I feel like I need a button on HN for, as another commenter put it, "folksy wisdom porn", where an article superficially touches all the right buttons to get it to the front page (hey, I always fail to reach my goals, I need a new framework!), but is just anecdotes and shows the results of the author's own Rorschach test.
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").
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.
I agree with the author, but I would also say there is something above goals and constraints. Values. A set of things that, when comparing multiple options, make the choice clear. An example of some values I frequently use is "What will give me the most enjoyment the furthest into the future? "What will result in the world being a better place?" "What will make me become someone who resembles Jesus more?" They are different from constraints as they don't knock out any options by default. Instead, they make triaging when there are many different things I could be doing much easier, and circumvent my messy intuition which is based on hormones, hunger, weather, etc.
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/
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.
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.
I think the article sets up a pretty silly and false dichotomy between goals and constraints. You’re not doing anything without planning, and you’re not doing anything with only planning.
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.”
I sometimes feel guilty. I’ve tried to set goals (I really have) but it’s just not how I’m wired. I tend to improvise my way through things. Even as a kid, I remember never feeling that urge to "win" at anything. Sports, board games, whatever. Other kids would light up with competition. I’d just… show up, participate, drift through it. I always felt slightly out of sync with that whole dynamic. That’s why this line hit me so hard: “Some of the most powerful forms of progress emerge from people who stopped trying to win and started building new game boards entirely.” Maybe that’s been the point all along. Thanks for sharing this.
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.
"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.
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 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'm gonna go out on a limb and say that successful people do all sorts of things in all manner of ways, but that most of them probably don't spend much time reading blog posts on how to be successful.
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!
To me, this sounds like a reframing of the classic advice “focus on your process”. Success is emergent - it can rarely be brute forced. What matters is the process you use for navigating life, any success you realize is a byproduct of your process. This snippet from the article illustrates what I mean:
“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.”
The Fountainhead has many flaws (IMO) but a scene I remember very well that I recall often, is the one where Peter Keating finally reaches the top of the firm, sits in his office, and starts crying. To me, and I guess to the author, it represents this aspect of having externally defined goals (as opposed to personnaly/intrinsic defined) and how unfulfilled you feel if/when you achieve them.
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.
"Constraints" is when I finally understood why, when trying to get a startup off the ground, it wasn't going to work.
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.
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.
I used to make these long to do lists and chase after big goals.
But honestly, most of them never got done.
What actually helped me were small limits, like not checking Slack after dinner or opening a new tab only after I finished the task at hand.
Sounds weird, but limits gave me more freedom.
Less chasing, more doing.
> That was the moment I began to question the entire architecture of ambition. Not whether it worked, but whether it asked the right things of a person. Whether a life could be constructed from milestones rather than methods, from outcomes rather than orientation.
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.
If you've done any sort of optimization / operations research, you know that most things can (sometimes unhelpfully) be rephrased in terms of an optimization problem. If "success" (whatever that means) is to be seen that way, then (some) successful people probably do both: set constraints to reduce the search space, and chase goals within that space (optimization). You can relax some constraints but then you need to be better at optimizing fast, or willing to accept other goals / winning conditions (get rich by being a criminal).
Like some other comments, found the article a bit "off" regarding the words and their usage (among other things). But since it does touch a topic that I have thought of a lot, as have many others, leaving my unsolicited advice here.
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.
Just slept on this article and realized something.
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.
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.
I used to always set goals for myself, but a lot of the time I’d either burn out or lose focus halfway through.
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?
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.
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.
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
>"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.
Constraints in one dimension can allow unconstrained movement in another dimension. I use this all of the time in my revenue consulting. A classic example: given fixed costs, if you constrain margin, price must be unconstrained and be free to move up or down. If you constrain price, then margin must be free to fluctuate.
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.
I don't understand what this article is trying to say.
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.
There is a mathematical parallel here. Boundary conditions are essential for solving PDEs and ensuring that the solution is physically relevant and unique.
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
I personally have found it effective to oscillate between having a goal and defining constraints in some _direction_. There are points on the journey where articulating a specific goal is helpful. At other times, I get more results with a few well-defined constraints. It can depend upon the season, but both have been solid tools for progress.
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.
Having constraints may also make something more achievable. It helps avoid issues like analysis-paralysis, and helps me focus on the path through the obstacles towards the destination I desire.
So for me, still goals, but made more efficient by constraints?
I like this idea, but my problem is with the word "successful". Setting constraints rather than chasing goals leads to doing interesting things. But there's no guarantee you'll ever be recognized or rewarded.
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.
Meh, we are very used to one constraint: time, and you can see that a lot of very successful people chase goals because they don't have that hard constraint embedded on the daily job. Bell Labs? Xerox Parc? Fermat being a lawyer and "playing" with math? Libcurl?
A clear goal includes constraints, the problem is blind goals.
Successful people set constraints rather than chasing goals
(joanwestenberg.com)395 points by MaysonL 10 June 2025 | 218 comments
Comments
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").
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.
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/
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.
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.”
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
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'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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
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)
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?
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.
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_...
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.
>"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.
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....
• <https://web.archive.org/web/20210811125743/https://www.scott...>
Alternatively, as a ~5-minute video:
• <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwcKTYvupJw>
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?
A clear goal includes constraints, the problem is blind goals.