If you want your team to come up with a creative solution to a challenge, here’s the equation:

(x – 1) + (y – 1) = z

You: “Uh, Bill, I was told there’d be no math in these posts.”
Me: “I never promised that.”

Still, your point is taken. But stay with me—it’ll all make sense.

In this equation:

• x = time

• y = money

• z = the creative solution

In plain English:

Give them slightly less time and slightly less money than they need, and they’ll get creative.

You: “Why didn’t you just say that at the beginning?”
Me: “Because then we would have missed out on these lovely exchanges.”

But here’s my point: unlimited time and money rarely produce great ideas.
They produce comfortable ones.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again (right here, for example):

Creativity loves constraints.

Take the movie Jaws.
You’ve probably heard the stories about how Bruce—the mechanical shark upon whose “performance” the entire movie depended—kept breaking down.

So much so, in fact, that young director Steven Spielberg couldn’t actually show the shark for most of the movie.

A movie that is famously about a shark.

Now, a later version of Spielberg might have been able to throw time and/or money at the problem and just have a new mechanical shark constructed.

But not this version.

This version of Spielberg had to get creative, because he didn’t have the luxury of time and money.

What he had, though, was creativity.

Camera angles.
✂️ Editing.
An amazing score by John Williams.

By combining these elements in creative ways, Spielberg created a timeless masterpiece about a shark—without the shark.
(Except at the end, when Robert Shaw… well, I won’t spoil it for you, in case you haven’t had a chance to see it yet. Which is fair. I mean, it’s only been 50 years.)

Now, your version of the shark might be:

• a budget cut

• a tight deadline

• a missing resource

Yeah, it sucks.
And, for a lesser person, it might be a convenient excuse.

But it doesn’t have to be the end of the story.

Because creativity doesn’t thrive on abundance.
It thrives on constraint.

Or, to put it another way:

(x – 1) + (y – 1) = z