Creativity Loves Constraints

Freedom does not make you creative.

Freedom makes you distracted. Freedom makes you scroll. Freedom makes you open twelve tabs, rename the document “new_v4_final_final,” and wonder if maybe you should just go get another coffee before inspiration hits.

Christopher Nolan, the guy who can turn physics homework into cinema, once said,

“The highest form of creativity is found by improvising within a set of restrictions.”

Nir Eyal, the behavioral whisperer behind “Hooked,” backed him up from another angle:

“Too many choices or irrelevant options can cause hesitation, confusion, or worse -- abandonment.”

Combine those two and you’ve got the entire creative tragedy of modern marketing:

Option overwhelm crushes creativity, but constraints set it free.

The Tyranny of Infinite Choice

We’ve all sat in those brainstorms. Someone throws out an idea: “What if we…”  and before the sentence finishes, the whiteboard has twenty-seven more ideas scrawled randomly across its surface. Everyone nods. Everyone smiles. No one knows where to start.

You leave the room with ten campaigns, zero clarity, and a creeping sense that maybe “brand synergy” is the creative equivalent of beige paint.

Writers love to talk about “creative freedom,” but freedom without focus is chaos. Unlimited options don’t create genius. They create indecision. And indecision’s best friend is mediocrity. Because when everything is possible, nothing is essential.

Creativity Loves Constraints

A 30-second spot. A 120-character limit. A single idea that needs to land before someone’s thumb scrolls past it.

Restrictions aren't handcuffs. They’re scaffolding. They give your imagination something to push against.

Think of a haiku, 17 syllables. That’s it. Yet centuries later, we still feel something when we read about  Basho’s frog jumping into an old pond.

Think of a tweet that changed public opinion, or a six-word story that broke your heart.

Creativity thrives not despite limits, but because of them.

When you only have 50 characters for a headline, every letter matters. Every comma becomes a weapon. You become ruthless. Sharp. Dangerous.

That’s what great marketing writing is: the art of doing maximum damage with minimum words.

Option Overwhelm

Marketers love options.

“Let’s make ten versions of the campaign!”

“Let’s test all the CTAs!”

“Let’s brainstorm five hundred headlines and see what sticks!”

Translation: Let’s drown our clarity in a sea of possibilities.

Nir Eyal nailed it: too many choices paralyze people. That’s true for your audience, and it’s true for you. Too many directions and you freeze. Too many paths and you forget why you started walking.

Constraint, on the other hand, focuses the beam. You stop wandering and start aiming.

 

Relevance

The greatest weapon in a writer’s arsenal is not vocabulary, it’s discernment.

What to leave out.

What to cut.

What to refuse to say.

When the brief is tight, your writing gets sharper. Every line has to justify its oxygen. Every choice becomes deliberate. Limitation becomes liberation.

As a marketing writer, you’re not meant to explore every idea. You’re meant to choose one and make it unforgettable.

So …

The next time you get a brief with too many “maybes,” do the brave thing: cut them. Draw lines. Make rules. Put walls around your project  -- word count, tone, message, medium -- and then rage inside them. Push every inch of that boundary until it groans. That’s where originality lives. Not in endless possibility, but in deliberate constraint.

True creativity isn’t about having all the freedom in the world ... it’s about knowing exactly where the walls are …

… so you can blow the roof off.

Possibly the best blog post on qualifiers you'll ever read.

Qualifiers express doubt;
they leave your reader wondering
if you know what you're talking about.

This is OFTEN the best advice you’ll ever get on qualifiers.

This is USUALLY the best advice you’ll ever get on qualifiers.

This is PERHAPS the best advice you’ll ever get on qualifiers.

This is POSSIBLY the best advice you’ll ever get on qualifiers.

This is TYPICALLY the best advice you’ll ever get on qualifiers.

This is PROBABLY the best advice you’ll ever get on qualifiers.

This is GENERALLY the best advice you’ll ever get on qualifiers.

Eliminating qualifiers makes your writing more convincing.

_________________________

A quick qualifier about qualifiers: Of course, qualifiers can be mandated by Compliance and/or Legal departments …there are rules must be followed. And keep in mind that even in places qualifiers are not required, qualifiers are useful tools (when used sparingly and intentionally) to add an element of honesty to make claims accurate and credible.

A Peek at the Future of Marketing

 

There’s a certain flavor of panic you only see in marketing departments these days: the “oh God, AI is here and I’m supposed to pretend I know what I’m doing with it” kind.

You know the look: Eyes like saucers. Slack window open. Fingers hovering over a prompt box like it’s a bomb defusal device.

And then you read something like this from Thomas Zoëga Ramsøy and suddenly the room goes still:

“A recent MIT Media Lab report showed that 95% of GenAI initiatives fail.”

Ninety-five percent. The same number you’d expect if the strategy were “throw spaghetti at the algorithm and hope it becomes a landing page.”

But Ramsøy isn’t here to mock us. He’s here to hand us a map. And it’s surprisingly simple: stop treating generative AI like a magic trick and start treating it like part of a relay team.

His formula goes like this:

Predictive AI => Suggestive AI => Generative AI (Human still holding the baton, for now.)

Predictive AI is the one with its shirt tucked in. It’s the adult in the room. It can tell you instantly if that ad you’re about to ship is a hero or a hazard. “Good to go” or “needs fixing” in seconds.

Then comes Suggestive AI: the artsy cousin with actual taste. It pulls from neuroscience, psychology, and design patterns and says, “Look, here’s how to make this thing work.”

Finally, Generative AI takes those suggestions (grounded in science, not vibes) and spins up new creative assets. Predictive AI tests them again. The loop tightens. The work sharpens. The guesswork evaporates.

And here’s where Ramsøy hits the gas:

“This entire process now takes minutes, not days.
Campaign materials can go from no-go to launch-ready
in the time it takes to grab a coffee.”

Minutes!

Predictive => Suggestive => Generative

A trifecta. A choreography. A closed loop. A system.

Blizzard

 

By the time we stepped out of Washington DC’s Union Station last night, the blizzard had already been at work for a few hours. Snow came down hard and heavy. The kind that looks cinematic and inviting until you have to walk through it.

The roads around the station were mostly clear ... traffic had bullied the snow into submission. We grabbed an Uber without much trouble.

The city streets were unexpectedly busy. In the nation's capital even a blizzard can’t fully cancel the instinct to commute ... headlights glowing, brake lights blinking, snow reduced to wet grit by the sheer force of movement. But once we crossed into suburban Virginia, the mood shifted. The traffic thinned. The slush gave way to actual snow.

Even with the windshield wipers at full speed, visibility narrowed to a kind of soft white blindness. The world outside the windshield looked like an overexposed photograph. We could feel the tires crunch through fresh layers, that brittle, granular sound that says, “You are no longer in control.” Every so often the car would start to hydroplane before the tires found their footing again.

I kept waiting for the driver to say, “This is as far as I go. This is unsafe.” It would have been reasonable. Sensible, even. But he didn’t. Maybe there wasn’t anywhere decent to stop. Maybe he was young enough to be shielded by that sense of invulnerability that weakens with age and experience.

When we turned into our neighborhood, the car pressed the first tracks into snow that hadn’t yet been disturbed. When we reached our house and stepped out of the car, the cold was immediate, complimented by the muffled quiet that only heavy snowstorms manage. We thanked him. He told us to stay warm. We told him to drive safely.

Bags in hand, we trudged up the driveway, trying and failing to keep snow out of our inappropriate for the weather running shoes. I turned back just in time to see the white Toyota Corolla dissolve into the white curtain of falling snow. After it vanished, I could still hear the low hum of the engine and the steady crunch of tires on new snow long after sight had given up. I like to think he was headed home. Everyone should be, in weather like that.