Thinking Boxes and Bleeding Ears

Fingernails on a blackboard.

That sound foam makes when it’s just creaking and on the edge of snapping.

Gum smackers.

And anytime someone says “Let’s think outside of the box.”

These are all things that make my ears want to bleed.

Why people in business continue to use this idiotic expression eludes me. Maybe it’s just me but “thinking” pretty much covers what you need to be doing when coming up with ideas — creative thinking, lateral thinking, and, [puke] blue sky thinking.

Google provides us with:

noun

the process of using one’s mind to consider or reason about something

adjective
using thought or rational judgment; intelligent.

Yeah, that covers it.

The reason for this mini-rant is that I saw the phrase in consecutive posts on content marketing yesterday. And it gave me an idea for an image — and an excuse to goof around in Canva last night while half-watching TV.

I’ve been spending a bit more time recently thinking through using Canva and/or Pablo from Buffer for our clients — they’re quick and easy ways to create shareable quotes (note to self: take a look and see if there’s another round of quote-extracting tools available, like ProQuoter and others).

While I’m no designer (font choices, letter and line spacing, image selection and placement — it’s really much easier to tell a designer “here’s my idea, make it pretty”), these tools are easy enough to use that — if you keep it simple — you can create an image to accompany a post that can have an impact. My efforts are wildly inconsistent, and probably appeal only to me at the moment. But I’ll continue to work on it.

The first effort was the image above. I also gave it a try again here. Buffer’s Pablo choked when I tried to download my brilliant (ha!) creation there or I’d have a third.

And those are three of our four cats — Sasha Fierce Marmalade on the box, Jackson Beauragard in the box, and MacCleod looking like he’s about to pounce on Jackson.