Where is “thinking out of the box” coming from?

As you might know the phrase “thing out of the box” usually use in business context, especially in creative industry and obstacle need breakthrough solutions. Today, I stumbled across the question “Where is “thinking out of the box” coming from?”. Hum, so I started to do some google search.

You go search for some images related to this, you will find a lot of interesting visuals:

So which one is the origin?

So I dig deeper and found out this puzzle:

Can you with 4 lines connecting these dots?

There’re a lot of solutions. However, you need to know from the basic. The basic is that you need to think this is not a square box covering with 9 dots outside. You need to imagine that this is a white surface and the line can be in different sizes and can cross the dots in many ways.

Here are 2 different ways to solve it:

In real life, people usually think as they are in the box and struggle with the solutions. They forget that quiz always come with solutions. Only that it’s important to answer “when and how you will solve it”. Creativity is important. However, patience and practice are more important to form you a champion. To solve hard quizzes requires unstoppable decisiveness from you. As you can see a lot of famous pianist need to practice 8h daily in 2-3 years for only 1 beautiful song.

PS: Today is the 5th Jan (Lunar Calendar), everybody is asking me: Why do you go to work? Don’t you think it’s unlucky? Why is the company working on the 5th? Come on man, think out of the box 🙂 !