Good Life Project - How Constraints Fuel Creativity: When Less Is More

Episode Date: July 30, 2015

Have you ever found yourself saying, "if only I had more [insert missing ingredient], I'd be able to succeed on a totally different level?"Yeah, me too. Thing is, with very rare exception, that's never true. Taking your game, your craft, your career, your creative or innovative juices, your art and outcomes to the next level is often not about more, but about less.Less money, less ability, less resources, less freedom, less of everything. When you are constrained, it forces you to operate on a whole different level. And, that's often where the real magic happens.That phenomena, why we're wired that way, and a fun bit of research is what this week's GLP Riff is all about. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today's episode is brought to you by Camp Good Life Project. Now you guys have probably heard me jamming about this for a couple of months now. We literally take over a kids sleepaway camp about 90 minutes outside of New York City for three and a half days at the end of August. And if you're listening to this in real time, that's just about a month from now. So it's coming up really soon. And we bring together an amazing group of entrepreneurs, makers, movers, and shakers. People who are really just inspired by a shared set of values and beliefs and aspirations.

You can work in a huge corporation. You can be a solo artist. It's really about this beautiful community and shared values to create three and a half days of what can only be described as pure magic and intense learning. So if that sounds interesting to you, if you feel like the end of August, that would be a great place for you to be and you could really use those three and a half days as a complete mind-body-business-life perspective reset. Go check out the details at goodlifeproject.com slash camp.

So I was reading this fantastic article in Rolling Stone as a cover story a couple months back, actually. I think it was the end of 2014. And it was called Anchor Management, about the improvisational movie-making odyssey that's become Anchorman, and the sequel that was released, Anchorman 2. And at one point, the co-writer and director of both movies, Adam McKay, shares, the first movie, no one's getting paid anything. For the second one, you want to do new shit. You need a little boost in production and everyone now gets paid 40 times what they used to get paid. So McKay asks Paramount for $80 million and they laugh so he drops it to $60 million. And after a lot of wrangling,

they settle on $50 million, which means cutting a ton and persuading all the stars to work for less. And McKay continues, doing it for $50 million was exhausting but fun. I hate to give Paramount credit, but they probably gave us the perfect budget. Money can kill comedy. It made us get scrappy. It made us get clever. All the making do is what the good shit comes out of. So I found this to be pretty universally true across nearly every creative endeavor as well, from writing to video production, to audio, to art, to entrepreneurship,

however you express yourself creatively. So how many times have you said, I could do so much more, so much better, if I only had more money, more supplies, more connections, more time, training, blah, blah, blah, right? Meanwhile, some quotes, not knows, no talent kid with empty pockets, no pedigree, no reputation, no degree, and in your mind, no clue, drops onto the scene with an iPhone and a screen of $1 apps and laps you in a sitting minute. You're thinking to yourself, what the hell just happened here? The production cost per minute when we were filming Good Life Project TV was literally a thousandth, one one thousandth, the cost per minute of a network TV show. And sure, I would have loved a higher budget,

but it just wasn't there yet. So we got super scrappy to make things happen with what we had. And I often wonder whether my desire to produce that next level aesthetic was really just more about me than my viewers. Many of the top shows on YouTube are literally filmed had. And I often wonder whether my desire to produce that next level aesthetic was really just more about me than my viewers. Many of the top shows on YouTube are literally filmed with one camera, often the computer's webcam or an iPhone with a $20 mini LED light panel. Author John Green is actually a really fascinating example, along with his brother Hank and a few webcams. He produces Vlogbrothers. They have, I think at this point, over 2 million subscribers. Each episode is watched hundreds of thousands of times. Some of them are watched

millions of times. The format forces the essential ideas and delivery to be that much more exceptional. It's just really basic. So sure, you need to get the basics rolling, right? But oftentimes, the difference between crap and craft isn't more, but less. Constraint forces creativity. Fewer resources mean the essential nature, the soul of your output has to be that much better to break through all the noise. And even more, constraint in one area of your work or life makes you more creative in all areas. There's research behind this, actually, according to a study by Janina Marguk, and I'm hoping I'm saying her name right, at the University of Amsterdam. It was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. And quoting from that,

she says, encountering an obstacle in one task can elicit a more global gestalt-like processing style that automatically carries over to unrelated tasks, leading people to broaden their perception, to open up mental categories, and improve at integrating seemingly unrelated concepts. Now that's fancy talk for limits expand potential. So you know you've been saying I can't do that thing on the level that I want to do it because I don't have enough. Insert whatever bells, whistles, fancy stuff, money, budget, gear, swag, people, resources, connections. You know how you've probably been saying that about something in the back of your mind. So just stop sitting here listening to this today. You very likely have what you need. You may need to get scrappy. You may need to get more real to hone your ideas, your voice, your presence, your ability to radiate. Your breakout move is to elevate the essence, not the trappings. A question to you

as we wrap this riff is what are you going to do about it now? I hope you've enjoyed this week's Good Life Project riff. As always, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.