Sometimes creative people fall into the originality trap. They focus so much on originality that they lose focus on the other half of the creativity equation: effectiveness. To be creative, an idea much be both useful and unique. 

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Ignoring either side of the equation is a recipe for disaster. Usefulness without uniqueness is simply problem solving. It does little to expand the industry because it lacks originality. There’s no fork in the road where anything changes. On the other hand, uniqueness without usefulness isn’t grounded in reality. A car with square wheels is unique, but not useful. To have value to people, to be useful to them, a product must satisfy constraints. 

Placing contraints on ourselves as creators is how we guide our creativity towards usefulness. Constraints are a necessary component to great creative thinking. We don’t value original thinkers, per se. We value people who are able to be original within a given set of rules. Those rules are determined by the domain they’re working in, but they also evolve over time. Said different, constraints effect your work, and your work effects them.

Google’s early success was in large part due to how they defined the problem of finding webpages. Yahoo and Google defined the problem in vastly different ways. To Yahoo, the king of internet directories, the business model was clear. They need to have all the websites categorized in directories so that you could click through each subdirectory before you find the page you want. This also allowed Yahoo to place advertisements on each subdirectory. The more pages a person clicked on to find the page they wanted, the more money they made. That was how they defined success. 

Google had a wildly different set of constraints, which lead to a wildly different product in the end. To Google, success was getting the user to the webpage they want in the fewest steps possible. Early on, they didn’t even know how they’d ever monetize this. They didn’t figure out how to make money from the search engine until long after Google had already launched. They got their product right, then they worried about the money.

Another great example of changing constraints comes from the development of the iPhone. In the early 2000’s, the rules of the cellphone industry said that smaller cellphones are better. Each generator of cellphone got smaller and smaller. It was as if some point in the future, we’d all be carrying around tiny, fingernail sized phones like in the movie Zoolander. Until, of course, the iPhone came out. Since then, cellphones have gradually gotten bigger and bigger. The rules about what makes the best cellphone have changed, so the constraints the manufacturers place on themselves have also changed. 

Before the iPhone, manufacturing constraints were the primary reason for big phones. We just didn’t have the technology to make anything smaller. Each year, technology got better, so cellphones tended to get smaller. Constraints determined the product that was created. After the iPhone, those constraints didn’t disappear, they morphed into something new. They were replaced with a new set of constraints and the process repeated itself.

Your creative. Your a free thinker. You’re an artist. That’s true. But what matters is whether you can be a free thinker inside a set of constraints. That requires not only being highly original inside the constraints, but it also assumes you choose the correct set of constraints for any problem. You must define the problem correctly.

If Google had decided that the real problem was how to deliver lots of ads to customers, they’d have been just another look-a-like. If Apple had decided that the real problem with cellphones is that they’re still too large, we’d have continued down the same path. Apple and Google defined the problem in a wildly different way than their competition. And when you see the problem differently than others, it only makes sense that you’d take different actions, based on different goals, and arrive at a different conclusion. Your constraints matter. How you define a problem matters.