MOSENABRE, JEA E.

BSCE-5A
WRITE-UPS NO. 5
CREATIVE THINKING
How to Get Out of the Box and Generate Ideas
By: Giovanni Corazza at TEDxRoma

This speech is really a life changing. There are a lot of lessons we can learn from this
man speaking in front of different people who are facing different challenges in life. Thanks to
this man who proudly speaks to encourage a lot of people not just the audience watching out
there but also someone like who's watching through my phone. Hope you continue motivating
people in the future. In his video I learned that Leaning Thinking out of the box is the way to
super intelligent. Practice and Improving More useful Knowledges are kind of the key or the gun
or the food that help your mind more successful in the future.
POINTS OF IDEAS WE GET:
 To be creative, you need to practice out-of-the-box thinking.
 Be aware of your assumptions. Unfounded assumptions prevent you from thinking
creatively.
 Value Long Thinking; judge ideas by how they fit as an ensemble, not individually. You
can only do this with patience.
 Apply theories and concepts to areas that were never applied to before.
 Creative thinking is about finding many alternatives and choosing the best answer, not
about finding the right* answer.
 If your environment punishes mistakes, you will never be creative.
 Combine different disciplines to create new ideas using metaphors.
So which box are we talking about? We must ever clear the definition so that we’re really
talking about something specific. It’s not our minds, we cannot think out of our minds. It’s a
boundary within our minds, the boundary between what we know, and what we yet ever still, or
yet thought about. What is on mind? What is on knowledge structure? Is it an emerging
phenomenon out of the complex mechanism which is brain? We start with the initial conditions
are genetic characters. We have boundary conditions, the environment, we have indirect
experience. Years and years spent in school and university to learn what other people left thought,
what other people left discovered, what other people left created, and then we have our own direct
experience, are successes or failures that really made what we are. All of this built the ant hills
within which we live, and we live very well in that, and whatever we think inside that, until that
box we feel safe, whatever outside is invisible to us, we don’t know what is outside and that’s
risky because now nobody else knows. And so, we are faced with is something necessary to our
dignity, but actually it’s very difficult to do.
How do we go out of the box? How do we do that? What are the mechanisms? Do we
need to wait for an apple to fall on our head or are there some specific techniques? Well… reality
out there for us to perceive it. It’s beautiful. You see these flowers. And we have a lot of ideas,
which are convergent to information. The dominant idea, whenever we need to think about an
area, a focused area, we have idea on how things should be. We have requirements, we have
specification, we know how things are because that’s the way they always have been. But if we
want to go out of the box, we need to add something more, a little spice, something which go
beyond the convergent information, something wrong, something absurd, something apparently
is not relevant, something which takes us far. This is what we called divergent information. We
need a little bit of that divergent information to cross the border within our mind from what we
know to what we ever thought about. So, this is the essential mechanism that’s necessary and it
takes us to a place we don’t really know where to go. We are suspended. It’s like the middle
game in chess. Where do you go once, you’re out of the box, you have no preset direction, so it’s
already potential situation that brings us to the feeling that we should immediately go back. This
now makes any sense, let’s go back to safe place, let’s go back inside the box. That’s the
temptation that we need to resist. We need to value long thinking, normally we talk about
brilliant thinking, fast thinking, deep thinking but here we’re talking about something different,
long thinking. What those that mean? It’s some thought that takes us far, it’s as if you were
reading poetry or listening to music, you don’t judge the single notes, you don’t judge the single
words. It’s the (?) that gives you feeling and takes you far. We must do the same thing without
concepts. We need to go far. And so, we can use association of ideas, combination of ideas,
extraction of principle and application of those principles to areas where they never applied
before. We need to be open minded; we need to be fluent. Look for alternatives and not for the
correct answer because when you think creatively, there’s no single correct answer, there are
many possible alternatives.
And suppose now that we are lucky, we land upon a new idea, we are now travel in the
exploration out of the box. What is the value that, how do we assess the value of new ideas, it’s
very difficult, it is really new because you’ve never seen that before, nobody else has seen that
before? It’s as if we planned on a new planet, totally undiscovered territory, and it’s difficult to
understand the value of something new. First of all because we don’t feel entitled to be inventors.
Who am I to be the generator of that new idea? And probably this was being thought about
before, if this is correct, somebody would have done it before me. These are all-natural
mechanism within which we kill our own ideas. We have to resist that. We need to look for the
match between new idea and our initial drive, our initial focus. Or, evaluate the idea per se, for
its own value, and maybe that’s something that solve another problem, which was not yours.
Several deputies happen all the time, we just need to have the eye to see that, to notice the
difference.
Okay but we are social animals, we live in environment, so to think out of the box, bringing new
ideas we need challenge the environment. When is it a good idea to challenge everybody around
you? In your working environment, you’re the boss, you don’t want to upset him or her. When is
it a good idea to think out of the box? Well first of all, if the environment punishes mistakes, you
will never be tempted to go out of the box, would remain safely in the non-environment. So, it
you want to stimulate an environment which is creative, you need to allow the existence of
divergent information, you need to allow your relevant information to come in, you have to mix
and match different disciplines, you have to use metaphors in the organizations. Only in that
case, you would allow the environment be ready to prone to generation of new ideas.
A speech by Giovanni Corazza shows us that we may often find ourselves in a safe
and secure place, but to create new ideas we must adventure out into the unknown: Being inside
your personal bubble will be safe and comfortable, and when we are asked to come out and give
our thoughts on things it won’t be the same. So why would we risk that and venture into
unknown ground? If we truly want to be creative, we must push ourselves outside of our comfort
zones and begin to think on why we want what we do. What, we know and experience around us
makes us who we are, and builds up the walls of our box to keep us safe. However, when we
take on anything new – some information that doesn’t fit with our usual ideals – we enter a new
place that we may not understand. So many of us will decide to jump back into our safe areas
and not explore the new. Instead, decide to take on the new and see where it takes you. Take on
the adventure rather than hiding away and you will discover a new world of opportunities. Find
new ideas by doing what you wouldn’t normally wouldn’t and thinking on things that would
normally never enter your mind.
We worked so hard for a lifetime to build it up, why should we risk it? Is this
something which is a luxury, that only a few people can do, or is it really a necessity? Why?
Think of our lives today. We are really a part of a network. We are nodes in a network. We share
information in real time, and we, in the end, all possess the same information. That’s the end of
it, and that is a scary thought. If we all possess the same information, what makes a difference
between ourselves? Where does our dignity as human beings lie? It really depends on what we
generate with that common shared information. So, to think creatively, to go out of the box, is
not a luxury. It’s a necessity for us and for our dignity as human beings.