Art is transformative. It brings meaning to life, turning a $7 blank canvas from Walmart or the back of a discarded receipt into a vessel for meaning and emotion. Its only limit is what you can imagine (just like life).
The freedom and lack of restriction is exhilarating and liberating at first. You can use watercolors, pencils, pastels, and charcoal to paint walls, the street, and clothes. But as you stand before this blank white expanse, paralysis often sets in. With infinite possibilities, where do you begin?
What if, paradoxically, the solution to this paralysis stems from infinite possibilities lie in the opposite direction of embracing constraints?
My best work in art has always resulted from constraints: either a competition that set rules for what kind of thematic art they accept, a lack of actual art supplies, resorting to mixing makeup to create my own colors, or setting my boundary lines based on what I want to create intentionally as a gift for someone else.
First you understand the rules. And then you break them.
Having more resources didn’t create electricity or invent the wheel. Language wasn’t created with the help of dictionaries. The ‘smartest’ people in history didn’t know everything about everything. But what they did know, they knew well. They ruminated on the little information they had, running through their neural pathways over and over again until the road broke off into a hidden trail.
In today’s world, we’re much more likely to be victims of abundance, not scarcity. Too much choice, too many options, too much information.
Constraint and scarcity force you to act better with what you do have.
When you dont have much handed to you, anything you seek automatically results from you wanting it bad enough, making it harder to do the wrong thing because it isn’t easy to.
Unlimited resources are overrated. Truly novel things rarely need an abundance of money. If that were so, billionaires would have a monopoly on inventing new things, and they don’t. Breakthroughs can’t be bought. Instead, passion, persistence, belief, and ingenuity are required to invent new things, qualities the less funded and young often have in abundance.
What you regard as a disadvantage might just be your biggest strength. Having less is good. An example is art, but this applies to life, too. Restrict yourself on money, time, material things. This way, you remove the bullshit and get shit done. And often, the shit done is better than what wouldve been done with more.
Abundance flows from within you into the rest of the world.