Assumptions

The entrance I usually use at work is a double set of doors. There's a scanner for my ID card on both the first and the second set. For the first several months I worked there, I scanned my ID on the first one, stepped through the doors, scanned my ID again, and went on to work. It baffled me that there were two scanners even though there's nothing but a garbage can and about 12 square feet of carpet between the two sets of doors. But I saw a red light on the scanner, so I dutifully scanned.

But then one day I was walking in right behind someone. He scanned his ID card on the first door, opened it and walked through, and then opened the next door and held it for me. No scanning. And I realized that in all the months of assuming I needed to scan my ID, I'd never once checked to see if the door was really locked. A little while after that, a sign went up on the second scanner, saying it's only to be used for people arming and disarming the system. Oops.

I often think about that when I walk through that same set of doors. I work at a creative place, where my job is to create. And yet here I was, so set in my assumptions about how something mundane worked that I didn't even check to see if it could be done a different way.

It's only semi-difficult to think outside the box when you're trying to think outside the box. But to recognize the areas where you didn't even realize you were in a box? That's the mark of a true creative.