Thinking out of the box

There's danger in thinking within the box.
Everyone who talks about creativity goes on and on about "thinking outside the box". But what does that really mean? And why is it so important?
Well, learning to think outside the box can really make a huge difference. Trust me on this. I know!
A couple years ago, I suffered through a horrible, torturous reminder about how important it is to think outside of the box.
Here's the story of a person!
It was one of his first times visiting Germany, and he understood almost no German. So, every time they went out to eat, he had to spend a ton of time poring over every single menu item with a dictionary in hand. Then he'd ask my friends to translate - and of course, forget half of the menu by the time they finished.
It always took forever.

One night, they decided to order pizzas and, rather than spend my normal 30 minutes staring at the available toppings and making my German friends translate everything twice, he decided it would just be easier to order a normal, old-fashioned Pepperoni pizza.
he should have been warned when everyone asked me, "Just pepperoni?"
But no, being a confident American who has successfully ordered pizza hundreds of times in the US, he charged blindly ahead.
"Just pepperoni!" he said with a smile (thrilled there was a type of food I could order easily in Germany.) After all, how hard could it be?
Then the pizzas arrived and boy, was I in for a surprise!
When he opened the boxes... he didn't see any pizzas that looked like mine. Of course, there was a very simple explanation for that.
In German, "pepperoni" does not refer to the style of pizza we Americans normally envision. No, in Germany, a "pepperoni" is the topping you see on the right.
Wikipedia explains the source of my confusion:
Pepperoni is frequently used as a pizza topping in American-style pizzerias. It is the most popular pizza topping in North America....Pepperoni is a corruption of peperoni, the Italian plural of peperone, referring to the bell pepper, so that ordering "peperoni" pizza in Italy is often an unwelcome surprise for North American tourists." (read it here)
Exactly. he was just a little surprised! It never occurred to me that pizza toppings were different in different countries. My thinking was so stuck inside the (pizza) box that he couldn't imagine anything else was possible.
This is exactly the sort of thinking that happens in the real world too. Most people never think beyond what they already know. If you had asked people what they wanted most in transportation options at the beginning of the 20th century, they probably would have said they wanted a faster horse.
So, while you hopefully won't ever end up in the same situation as me - picking minuscule bits of hot pepper out of your overly-spiced pizza while your "friends" roar with laughter - remember that thinking only inside the box can blind you to the possibilities that are really out there.