I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it.
Interpretation
Encouragement to think creatively requires prior evidence of conventional thinking.
This quote by Terry Pratchett highlights the importance of foundational or conventional thinking as a prerequisite for fostering creativity. It suggests that in order to truly encourage innovative ideas and 'thinking outside the box,' there must first be a clear understanding and demonstration of traditional thinking processes. Without this grounding, efforts to encourage creativity may be ineffective or misguided.
In practice
In a team meeting focused on brainstorming, use this quote to emphasize the value of foundational ideas.
And then Jack chopped down what was the world's last beanstalk, adding murder and ecological terrorism to the theft, enticement, and trespass charges already mentioned, and all the giant's children didn't have a daddy anymore. But he got away with it and lived happily ever after, without so much as a guilty twinge about what he had done...which proves that you can be excused for just about anything if you are a hero, because no one asks inconvenient questions.
They've got something they do it with, I think it's called a mocracy, and it means everyone in the whole country can say who the new Tyrant is. One man ... one vet. ... Everyone has ... the vet. Except for women, of course. And children. And criminals. And slaves. And stupid people. And people of foreign extraction. And people disapproved of for, er, various reasons. And lots of other people. But everyone apart from them. It's a very enlightened civilization.
Geography is just physics slowed down, with a couple of trees stuck in it.
You can't trample infidels when you're a tortoise. I mean, all you could do is give them a meaningful look.
Any fool could be a witch with a runic knife, but it took skill to be one with an apple corer.
People look down on stuff like geography and meteorology, and not only because they're standing on one and being soaked by the other. They don't look quite like real science. But geography is only physics slowed down and with a few trees stuck on it, and meteorology is full of excitingly fashionable chaos and complexity. And summer isn't a time. It's a place as well. Summer is a moving creature and likes to go south for the winter.
Nine-tenths of the miseries and vices of mankind proceed from idleness.
Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.
And a mistake repeated more than once is a decision.
Use your health while you have it, my dear friend and brother. Do not cast away peculiar opportunities that may never come again. You know not when your last Sabbath with your people may come. Speak for eternity. Above all things, cultivate your own spirit. A word spoken by you when your conscience is clear, and your heart full of God's Spirit, is worth ten thousand words spoken in unbelief and sin.
Stupidity is the deliberate cultivation of ignorance.
If the stories come, you get them written, you're on the right track. Eventually everyone learns his or her own best way. The real mystery to crack is you.
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