Limitations Are The Key To Success

Which option do you think can make you more productive at doing a task? Being free to do whatever without bounds, or setting limitations for yourself?

I always caught flack for this, but throughout my life and from the guidance of Graham Cochrane (therecordingrevolution), a phenomenal teacher of audio recording, I’ve found that limitations are the key to success. At first glance, it seems very untrue. How can limiting yourself help you achieve more or create a better end result? Why wouldn’t you want to use all of the tools in the shed as opposed to a select few? The answer to that which sounds snobby but isn’t: using your brain.

Quick! You have to draw a car. Here’s 4 colored pencils, 3 colored pens, and 2 different colored highlighters. Go!

What’s the first thing you’re going to do? Spend time choosing what writing utensil to use. Okay after that? Choose what color. How does doing this affect your ability to produce one car on the paper? Instead of drawing the car, you spent brain activity deciding things that won’t actually help you draw the car. You could’ve been on your way drawing the car and deciding more important things like, what kind of car? 3 dimensional? 4 door?

These questions would have helped you draw the car to a much greater detail instead of the kind of utensil and color of utensil. If you had limited your choice to one color, one utensil, you’d be thinking about what it is you’re actually going to draw.

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The First Step

The first step to take is defining what your goal is. Is it to make a car as fast as possible? Draw a car to the greatest detail? Once you figure this out, you can eliminate everything that contributes nothing or little to the goal.

The Art Of Choosing Your Limitations

Choosing your limitations can be crucial to how well you succeed in a certain task. How do you go about doing that? Setting your priorities can help narrow this down.

By keeping in mind what matters most, you can begin setting limitations. Too strict of limitations, it’ll hinder some aspect of the task. Too broad, and it’ll be as if there was no limitation at all. Choose your limitations so that you’ll be the most productive.

The Magic Of Limitations

The special things limitations can do is get you to use your brain. Ever have to write a paper without any prompt? It’s hard. That’s when you set a limitation. Your goal is to write a paper about something. So, let’s set a limitation of what that something is.

Let’s write about cats. Suddenly, your brain gets filled with ideas. Who likes cats? Who doesn’t? Which cat looks most like Batman? (The answer is this cat)

Your brain started working pretty productively just by setting one limitation, the topic, cats. Suddenly you can actually get to work writing about something.

Not only do you have stuff to write about, but it increased your creativity. You can now think of innovative ways to tell a story about cats, in a way no one else has done before.

If you hadn’t limited your prompt down to a single topic, you’d still be thinking about things like, "Why does the paper have to be so long? It’s going to take forever to find all of these sources. I hate MLA format!" It’s much easier to stay focused by setting these boundaries your brain has to work within.

The Most Important Limitation

I think the most important limitation you can set is time. The age old problem of procrastination? Gone. You now have one week to write this paper instead of the semester. Going to have to make it work!

In a way, we sort of already do this when we procrastinate. By procrastinating, we’re shortening the amount of time we have to do the certain thing. Suddenly we become more productive by reducing the amount of time we have to complete the task.

This can work in favor of quality as well. Since your time is compressed down into a very productive short amount of time, your thoughts are all pretty well connected and you can get into flow. If expanded over time, you may forget certain connections you could have made if it had been in your mind more recently.

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Limitations have kept me focused and productive since I’ve actively been looking for ways and situations to apply them to. For something as broad as songwriting, limitations are a must in order to actually finish a song or album. I use limitations all the time when mixing especially. Setting soft deadlines to get certain milestones done really helps keep things moving, for example only looking at the drums, only using certain plugins, etc.

I’ve noticed a huge growth in my skills and end result since implementing the strategy of setting limitations. Hopefully this can help you out as well! Would love to hear what limitations you use to help you be more productive, stay focused, and end with a better result!

-Michael