Limits Are Creative Oxygen
Want to be more creative? Restrict yourself.
“The absence of limitations is the enemy of art.” Orson Welles
I am researching the creative process and that involves breaking it up into parts.
Many people know the start of creativity—the moment inspiration strikes.
And they know the result, and stories of how difficult the final phases of completing and shipping a good idea can be.
But few talk about the time in-between the idea and the result.
A time when your ideas need to breathe Creative Oxygen.
This is when you find out if your idea has legs. This is when your ideas are the most sensitive and need to be nurtured because it’s at this point in the creative process they are in danger of not getting the focus they need. They are at risk of Extinguishers that can put out their spark early, starving them of the Creative Oxygen they need to become a fire that lights up your life.
Many people’s instinct is to feed their good ideas to generate more options for them, and to add complexity to them, but adding more can smother a fire and act as an Extinguisher.
When it’s time to work on your ideas what you need to grow them isn’t more—it’s less.
What you need are limits, because limits are Creative Oxygen.
Seek Limits
Many with a creative spirit reject limits—they don’t want to contain their infinite expression. They don’t want to deny opportunity and to many creative people, limits are inherently bad.
But the truth is, if you have not created what you desire yet, the most likely culprit is that you do not have enough limits, rather than too many.
Gasp.
If a version of me ten years ago read that sentence they would close the tab on this letter right here and now. Reject all limits! But I have since learned that in rejecting limits I had also denied myself a more important lesson, which is that limits are not the enemy of art, as Orson Welles, author of The War of the Worlds, once wrote.
Instead, limits are an ally to art.
It is counter-intuitive when we use art to feel free, to express ourselves without limits, and to create solutions to lives that feel trapping. And yet, all creating thrives on limits.
In fact, without them, nothing may ever get created.
Limits Breed Creativity
They say “Necessity is the mother of invention.” And that’s because necessity is a limit. Limits breed creativity, because they create a scarcity of time, on options, on outcomes that narrow them down into the ones that actually happen.
Everything that gets in the way of that isn’t helping. The most common form of distraction come in the shape of tools, and conveniences that promise a quicker path to the result, but usually don’t.
Every hobby I’ve ever had I reached a stage where I convinced myself the most productive thing I could do was get new tools. Maybe I convinced myself that my music didn’t sound as good because I was missing the quality instruments that are a magnitude higher in cost above the entry-level stuff. Or that I needed premium colored pencils, to draw like my idols.
In more expensive hobbies like golf, where the accessories are in the hundreds and thousands of dollars this cost adds up. But to create the swings you want it can feel worth it.
This all is nothing in contrast to the way the expenses in a business of seemingly cool, unique, and handy tools and software can add up to thousands a month.
There is a degree that quality will be limited by the tool. But in my experience, just being equipped with the bare minimum to create what you need is what’s most important.
Beyond that, the fewer tools you have the more creative you will be.
A tool becomes a crutch when you aren’t actually getting more done. Pretty simple.
This does not include the few days with new tools where you need to spend dedicated time to learn how they work and read the manual.
When you embrace limits you may find that the way you approach your craft needs to change. And how you’re used to approaching it may no longer apply. You may need to change your technique dramatically to get a better result with the limits you embrace and the tools at your disposal, but technique is not a tool. It’s how you use the tools you have.
In all disciplines focusing on mastery of the basics is the ultimate technique. This is the essence of what Bruce Lee is saying in his famous quote,
“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”
Tools stop being tools when they become distractions or divert focus.
Embracing limits doesn’t mean making your job harder than it needs to be.
As the world progresses so too do our standards and our basic tools for accomplishing a job. For instance, I would not want to start a woodworking shop without any electrical saws. Certainly, your productivity would be reduced if you had to switch to cutting wood by handsaw.
So, master the basics. Understand what they are for what you are aiming to do. And then, if you want to increase creativity, increase your limitations.
Add a timeline or a deadline. Commit to limiting your options to your choice. This is why focus increases as you ascend the stages of the creative process from capturing the idea, to growing it with Creative Oxygen to shipping final result.
Love Fate to Embrace Limits
Knowing conceptually that limits are good for your creativity isn’t enough to actually utilize them fully.
To a creative person, who at their core wants to expand, experience more, seek novelty, and create as much of it as they can—it can be counter-intuitive to embrace limits.
Many creative people seek to tear down walls, and remove barriers, so putting them up as blinders can remain an illusive, counter-intuitive tactic that can help them build up enough focus to do what they need to do.
There are two main reasons why most people fail to embrace limits.
The first is distractions masquerading as possible tools that can make the process easier, attractive, and fun—but which actually get in the way.
The second reason is that it just feels good to rebel against limits.
It feels good to do away with tradition and routine and the same old. It’s hard to instead choose to do one thing well, again and again and again. Which is why the largest obstacle to embracing limits is first embracing the philosophy of truly appreciating limits.
The Romans did this, like many things, well with the Stoic philosophy of “Amor Fati” which means the “love of fate.” Many are introduced to this philosophy in the emperor’s journal ‘Meditations’ by Marcus Aurelius. Later, Nietzche popularized the “love of fate” in his philosophy of achieving happiness and self-realization by embracing all sides of life.
This is relevant, because life itself places limits upon us with fate.
We grow from the possibility of becoming someone, to becoming someone by the choices we’ve made or the fate we’ve been dealt. At that moment, we’re offered a unique opportunity which is to choose who we shall become next.
Will we seek escape, a distraction, and something to open up a new path that is anywhere but where we are? Or will we embrace the limit that is our fate and create the best we can with where we are?
Denying fate and sacrificing presence where you are to imagine a greener pasture can blind you to the opportunities right in front of you. And the best technique, and use of the tools, within the limits of a fate that you love, to create more of what you want.
A love of fate simply means to love what has happened and what is happening now.
Not because it is easy to love fate, especially when you are a victim of it. But because denying fate can blind you to life now. And from this state, you can still create.
If you do not love your fate, you have not created what you seek yet.
And if you have not created what you want yet, seek limits.
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