Thinking Inside the Box: How Constraints Can Make Us More Creative

Eighteen‑year‑old Vera Brandes had not intended to make music history on the night of January 24, 1975. She planned only to put on a sold‑out concert at the opera house in Cologne, Germany.

Brandes had grown up in a house of music enthusiasts. Her father named Vera’s brother Julian Stefan so that he would have the same initials as Johann Sebastian Bach. When Vera was fourteen, a family friend who ran a jazz club in town overlooked the club’s age limit to let her in, and she became a regular. After she turned sixteen, her mother allowed her to attend the Berlin Jazz Festival; she got tickets that put her right onstage with the likes of Miles Davis and Duke Ellington. She attended absolutely everything, including the hotel where all the radio journalists hung out.

She was still sixteen when Ronnie Scott, a prominent British saxophonist, asked her to be his agent and arrange tour gigs. “I’m still going to school,” she told him. “My mother would kill me.” Scott replied that her mother didn’t have to know. He had a point. Her school day ended around one p.m., which gave her plenty of time to call venues. And so she became an agent. At seventeen, when she learned that a concert in Cologne featuring a well‑known band from America was about to fall through, she stepped in to save it, finalizing contracts, securing a venue, and mustering promotion at the last minute. It played to a sold‑out crowd of eight hundred, and thus she became a concert promoter.

Eicher walked over and told her that if she couldn’t find another piano, the concert was off.

Next, Brandes started her own concert series. She called it New Jazz in Cologne. She wanted to bring musicians who were shaping their field, often fusing jazz with European classical or folk music. The fifth concert in the series would bring twenty‑nine‑year‑old American piano phenom Keith Jarrett, who had played in Cologne a few years prior with a group led by Miles Davis. This time, Jarrett would be a soloist, and it would be Brandes’s biggest concert yet. She reserved the Cologne Opera House for a Friday night, which meant the concert would be late—eleven p.m.—because it would have to begin after that night’s opera.

To allow anyone interested to attend, she kept the tickets cheap; some went for four deutsche marks, or about $1.50. When the day of the show rolled around, all 1,432 seats had been sold.

There were signs of trouble from the start that day. Jarrett had performed in Lausanne, Switzerland, the night before, and had to drive the four hundred miles with his producer, Manfred Eicher, overnight to get to Cologne. Neither had slept, and Jarrett was wearing a brace due to persistent back pain.

They wanted to see the performance space before the show that night, so Brandes met them at the hotel in the afternoon, and they drove to the venue to take a look before that evening’s opera. They also wanted to check out the piano, which Jarrett had specifically requested: a nine‑and‑a‑half‑foot‑long Bösendorfer 290 Imperial concert grand piano.

The venue was quiet when they arrived. The opera rehearsal personnel were already gone, and the performance staff for that night had not yet arrived. The piano was sitting on the orchestra lift, a platform in the orchestra pit that can be raised up to the level of the stage. Brandes found someone who could raise the platform, and Jarrett tested a few keys. Then Eicher tested a few keys. Brandes could hear immediately that something was wrong. Eicher walked over and told her that if she couldn’t find another piano, the concert was off.

It wasn’t just that the piano was wildly out of tune. It was the wrong piano. In addition to being two and a half feet shorter than the Bösendorfer Imperial, it actually had fewer keys in the bass range.* Plus, the pedals were sticky, as were some of the black keys in the middle, and while the lower register wasn’t great, the upper register was worse—tinny, due to worn‑out felt on the hammers. Jarrett would later become known as a performer liable to stop mid‑melody to dress down audio engineers or audiences if they interfered with his sound. He once threatened to cancel a concert if he heard the click of a single camera. And there he was, presented with an instrument he later described as sounding “like a very poor imitation of a harpsichord or a piano with tacks in it.”

There were two Bösendorfer pianos in the arts complex that included the opera house, and a transport company had moved the wrong one. The Imperial concert grand was still sitting between two large metal doors in an underground tunnel that connected the opera house to a theater. The tunnel served as an evacuation route for both buildings, but because the area between the doors on either side had a constant temperature and humidity, it was the perfect place to store one of the most expensive pianos in the world. But Brandes would only learn that much later. At the time, she had no idea where the piano was, only that it wasn’t onstage.

Finally, he sat down to play. It was magic from the very first notes.

Facing the prospect of canceling a sold‑out concert, she found an open office in the opera house with a telephone and “called every radio station, studio, and venue within one hundred kilometers.” Around six o’clock, she reached the father of a girl she went to school with. He was an executive at the local university, which had a venue where Brandes staged a previous concert. They also had a Bösendorfer Imperial. “Lieber Herr Schreiner, kann ich Ihren Bösendorfer ausleihen?” Brandes asked when he picked up—Dear Mr. Schreiner, can I borrow your Bösendorfer?

Thankfully, he agreed. The university venue was within walking distance, but it had begun to rain. Brandes rounded up her staff—a group of kids she knew from school—and made a plan to throw blankets over the piano and wheel it through the main square of Cologne to the opera house. Just before she left for the university, the piano tuner showed up. He asked if she had 45,000 deutsche marks (about $19,000 at the time), because that’s how much it would cost to get a new piano after she rolled a concert grand across cobblestones in the freezing rain. So that plan was out.

While Brandes had been working on the piano problem, Jarrett was down in the parking lot, sitting in a car with Brandes’s brother, assuming the concert was canceled and waiting to be taken to his hotel. When Brandes looked out the window and saw the car start to leave, she bolted outside. She opened the door of the yellow Rambler and leaned in so that she would be right at eye level with Jarrett. “Keith, if you don’t play tonight, I’m going to be truly fucked,” she told him. “And I know you’re going to be truly fucked too.” Her English was mediocre, and she didn’t know exactly what she meant, but she remembered Miles Davis saying something like that to his band once, so figured it was worth a shot. After a long pause, Jarrett replied: “OK, I’ll play. But never forget, just for you.”

The piano tuner called his son to help, and they set to work, doing the best they could to get the wrong piano into a playable state. While the opera Lulu was playing out front, the tuner and his son toiled backstage. Meanwhile, Jarrett and his manager went to dinner at an Italian restaurant. In fitting form for the day, the restaurant was sweltering and Jarrett was served fifteen minutes before they had to return to the opera house.

Between the furious tuning effort and the late dinner, Jarrett didn’t get onstage until close to 11:30 p.m. Finally, he sat down to play. It was magic from the very first notes.

The tuner was able to get the middle register in order and the bass register playable, but the upper register was still a problem. The first tinkling notes mimicked the pre‑concert bell that ushered the audience to their seats—an unusual start that elicited a giggle from the crowd. Over the next hour of improvisation, Jarrett stuck to the middle of the piano for extended periods. Instead of relying on the full range of notes, he wielded shifts in the loudness and softness of the music to craft an emotional sonic journey, moving between driving rhythms and fragile whispers. He focused on ostinatos, or repetitive patterns of notes, out of which recurring themes blossomed. Combined with steady rhythmic changes, it gave the playing a gorgeous, ethereal quality.

In contrast to the sprawling “free jazz” improvisation that was common in Europe at the time, Jarrett spent long stretches playing a few chords with his left hand (one ten‑minute span alternates between two adjacent chords, one minor and one major) while his right hand played the part of soloist, improvising groove passages, often in a narrow pitch range but with widely varying rhythms and recurring elements. The smaller piano was not meant to project sound that could reach the balconies, so Jarrett had to press the keys (especially in the bass register) aggressively. He occasionally supplemented that with a novel percussive element: stamping his foot against the pedal without pressing it down. Here and there, he added a well‑timed hoot of apparent delight.

Well after midnight, after two long pieces—and an hour of improvising—Jarrett brought the music to a delicate close. Upon which the audience clapped and whistled and hollered in a crescendoing cacophony for several minutes, eventually coalescing into a coordinated clap, until they got one final, short piece. The next day, Jarrett was already back in Switzerland for another show. But that wasn’t the end for the Cologne concert.

Even after Jarrett had agreed to play, he and Eicher almost dismissed the recording team. But since the sound engineers were already there, they let them proceed, assuming nothing would come of it. Instead, the Cologne performance was released later that year, using the German name of the city in the album title: The Köln Concert. Jarrett’s improvisations that night were too long for radio.

But when people heard the album, they loved it. The repetitive elements and anchored improvisations are thrilling but easy to follow, even for a complete novice. It immediately began to spread by word of mouth or by people hearing it played in record stores and asking if they could buy it. It started selling . . . and selling, and selling, until it had sold millions of copies in all. That recording, of the undersized, partly tuned, sticky-pedaled piano, eventually became the bestselling solo piano album of all time.

“He had to reinvent his music at that point in time to accommodate that piano,” Vera Brandes told me, a half century after the concert, and after a career of creating and running record labels. “That piano did him the biggest favor on the planet.”

Eventually, Jarrett developed a dim view of the recording’s popularity and stopped talking about it, perhaps because it influenced and became associated with atmospheric New Age music, which lacks the technical sophistication of Jarrett’s work. The Cologne concert itself was certainly not Jarrett’s most complex technical achievement, but he acknowledged that the limitations of the piano shoved him to a new creative space.

That’s the thing about constraints that spur creativity: They shut down many possibilities, but stimulate more varied and novel exploration of those that remain.

“What happened with this piano was that I was forced to play in what was—at the time—a new way,” he said. “Somehow I felt I had to bring out whatever qualities this instrument had. And that was it.” Decades later, referring to a different performance (his best, he felt), he told Keyboard Magazine: “When I find a piano that has this ‘imperfect’ character, it’s actually much more to deal with—and I mean that in a good sense—than a ‘perfect’ piano.”

Jarrett is hinting at what psychologist Catrinel Tromp has termed the Green Eggs and Ham model of creativity—the paradoxical idea that “working with constraints can yield more creative outputs.” The model gets its name from the origin of the seminal children’s book by Theodor Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss), which began when Bennett Cerf at Random House bet Geisel fifty dollars that he couldn’t write a children’s book using just fifty words.

Even before he wrote that zany masterpiece, the book that vaulted Geisel to international stardom was executed with similar constraints. In the mid‑1950s, the typical reading primer for children was, as the journalist and novelist John Hersey wrote after serving on a school‑study council: an “antiseptic little sugar book showing how Tom and Betty have fun at home and school . . . uniform, bland, idealized and terribly literal.” With that in mind, the head of Houghton Mifflin’s education division invited Geisel to dinner. He gave Geisel a list of vocabulary words for kids and asked him to write a book for six‑ and seven‑year‑olds using no more than 225 words from the list.

Geisel mulled over the assignment, and over two of his favorite words from childhood—“queen” and “zebra”—and decided to write a story about a queen zebra. Unfortunately, neither word was on the list. The list exasperated Geisel. “There are no adjectives!” he complained to his wife. In fine Seussian form, he compared it to “trying to make a strudel without any strudels.” So he looked over the list again, and decided that the first two rhyming words he found would form the title of the book, and he’d proceed from there.

Thus, The Cat in the Hat was born, transforming contemporary children’s literature. Like Jarrett, Geisel was given limited sounds to work with, so he had to focus more intently on exploring rhythm, quickening the words as the plot quickened. He found it extremely difficult, but also extremely generative.

That’s the thing about constraints that spur creativity: They shut down many possibilities, but stimulate more varied and novel exploration of those that remain. As a prominent creativity study put it, given complete freedom, our very strong urge is to follow the “path of least resistance.” Specifically, we do only what we have done before, or follow the first example that jumps to mind. Our brains enjoy convenience, and that takes less cognitive effort. A related phenomenon is known as the Einstellung effect, a psychology term for the instinct of problem solvers to employ only familiar methods even if better ones are available. “Without constraints,” as one creativity researcher eloquently put it, “composition takes place in a cul‑de‑sac of the customary.”

We may associate creativity with total freedom and spontaneity, but that usually just sends us down the well‑trodden path of least resistance.

In other words, when anything is possible, it becomes nearly impossible to do anything new. Complete freedom, paradoxically, leads to conformity.

This tendency appears in study after study of creativity. Asked to imagine life on other planets and given no restrictions, creators almost always draw animals that look just like those on Earth. Until they are instructed specifically to consider, for example, the need to acquire food, which suddenly elicits more original depictions than did complete freedom. Asked to propose ideas for improving health, people generate more and better ideas when prompted to start with a specific area, like nutrition, hygiene, or exercise.

In a study reminiscent of Geisel’s Cat in the Hat strategy, participants made more creative rhyming messages when they were required to incorporate a particular word compared to when they had no restrictions. In a famous study of toy creation, designers were more creative (and worked harder) when they were given five randomly selected components to work with and forced to incorporate all of them, compared to when they were offered a larger set of pieces and allowed to use them however they wanted. “Constraints,” the researchers wrote, “were forcing people off the path of least resistance.”

A study of mechanical inventions was nearly identical, with the most creative results occurring when inventors were given a category (like tools, weapons, or transportation) and made to work with assigned pieces from a larger set.* Inventor Simone Giertz, famous for her wacky robots and ingenious products—like a hinged hanger that folds for small closets—crafted a simple tool to spark ideas: a set of three dice. One die lists objects, another materials, and another properties. Roll the dice and you might have to make a piece of furniture from cardboard that makes music, or a metal art object using no power tools.

“If I have just an open field of possibilities, I won’t come up with any new ideas,” Giertz told me. “I made the dice to create as specific a brief as possible. And you can stray from it, but it gives me enough constraints to get started. It’s like if you can cook any meal, you’re probably going to cook something you already know, but if you can only cook with these three ingredients, you’re going to have to come up with something new.”

We may associate creativity with total freedom and spontaneity, but that usually just sends us down the well‑trodden path of least resistance. Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that some of the greatest creators in history voluntarily heaped artificial constraints upon their own formidable heads.

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From Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better. Used with the permission of the publisher, Riverhead. Copyright © 2026 by David Epstein