You can have too much freedom.
Say I give you an unexpected month off work, what would you do? You could do anything. But would you do nothing or do lots? You could do something you’ve always wanted to do. Something you’ve been putting off. Something you’ve never thought about before. It’s difficult to decide isn’t it?
Part of the problem is that you have too much freedom. In a world of possibility, it’s easy to get confused and play it safe. So in the end, you might just do, well, nothing.
Say I gave you a month off work, but said you had to create something. All of a sudden you have a goal. Something to aim for and a reason to get the brain ticking over. What if I said you had to create something that was funny? Or said it had to be made out of paper? Or stipulated that it had to absolutely, by any means necessary, be abe to fly?
On the face of it, I’ve restricted you. I’ve curbed your free creative spirit. I’ve channelled you towards a single point. But what I’ve actually done is challenged you. And for me, restrictive challenges produce the most creative outcomes.
There are loads of examples of this at play. 48-hour film challenges being one. Twitter, even, being another. 140 characters often brings out the best in people as their challenged to be creative. It’s why a lot of people don’t write blog posts anymore, there’s too much freedom.
I may have mentioned this before, but I saw a great talk by a games designer about why Lego is successful. He insisted it was because Lego was restrictive. There are only certain ways to build Lego, therefore it has a system. A system demands mastery. And mastery of a system leads to creativity. This is also the case with videogames, hence the talk.
So, restricting yourself every now and again can produce a creative response. Next time you want to do something, give yourself a time limit. Or how about you put other restrictions on yourself? If you’re making a film, restrict it to one location. A good few years ago now I went to visit Louis in Edinburgh and we decided to make a film. We restricted ourselves to setting it solely in a cupboard and gave ourselves two hours to complete it. This is what resulted:
It was really fun to make and meant we’d made a film in two hours (plus editing, there’s always editing). We had never thought of any of the ideas before, it was all on-the-fly creativity and I think it resulted in something a bit different than we’d usually make. Since then, I’ve always considered how to restrict a project, rather than let it grow out of control. It might work for you too.
Restriction breeds creativity. Freedom is overrated.
