Invisible Boundaries Limiting Our Creativity

Culture, religion, and upbringing shape us. They hand us invisible rulebooks for how to live, behave, and fit neatly into the society around us. Then, when we enter the workplace, the funnel gets even narrower. We're refined, stripped back, and nudged into disciplines that have their own accepted ways of thinking. Before long, we're surrounded by people who've been through the same process, trained in the same frameworks, using the same language. It's no wonder whole industries end up sounding and acting the same.

We tell ourselves we're being creative. But most of the time, we're only being creative within blinkered boundaries, boundaries set by upbringing and reinforced by the workplace, many of which we no longer even notice. In practice, that means we're often solving problems in the same box as everyone else. What feels like creativity is usually just logical decision making dressed up as innovation.

Rory Sutherland puts it brilliantly in Alchemy: logic is great at proving one idea right or wrong, but only after the idea exists. It's hopeless at creating the idea in the first place. Logic narrows the field. It strips away the “nonsense,” but in doing so, it also strips away the possibility of magic. If you only ever follow logic, you get incremental improvements - better Fiats. You don't get Ferraris.

Humans didn't evolve to live in corporate funnels or academic frameworks. We evolved to survive, to adapt, and to innovate in the messiness of the real world. Logic has its place, it keeps the wheels turning, but the spark of creativity doesn't come from logic. It comes from our evolutionary wiring: curiosity, intuition, play and the ability to connect dots that don't obviously belong together.

When we reconnect with those instincts, we're no longer limited by what's rational on paper. We're free to explore what feels right, what resonates, what excites. And often, that's where the best solutions live, in the illogical, the playful, the ideas that make no sense until they suddenly make perfect sense.

Real breakthroughs don't come from doubling down on the funnel. They come from having the courage to step outside it and see a different perspective.

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Below is a small set us examples:

Airbnb

Hotels = safety, standards, regulations. Logic said: no one would ever pay to sleep in a stranger's spare room. Airbnb leaned into the opposite and unlocked a global shift in hospitality. At first it made no sense. Now it's a $100B+ company.

ChatGPT / Generative AI

Logic in tech said: AI should be precise, factual, and rule-based. Then along came large language models that are messy, probabilistic, and often “hallucinate.” Illogical on the surface. But the breakthrough was that people didn't want a calculator — they wanted a collaborator, a co-creator.

Nintendo Wii

Gaming logic said: better graphics, more processing power. Nintendo went the other way: low-spec console, motion controls, family play. Critics laughed, but it outsold the Xbox 360 and PS3 for years.

What and who will be next?