I think there are two primary ways we limit our own creativity.
What I’ll call Type 1 is the inability to access your true, internal self. I discovered this concept while reading “Letters to a Young Poet”—a correspondence between a young poet and Rilke in the early 1900s. The young poet sought advice about his poetry. Rilke responded by urging him to reconnect with his inner curious child.
To be solitary as you were when you were a child, when the grownups walked around involved with matters that seemed large and important because they looked so busy and because you didn’t understand a thing about what they were doing. Rainer Maria Rilke
Rilke argued that we’re most creative as young children—exploring without access to the adult world. Everything is possible. Everything becomes a game, exciting, imaginative. Rilke believed this represents our purest form of creativity.
I encountered this idea again in “Mathematica”, which explains how our understanding of advanced mathematics is completely wrong. You can’t learn higher-level math through memorization. It’s imagination-based. It requires visualizing how things work and how they connect. This visual understanding isn’t secondary—it’s the entire foundation.
This concept—the inner child, inner curiosity, pure curiosity—is absolutely essential. It’s the voice we must rediscover within ourselves if we want to produce meaningful ideas.
Type 2 self-restriction is external, and looks a lot like peer pressure or audience capture. And whether you’re a creator with an audience or not doesn’t matter. What matters are the expectations placed on you. The real danger isn’t the expectations you recognize—it’s the invisible ones. Expectations from peers, family, friends, and work.
They don’t just restrict what you’re allowed to write or say. They restrict what you feel comfortable thinking. They limit how you approach problems or conceive solutions. You end up thinking only within the bounds of what’s acceptable to those around you. You stop feeling creative. You stop having ideas. All because you’ve self-limited.
To do your best work, you need both types of freedom. You must separate yourself—go into isolation. A quiet office or library will suffice.
What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours—that is what you must be able to attain. Rainer Maria Rilke
You must enter a state of pure, young-minded, unbridled curiosity—authentic exploration and imagination. That’s Type 1 freedom. Imagine it flowing from you, spilling out.
Type 2 freedom means escaping external factors that shape, control, and limit what emerges from you. Here’s the complication—and this fascinates me—excessive Type 2 limitations can actually destroy your Type 1 creativity.
It’s as if Type 2 limitations recognize the dangerous ideas lurking within pure, childlike curiosity. They know that unrestricted creativity might produce thoughts that “those people” wouldn’t approve.
I find this framework liberating, exciting, and challenging. It’s about improving your creative output. Some might call this writer’s block—and perhaps writer’s block is simply a Type 1 limitation. Maybe. What I know for certain is that both limitations obstruct maximum creativity.
I urge you to address both. Start by taking an inventory of your creative restrictions.
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