Title: "Freedom is the enemy of creativity, limitations are its savior" - Source
[Claim] Limited environments actually foster more creativity than free and open ones, given that you already know how to perform your particular skill.
Enforced time constraints from work commitments have the same effect. When you’re under pressure to complete a task because you don’t feel you have the time necessary to write well, you have to think of new, more interesting, ways to write.
Sometimes you have to put yourself inside the box to think outside it.
Limiting the amount of money you spend on a project can also force you to think of new ways to create.
[...] these restrictions show how putting pressure on yourself to perform within certain boundaries forces you to think outside the box.
It’s clear from the last two sections that restrictions in tools, supplies and overall finances put our brains into an innovation mindset. But, in order to excel under these limited conditions, we have to understand how to create within our field and ground our work in fact.
Tyson often quotes Mark Twain as having said: “get your facts straight first, then distort them as you please.” Suggesting that in order to come up with creative fiction, you need a factual anchor.
“It’s an old observation, that the best writers sometimes disregard the rules of rhetoric. When they do so, however, the reader will usually find in the sentence some compensating merit, attained at the cost of the violation. Unless he is certain of doing as well, he will probably do best to follow the rules.” - You must know the rules before you can break them. - Elements of Style
"Creativity is not born from freedom. If you really want to push yourself beyond your limits you have to learn a skill, absorb its rules, learn where the limits lie, and exceed them."
One method for doing this might be to deliberately restrict yourself in a situation to not using all of your available recipes. Maybe you force yourself to write without any adjectives, or draw using only pencil, or play with only your pawns and king. By deliberately limiting what data you can focus on, you’ll develop a more intuitive understanding of what is and isn’t relevant in novel situations. Thinking Inside The Box