To be creative one must "think outside the box." Now there is one incredibly useless piece of advice.  No doubt this was thought up by some methodologist who couldn't earn an honest living.  You may think that is too harsh a statement.  I do not, but I will admit it is far too sarcastic.  But, I wanted to get your attention.  First creativity is easy.  It is one of the most natural things for a human being to do.  However, people can be taught to be uncreative.  Thinking outside the box is a metaphor to help people, who have been taught to be uncreative, to overcome their training.  It is a metaphor that can only be understood by those who are creative.  If you are not creative you cannot see the box you are in.  In any case I distrust metaphor.  It is a part of fuzzy language thinking that can, all too often, mislead.  I strongly suspect that people who use such metaphors do not really understand creativity.

Creativity is simply the process of recombining multiple things that have been previously known into new relationships and on only the most extremely rare occasion is it creating something entirely new.  One can state the point with more technical accuracy by saying that creativity is an evolutionary mimetic search algorithm.  The quality of the creativity is primarily a function of recombining prior mimemes into new mimemetic structures with the occasional discovery of an entirely new mimeme.  A meme is an idea, thought, fad, concept, behavior, etc.  A mimeme is the internal representation of that meme inside your brain.  This is a summary of the primary point of a subject that would be too much of a side trip at the moment.  I will cover this later when I discuss Mimetics in the Section: Theory of Society.  You may find this claim rather surprising.  I certainly did.  Until we get into the detail later, I ask you to tentatively accept it.  It is correct and truly remarkable. 

One does not need the theory to understand the basic mechanics of how to be creative.  It is not mysterious.  It does, however require hard work and doing it the right way.  You simply study what has been done before, combine old things in new ways, and then test for value.  Let's look a little closer.

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