"Embrace the shake." - Advice artist Phil Hansen received from his neurologist after developing irreversible nerve damage in his right hand.
In the late 1950s, a young author who worked in the advertising industry accepted a challenge from a publisher to create a book for first graders that would inspire them to love reading. The challenge came with a big catch: The writer was to use fewer than 225 words selected from a total list of 384 first-grade vocabulary words.
Theodore Giesel, the author, wanted to write about a king cat and a queen cat, but queen wasn't in his proscribed list of words.
At first I thought it was impossible and ridiculous, and I was about to get out of the whole thing; I then decided to look at the list one more time and to use the first two words that rhymed as the title of the book -- cat and hat!
-- Theodore Giesel, the author known as "Dr. Seuss"
The Cat in The Hat, which uses 236 different words, went on to sell one million copies within the first three years of its publication. Almost 50 years later, Publishers Weekly listed it as one of the best selling children's books of all time.
This story gets even better.
In 1960, another publisher bet Theodore Giesel 50 dollars that he could not write an entertaining children's book using only 50 different words.
It took a little longer than normal due to the severe word constraint, but the wait was worth it; Green Eggs and Ham, which consists of 49 monosyllabic words and the word "anywhere," went on to sell more than 200 million copies.
The stories of The Cat in The Hat and Green Eggs and Ham are really stories about the formative power of challenging constraints.
In the transformative book, A Beautiful Constraint, Adam Morgan and Mark Barden explain that authentic success is really about changing our stories from "We can't, because," to "We can, if."
This idea is so powerful that it can work for entire nations: In 1949, two million people left mainland China after the civil war to form Taiwan, a country described by Thomas Friedman as a "barren rock with no natural resources." Realizing that they had no environmental advantages, the Taiwanese government changed their thinking from "We can't, because we have no natural resources," to "We can, if we think of people as our natural resources." They invested a large portion of their time and energy into education and other creative initiatives, revolutionizing their economic future in a few short years. The phrase, "Taiwan miracle" describes the astounding growth rate of real GDP in Taiwan from 1952 to 1982, leaving a nation of 23 million people with the 4th largest cash reserve in the world.
To give you an idea of the impact of Taiwan's annual income growth, consider that an American citizen who earned $30,000.00 per year would be earning about $360,000.00 annually if we enjoyed the same growth rate as Taiwan over a 40 year period.
Can you take another look at the reasons you and your teams are not moving powerfully towards your visions? Did you just crash into a new roadblock?
Do your best to reframe the story.
"We can't sell more now, because the economy is slow" becomes, "we can sell more now, if we lower the prices on our existing inventory. We can lower the prices if we use less material in packaging. We can use less material if we redesign our product so that it comes disassembled."
If this switch in thinking seems impossible, practice "priming" your thoughts -- ask your team to remember times when they've used a constraint to propel success, or times when they were able to positively change the way they viewed a circumstance. If that's too much, people can recall a time when they were surprised by a positive result as another way to prime their brains for success.
Your challenges can be the source of your breakthroughs. In fact, you can often cause a breakthrough by imposing constraints on projects or choices. A firm deadline or a commitment to stay the course for a minimum time period no matter what can be used to jump start creativity and fuel fast progress towards your goals.
Constraints fueled the creative genius of Nike, the victory run of Audi at LeMans, the revolutionary economic growth of a country, and the writing of some of the best-selling children's literature of all time.
Just imagine what you and your team can do if you become willing to turn your challenges into fuel for success.
Freedom, in the real world, is not utter license to do as we please; it is much closer to Robert Frost's famous formula -- 'moving easy in harness.' Constraints are always there. It's a matter of how we move within them.
-- Robert Bethune, Art Times 2009
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