The problem with that is you become the "no guy" even when yes is the right answer. Saying no to bad things is good, but you don't want to look too hard for reasons to say no lest you say no to something worth doing.
There are 4 things that are true in this world: 1) successful people set constraints, 2) successful people set goals, 3) unsuccessful people set constraints, and 4) unsuccessful people set goals.
Not a real fan of this approach.
This is what's called emerging strategy where you react on what happening around you (not to be confused with agile where you look at what's happening around you and then deciding a course of action). Problem here is that you are never in control of where you are going to, and wasting a lot of energy and work switching over to the new strategy.
Well that would be subtractive: I don't know what I want, but I don't want X & Y. You would steer yes, but it would be very broad. You're not really working towards something, you're working away from multiple things.
I find that orienting around results can help unlock whether positive or negative space (a goal or constraints set) is the better focus. In my experience, there are times when goals do not serve me, but rather hinder me. This is purely from regularly observing results. In those cases, pivoting to a focus on some well defined constraints has yielded better results. As long as the direction is the same between the two, that might still be considered proactive.
While I enjoyed the essay, I have my quarrels with it.
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 your second point: For me, the major difference between goals and constraints would be that I can clearly achieve a good goal, but a constraint is something that will never be fulfilled. A good goal is to run and complete a 10k marathon, it's easy to tell when you're done, or if you failed, potentially even measuring how far off you were. But a constraint would accompany you until you choose to disregard it. You can respect a constraint, but you can never complete it, only in the context of a finite project.
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.
This was a neat way to put it. Goals have always bothered me because they are an excuse to stop working – either because they are fulfilled, or because it becomes clear they will not be fulfilled. Constraints don't have the same problem.
Goals have always been more like milestones to me and also something that you can change. I see goals and constraints both as different kind of tools to be used. If you decide to change direction, both of them can change.
I think both goals and constraints are powerful tools for achieving success. Goals give you direction, while constraints shape your mindset and drive consistent progress. For example, “write every day” is a constraint — and it reliably leads to improvement. I enjoyed the essay. It’s not a complete system, but I appreciate its focus on consistent action over goal-setting. Thanks for sharing!
"When John Boyd, the brilliant / irascible military strategist, developed the OODA loop, he worked within the limits of jet fighter dogfights."
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.
Maybe you're the right person to clear this up. Ages ago I read in a HN comment that the OODA loop is often misunderstood to be a sequence of steps, rather than something more continuous? And that people's explanations of it are very different from what Boyd had in mind. People treat it more as a Shewhart PDSA cycle rather than the integrated, concurrent dynamic process Boyd described it as.
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?
Not OP. Have you perused these references from the Wikipedia page for OODA loop? The reference to a “supposed slide set” sounds interesting; perhaps that is what you’re alluding to regarding source material being hard to find?
Boyd, John R. (3 September 1976). Destruction and Creation (PDF). U.S. Army Command and General Staff College.
The OODA loop is great, but Boyd has so much more brilliant stuff for people willing to put in the effort. OODA loop gets you the heart of his thought, but if you really want to understand him read a transcript of "Patterns of Conflict." Osinga's "Science, Strategy, and War" is also a superb summary of Boyd's thought, although I'm partial to "Patterns."
Aren't these 2 complementary things? Goals tell you what you need to achieve, constraints tell you what road to take or rather avoid taking, to get there.
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.
I think this sums up my approach to work and life even though I never put it into words.
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.
I always get into this argument with people who always want to "keep their options open". No, that's just refusing to set a constraint, and that's a decision in itself, that usually leads to the most mediocre outcome.
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.
The definition of success remains personal. Employing certain biases, too. Being successful in World Choice and Gameplay is relative, but it is also proportional to the biases.
goals imply that achieving the goal will give you the success that the goal is meant to be a proxy of. That's why people go high into debt to obtain that degree - it's a goal, and the proxy for successful job/career. And yet, it seems to not be the case when they discover that this degree isnt the the golden ticket.
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.
If you fail a goal in games you can restart - which most of us will a few times in playing games. You cannot restart life so easially. We only get an unknown amount of years to live (statistically about 80, but up to about 120 is possible, or down to however many hours old you are right now) I've thought about going back to college several times in life, however as each year goes by the value of a different degree goes down because there is even less time I could use it. Though also as time goes by the cost of "useless degrees" goes down because I have more money saved (though it is saved for retirement).
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)
Maybe goal of the hunter is food. Meat is often end result and what they train for - but if they happen on a ripe raspberry patch they can divert to get food from that instead.
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.
No hunter would choose rasperries over meat. You maybe eat some while hunting, or after the hunt failed. But collecting rasperries and hunting requires very different equipment. You wouldn't risk loosing 100kg of meat because you found 50 g of rasperries.
(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)
Hunting is also a high risk activity - you sometimes don't get anything. Thus some ancient tribes would choose to pick the raspberries - which is to say abort the hunt to bring the women and children to pick with them. Others would turn back to get the women and children and then go on with the hunt. Still others would just go on with their hunt without telling anyone.
Yes, in ancient context it is search for game - but that means searching for fresh tracks. And when you follow fresh tracks, you don't stop for rasperries until the track turns cold. It would be distracting and like I initially said, only to be considered if the hunt failed (meaning no signs of game at all)
Which one do you have in mind? For each of those three constraints mentioned, I can think of a reason why it's not like the other two, but there's not one in particular that seems to stick out especially.
The issue is whether a constraint is positive or negative. Choosing to handicap oneself, for example by wearing a blindfold, is an indeed a constraint with tangible and predictable effects, but these are negative effects. You can’t see what’s in front of you.
The parent comment advocates for adopting a religion you don’t believe in, for the sake of “constraint.” Self-deception is choosing a blindfold.
You are conflating religious belief with religion. Just the word "religion" is underspecified. Historically and reaching to the present, there have been many communities where the church was the mechanism to deliver healthcare, food distribution, some forms of non-religious education, banking, community bonding and growth, etc. They also had religious services, and the religious leader managed how all the other things were done. Does that count as religion?
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.
These are merely correlational studies. Religion often makes people’s lives worse as well: sexual repression, homophobia, religious intolerance, fear of eternal damnation, misplaced guilt/shame, hours wasted on prayer/services/rituals, sheltered upbringings..
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.
> These are merely correlational studies. Religion often makes people’s lives worse as well.
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?
I’m not denying it can have beneficial effects but only denying that it necessarily has beneficial effects. That’s why I pointed out that the studies in its favor are merely correlational and why I also list several negative effects it can have (although it won’t necessarily have).
It’s clear that social outcomes always have intertwined retroactive loop with psychological representations.
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.
--
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.
Protestant Scandinavia and Calvinist Netherlands and Switzerland never really consider(ed) Manifest Destiny nor Capitalism as religions. And both regions are becoming increasingly atheist.
If you look for examples of something good, or something bad, you will always find them.
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)
Which still provides tangible benefits (comfort, meaning of life, emotional support, coping mechanisms, a community) to many.
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.
> one of the most consequential decisions you can make in life is the city you choose to live in
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.
You'd find many people (even here on HN) that would argue your time spent among "nature, good food, an endless supply of places to go and interesting things to see" is well worth the lack of focus on your career. Hell, many people hyper focus too much on the latter until they wake up one day wishing they spent more time appreciating the former.
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?
"Hell, many people hyper focus too much on the latter until they wake up one day wishing they spent more time appreciating the former."
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.
> it's hard to imagine anyone arguing in good faith that you should give those amenities up and move somewhere boring
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.
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.
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 talking about human psychology not about making a strategic choice.
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.
Not sure how that is a contradiction. My point was that the goal isn’t necessarily to reduce the options the opponent has, because if you remove all options it’s actually not a good move - as the enemy will then fight to the death, literally or metaphorically.
The way "success" is obsessing someone is a big constraint.
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.
> one of the most consequential decisions you can make in life is the city you choose to live in
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.
Yes, and the idea of separating from siblings and other relatives was a huge factor for us. We've visited SF several times, it would be awesome to live there, but man, the cost and family made the decision easy not to.
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.
One part that really hit home for me was how constraints actually help you cut through the noise. Like for me, I stopped trying to get to the perfect gym routine and just decided I’d never work out for more than 30 minutes. That one rule made it way easier to actually show up and do it. No more feeling like I had to have some big goal or perfect system. Just a small boundary that worked better for me.
interesting equality assumption: the title of the post says "successful", the title in the web page says "smart". This post have been flagged as uninteresting by my personal heuristic.
Wether they are imposed on us or self-imposed, constraints reduce chaos.
But while a chess coach will tell you not to leave pieces hanging a top chess AI will leave pieces hanging in order to gain a more important long-term advantage. It thrives in what looks like chaos to a less capable player.
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.
Interesting article. But I think the author is implicitly considering an agentic individual who does something, because 'total inaction' is a valid solution for a constraint-oriented approach (unless we are assuming constraints that force you to do action like "do X every day"). Otherwise, you can be perfectly aware of the limits of your situation while not doing anything.
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.
goals or constraints are just different life outlooks, and could be rephrased and characterised as overly ambitious and giving up depending on which finger was pointing where
as to the worlds complexity, that realy depends on
definitions, and how much situational detail is included in "different" so called profesions, which to illustrate I will point out that, no one who has not taken on formal(paid) students and actualy proffesed there occupation is in fact a profesional.
my real point is that any discussion of the things that are exclusivly human constructs is stuck in a world of arbitrary definitions and is meaningless unless there is a strict adhearance to those defintions.
there are dictionarys, use them
System in itself is not super productive. It can work with implied goals (usually if you have a lot of experience).
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.
It's from the pre-web internet of usenet, smtp and uucp in the 1980s.
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.
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?
The funny thing is, I think either goals or a constraint are a tool that should serve the user. Constraints that don't automatically allow the user to achieve goals they would have otherwise accomplished, and that are meaningful and important to them, are useless constraints.
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.
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[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 260 ms ] threadEvery 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....
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.
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.
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://danford.net/boyd/essence.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop
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:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWfbPoDuEwg
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...
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.
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.
Lars Von Trier challenges Jørgen Leth to remake his classic short ‘The Perfect Human’ five times under increasingly ridiculous constraints.
Really worth a watch.
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0354575/
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?
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.
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.
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.
• <https://web.archive.org/web/20210811125743/https://www.scott...>
Alternatively, as a ~5-minute video:
• <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwcKTYvupJw>
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.
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.
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.