right shades of brown, while a few stubborn kids had done what they had done the previous day and filled the pirate with all the wrong colors.
The kids don't know it yet, but they have just been guided into the box and taught to think like their teachers, who in turn were taught to think like the rest of the world.
Those kids have just become Box Thinkers, however, the kids that continued to color outside the lines and “with all the wrong colors”, remained outside of the box.
Those kids stuck to their unique ways of thinking and kept their creativity, they've unintentionally started the path of looking at the world and seeing things a little differently than their peers, they have just become Out of the Box Thinkers.
If I get 10 reactions on this post, I will drop the next part shortly!