How Constraints Make Me More Creative
Creativity does not equal chaos
What comes to your mind when you imagine a “creative person”?
Do you think of an eccentric writer or artist living in an attic? Or a digital nomad who wakes up to a different city each week?
As a society, we have an embedded idea of what “creative” looks like. It looks like a person who snorts at convention, who embraces adventure and spontaneity and sticks their middle finger up to everyone else’s rigid, nine-to-five lifestyle.
But having structure doesn’t mean you’re not creative. In fact, rules, structures, and constraints can boost creativity.
Creativity is shaped by environment
We tend to think of creativity as innate. Oh, that person is a creative person. They’re an artist, a dancer, an actress, a writer. But creativity doesn’t always have to be artistic. In fact, you use creativity in everyday life to solve problems. This is sometimes called “small c creativity.”
Everyday creativity
As a kid, I hated having to find a garbage can as soon as I unwrapped the straws from juice boxes because I’d have to throw away the little plastic wrapper. So, being lazy, I figured out a way to unwrap the straw without pulling the wrapper off the juice box. This saved me a trip to the garbage can and a lecture about littering.
Our environments . . . either impel us to see things differently or they don’t. That implies that creativity is in many ways situational, not some inborn faculty or personality trait. — Scott Sonenshein, Fast Company
This trick didn’t feel like a big deal to me, but other kids’ eyes would boggle at the way I drank juice boxes.
Mundane as this is, my juice box problem-solve is an example of little-c, everyday creativity at work. In this case, constraints helped me. I wasn’t given unlimited resources to invent a new juice box that would be more convenient for lazy kids. I only had a juice box, a straw, and an annoying piece of plastic, yet I quickly—and some would say creatively—solved the problem.
Rules challenge your creativity, but freedom makes you complacent
In addition to drinking juice, I loved to draw as a kid. Stick a blank piece of paper and a pencil in front of me and I’d be preoccupied for hours.
But I was good at drawing some things more than others. I was good at drawing animals in the style of Disney movies. I was less good at drawing people. So, if you had given me a piece of paper and told me to draw whatever I liked on it, I would have drawn a pride of lions à la Lion King.
If you had given me a piece of paper and told me to draw a human, however — or a saltshaker, or a car, or a bookshelf — I would have had to think harder. I would have had to be more creative because I didn’t draw many saltshakers, cars, or bookshelves.
Constraints “force” you to innovate
In other words, having the freedom to draw whatever I wanted made me lazy. It probably also stifled my artistic growth, because sooner or later, if you want to be a professional artist, you’d have to draw more than Disney-style animals. Being told what to draw, however, would have forced me to develop new skills.
According to the studies we reviewed, when there are no constraints on the creative process, complacency sets in, and people follow what psychologists call the path-of-least-resistance — they go for the most intuitive idea that comes to mind rather than investing in the development of better ideas. Constraints, in contrast, provide focus and a creative challenge that motivates people to search for and connect information from different sources to generate novel ideas for new products, services, or business processes. — Acar, Oguz A. et al, Harvard Business Review
How I use constraints to write creatively
Okay, enough about juice boxes and animal drawings. How do I, an adult content creator, use constraints to enhance my creativity?
I’ll give you an example: I’m currently writing a book. Now, nobody told me to write a book; I have license to write a book about literally anything, and if I’d given myself permission to do so, I’d still be in the brainstorming stage right now.
Instead, I gave myself project requirements. Here are some:
- Fiction
- Suitable for a young (Gen Y and Gen Z) audience
- Drawn from my personal experience
- Commercially viable yet literary
Having criteria gave me a framework to creatively think up solutions to fulfill these requirements.
For example, the requirement of being “commercially viable yet literary” was a particular challenge. Usually, commercial fiction and so-called high-brow literature don’t mix. I had to think of a creative solution to make something commercial and literary.
My solution was to focus on cultivating a unique narrative voice — a feature that, simultaneously, is the selling point of many YA books. Using a contemporary teen’s first-person voice, I could play with literary devices and narrative techniques and be approachable, accessible, and relatable to a wide audience at the same time.
The takeaway: rules do not equal rigidity
I used to feel ashamed of being a person who thrives with structure. I thought: shouldn’t I be less rigid and embrace chaos and spontaneity? But in reality, I wasn’t being rigid. Instead, having constraints has made me more fluid.
For example, I like being busy. Not busy to the extent of being overwhelmed and stressed, but busy in the sense of having a job, social obligations, and chores to tend to. I find that I’m actually more productive when I’m busy. When I have a full day of nothing before me, I tend to get lazy; I’m less creative with how I spend my time.
So, it’s okay to have structure, it’s okay to have rules. Doing so does not mean you are less creative; in fact, it may very well mean the opposite.
Join our global community of content creators: daily newsletter, weekly podcast, and more. Learn more by clicking here.
