The Surprisingly Simple Truth About Focus

How a Grammy award-winning duo recorded an 18 track album in ten days.

They say the best ideas come from outside the box. Many innovative companies like Apple were founded on this principle.

But thinking outside the box is hard. And it can eat up a lot of time. Time you might not have when you’re working on a deadline.

What if I told you there’s another way? What if I said you don’t have to think “outside the box” to come up with great ideas?

What if I said you can be just as creative AND meet your deadlines by simply thinking INSIDE the box?

That’s exactly what the White Stripes, a Grammy award winning rock duo, did to record an album in ten days.

An album that sold over a million copies and which critics describe as being one of the best of its decade.

How did they do it? How did they turn out a project like that in such a short space of time?

And how can you apply the same formula to your projects and boost your productivity?

The liberation of limiting yourself

In an interview, Jack White, the band’s frontman said “The whole point of the White Stripes is the liberation of limiting yourself. In my opinion, too much opportunity kills creativity.”

But what does the “liberation of limiting yourself” mean? How does it work in the context of a marketing strategy or product development for example?

Let’s break it down and see.

Bigger is better

Most people believe more equals better. Most people fixate on the ideal of creativity being the domain of free spirits unbound by rules or discipline. That constraints stifle creativity.

But is this how works of art come into being?

Does a bigger budget, a bigger team or more time turn out a better product? You would assume so. But this isn’t necessarily the case.

Less is more

Having more can work against you instead of for you. Research suggests you’re at your most creative when you have LESS to work with.

When you have:

• A limited budget.
• A smaller team.
• Less time.

That’s when you’re at your best. Does this mean you should slash your marketing budget? Fire your graphic designer? Not quite.

The bootstrapper’s guide to the universe

The liberation of limiting yourself isn’t about cutting corners. It’s about imposing rules to simplify what you do.

For the White Stripes, this meant following a set of five rules in recording their album. There would be:

• no blues,
• no guitar solos,
• no slide guitar,
• no covers and
• no bass.

These rules constrained them to a box. Exploring the limits of that box liberated a rapid-fire creativity that produced an album in ten days.

Great painters like Monet, who repeatedly painted the same subjects, have used this approach to great success.

It’s the same approach Tina Fey used to codify her Saturday Night Live experiences into rules for producing 30 Rock.

It’s an approach you can use to code, write, compose, design. Just about anything you do can benefit from imposing rules.

Steve Jobs said:

“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.”

There’s never been a time when so much has been in the hands of so many. You literally have the world at your fingertips. But you need your own box to play in. Rules to guide how you approach everything from investing to A/B testing.

Think inside the box. You’ll move faster.