How Mario's Creator Taught a Brilliant Lesson in Emotional Intelligence, Backed By Science

So, to make his small character look more human, Miyamoto gave him a big nose. He added a mustache so there was no need to draw a mouth or show facial expressions, and a hat so the character’s hair wouldn’t need to be animated when he jumped. The high contrast red overalls and blue shirt completed the look.

The concept of changing the way you view constraints was laid out in the book A Beautiful Constraint: How To Transform Your Limitations Into Advantages, and Why It’s Everyone’s Business (Wiley, 2015), by Adam Morgan and Mark Barden, the founder and partner, respectively, of marketing agency Eatbigfish. Morgan and Barden argue that while many see constraints as restrictive and severely limiting, the opposite is true. Constraints can improve your work, make you better, and create opportunity.

In 2019, researchers from three universities reviewed 145 empirical studies on the effects of constraints on creativity and innovation. They found that as long as constraints were delivered in a healthy dose, they actually benefited the teams and organizations that worked under them.

For example, the researchers cite an ECG machine developed by GE HealthCare. GE engineers were given a formidable set of constraints: utilizes new technology, produces scans for $1, and is battery operated and ultra-portable. The engineers were given a modest budget of $500,000 (the predecessor cost $5.4 million to develop) and a timeline of 18 months.

The same way the challenge of 1980 video game technology motivated Miyamoto, the researchers believe, the constraints placed upon GE’s engineers provided a motivating challenge and area of focus that spurred innovation.

“When there are no constraints on the creative process, complacency sets in, and people follow what psychologists call the path of least resistance. They go for the most intuitive idea that comes to mind rather than investing in the development of better ideas,” write the study’s authors in an article for HBR.

“Constraints, in contrast, provide focus and a creative challenge that motivates people to search for and connect information from different sources to generate novel ideas for new products, services, or business processes,” they continue.

Google’s homepage is super simple because it is the limit of what one of its founders, Larry Page, could create at the time. That simplicity helped it to become the most popular search engine on the planet.

Ikea likes to take on challenges like this one: How do you design and make a durable table that can be sold profitably for five euros? By solving problems like these, Ikea became the largest and best-known furniture manufacturer in the world.

Now, I try to organize my work and play in sprints. When the kids are off, in addition to enjoying time with the family, I get a mental break from work and a chance to reset my thinking. That time away and shift in focus keeps me fresh and helps me be even more creative when I get back to work.

As you pose these questions to yourself more and more often, you’ll find that you slowly transform the way you think. You stop seeing constraints as limitations, and start seeing them as opportunities.