When I travel, one of the highlights for me is enjoying the variety of local cuisine. I’m traveling today, and as I drove to the airport, I looked forward to picking up a cup of coffee and a breakfast sandwich once I arrived.
Upon selecting the coffee shop, latte and sandwich that most appealed to me, though, I was hit with a fleeting feeling of grief. By choosing those things, I wouldn’t have room to try the other options.
Maybe I should have gotten the soufflé instead of the croissant. How would the pistachio latte have tasted?
There’s a limit to the amount of food I can consume. There’s a limit to the amount of money I can spend. There’s a limit to the amount of time I have. And I spend a tremendous amount of time resisting those constraints, wishing I could have it all.
As an Enneagram Type 7, that’s par for the course. We are terribly prone to gluttony and hedonism. I want to try everything and say “no” only to the things that aren’t enjoyable. I want to have absolute control over what I’m not able to do.
But, as they say, the sweet doesn’t taste as sweet without the sour.
In my work, we often ask our clients to give us creative constraints. Is there a color they don’t like? A certain style? Is there a use case that has a time constraint or an application that requires a certain formatting?
Our creative director often says that the worst thing you can say to a creative is, “Just make something awesome.” He’s right: the most creative ideas come out of constraints.
Colleen Cook works full-time as the Director of Operations at Vinyl Marketing in Ashland, where she resides with her husband Mike and three young daughters. She’s an insatiable extrovert who enjoys finding reasons to gather people.
Just look at how we’ve all innovated over the past year. So many things that have always been done a certain way have been disrupted, and new, amazing ideas came out of the disruption—many of which will sustain well past the end of the pandemic. The limitation felt brutal, and while the byproduct doesn’t make it all worth it, the new things that are created are good.
Most people do their best work under the pressure of a deadline. The time constraint forces them to nail down their energy to that moment and turn out something better than they would have if they felt untethered, with endless amounts of time.
I’m a firm believer that, without a clear and close deadline, most things won’t actually get accomplished or won’t be accomplished as well as they might have with the time constraint.
I doubt I’m alone in finding myself crippled by focusing on the limitation. I long to find a way to manipulate the constraint away, to free myself from it. I panic at the thought that the limitation might be too restraining to accomplish the task at hand.
Yet I’m learning that if I can accept the limitation—perhaps even welcome that limitation—I might free myself into an exciting new place of creativity and enjoyment. I might just enjoy the croissant more because it was the best choice, given the constraints at hand.
