Barden Mark - A beautiful constraint: how to transform your limitations into advantages, and why its everyones business

Cover and text design: Helen Redstone

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Copyright 2015 by eatbigfish. All rights reserved.

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Published simultaneously in Canada.

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ISBN 978-1-118-89901-4 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-118-89943-4 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-89945-8 (ebk)

For Cleo, Josie, Will, and Louis

A few years ago, the Internet meme Do Your Best Jagger sprung from the game of the same name. The rules were not complicated: players could challenge each other, at any time, in any place, in any medium they liked, to do an impression of Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones performing on stage.

As soon as you received the challenge, you were obliged to do your impression. There was no waiting until you were somewhere a bit more private, or until you had taken your coat off, or finished your falafel. You had to channel your inner Mick there and then, in front of whatever audience you found yourselfand in the consequent video lay the success of the meme.

The interesting question is not so much why one would ever start on this kind of madness, but why the game worked so well. How was it that, even when imitated poorly by a reluctant amateur at the counter in Subway, the audience understood that Sir Michael Philip Jagger was briefly in their midst? How did the veteran rocker come to create an onstage routine recognizable to anyone with even the briefest acquaintance with a Rolling Stones concert?

The answer lies in the beneficial effect of a constraint.

In Keith Richards' autobiography, Life, Jagger's fellow Stone explains how this distinctively flamboyant style came about. When the Stones started, he says, they played very, very small venues, and by the time the equipment was set up and the audience in place the singer often had a space no bigger than the size of a table to perform in. But as the front man of a band ambitious to break through, Jagger learned to work it, even in such a confined area, and it was from this combination of desire and restriction that his unique moves evolved.

At some point, consciously or unconsciously, the young singer made a decision about how to respond to the space constraint. It could have led him to be static, restricted, somehow less; instead he used it as stimulus to be more dramatic, engaging, distinctive, compelling. He used it to make him more.

Constraints have a bad rap. Constraint is, by definition, a negative thing. Its imposition prevents us from acting as we would like to, because it restricts us in some important way. Constraints hold us down, knock us back, make us fail. Don't fence me in, the old song says: if you want me to show what I can do, then leave me unconstrained.

This book's aim is to show how and why the opposite is true. How constraints can be fertile, enabling, desirable. Why they are catalytic forces that stimulate exciting new approaches and possibilities. How they can, in fact, make us more than we were, rather than less than we could be. Why we should see in them beauty, rather than the beast, and why that is more important now than ever.

The beneficial power of constraint is all around us, whether we recognize it or not. In lifelong relationships, we commit to one partner to the exclusion of others; the constraint we put on ourselves allows us to focus our emotional energy on building a life with that person, and gives us a deeper level of intimacy and security in return. In play, we understand that the limitations our favorite game's rules impose also give that game its unique character, energy, and pleasure; to relax those parameters means less of each. And a critical part of good parenting lies in understanding what limits are beneficial both to our children and to our family lifeand then staying true to them, whether they are welcomed by our adorable little digital natives or not.

In business, the forced but delicious fruits of constraint are all around us, their starting impetus now all but forgotten. Google's home page is as simple as it is because that was the limit of Larry Page's coding ability at the time. He couldn't afford external resources, and all he knew how to do was create a search box and a logoso while the rest of the search brands visually cluttered their home pages, Google's simplicity stood out for its understated respect for the user. Mario, the most famous character in the world's largest entertainment business, is as colorful as he is because of the challenges of eight-bit technology: to compensate for poor pixilation definition, designer Shigeru Miyamoto gave the character a large nose to emphasize his humanity, a mustache to obviate the need for a mouth and facial expressions, overalls to make it easier to see his arms in relation to his body, and a cap to free him from the problems of animating hair; the most recognizable character in video game history was born of technical constraints. Basketball owes much of its relentless energy to the introduction of the 24-second shot clock in 1954. And Twitterwell, we all know about Twitter. Which of us would be using Twitter at all today, if it had a limit of 14,000 characters rather than 140?

While the benefits differ, each of these constraints prompted a kind of enhancement. The people working with them made their constraints beautiful.