I hate the phrase “thinking outside the box,” mainly because of its misuse in business environments.

But I have noticed that a lot of people just get…stuck. Inexplicably. Where I work, there is an entire team of people when one thing goes wrong, they get stuck for hours. Irrevocably, until someone effectively reboots them.

Something I’d just skip over and try to find the answer later (or make my own), everything on that team comes to a dead halt, like a car out of gas on the edge of the highway.

Often I’m not even the closest to the smartest in the room but I rarely if ever get halted like that. I’m expert at dodging around, finding another answer, doing something a different way, even charging ahead where someone has told me I could not go. And I don’t care much about rules or breaking them, so that helps too I guess.

Increasingly I’ve observed that people objectively much smarter than me have trouble doing what I do because they just got immediately mired in quicksand that I dance over without even realizing it’s there.

Don’t think any IQ tests can measure that, even as much as I believe they are measuring something.