The Power of Forgetting (19 page)

Constantly thinking outside the box was an important skill I mastered out of necessity when I was young, but it’s
never too late to start thinking in this manner. If you’ve never been pressured to think too far out of your box, and you’re an adult hoping to make the most of your life and get further ahead, then there’s no time like the present to pick up this skill and make it a habit. The ability to think outside the box will increasingly become a highly valued asset that separates the people who don’t excel from those who achieve enormous success—that is, those who are prepared to change the world and excited about doing it. These are the people who also happen to find life more fulfilling on a deeply personal level because their minds think in ways that keep them entertained and resourceful when they least expect it. In other words, they rarely get bored.

Thinking outside the box has everything to do with being a productive thinker. The skill allows you to discover novel solutions, become more efficient in everyday tasks, problem-solve more quickly, and ultimately maximize the development of all the other skills outlined in this book. Even your capacity to forget when you need to will depend on your ability to think outside the box. Once this skill becomes second nature, you’ll find that identifying and labeling incoming content to your brain as either important (“retain and remember”) or destined for the trash can is much easier. Which ultimately helps you to make room for more information and have more mental bandwidth to think creatively.

In this chapter I’m going to nudge you to think outside the box in the hope that you can take these mental exercises and open up areas in your mind that encourage you to be more creative. More resourceful.
Different
. What I love about this skill is that it compels you to integrate all of your talents and abilities at the same time. You’ll blend logic with
creativity, unite reason with imagination, and mix rationality with absurdity. The whole point of being able to think outside the box is to honor discovery, playfulness, invention, independence, and adaptation. No sooner will you be thinking further outside your box in all that you do than you’ll transform your brain into a sweeping source of ideas, fresh insights, and intuitive wisdom. You’ll also be stimulating its processing speed, power, and capacity. In short, you’ll be edging it toward that place where you optimize your mind’s productive output.

Let’s start with a classic puzzle: the Nine Dots. See if you can find a way to link all nine of the following dots using four straight lines or fewer, without lifting your pen and without tracing the same line more than once.

Here is just one way to solve this (indeed, there’s more than one solution to this puzzle):

How difficult did you find this now-famous puzzle? The Nine Dots—which originated in the early twentieth century and actually predates the slogan “outside the box”—has come to signify the concept of thinking outside the box because it literally shows an invisible “box” and how you have to go beyond the boundaries to link all the dots in four straight lines.

It’s well documented that people who consistently think outside the box tend to be more inventive, more creative, and often more successful overall in life. But what does thinking outside the box really mean—and how can you develop this skill?

This chapter is filled with games that will help you look at things differently. That’s all that thinking outside the box really is. I’m going to take you on a wild ride through fresh and innovative ways to solve traditional yet complex math problems whose shortcut solutions using my techniques are surprisingly simple (easier than the traditional route!). The goal is not so much to learn how to perform these math tricks but to train you to empower your mind in ways that go against traditional or ingrained modes of thinking. These methods can spur new ideas and tap a deeper level of creative
genius that will serve you well in every area of life. And who doesn’t want to be more creative and inventive?

In my everyday work, I’m constantly encouraging and training kids to think outside the box. What I’m up against, though, are the “rules” that they’ve learned and resolutely stick to. Although the very nature of education is supposed to foster their creativity and teach them how to use their own independent minds to arrive at solutions, I frequently find that the very nature of education also encompasses customs and habits that inhibit the creative spirit. Rather than being encouraged to think differently and break tradition by coming up with their own solutions to problems, they are instead taught that if they don’t follow certain rules they will fail.

Take, for example, the how-tos of squaring numbers. When asked to square a number, the kids I work with cannot do it in their heads very easily. They write it out, move from right to left, carry the one, and so on (or resort to a calculator). They don’t even try to do it any other way—because they are trained to believe that there
is
no other way! Or, as I’ve already discussed, if given the task of memorizing a long list—say, reciting the presidents in order starting with George Washington—they will approach the task by trying to drill the facts into their heads using rote memorization. That rarely works well.

So let’s see how far you can flex your mind and how much permission you can give yourself to seek different pathways to solve problems. The exercises in this chapter will call upon lessons you’ve already learned from previous chapters and challenge you to go further in stretching your mind’s muscles. The Nine Dots puzzle should have helped to loosen
up those latent areas of the mind that rarely get the attention they deserve. Now let’s take it up a notch!

The game of Twenty-Four is great for revving up your brain and getting creative. (It’s especially fun to play while driving.) Here’s how to play:

The object is to turn four random numbers into a mathematical combination that equals 24. You can use addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. While on your trip, keep an eye out for any signs that contain numbers in a row (such as a roadside assistance sign with a phone number), license plate numbers, or even the numerals at the bottom of a dollar bill. Write down the last four digits of that number and use basic math to create an equation that equals 24. Use parentheses if you like. The first one to come up with a solution wins. For example, let’s say you see the following numbers:

Here are some potential ways to play with these numbers using basic math to arrive at the number 24:

A rebus is a pictorial representation of a name, work, or phrase. Each rebus puzzle box below portrays a common word or phrase. Can you guess what each one says?

Did you notice that as you moved through these games, your mind got better—faster—at picking up the answers? That’s some serious mind sharpening in action! Rebuses call on imagination, focus and concentration, pattern recognition, problem-solving ability, thinking outside the box—just about all the skills of a quick mind. You can find hundreds more of these rebus games online by searching for “rebus puzzles.” Better yet, try to come up with some of your own rebus puzzles, using this list of phrases and words.

Remember, there are likely to be several ways to design these rebuses. For an added challenge, see if you can devise at least two representations for each phrase!

Here’s another visual game that forces your brain to fire on multiple cylinders, utilizing different areas to see the image (and images) from different perspectives. This requires lots of focus and concentration, among other skills.

How many triangles can you find in the following figure?

Here’s one more:

Each question below is made up of a number followed by some initials—there’s a connection! Can you work these out?