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 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.
same for me, i see it also as a mirror of people's approach to a happy life, ie. ticking the checkbox goals: marriage, kids, career, house, money for x, etc and finding (apparently?) satisfaction in that.
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
I’ve always felt the same way. What’s the point of winning in a game? Why are some people so obsessed with that kind of competition? The rules are artificial, it’s somebody else’s box. You’re mostly just training yourself to accept external reward functions uncritically.
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.
I prefer timeboxing to goals.
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.
As it happens, you are creating a time constraint.
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.”
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.
Put this way (P and GP) this makes a lot more sense. Thank you, glad you chose to share!
Seems a little contradictory.
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 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.
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.
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.
"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.
My OODA loop notes for tech teams are here: https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/ooda-loop
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.
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.
An interesting video from another time this came up on HN:
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:
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 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!
The Five Obstructions is a beautiful example of how constraints - counterintuitively - make creativity easier not harder.
Lars Von Trier challenges Jørgen Leth to remake his classic short ‘The Perfect Human’ five times under increasingly ridiculous constraints.
Really worth a watch.
Thanks but one of my constraints is to never watch another Lars Von Trier movie.
I have a google doc called "The No Project".
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....
I have limited myself to not setting any constraints.
Haha I love this
Paradox
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.
My email sig (remember those) is:
--
"Design depends largely on constraints." - Charles Eames
Remember when echomail taglines were supposed to be a single line of no more than 70 characters?
> Remember when email sigs were limited to 4 lines and had to have the double hyphen and a space on a line above?
I do not - sounds like a specific email client's thing rather than something in any IETF RFC.
I’ve always found an “heuristic” approach useful.
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 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.
A.k.a. “goals vs. systems”:
• <https://web.archive.org/web/20210811125743/https://www.scott...>
Alternatively, as a ~5-minute video:
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.
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.
Your website is beautiful on desktop. I had to look up to make sure I was still in my browser. Very cool.
agree. it reminds me my own personal website (yaps.gg)
agreed. and this was a good essay.
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.
you could actually define the goal as a set of constraints.
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.
I didn't know that's what smart people do.
Does the author mean that if I create limits, I am or become smart?
Or is this blog post merely an observation?
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.
You're welcome.
Yea I also spotted that. Never liked the format of “Successful people do X. You should do it too”.
Interesting article though, somehow I found goal setting never worked for me well, but I find clarity in constraints.
Absence of execution equals bounty of potential.
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.
reminds me of hunter's take-- https://fs.blog/hunter-s-thompson-to-hume-logan/
There's a saying for this. If you're not building your dream, someone will hire you to build theirs.
"You don't rise to the level of your goal, you fall to the level of your training"? Something like that?
I would like to think of this as Operational Gravity, or something like that. Might help it stick. Good quote. Thanks for sharing.
I recognised myself in this one. Good job.
Phew that hits hard.
Aren't you saying the opposite of the article? A "dream" is a goal in slightly different terminology.
So the latter is better because you get paid.
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
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@grok summarize
> 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. Always wanted to move to the Bay Area growing up because that’s where the tech industry was. When I 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 just wasted. Now that I have kids and 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 me to fight against them 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.
> I would add: successful people navigate worlds. Children play games.
Seems kind of arrogant. I personally view goals and constraints as different kind of tools that are both helpful.
Constraints create games.
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.
Sure, degrees don't _guarantee_ you'll be successful. That's just a misguided expectation. You might even create constraints to help you get there.
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.
Yeah and I still play games so what.
> Other big constraints are: marriage, religion, and choosing to go the VC vs. bootstrapped route in a SaaS business.
This gave me a chuckle. On of these is definitely _not_ like the others.
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.
I needed to read this today, it makes perfect sense. Thank you.
Location, VC/bootstrapping, marriage all provide real-world tangible trade offs. Religion is an unverifiable claim made about supernatural entities.
The effects of believing something, whether real or not, are tangible and often predictable.
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.
Religion is a major factor, that impacts your lifestyle, community, happiness and longevity. In most cases, positively. There are studies proving it.
So yes, most religions if not all are based on unscientific claims, but they make people's lives better.
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.
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).