When I was in my 10th, I spent all my pocket money on internet cafes. And my weekly pocket money would not be more than 15–20 rupees. That means not more than 1 hour of internet access every week.
I wanted to learn animation and a lot of other stuff. That left me with only 4 hours in a month to learn something I was passionate about. We got a new computer at home but no internet connection. And that was a good thing.
Every week I went to the internet café for one hour with notes of questions I had in mind and I asked Google. I learned the basics of animation that way within 10 hours spread across 2 months of internet café visits.
This trained my brain to learn at rapid speeds. Because the constraint of time for me was very real.
The day access to information became cheap and easy I got lost in it and my ability to be intuitive was clouded. All I needed to do is bring back my constraints and focus on things that matter.
Our DNA is one of the greatest examples of constraint at work. The child of a human will never be a bird. Constraints are at the core of great systems. Systems that work well all the time.
All great creations have a constraint at their core. The reason we can recognize the work of great artists is because of their consistent style. It was the constraints that gave them that style, not their creative freedom.
