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.
The tears that you spill, the sorrowful, are sweeter than the laughter of snobs and the guffaws of scoffers.
When you learn about the teaching and the practice of another tradition, you always have a chance to understand your own teaching and practice.
Many people resented my impatience and honesty, but I never cared about acceptance as much as I cared about respect.
It's not uncool to worry about people who seem like they're going on the wrong path. There's nothing cool about being self-destructive.
To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.
This grieved me heartily ; and now I saw, though too late, the folly of beginning a work before we count the cost, and before we judge rightly of our own strength to go through with it.
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