You have heard about thinking outside the box, right?
I was listening to Jay Alto’s podcast on Paul Graham’s essay Hackers & Painters when Jay said something that became engraved in my mind: think inside the forbidden box, go into the box that no one else will go into.
Thinking outside the box is a trap because you still frame your thinking against the same box. You are still dependent on it. The box persists because it feels natural, not constructed. That is why thinking inside the forbidden box has merit.
But readers will take forbidden literally as bad or immoral. Replace it with unthinkable, and we get a better phrase: Think inside the unthinkable box.
A good test for this, from Peter Thiel, is to question: what valuable truth do we know that others refuse to believe or question?
Now you have a different problem. How do you find the unthinkable box? If it is truly unthinkable, no human will be able to find it. There is a high chance that the existing box might be the only one you will ever see. It is not to discover a new box, but to change the one we see. Therefore, change must occur at the box itself.
But what does it mean to actually change the box? To change the box is not to be reckless for sport; it is to look at what the status quo cannot afford to imagine.
Just as habits are shaped by the environment, we must change our environment to change our habits. The box makes certain behavior appear normal.
Thinking outside the box challenges existing boundaries without changing them. Thinking to change the box challenges the reality that made the boundaries look natural.
Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis was an antiseptic pioneer. He looked at the mortality data and asked why doctors’ wards killed more patients than the midwives’. That is thinking the box he was in, examining the foundation that the profession’s self-image could not afford to test. The Semmelweis reflex is indeed the reaction of those dependent on the box against those who question its existence.
The original box was based on human experience and knowledge of those who are no smarter than you. Once you realize this, as Steve Jobs said, you can change and influence it. Go back to the original problem the box was built to solve, and ask whether that problem is still real. You must think below the box, and understand its foundations to be able to change it.
Eventually, the unthinkable box is what you will find after you go below and ask whether the original problem still exists.
The box you see was built by a human after all. Like Semmelweis, the task is not to think outside or somewhere unthinkable. The question is whether you have the honesty to think below the box.
Thanks to Imogen Holly, Anis Sherif and Joy Wu for reading drafts of this.