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Comment by alexilliamson | Hacker News Reader

> I learnt to prefer discovering the limits early, then proceeding to be creative within those. I don’t get thrilled about what we could potentially do with unlimited time and twice the number of people. I genuinely get most excited by what we can do here and now with the resources we have.

I'm curious what other people feel about this. It is also my tendency to be creative "within the box", but I always feel a vague pressure to be more enterprising and expand scope so that we can get more headcount.

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The authors appreciation for working within limits speaks to me, and resonates deeply within. This is how my own creativity works. For example when I'm embarking on a project where I'm going to build something, I'm not interested in what's possible if I have unlimited resources. I'm interested in what's possible using the tools and materials on hand, with very little brought in from the outside.

To me it's part of the "hacker" mindset- doing 90% as good with 10% the means.

This was maybe the one point in the whole article I disagreed with. I find that I can only be creative if I start with unconstrained thinking. But maybe that's because my natural mode of thinking is to try and constrain things as quickly as possible (which is part of my job, I guess, as a technical person). But when I jump to constraints quickly, I often rule out answers that may make a lot of sense, even given the constraints, or end up forming the wrong constraints.

Anyway, maybe being creative is just an exercise in fighting our inner biases. If you're an unconstrained thinker, it requires you to constrain things. If you're a constrained thinker, it requires the opposite.

Anyway, I loved the article overall. Very thoughtful and inspiring.

100% agree with it. As a child, I always felt most creative when the number of lego pieces was limited. Like, what can I make that's cool with just these two handfuls of lego? Where would this weird piece go, and what could it be?

Unlimited possibility bogs me down. I get frozen.

I wish everyone had this mentality, creatives and developers alike. We would get so much more done.

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