Successful people set constraints rather than chasing goals
joanwestenberg.com
joanwestenberg.com
The section on NASA made absolutely no sense to me:
> NASA had a fixed budget, fixed timeline, and a goal that bordered on the absurd: land a man on the moon before the decade was out. But what made it possible wasn’t the moonshot goal. It was the sheer range of constraints: weight, heat, vacuum, radio delay, computation. Each constraint forced creative workarounds. Slide rules and paper simulations gave us one of the most improbable technological feats in history.
Wut? The constraints are what made it a hard problem, but the only reason they were able to hit this goal in an impossibly short timeline is the huge amount of resources that they put toward a very clear goal (which was, honestly, less "let man explore the heavens" than "beat the Soviets").
The guard deters thieves by mere presence - just like how an apparently-locked door, even if unlocked, deters more thieves than a wide-open door.
The example doctor provides psychological support and real advice when things are _obviously_ wrong. Those are things that are way more useful than a rock (also, in real cases, patients do return after 2 weeks).
(the futurist provides no value whatsoever, here we do agree :P)
But I feel the entire underlying message is questionable. "Pretty good heuristics" are honestly pretty good! Sometimes (oftentimes, even) it's all you need, and it's much better than doing the extensive research. You should only do the extensive research for the "volcano" scenario, where the consequences are dire - otherwise, you're probably wasting time)
I don't really have any point to make, but it is fun to note that you can buy these.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Secured-ADT-Alarm-Window-Stickers/d...
[0] https://www.amazon.com/BNT-Security-Simulated-Surveillance-R...
This article is from 2022, and data science wasn't exactly novel by that time, considering the author appeals (successfully) to those big brained silicon valley types, that leads me to throw some shade at the writer and his readership.
Designing detectors for rare events is a pretty common, problem dealt extensively with in statistics, after all the linked methodology was devised for WW2 radar operators, and the default mode for radars is 'there isn't a German plane in range', despite that they needed to find a mathematical approach to find how good their radars are.
But anyway, the examples used are not in any way like another. The "futurist" in particular fundamentally lacked the "they do things well and then get sloppy" which leads me to believe the author has a particular axe to grind about the topic of tech progress.
For a lot of the other examples, the entire point is that the person knows they are being sloppy, they know they're letting issues slip through the cracks. If you know you're doing a bad thing, what use is the analogy to a heuristic? It's not a heuristic to be sloppy, it's just being sloppy.
And part of that correction lies in the fact that different domains place different costs on false positives and false negatives.
He describes different scenarios and the apparent contradiction is resolved by weighing the consequences of getting things wrong. The futurist can do whatever, since nobody nothing happens if he gets things wrong or right. In the case with real stakes, where getting things wrong has an immense cost, you just have to accept you will cry wolf a lot of the time.
In the doctor scenario, let's say the doctor is highly skilled, and can tell that if a patient has a certain set of symptoms, he's 99% likely to have cancer. Thing is, only 1 people in 1000 actually do, which means even this amazing doctor will tell 9 healthy people for every sick person that they have cancer. Is the doctor bad at their job? No, he's excellent - the inconvenience caused to these people is dwarfed by letting a sick person go undiagnosed.
If a factory is making Happy Meal toys, and they determined that 1 out of 1000 they produce is faulty, should they invest in a similar screening process? No, the cost of the process, and the cost of handling false positives is way costlier than the minor problem of a child getting a broken toy once in a while.
Same numbers, different common sense actions.
I just wanted to say that I still think the article doesn't really show surprising to people who took an undergrad stats/data science course, and the apparent 'conundrums' are well-understood.
My goal is not to work for a salary. I'm constrained by an otherwise empty stomach to do it.
The "wisdom of the crowd" is a combination of ignorance and mesmerization, and the result is a front page of dreck.
While I agree many posts are full of shit, I think it's important not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are tons of HN posts that I find incredibly insightful and informative. The ones I like usually fall into 2 categories:
1. They are a detailed description of something the author actually did, and show a really cool solution or implementation of something. They don't always have to be jaw-droppingly amazing (though some are), but they just have to show that the blog post is the outcome of the work, not the other way around.
2. The author has been thinking about a problem for a while and brings a clear, informative, well-argued insight to the problem space. E.g. this post, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37509507, is one of my favorites that helped me understand phenomena I was definitely aware of but hadn't yet tied together.
For me, this "folksy wisdom porn" is a cheap, bad, superficial version of #2 (FWIW, I think what you describe as "a novice who just discovered a minor technical detail that is superficially new information" is the cheap, bad, superficial version of #1). It has the veneer of some sort of deep insight, but when you actually get to the details and try to understand it, it either just doesn't make sense or is essentially word salad.
A nuanced critique! - excellent.
Please, nobody reply to this comment.
This is certainly entertaining, and feels insightful and informative. But usually it is inaccurate, subjective, or wrong, because it's an individual non-expert's experience.
> 2. The author has been thinking about a problem for a while and brings a clear, informative, well-argued insight to the problem space
Again, feels like wisdom, but an armchair expert is not an actual expert, and "I thought about it for a while" is not the same thing as "academics critically discuss at length and come to a consensus".
In almost all cases, actual experts have actually studied a thing for a long time, or practiced it for a long time, and have actual evidence to go on. Blog posts don't - because real experts tend to publish in books and journals first (which are peer reviewed), not blogs. If the blog post isn't showing its work with a lot of evidence, critical study, and consensus, it's extremely likely to be bullshit.
I say all this because in the 16 years I've been on this forum, I can count on one hand the number of front page blog posts that accurately portray my field. I'm guessing the real information is not clickbaity enough, or it doesn't validate the biases and expectations of readers. However, the number of posts full of bullshit has been endless.
Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound
(or, you know, constraints).
We obviously couldn't have gotten to the moon without any of those things, but someone always jumps in and credits the whole endeavor to Operation Paperclip as if it's a revelation. Gotta cash in on the modern trend of "erm, actually"-ing everything, I guess.
In this case those initial breakthroughs were made by the Nazis. Nobody is disputing that. But there is quite a leap to be made between lobbing explosives at London and putting live humans on the moon and then retrieving them, and many things besides scientists with dubious pasts were needed to make that leap. I do not understand what drives somebody to downplay those accomplishments every time the subject comes up. Your statement that those scientists were "what actually made the moon mission possible" is worded in a way that implies that they were the only thing that made it possible, rather than one factor among many, and that is objectively false. It's like saying that a spark plug is "what actually makes a car run".
It seems like you'd do a better job "setting yourself up for success" than making your life as hard as possible, and hoping "that which doesn't kill you only makes you stronger" doesn't, in fact, "kill" you (metaphorically or literally speaking).
While there's a hefty dose of junk, most of what's worth in life advice is "just anecdotes" too.
"Research-driven" or "scientific" insight for such matters is a joke - and often more snake-oily and based on some current fad than any crude anecdotes.
Fortune favors the bold, sometimes. Did the good luck of the preceding astronauts lead to the decision to launch a space shuttle under adverse conditions on the day Reagan was scheduled to deliver his SOTU, etc?
At least this one was just a waste of time, instead of being actively harmful like some of it is.
Reminds of something that Paul Graham once wrote: one of the most consequential decisions you can make in life is the city you choose to live in. Now I realize this is just a big constraint you place on yourself: location.
Other big constraints are: marriage, religion, and choosing to go the VC vs. bootstrapped route in a SaaS business. Going the VC route constrains your version of success to extremely high growth (a very successful bootstrapped business would be a VC failure), while going the bootstrapped route constrains your growth rate potential (you might make millions but not billions).
I especially love this heading from the article: Goals are for Games. Constraints are for Worlds. I would add: successful people navigate worlds. Children play games. Many people are still stuck in a game-playing mindset even into their 40s, rather than navigating their world, they are still stuck in a goal-oriented game, such as a "career". Right out of university they look for their next well-defined game. At some point the complexity of the world collapses all your games. Then you hit your mid-life crisis.
Seems kind of arrogant. I personally view goals and constraints as different kind of tools that are both helpful.
it's true that goals in games work - because it was designed to work that way. People setting goals in real life like they might be in a game (such as obtaining some sort of achievement, beating a "level" like passing school etc) might find that these goals don't actually reward them unless they're after intrinsic rewards.
Not all goals are misguided, and constraints can be misguided, too.
Do constraints somehow reward you more then? I've had both constraints and goals in my life, both have been rewarding and not just intrinsically.
Often if you fail to reach some goal in life it is gone for good. If you lose out in a promotion to someone else (who might or might not be good) you need to give up on that goal - either find a different promotion you can get next year, or a different job equivalent to that promotion (assuming you are worthy of the promotion)
Constraints are where and when and how you can hunt. But the goal of a hunt is the meat.
Note that I said maybe. Different cultures have different situations. Sometimes your constraint it meat and you need to walk past those easy to pick raspberries.
(Rasperries take a lot of time to collect, hard to transport in meaningful quantities and go bad very quickly. If we are talking about ancient hunter tribes - children with women would be the ones doing rasperry picking close by while the men go further away and then carry the meat back to the camp)
In either case, the goal would still be to get food.
This gave me a chuckle. On of these is definitely _not_ like the others.
VC/SaaS is surprisingly like religion!
The parent comment advocates for adopting a religion you don’t believe in, for the sake of “constraint.” Self-deception is choosing a blindfold.
Many of the "faithful" were not, in fact, faithful. Or they only applied it to very limited parts of their lives. But they still showed up to church on Sunday, and professed to believe the teachings (in general even if not in any of the particulars).
Adopting a religion you don't believe in is quite common and rational. Do you think all those people who marry into a religion or different denomination are getting brain surgery at the altar? Or if you want to run a business in a community, do you want to be the one guy who doesn't go to church? In some places, that would be both stupid and pointless.
So yes, most religions if not all are based on unscientific claims, but they make people's lives better.
I think the underlying issue is whether a person views the objective appraisal of reality as a positive thing or not. For someone who doesn’t, self-deception may seem the better choice.
I'm not religious, but that doesn't make any sense: those cases would weaken the correlation (or correlate it the other way), and now you're also claiming a causative effect that's opposite to the correlation you don't refute?
When we live in a society which publicly announce anyone doubting the dogma is a miscreant who should be tortured through long painful experiments, we will feel safer and better if we are in the camp of the true-sincere-believers™. Indeed it’s far less likely that any of these corrupted souls will come and trouble our peaceful minds. But if we have a ounce of skepticism in our veins, there’s no happy path for us in this society.
The reason those studies are just correlational, is because in social sciences, you don't really have many other tools.
There are no axioms, deduction is impossible. So that part of the argument is not really all that much valid. You have no mechanism to make social sciences more exact.
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Yes, there are also negative outcomes. But positive ones are stronger than the negative ones.
And also, some of your examples are not negative at all. The point of fear of damnation for example is the reason why ethics were enforceable for hundreds or thousands of years, when the state was significantly weaker, there weren't real courts, etc. Shame and guilt are important motivators. They developed in humans to make correction of antisocial behaviors possible if you don't want just violently punish people for everything. Having no shame and guilt is an attribute of psychopaths.
You would expect a population with "better lives" to outperform the rest.
The Taliban shows it is not always thus. Nothing is that simple.
I think, when we look at all social phenomenons, we need to look on the whole system. What is the role of religion? When religion is not there, what fits the hole? (Nowadays, there are many non-religion religions like consumerism, extreme-individualism, or global warming; all of those have their own prophets, the story of fight between good and evil, rituals, inherent sin and a way to 'buy out' out of that sin)
I don't subscribe to one myself, but I definitely see the benefits. In a way, I think my life would be better - or at least easier - if I wasn't so skeptical.
This seems to have had the reverse effect on me. I always wanted to move to the Bay Area growing up because that’s where the tech industry was. When I finally did, I got distracted by all that California had to offer: nature, good food, an endless supply of places to go and interesting things to see. I moved there for tech but promptly lost interest in tech. I picked up a bunch of fun hobbies totally unrelated to my core motivations in life.
Now that I live somewhere boring again, I spend most of my free time learning about new areas of mathematics and computer science.
I’ve also observed the same paradoxical effect with having children. Prior to kids, I had tons of free time that I essentially wasted. But now that free time is scarce, I wake up at 4 AM to study, practice, or create something before the work day starts.
It’s almost like sub-optimal conditions trigger an instinct to fight against those constraints by producing value. If I actually get what I think I want (living somewhere interesting, having plenty of free time, etc.), it’s like I just lose focus and motivation. Go figure.
The beatings will continue until productivity increases!
And, it's hard to imagine anyone arguing in good faith that you should give those amenities up and move somewhere boring in order to "spend most of my free time learning about new areas of mathematics and computer science" (not that that's not a noble pursuit in itself).
Harking back to the article, it's more about how you want to see yourself in the future. Do you want to be someone who has an appreciation (and has appreciated) life outside a career, at expense of some potential of said career?
And some wake up realising they will still have to die, despite their awesome career and that there is no point in taking their money into their grave and they should have started living at some point. But it might be too late by then.
Like most things in life, it is about the right balance.
Oh, that's certainly not why I moved haha. We wanted to be closer to family and that was just one of the unfortunate tradeoffs of that decision. The math and CS topics I've been studying are those that I find intrinsically interestingly (e.g., computability theory), but they are unlikely to benefit my career more than tangentially. I didn't really make that clear above.
With "core motivations" I was referring to what I would like to accomplish over a lifetime, which is more about what actually benefits society in some way (and at least so far, that appears to be orthogonal to my career). Personally, I found that moving somewhere less "interesting" helped me to realign with those objectives. Or maybe that's just post-hoc rationalization.
Billionaires famously never have mid-life crises
From a purely strategic perspective, as in military doctrine or game theory, expanding your set of viable options is almost always advantageous.
The goal is to maximize your own optionality while reducing your opponent's.
The failure mode you're describing isn't having options, but the paralysis of refusing to commit to one for execution.
A better model might be a cycle:
Strategy Phase: Actively broaden your options. Explore potential cities, business models, partners. This is reconnaissance.
Execution Phase: Choose the most promising option and commit fully. This is where your point about the power of constraints shines. You go all-in.
The Backlog: The other options aren't discarded; they're put in a strategic backlog. You don't burn the bridges.
You re-evaluate only when you hit a major "strategic bifurcation point" - a market shift, a major life event, a completed project. Then you might pull an option from the backlog.
This way, you get the power of constraints without the fragility of having never considered alternatives.
From Sun Tzu, and put into practice frequently by the Mongols:
When you surround an army, leave an outlet free.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Mohi
Finally, the demoralized soldiers decided to flee. They tried to escape through a gap left open on purpose by the Mongols, and almost all of them were slaughtered.
Sun Tzu was saying it is better to give your enemy the illusion of a path to retreat. If you don’t, the enemy will fight to the death. It is for the same reason why you should treat your prisoners humanely. You want them to surrender and end the fighting as quickly as possible.
Choosing a strategic plan only works if you follow through and execute. What is worse than paralysis by over analysis is a boss who constantly changes strategy. That is a sure path to ruin.
People make games actually because they have interest in well defined constraints, and in experiencing what can be achieve or not within some arbitrary rules.
Also anything humans do can be portrayed as some game. That’s no accident the game theory extended and swallowed so many domains in its models.
It's not always quite as simple as it being a choice. E.g. I might be able to move to SF if I liquidated my assets and applied for a green card, but that's not an easy feat. Where we are born & raised limits that choice to a large extent.
Thanks for this gem. We're all just learning this game/world of life as we go along, right?
I think values, goals, and constraints are all valuable, but it's a hierarchy. We should create constraints that help us become more aligned with our values. We should create shorter-term goals that make it easy to stay within our constraints.
To support both my point and the authors, here is Benjamin Franklin's "Thirteen Virtues," which seem to be a mix of constraints and values (zero goals): https://fs.blog/the-thirteen-virtues/
Certainly period-correct carpentry tools such as an adze, maul and cubit stick.
Thank you for saying it so well.
I have found difficulty in finding my values. Writing my obituary helped: https://www.jjude.com/my-obituary/. I wrote that almost 16 years back (published only in 2020). It helped me choose my pursuits well.
I don't live in the biggest house in town, or own a sports car. But I work for 3 days a week, homeschool two kids, have breakfast and dinner together as a family, we either workout at home or swim as a family, preach in two churches, and enjoy my work. I consistently feel, I am living in a dream.
Temperance (Practice Self-Control): Don't overeat, and don't drink just to get drunk. Practice moderation in your habits.
Silence (Speak with Purpose): Only speak if you have something meaningful or helpful to say. Avoid gossip and pointless chatter.
Order (Be Organized): Keep your belongings organized and manage your time effectively. Have a place for everything, and a dedicated time for each task.
Resolution (Be Decisive and Committed): Figure out what you need to do, and then follow through. Do what you say you're going to do.
Frugality (Be Mindful of Your Money): Spend money only on things that truly benefit you or others. Be resourceful and avoid waste.
Industry (Work Hard and Be Productive): Use your time wisely. Always be engaged in a useful activity and eliminate distractions.
Sincerity (Be Genuine and Honest): Don't deceive people. Be sincere in your thoughts and words and speak with good intentions.
Justice (Be Fair and Responsible): Don't harm anyone. Fulfill your responsibilities and be fair in all your dealings.
Moderation (Avoid Extremes): Practice balance in all things. Don't overreact, and learn to let go of grudges.
Cleanliness (Be Clean and Tidy): Maintain good personal hygiene and keep your clothes and living space clean.
Tranquility (Stay Calm and Composed): Don't get upset by small things or events you can't control.
Chastity (Practice Sexual Responsibility): Treat sexuality with respect, in a way that isn't harmful to your well-being or anyone else's peace of mind and reputation.
Humility (Be Humble): Learn from others. Prioritize listening and learning over ego.
Rather than "I will achieve this fixed thing" I say "I will change my behaviour in this manner for this amount of time and see what happens".
It works so much better. It emphasises that the only thing I can control: my behaviour.
Or not: plenty of times the thing that happened is that I couldn't keep up the desired behaviour for the desired time. That is also a valid outcome.
I am not in control of events, or circumstances, or other people's behaviour, or any of the other things that determine whether I succeed in achieving a goal or not. Because the effort is not linked to the outcome, when it's clear that the effort is not going to achieve the outcome, then that doesn't disincentivise the effort. The effort becomes the point. Which is really valuable in its own right.
First of all the over-generalization: why would all successful people do the same thing? Why would there be only one road to succees? People are different.
Second: the lack of definitions. Is "leave everyone better than you found them" a goal? It would appear so. What about "leave no one worse-or-equal than you found them"? Looks like a constraint. And yet they are the same rule.
Lastly: the lack of backup. Except for some interpreted anecdotes, there's not much evidence there.
Points for creativity and engaging style. But could do more on evidence and clarity.
To me, a lot of this post sounds like goals vs habits, caring more about what you do today than what you may achieve sometime in the future, only that the habits are constraints here, so not doing something. In short, "leave everyone better than you found them" is something you can adhere to constantly (like a habit), but for it to be a good goal you would have to know when you're done finding people I guess.
Ultimately, what I read from this post is that constraints are used to provide identity, to help you guide yourself everyday. And maybe that's what you need more than goals if a lack of identity (in your work) is what's troubling you.
Anyways, the following part does resonate with me. “Setting goals feels like action. It gives you the warm sense of progress without the discomfort of change. You can spend hours calibrating, optimizing, refining your goals. You can build a Notion dashboard. You can make a spreadsheet. You can go on a dopamine-fueled productivity binge and still never do anything meaningful.”
“There are times when goals make sense. Training for a marathon. Preparing for an exam. Trying to ship a product by a hard deadline. In finite, controlled, well-understood domains, goals are fine.
“But smart people often face ambiguous, ill-defined problems. Should I switch careers? Start a company? Move cities? Build a media business? In those spaces, setting a goal is like mapping a jungle with a Sharpie. Constraints are the machete.”
“Do you want to be someone, or do you want to do something?
“Goals often come from the first desire. Constraints come from the second.
“One is about image. The other is about identity.
“And the latter has more room to grow.”
There is a better article hiding in there, but I think it is making a good point.
In a lot of contexts, taking action with incomplete information is better in the long run than spending a lot of time weighing every decision and taking fewer actions as a result. And there are studies out there that show this.
An example: Not that I advocate individual stock picking, but if you spend 3 months researching the best biomed company stock to buy, you may be decreasing your risk of picking a bad one, but you are just as likely to miss out on 3 months of positive market-based returns that you would have gotten had you just picked _any_ company with a positive balance sheet.
When these boxed-in competitive people age, usually money becomes their terminal external reward, but they don’t seem to know what they want to actually do with it.
What I don't get is watching someone else play a game. I want to do it myself. If I'm watching the game it is to learn how someone else does it. OTOH, I can sit in the audience and watch someone else play music for hours... YMMV.
while i never would or could, i live a comfortable life with a lot of freedom but never felt like i've achieved a goal. i just look for the next interesting challenge or path to walk because we have only one life, and sitting with one person in a concrete box somewhere and just sit it out would be a waste of mine.
so i constantly change/challenge the constraints/rules of the game i'm playing to keep life interesting enough to participate without falling into the hedonistic treadmill trap
Boyd is a superb recommendation for startup programmers to read. Boyd and the OODA loop can completely transform teams who aim to build software quickly.
My OODA loop notes for tech teams are here: https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/ooda-loop
Since then I've avoided reading others' re-explanations of it, and instead tried to find any original writing from Boyd on it, to shape my own understanding of it before corrupting it with others' misunderstandings.
The problem is I have been unable to find any original Boyd writing on it. Could you guide me in the right direction?
Boyd, John R. (3 September 1976). Destruction and Creation (PDF). U.S. Army Command and General Staff College.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a6/Destruct...
Boyd, John, R. (28 June 1995). "The Essence of Winning and Losing". danford.net. A supposed five-slide set by Boyd.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdK4y6O-llE
> OODA Loop & Evolutionary Epistemology of John Boyd by Chuck Spinney
From this comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26466750
They also mention a video by Chet Richards and how it relates OODA to business context.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hDhznBtN24
The Q&A with both Chet Richards and Chuck Spinney is also worth a look:
Same for your OODA loop and anything supposed to improve your efficiency.
Patterns of conflict presentation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phm0Y5mFz1g&pp=ygUjSm9obiBCb...
For example: "Constraints scale better because they don’t assume knowledge. They are adaptive. They respond to feedback. A small team that decides, "We will not hire until we have product-market fit" has created a constraint that guides decisions without locking in a prediction. A founder who says, "I will only build products I can explain to a teenager in 60 seconds" is using a constraint as a filtering mechanism."
I think sensible constraints are based on knowledge. Goals can also respond to feedback, not be indefinitely locked-in. But they do differ as tools.
The small team that decided to not hire probably created that constraint to get to some goal, e.g. profitability, and the constraint is based on a prediction about what should work best.
Similarly, the 60 sec constraint probably serves some goal. Why are goals so bad again?
I think figuring out the constraints one likes to work with can act as a great filter once someone knows what kind of success, goals, values and life they want to inhabit. Otherwise, it's as arbitrary as goal setting.
For me, I parroted other people's cool-sounding goals for a lot of my life, achieving varying degrees of success and happiness. Only in retrospect can I look at my favourite success and failure stories and consider which constraints, if I held them earlier, would have helped me narrow down to those favourite storylines from the get-go. Those constraints, I keep near and dear to my heart and attention in my daily life.
I don't think there's a way to set a meaningful constraint before practicing setting goals first. Walk before you run, etc. etc.
I've never set myself a career goal, but being uncompromising about the work I do pulled me up rather quickly in every single place I worked in. This is only possible in workplaces that aren't stagnant, where your work actually matters, but by coincidence this was the constraint that I chose for myself long ago.
Same goes for my running hobby: I don't have a goal to run the marathon, but I run 5-6 times a week and run a marathon almost every weekend. The constraint I have is to push myself to run even when I don't want to. So far I've been doing better than some of my friends who has a "marathon goal" but only run when they feel like it.
Every day I try and add something that I have said "no" to. Projects, feature requests etc. I don't always have an entry, but it keeps No top of mind.
Not exactly a constraint, but....
“One person sets a goal: become a best-selling author. Another imposes a constraint: write every day, but never write what bores me. The first may spend years pitching, networking, contorting themselves into marketable shapes. The second may accidentally build a following simply because the work sustains itself.”
People (me included) often get confused and think that their goal of climbing the career ladder or being able to afford the nice <anything> is goal set by themselves only, when in fact it is a goal most likely induced by society and/or to reach a given social status. If you pause for a second and think honestly about your current goals you can probably identify the ones that are truly yours and the ones that are expected by society.
In the book "The subtle art of not giving a fuck" there is in addition to that the notion of open ended goals as a rule of thumb of good goals to have. And this to me is probably the equivalent of "constraints" in this essay. Make sure the goals you follow are set by you and not expectations of society and try to make and formulate them as open ended goals.
I think we just have to know our limits and set a reasonable amount of constraints accordingly. You don't want to burn your wings.
The first (and only) time I tried to make a plan with my co-founder, and there was an obvious constraint, he couldn't work with the constraint. It was at that point that I realized my co-founder just couldn't stop himself from letting his imagination run away.
For context, throughout the process of trying to get our startup off the ground, every other week or so, my co-founder would come to me with some kind of idea and just wouldn't take "no" for an answer. I couldn't understand why he just kept pushing beyond reason, until he got into that mode when we had an external constraint around what the idea could be, and he couldn't adapt his ideas to the fundamental constraint that we had to work with.
At that point I realized that my co-founder was just letting his imagination run away the entire time: constraints be damned! It became clear that my co-founder couldn't turn his insights into actionable plans.
> The first (and only) time I tried to make a plan with my co-founder, and there was an obvious constraint, he couldn't work with the constraint.
The tandem word here is "discipline". Once the constraint is created, then discipline is required to stay within that constraint.
Case in point: deadlines. Deadlines are fine. Deadlines without discipline with respect to scope creep is just setting a team up for failure and low quality work.
Lars Von Trier challenges Jørgen Leth to remake his classic short ‘The Perfect Human’ five times under increasingly ridiculous constraints.
Really worth a watch.
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"Design depends largely on constraints." - Charles Eames
I do not - sounds like a specific email client's thing rather than something in any IETF RFC.
Back in the deep dark past of bang email addresses and HOSTS.TXT when all Australian email addresses had !munnari at the end and everyone knew about !decvax and how to connect to it.
Just happen to be reading Augustine's Confessions and this is very similar to his struggles in deciding whether to give up his temporal ambitions and become a Christian. He wonders why he's so devoted to pursuing his ambitions for status and accolades, when it doesn't really bring him much joy.
Set a "goal" and then figure out a "daily-habit" that brings you closer to that goal. Then mostly just forget about that goal and execute on that daily-habit. Every now and then, either (1) change the goal - based on your feelings about the daily-habit you are executing, or (2) change the daily-habit - based on whether it is bringing you closer to the goal or not. Repeat.
I have been on both ends at different times - obsessing over either the journey or the reward - and like most things - the answer is not neat, it is murky, and in the middle. We like neat boxes so we obsess and ruminate - goals or constraints, identity or actions, work forwards or backwards, promotions or purpose, etc. - I feel all these ruminations are forms of procrastination and pseudo-productivity.
While it is good to adjust and calibrate your goals & wants every now and then, I believe that taking action is more important than passive thinking. Also, figuring out what you TRULY want becomes a lot easier after taking a bit of action anyway, instead of being in your own head.
Instead of saying “I want to be there, then.” (A goal), or “I won’t accept a less than 40% success rate.” (A constraint), I say “That hill seems to be the one I want to climb. I know that it gets colder, as I go up the mountain, so I’ll pack some long underwear.”
But I suspect that my own definition of “success” may be somewhat orthogonal to that of a lot of folks, hereabouts.
The author seems to be distinguishing goals that are externally motivated (eg win award) vs internal (eg practice every day)
For example "write the essay that's due on wednesday" is a goal while "work on english homework for 30 minutes every afternoon" is a constraint. The difference is between a discreet event versus a general behavior.
There are two wildly popular management methodologies in IT (and probably other places), which can be grouped into constraint-based like agile, scrum, where the focus is not on individual deadlines, but getting a consistent performance out of employees, and goal-based, with project managers and deadlines.
I wouldn't exactly say either style is uncontroversially popular, and depends on the needs of the project, with greenfield projects requiring a goal-based approach, and maintenance/feature dev of existing ones leaning more towards agile (there's a lot more of the latter, that's why agile's popular).
For what works for you, well that's up to you. I'm a wildly inconsistent person by nature, whether playing to my strengths or covering my weaknesses is a better approach, that's once again not an easy question to answer.
Having a direction (or goals) has the side effect of being a strategy that is biased towards action. Theory of Change, I think, is kind of an intersection between the two. You have an idea of what you want and then proceed backward to your current situation, address the limits, and try to increase the probability of making it happen. It is planning and "plans are scripts. And reality is improvisation" but if you act randomly and you constantly improvise without a direction, you are in a brownian motion with an average displacement of 0.
You need to set goals if you don't want to wander around for a while on the "ok" paths until you stumble onto something that might be your target or just a local maximum.
Constraints define the how and why, they shape focus, discipline, and intention.
Together, they form a system that keeps progress going.
I don’t see them as opposing ideas.
Constraints and goals work best together for most of my real-world projects.
Still a great read and interesting point of discussion.
But as constraints go: Ikigai is great. [0]
With regard to the popular Venn diagram [1], I add: "With who inspires you / Community"
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikigai
[1] https://www.japan.go.jp/kizuna/_src/7994686/ikigai_japanese_...
>"Goals are for Games. Constraints are for Worlds.
A goal is a win condition. Constraints are the rules of the game. But not all games are worth playing. And some of the most powerful forms of progress emerge from people who stopped trying to win and started building new game boards entirely.
[...]
Richard Feynman didn’t get his Nobel Prize by pursuing "win a Nobel Prize" as a goal. He played with problems, often placing arbitrary limits on himself: what if we assume this system has no dissipation? What if we ignore spin?
He looked for elegance within boundaries, not outcomes.
His freedom came from self-imposed structure."
The error is when the client has goal like "We need to sell at $X to keep up with competitors and our margin needs to be Y" while costs are unable to change.
That is two competing mutually exclusive goals. I use the financial reality of these constraints to help get at the bottom of their true goals.
• <https://web.archive.org/web/20210811125743/https://www.scott...>
Alternatively, as a ~5-minute video:
The most resilient structure is a web of interconnected goals: even if you fail at some, the web will not break. The more interconnected your goals are, the higher your chances of success.
Lately I’ve been trying simple constraints instead, like no phone use in the 20 minutes before bed. These small limits have actually helped me feel more focused and less anxious.
Curious if anyone else has tried something similar. How do you balance goals and constraints in your day to day?
Whatever constraints exist certainly shape things, but they're not some success magic ... the fact that they exist at all / in so many success stories isn't significant, constraints exist in life, including with success and failures.
I also don't see "goals" and "constraints" as some weird opposite forces or concepts that conflict.
Maybe I missed the whole idea here....
The goal here is “solving the PDE” and the constraints ensure the solution accurately models the physical environment of the problem. Without constraints there can be an infinite number of solutions
This is anecdotal folksy wisdom porn.
So for me, still goals, but made more efficient by constraints?
Does the author mean that if I create limits, I am or become smart?
Or is this blog post merely an observation?
You're welcome.
Interesting article though, somehow I found goal setting never worked for me well, but I find clarity in constraints.
A clear goal includes constraints, the problem is blind goals.