Limits and Restrictions, Green Ham and Improving your Creativity

Writer/illustrator Theodore Geisel (Dr Seuss to me) was given a challenge (some say it was a bet) by his publisher: Write a book small children will love using no more than 50 words (which could be repeated as often as needed). The result became a classic. The book he wrote was Green Eggs and Ham, the 1960 classic featuring a creature named Sam-I-Am.

Limitations and Constraints aren’t the silver bullet for improving creativity, they’re simply one approach of many that can improve your creativity. Embrace, integrate into your practice, not be afraid of, and use as a tool to push through in order to find an outcome that achieves your goal.

We often think that limitless creative freedom will help us to solve the problem at hand, or give us that eureka moment that allows us to innovate and solve, however, limitless creative freedom isn’t always available to us. It’s possibly more accurate to suggest that for most of us, limitless creative freedom is not the environment in which we are able to operate the majority of the time.

Take a watch of this short well put together video around the Power of Creative Constraints. It’ll be worth your time, and give you an overview of of how limitations and constraints can be the friend of creativity.