Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think

by Peter H. Diamandis

The Power of Constraints Creativity, we are often told, is a kind of free-flowing, wide-ranging, “anything goes” kind of thinking. Ideas must be allowed to flourish unhindered. There’s an entire literature of “think-outside-the-box” business strategies to go along with these notions, but, if innovation is truly the goal, as brothers Dan and Chip Heath, the best-selling authors of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, point out in the pages of Fast Company, “[D]on’t think outside the box. Go box shopping. Keep trying on one after another until you find the one that catalyzes your thinking. A good box is like a lane marker on the highway. It’s a constraint that liberates.” In a world without constraints, most people take their time on projects, assume fewer risks, spend money wastefully, and try to reach their goals in comfortable and traditional ways—which, of course, leads nowhere new. But this is another reason why incentive prizes are such effective change agents: by their very nature, they are nothing more than a focusing mechanism and a list of constraints.