Idea · carried by 1 source
Constrained Creativity
Innovation bred by scarcity and constraint is qualitatively different from — and often superior to — innovation bred by abundance. The most creative ideas come from places where resources are tight, not where they're plentiful.
Where it comes from
William Hockey, explaining why he travels to emerging markets like Kinshasa, in highlights/william-hockey-bet-on-yourself (~6:00): “Founders who build there, the everyday people, they live in this constrained society. They're constrained in a way that San Francisco and New York isn't. And that breeds a different type of creativity, it breeds a different type of innovation that you really can't get anywhere else.”
How it works
- Abundance shapes thinking: In London, Vienna, Mexico City, San Francisco, “people are living in a world of abundance. And that causes a very specific creation cycle.”
- Constraint shapes thinking differently: Kinshasa (pop. tens of millions) is a “highly, highly constrained society” — and that “breeds a sense of creativity, breeds ideas, breeds stuff that you can't really get anywhere else.”
- Leapfrogging: In financial services, “financial services tend to be most innovative and most progressive in like the worst countries.” M-Pesa in Africa did mobile payments decades before Venmo.
- Designed from scratch: When you can't access global financial markets (Iran, Argentina), “you get to design things from scratch” and build differently.
- Differentiated talent: “Brains are distributed equally.” In emerging markets, top talent goes to banks because there's no Anthropic or Google to absorb them.
If you only build in environments of abundance, you miss the forms of innovation that only constraint can produce. Travel to constrained societies to expand your creative range.