Constraints can be liberating. When you're doing creative work, the total space of all possibilities is so vast that it’s unworkable. You have to carve off one tiny little sector, and think inside the box. The same is true when you zoom out to the scale of an entire life, but this is not obvious until all the constraints are removed: you don’t know

In what she calls her ‘Green Eggs and Ham hypothesis,’ the psychologist Catrinel Haught-Tromp argues that constraints can increase creativity, as Dr Seuss found when invited by his publisher to write a book containing just fifty different words: ‘Focusing the creative energy on a narrower field of exploration allows for a more in-depth processing o

All creative work has constraints, because all creativity is based on using existing constraints to find new solutions.