using constraint
Constraint is often considered a disadvantage. If we had unlimited resources, a bigger budget, better people, more time, we'd do something but for now, we can’t.
Reduced scope is often the way to create something that's more than the sum of its parts. How many times has the little guy won? How often do the big organisations become complacent? How often does a creator do better with less?
Quite often it turns out.
But more importantly than how often it happens, is how it captures our imagination. It's David vs Goliath. It's the Rebel Alliance vs The Empire. We love the little guy, we celebrate ingenuity and we want to see it. If you can harness your lack of size and do something born of constraint, it's far more compelling to the world than if you're the leviathan greedily hoovering up everything in your path.
Without further ado…
Bon Iver
Justin Vernon was in a rut. Kicked out of his band, breaking up with his girlfriend and enduring some health problems, he headed to his family cabin for the winter, spending 3 months largely on his own. His solitude was occasionally broken by his dad bringing some supplies and hanging around for a bit.
Vernon used the time to get his feelings out of his head and onto paper, coming back to the world with most of his breakthrough album For Emma Forever Ago. It sounded otherworldly.
I had nothing but the sound of my own thoughts, and they were really loud when that's all that was going on.
While he spent the first 3 weeks pissing about and drinking beer, he got bored of himself and began to experiment away from any external opinion. Being alone set him free.
He sang in falsetto, with the higher register helping him access "painful melodies" unattainable in his previous work. He toyed with his vocal further using AutoTune, popularly used by totally different artists like T-Pain.
While previously these ideas would have seemed ridiculous, he had no outside feedback. It was his ideas and expressions with no mitigation.
"With creative energies, with art, everybody has an idea what they want to do but the longer you live your life in society and the longer you are around other people showing you what's 'acceptable' you have trouble approaching some of your ideas because you are constantly self editing."
What seemed like losses to him in the first place, losing his band and the rest of his personal circumstances, actually gave him the space to create something that he never would have previously. The constraint of solitude set him free and made him a phenomenon.
Leicester City
Leicester City won the 2015-16 Premier League title. For those of you that don't follow English football, this is absolutely unprecedented. The top 4 is commonly regarded to have been contested by 6 familiar teams, with the occasional intruder from below. The league standings usually correspond to budget and Leicester were 5000-1 with bookmakers to win the division before the season kicked off. Leicester had never finished top of the table in over 100 years of their history. They didn't just win the league, they finished top by 10 points, an enormous gulf between them and the chasing pack.
How did they do this? Their record breaking striker Jamie Vardy had been playing non-league football until his mid-twenties, their best player Riyad Mahrez was an unheralded signing who became the first Algerian to win Player of the Year and their squad was a real dirty dozen assembled for small fees, discarded by bigger teams or having grafted up from the lower leagues. They were really looking at avoiding relegation rather than challenging for any honours at the beginning of the year, particularly after they had to change manager due to a series of disciplinary issues affected the outgoing man Nigel Pearson.
The answer is that while they punched above their weight, they had a style of play that they knew inside out, they had the benefit of being the underdog and they didn't have the distraction of European competition. While rivals fought on other fronts and assumed Leicester would drop off, they got better and better throughout the year and won the title early, not requiring any last day heroics to seal it.
Their constraints bred cunning from manager Claudio Ranieri, it bred a tight-knit group of players and a clarity of offensive and defensive tactics. The lack of other competitions to play for meant they could keep key players fresh and a regular eleven on the field.
In the end it wasn't close. A well-deserved victory and an all-time poke in the eye for the big guys. Constraint kept them focussed, on and off the field.
Roger Bannister
No, the tradition was of running and working—and while you were studying, being part of a team.”
Roger Bannister will be remembered forever for breaking the previously inconceivable Four Minute Mile threshold in 1954. Now, this is commonly busted through but at the time, it was a true breakthrough in human performance.
Rather than thrashing himself for hours though, Bannister had a whole host of other endeavours that competed with running for his time. He was a medical student and then a working doctor, fitting in his training around his other commitments. Sport was not his priority and he even 'developed the pose of apparent indifference, to hide the tremendous enthusiasm which I felt for running, from the day I set foot in Oxford.'
While he cultivated an air of indifference and didn't commit much time to running, he was very intentional about his training which would often last no longer than 30 minutes during his lunch-break. He didn't fuss over distances or worry too much about the prevailing training regimes of the time, instead examining his goal, the demands on his time, his physical constitution and figuring out a solution.
His maximum mileage was less than 30 miles per week, reducing to something like 15 during racing season. He also came to understand that that he needed breaks from his regimen, sometimes going away for hikes or just resting.
The 1954 season began with great expectations and for the first time Bannister started to train with others. He trained in his lunch break with friends and then did other sessions with his future pacemakers Chris Chataway and Chris Brasher under Franz Stampfl. The trio limited their training to 30 or 45 minutes four or five times a week, regularly running 10x440s
When their improvement stalled, Brasher and Bannister took a short mountaineering holiday, immediately improving on their return and tapering their workload to prepare for the Mile. Then when they took to the track at Iffley Road, Oxford, they did something previously thought impossible. Without constraint and the need to question contemporary approaches to training, would Bannister have managed his feat?
Breaking Bad
Do you know what a bottle episode is? If you watch any episodic television, you've almost definitely seen one. They might even be the ones you remember the most.
A bottle episode is:
produced cheaply
restricted in scope to use as few non-regular cast members, effects, and sets as possible
usually shot on sets built for other episodes, frequently the main interior sets for a series
consist largely of dialogue and scenes for which no special preparations are needed
commonly used when one script has fallen through and another has to be written at short notice
often due to budgetary constraints, perhaps to facilitate a bigger, flashier episode later on
Bottle episodes have also been used for dramatic effect, with the limited setting and cast allowing for a slower pace and deeper exploration of character traits and motives.
Breaking Bad's "Fly" is one of the most divisive episodes the show produced but it's regarded as something of a critical triumph. The showrunner Vince Gilligan
Even if financial realities didn't enter into it, I feel as a showrunner that there should be a certain shape and pace to each season [...] The quiet episodes make the tenser, more dramatic episodes pop even more than they usually would just by their contrast.
For this episode, they were 'hopelessly over budget' but took the opportunity to make something more intimate with just their two leads. It led to critical acclaim.
The A.V. Club gave "Fly" an A grade, calling it 'one of the most distinctive hours of television we're likely to see this year'; TIME called it "the most unusual and very possibly best episode of Breaking Bad so far"; Entertainment Weekly said they'd be "shocked if both Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul don’t use the episode for Emmy consideration", and lauded it for "[opening] up to become an opportunity for Walt and Jesse to explain more fully the sadnesses and regrets they have over everything"; Alan Sepinwall remarked that the budget-saving approach ended up leading to "an instant classic".
While there are plenty of amazing episodes of Breaking Bad, the need to restrict the setting and focus the plot around the two leads to save money created something unique even amongst episodes of the series, never mind other shows. It's a fantastic example of using your limitations to do something different.
Fiji 7s Gold
Ben Ryan coached the perennially talented but disorganised Fijian Sevens team to Olympic Gold and became a national hero in the process. While he had amazing raw material to work with, he'd come from one of the best-resourced teams on the planet and turned up in Fiji where he had to deal with regional rivalries, players in poor physical condition, stark cultural differences and above all, an enormous lack of stuff.
He found though that perhaps the advantages he'd enjoyed previously might have actually hindered rather than helped:
"With advances in technology and knowledge, sometimes you just make things more complicated than they need to be.'
After all, when you're out on the pitch playing in high pressure games only 14 minutes long, your GPS and laptop analysis is only of so much use. Out there you're alone.
You play rugby to test yourself physically and mentally against others. You play it to express the way you feel, to burst free of the prosaic constraints that can hold you back in the real world. You don’t play to spend days staring at reruns and never-weres on a laptop, or to be lecturing players for hours in a classroom, or to be stuck in meetings far away from the pitch.
The Fiji experience taught Ryan that more doesn't necessarily mean better, that lack of resources can engender togetherness and spirit, that less can be more. While Fiji had amazing talent, they lacked in so many other areas compared to their rivals. However, by turning these disadvantages into strengths, they augmented their talent and demolished Great Britain in the Olympic Final.
To Takeaway
What feels like a loss that could be a win? Are the things you've lost actually holding you back like Justin Vernon?
Where can you tap into an underdog feeling? Or how can you use limited resources as a reason for focus like Leicester City?
If you only have limited time, how best can you use it like Roger Bannister? What are other people overlooking that you can't afford to?
If resources are tight, what about you is most compelling and how can you showcase that like Breaking Bad?
What did you think was a strength that's actually a crutch? How can you pare it down to the essentials like Ben Ryan and Fiji 7s?