The Element of Constraints and its Hope for Focused Creativity

I meditate on asteya. Asteya is one of the yamas (ethical precepts) of yoga.

It means taking from the world only what you need -- without greed, excess or wastage.

I am far from where I want to be when it comes to asteya, but I get a little better every day.

Recently I spotted a can of beets and a can of pineapples in my kitchen cupboard. The cans had been sitting there forever.  I had picked them up and never gotten around to using them. They were a glaring example of not living by the principles of asteya.

But now I looked at the cans and decided “Enough is enough.  I need to use these cans and not let them lie around gathering dust anymore.”

Of course, there was the challenge of what to do with them.

I thought if I  opened the two cans and mixed the ingredients together - they might pair well. But the pairing needed something to make it work and taste good. 

That made me think about fruta picada – the Mexican street vendor snack they sell at the Beryessa Flea Market.  It is a mix of chopped fruit dusted with lime and chile.

“Fruit chaat, that’s it,” I thought, “All I need to do is add some chaat masala to the beets and the pineapple.” It worked.

This got me thinking about the avocados I had in the fridge.  “I wonder how they would taste with chaat masala,” I thought. I gave it a whirl. This was a successful experiment too.

Encouraged, I wondered what avocado pani puri might taste like.  I typed avocado pani puri into the Google search box.  Several recipes came up.  Avocado pani-puri turned out to be a great spin on pani-puri which is traditionally made with boiled potato and garbanzo beans.

Thanks to constraining myself to use up all the canned food I had at home, I experienced one culinary breakthrough after another.

Constraints lead to creative breakthroughs because they force us to think in new ways.

When you have to make do with what you have and nothing more, you find a way to make it work.

Whether our constraints are time constraints, resource constraints, information constraints, talent constraints, skill constraints or action constraints, when we have any of these constraints, our imagination and ingenuity is called into play.

Jonah Lehrer says: “The imagination is unleashed by constraints. You break out of the box by stepping into shackles.”

It was a constraint that led Archimedes to his famous principle which states: Any object, wholly or partially immersed in a fluid, is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the fluid displaced by the object.

This is the story…..

King Hiero II gave some pure gold to a goldsmith and commissioned him to build a votive crown with it.  However, when the crown was delivered, the king thought it seemed a little light and suspected the goldsmith might have kept some of the gold for himself and substituted silver for it in the crown. He asked Archimedes if there was a way to confirm his suspicions. Archimedes’ constraint was he could not damage the crown. He would not be able to melt it down into a regular shaped body to calculate its density.

How Archimedes solved this is a classic example of how a constraint forces one to be creative.

While having a bath, Archimedes noticed that the level of the water in the bathtub rose as he got into it. Archimedes immediately understood that this effect could be used to determine the volume of the crown. All he had to do was submerge the crown in water. The crown would displace an amount of water equal to its volume. Then by dividing the mass of the crown by the volume of water it displaced, the density of the crown could be obtained. If cheaper and less dense metals had been used by the goldsmith, the density of the crown would be lower than the density of gold.

Archimedes was able to confirm the king’s suspicions.  The goldsmith had indeed been dishonest and substituted some of the gold with silver.

Any challenge is more intellectually stimulating when there’s a constraint.

Have you ever thought about why you like detective stories?

It’s because the detectives in these stories operate under extreme information constraints.

They typically have a big puzzle to solve and very little information to go on.

But by being observant and making deductions from every little scrap of information, they are able to piece together the solution to these big puzzles which are given to them.

Recently, I watched the pilot episode of Sherlock on Netflix. Throughout the episode, Sherlock deduces all sorts of things based on very little information.  In the episode, besides making several brilliant deductions about Watson, Sherlock has to uncover who or what is behind several happy people committing suicide by consuming the same pill. I won't tell you more.  Watch the episode if you get a chance.

Games and puzzles would be no fun without constraints. We either need the constraint of time, or the constraint of resources, or the constraint of action to get intellectually involved in a game.

In chess, each piece can move only in certain ways. This is the constraint.  As soon as people become good at chess, they set themselves a time constraint as well.

Time constraints force you to think fast.

Many games would be half the fun without the time constraint factor.

I think back to the days when I used to play Pictionary with my friends in Chennai. Half the fun was being under the gun to make your team guess the word before the sand ran out in the timer.

People who are fast at games can get exasperated by players who don't like to play with a time constraint.

My friend Mira was one of them.  Whenever I played Scrabble with her, she would go “hurry up, hurry, up, hurry up, you are taking so long.” My slowness was a drag to her.

Since I started playing Merriam Webster Scrabble Online, I am faster with my Scrabble moves.  Time is of the essence in playing Merriam Webster Scrabble Online, because your points really go down if you take too long on a move.

Information constraints are a major form of resource constraint.

When you invest in the stock market, for instance, there’s no way to know if the market will go up, down or sideways after you invest.  If you invest in individual stocks, it’s even worse.  You do not know how the company is being managed and if the forces of change are about to take that company down. You have to be able to act without this information.  What’s a person to do?

Faced with this constraint, I found my own creative answer – and it was Pascal's Wager.

Here is an explanation of Pascal’s Wager from Wikipedia:

Pascal's Wager is an argument in apologetic philosophy which was devised by the seventeenth-century French philosopher, mathematician, and physicist Blaise Pascal (1623–1662). It posits that humans all bet with their lives either that God exists or does not exist. Given the possibility that God actually does exist and assuming the infinite gain or loss associated with belief in God or with unbelief, a rational person should live as though God exists and seek to believe in God. If God does not actually exist, such a person will have only a finite loss (some pleasures, luxury, etc.).

I had an epiphany that Pascal's Wager could be applied to anything in life, even investing in the stock market. Because you don't know if the stock market will go up or down, given the possibility it could go up, a rational person should elect to have at least some money in the stock market.

If you are having a tough time making a decision because of information constraints, see if you can apply Pascal’s Wager to your decision like I did.

I owe the fact that I did not panic when the Dow went to 6000 in 2009 to the fact that I had already accepted the information constraint which characterizes the stock market and to the fact  I had found my own creative answer to it in Pascal’s Wager.

If Archimedes owed the Archimedes Principle to the constraint presented to him by the king’s votive crown, we will all have victories we owe to constraints.

The advertising campaign of my career was the result of a constraint. 

It was for a brand of condoms, and all the initial creative ideas were considered too risque or too tame. 

The challenge of coming up with the right campaign presented 2 constraints. The first constraint was how to achieve excitement without crudeness or offensiveness.  The second constraint was how to develop on an already existing idea of associating different colors with different days of the week -  an idea which the account manager thought had potential, but just needed to be creatively reworked.   It was these 2 constraints which led to the development of the final campaign, a huge and instant hit. 

If you want people to think creatively, set them constraints. Tina Seelig regularly does this in her entrepreneurship classes at Stanford.  In one class, she divides her students into teams and gives them five dollars of seed funding in an envelope.  They are given any amount of time to plan what they are going to do with the money, but once they open the envelope, they have two hours to generate as much money as possible. This constraint forces the students to be creative with the limited time and money they are given. If you read her book, What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20, you can find out how inventive people can be under these constraints. One team generated $650 in 2 hours.

Seelig says: “Workers are puzzle builders, they get stuck when missing a piece. Whereas creative people are quilt makers — they can fit anything together.”

Indeed, the number one thing which was required from me back when I was a copywriter was to be able to quilt things together.

If we are not able to perform within constraints, we can be disqualified in some circumstances.

Athletes have to compete with the constraint of not taking any performance enhancing drugs, otherwise they will be disqualified.

When you play statue, you are constrained to not move. The minute you move, you are out of the game.

When I was in Toastmasters, sticking to the time limit for a speech was one of the constraints. 

You could not be more than half a minute under the stated time limit for the speech, or go more than half a minute over the stated time limit for the speech. 

If you were participating in a Toastmaster contest, you would be immediately disqualified if you were over or under time. 

I had to learn to speak within the allotted time, before I was able to participate in, and win the Toastmaster contest I told you about in my post How I Lost a Grand on Donuts.

Constraints lead us to cut out fluff.

When I developed my money workshop for the students of Bertha Taylor Elementary, I set myself the challenge of avoiding technology and sticking to just pen and paper.  My goal was to create a workshop I could administer virtually anywhere – even around a table in someone’s backyard; thanks to creating the workshop with these constraints, I was able to deliver it to my friend Sharon's children in just such a setting – someone’s backyard.

We should embrace the opportunity for constraints and turn them to action. Whenever we are given a constraint, our first thought may be, “it's impossible” “can’t do it with that kind of budget”, “can’t do it in that time”

We should replace these thoughts with “How can we achieve this?”

The Tata Nano is a result of a constraint.  The inventors set themselves the challenge of creating a car that would cost just $2000 dollars. Of course they had to think very differently in order to do that, which is why they had to model it more on a helicopter than a car.

The Jaipur foot is the result of a constraint. The inventors set themselves out to design an affordable prosthetic. The Jaipur foot costs only $45 to make and is fitted on 16,000 people across the globe every year.

The book Green Eggs and Ham was also the result of a constraint. Dr. Seuss was challenged to come up with a book using only 50 different words. Green Eggs and Ham was the result.

The above examples, all very different, explain the amazing things that can happen when you have a constraint.

Constraints are not just a passport to originality, but often a key to progress.

  

Producing under constraints leads people to break with tradition and prejudice.  For instance, until World War 2, American women were prohibited by law to work after they got married.  However, when World War 2 started, and there was an acute labor shortage, since so many men were off fighting, and extra hands were needed to produce arms and ammunition, the American government relaxed the law about married women working. Large numbers of married women joined the American workforce for the first time, and the path was set for the eventual freedom of women, single or married, to be able to work.

So how do you become more comfortable with constraints?

Be open to making decisions in spite of them.

Welcome the opportunity to make decisions with any kind of constraint - Incomplete information.Time constraints. Resource constraints. Skill constraints. Talent constraints. Action constraints.

Thrill to the challenge of doing more with less.

Get intrigued by the idea of solving puzzles with little to go on.

Trust that you will find the answer.

Hopefully, when you do, you won’t be in a bath-tub like Archimedes.

Why?

You don’t want to be running naked in the streets shouting “Eureka”, now do you?

As always, thanks for reading and have a great day and week….M….a Pearl Seeker like you.  Thanks to Goldwire Ananda, Ajay and Rosie for their comments on Facebook on my last post The Element of Everyday Miracles and Its Hope for Reveling in the Mystery of Life.  And thanks to all the rest of you for your votes.