Remember making rubber band guns in elementary school, or figuring out how to dye your Elmer’s glue green by dropping the inside of Crayola markers into it? Have you ever made a doodle in class that you’re particularly proud of? Or maybe a school project has turned into something you’ve shown off for years. Given the right circumstances, people can do some pretty remarkable things.

I believe that boundaries are essential to making people successful at what they like to do. For the previous examples, I used school as a boundary. Without it, the possibilities for what we could do with our time would be limitless. Who would choose to break open a marker and drop it into a bottle of glue if they could do anything else with their time? The fact that kids are stuck at their desks with nothing but school supplies to entertain them makes them push themselves creatively in ways they never would otherwise.

And the value of boundaries goes beyond just kids. For a musician, it could mean conveying emotion within a certain genre using certain instruments. For an artist, it could be sending a message using only paint or only metal. For a businessperson, it could be finding a way to sell their product to a specific demographic.

Without boundaries, the unlimited possibilities of everything we do would be overwhelmingly intimidating. In my opinion, it’s beneficial for a person to limit him/herself on purpose in order to see things to their end. Instead of searching the vast expanse of possibilities for the next step in a project, make yourself choose between a few different options. You’ll choose the best one every time without doubting yourself in the process.

In addition to making the creative process simpler, boundaries can help a person determine what they can’t succeed without. If you’re working in a tiny bubble of possibilities, it’s easy to figure out the things you need to make yourself better at what you do.

I’ll go back to the musician example; if a budding artist were locked in a room with every instrument in existence, I think they would have a much harder time determining their “sound.” However, if they were locked in a room with only a guitar, they may realize how much they need a drumset in order to get the sound they want. Essentially, setting boundaries is all about starting small and expanding only a little bit at a time.