How Mr Beast Uses Constraints In Creativity

Have you ever tried to generate ideas while staring at a blank piece of paper?

It is painful. Your brain wants to go in a million directions. The more options you have, the harder it is. This is not a recipe for productivity.

Enter the power of constraints.

Constraints unlock your creative potential

Constraints help to take your mental energy and focus it in a specific direction.

The best part is that you don't need anything complicated to create effective constraints.

Edward De Bono, a leading expert in unlocking creative potential, has written about this extensively. He recommends a variety of creative exercises that create constraints to drive creativity. Mr. Beast reportedly does something similar. He uses a handful of brainstorming exercises to drive ideas for his videos.

Where things get interesting is that they both use the same, dead-simple foundation for all their exercises.

They both use random words to constrain their ideas

That's it. Simple but powerful.

Most of Edward De Bono's creative exercises use random words from a table he provides. Mr. Beast's go-to brainstorming activity is to grab a dictionary, flip to a random page, and start generating ideas based on a random word.

Both approach the problem of staring at a blank piece of paper in the same way.

Here's how you can use it too:

Go to randomwordgenerator.com

Choose a noun

Generate 3 ideas constrained by that noun

Now that you are warmed up, can you take one of those ideas to solve your problem? If not, can you use the momentum (or grab a new random word) to keep generating ideas to solve your problem?

I cannot overstate how simple, yet impactful this has been.

I try to generate a least three new ideas every day when I journal. It used to take me more than 30 minutes to come up with those ideas. Now that I use this simple constraint, it takes less than 5 minutes and I usually double my expected output.

Nothing else has changed.

I generate more ideas with less stress. You can't ask for much more than that.

Give it a try! Let me know what you think.