The Art of Using Constraints To Push The Limits Of Our Creativity

In her debut salon, Silvia Bastos will host a conversation about deliberately using constraints to help us unlock, direct, and increase our creative power.

Dr. Seuss’s wrote his book Green Eggs and Ham using only fifty different words. The Beatles recorded their whole album Please Please Me in one day. To fight procrastination, Neil Gaiman often goes to his cabin and gives himself two options: either write, or do nothing at all (he usually ends up writing).

Defining rules and limits for ourselves can not only help us overcome creative blocks, but it can lead us to discover whole new avenues we would have never even explored without them.

In this salon we will discuss how different artists and creatives use constraints to push unexplored limits, how we can apply them to our own creative processes, and we’ll dive into questions such as:

• What is it about the nature of constraints that paradoxically helps us see more possibilities?
• When do self-imposed constraints stop being beneficial and become unhealthy self-coercion?
• Where do we currently feel stuck due to being overwhelmed with too many options?
• When is it good to play within existing frames, and when is it better to break them?
• Which constraints are already naturally present in our lives which we can turn into creative assets?

Reading list:

• (Live Twitter thread) Silvia’s experiment in restricting herself to a 6-color palette
• “Creativity: How Constraints Drive Genius”
• “Exploring the Power of Creative Constraints in 5 Examples” 
• “Boosting Creativity Through Constraints”
• “If You Frame It Like That” 

What to bring:

Think about an example of how you or a creative person you admire used constraints, self-imposed or otherwise, to benefit their work.

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