The Inventor’s Antidote
“To me there is no creativity without boundaries. If you're going to write a sonnet, it's 14 lines, so it's about solving the problem within the container.”
- Lorne Michaels
SNL is an paramount example of the paradox that creativity (original ideas) and innovation (their real-world applications) thrive not in an expanse of unlimited possibilities but within the tension and discomfort of constraint.
Two sacrosanct mandates of the show’s original design propel it. 1). Every show is created and produced from scratch each week and 2). it goes live at 11:30pm Saturday night. No matter what. Within the six-day window, the cast, writers, designers, directors, and crews have freedom and agency to experiment and adapt as sketch brainstorming transitions to producing a 90-minute live show. The mammoth deliverable looming when the clock runs out is an adversarial means of demanding collaborative focus to succeed.
Several other examples have stuck with me from creative fields:
Tierra Whack turned her self-described “scatter-brain” and the 60-second time for Instagram videos in 2016 into a wildly singular and successful debut album made up of fifteen, 1-minute tracks. For his directorial debut, Jordan Peele embraced a tiny budget and fewer resource inputs, developing a process which repositioned funding limitations and conventional inputs as levers for new creative possibilities, which wouldn’t emerge without them.
At the heart of every startup is a problem—the galvanizing reason for its existence. The problem is itself a form of constraint. It sets the contours and guardrails of founders’ journey to solve it, from which much creativity and innovation may flourish. Along the way, further limitations — time, funding, bandwidth, competition, market dynamics, shifting incentives, personal sacrifices — sharpen thinking, compel unconventional problem-solving, and drive urgency. In a first principles framing, it could be said that creativity and innovation born out of constraint is the self-evident purpose of startups and entrepreneurship.
The power of this dynamic may be most clear if it’s removed, when an early-stage company’s original constraints begin to shrink or disappear altogether. Abundance is a burden. Largesse invites distraction. For startups, this is commonly a profusion of funding that’s multiples more than the most generous runway projections. Bigger isn’t necessarily better. When everything or anything may be seen as an option or taken for granted, it’s easier to mistake possibility for necessity and motion for progress. Invention and impact become fleeting. Creativity needs friction. Innovation needs urgency.
To embrace addition by subtraction is to encourage success because of constraints and to keep them alive long after they’ve first disappeared. For founders, this isn’t about thwarting hyper-growth or avoiding entropy, it’s about sustain a culture of bold, high-velocity innovation over time. Often the most inspired work emerges along the edges of a boundary, against the confines of a clock.