I’ve written before about the importance of constraints in bringing out your creativity.
A lot of people mistakenly seem to think that creativity comes from the removal of constraints.
But if you want creativity, put the project under such tight constraints that almost no one can survive, and that’s where you’ll find it.
Take the Ramones’ 1976 song Blitzkrieg Bop (one of my favorite Ramones songs, by the way). The guitar is 4 chords. Mostly three, with a few moments of a fourth twice, probably just to shake things up a bit.
I can just imagine the songwriting process now: “You get three chords, maybe four on a good day, and you have to fit the whole song into that.”
Presentations follow that constraints rule too. If you want yours to be the best, put it under constraints so tight almost no one can survive. If your color palette is limited to 40, figure out how to do it with 5. If you have 30 minutes, figure out how to do it in 4. If you have 100 words, figure out how to do it in 8.
Now, for those of you who have Blitzkrieg Bop running through your head, here’s a link to that song to give you a little hair of the dog:
