On Something Clicking

2026.09.13

CLXIX

[Binding Constraints; Running a Coffee Shop; Limiting Beliefs; Pain is Non Binding; Google Search Sucks; When it Clicks]

Thesis: Growth is about repeating the process of identifying and removing the binding constraint; when you do, all of the other hard work you’ve done pays off at once.

[Binding Constraints]

Building anything awesome is a series of making progress, hitting plateaus, and then figuring out how to get past the plateau.

When you want to achieve some goal, often times, there is usually ONE thing that will move the needle much more quickly than ever.

There are other things that you can do that are good and important, but, if you’re actually caught on some other constraint, you won’t see the gains until after you tackle the real constraint.

This doesn’t mean you should do analysis paralysis and not work on anything because you don’t know what the binding constraint is, but it does mean that you should be vigilant about trying to find it.

Because, when you do, it feels like something all of a sudden clicks, and you grow in a rapid step function rather than incrementally.

It’s important that you don’t lose hope at the plateau, because assuming you’ve been working on objectively valuable things, the longer you’re at the plateau, the more you will rip once you solve the real problem.

This is important to remember, because finding the real constraint is super hard! But I do think that the longer it takes, the more worth it is - it will let you realize the gains from all of your other good but non binding changes all at once.

[Running a Coffee Shop]

Say you run a coffee shop. You have one barista and one machine and one cashier and altogether you can serve 30 people an hour.

You’re stuck, though! You can’t increase revenue! You keep marketing and marketing and trying to get more people to come, and there’s so much demand, but you’re stuck! You feel like you’re running in place.

Then it hits you - you’re at capacity! You are serving 30 people an hour and turning away another 15.

Marketing wasn’t the problem; your capacity was!

So, you double capacity. Now, you can serve all 45 people, and your revenue 1.5x’s immediately.

It feels like something clicked. The one single change, increasing capacity, let you unlock the gains from your previous marketing efforts. In this way, the gains from your previous hard work was finally realized all at once.

It doesn’t mean your marketing efforts were for nothing, you just couldn’t realize the gains from them until you tackled the actual constraint.

[Limiting Beliefs]

A lot of the time, limiting beliefs are a binding constraint.

Meaning there's one thing that if you did, you'd have a great outcome, but you keep not doing it, because you don't actually believe or realize that it's possible for you to do it.

This weekend, as an example, there was a specific data source we wanted to scrape for WhiteWhale, but were avoiding. The source is notoriously challenging, and back in maybe January 2025, I made an attempt on it and failed.

So, I had a 'prior' that this site was not worth it to scrape.

Last week, we were evaluating vendors to do it for us, but Jack actually challenged my prior and asked how hard can it really be. He was right to ask that, because I took another stab at it and did it in maybe 4 or 5 hours of coding time yesterday - not so hard at all.

This put the cost at ~1/5th of what the vendors were quoting us at, and we can get it even lower, really. There will probably be a little maintenance and editing to do over time, but at the volume we wanted to hit, this is worth it.

So, in the context of acquiring this data, my limiting belief was actually the binding constraint.

This is hard to realize sometimes, because it is often times efficient to come to a conclusion and then stop thinking about it for a while as you move on to the next thing. But revisiting your priors can be super powerful to see where you might be wrong. Especially when 1.5 years elapse and you’re much more competent in some regard than before.

[Pain is Non Binding]

I read this beautiful book a week or two ago, "A Canticle for Saint Leibowitz". It follows a monastery in Utah as the world recovers over 1500 years after a nuclear holocaust. In the last stage of the book, when society is more developed than it was before the disaster, the Abbot of the monastery reflects on pain after talking with a Doctor who wants to euthanize patients in great amounts of suffering.

The implication of suffering & pain being ‘evil’, is that absence of suffering and pain, and possibly even pleasure and comfort, becomes good.

This is directly antithetical to what I believe about achieving anything worth while: inherently, valuable things require pain and discomfort to achieve. Especially when you’ve been working towards something for years and hit a plateau and are going crazy.

If you believed discomfort was bad or evil, you’d probably be inclined to give up! That’s really easy when pleasure and comfort are so cheap.

Now, this might offend your sensibilities, but good and evil is not a spectrum where suffering is evil and pleasure or comfort is good.

Suffering is not categorically evil, and pleasure is not categorically good.

Let's say I'm sitting down and coding and really in on something and I kind of have to go pee but I'm locked in and want to finish the thing. The feeling of having to go pee is causing me slight discomfort, so okay, I'll go pee. Okay, now I sit back down and you know what I don't love the way the screen is hitting my eyes in this lighting, let me change the color scheme to something else. Okay great, but also, I wanted to listen to this one song while I was coding, let me pull up YouTube. Okay but yeah watch this quick recommended video first. Okay and now I’m at the song but this song was not like really the one I wanted to listen to let me swap it. Oh okay yeah but my water is out let me go fill it up. Okay great we're ready to go but you know what I'll probably do better if I have some sugar let me grab some honey. Okay great but now a weird song is on let me change it.

Do you see the problem here?

Doing the work is never going to be comfortable! Your comfort (or lack thereof) is not the binding constraint.

Someone once told me that he would be able to do SO MUCH more work when he bought an ergonomic keyboard and a better chair.

I'm sure it's nice, take care of yourself, but it's not the fucking problem. If you're not working "because" your chair is ‘sub optimal’, you're actually not working because you're avoiding the discomfort of starting something hard.

Optimizing everything becomes a disease the minute it distracts you from solving the binding constraint.

[Google Search Sucks]

Google search sucks, and summarizing the results with Gemini doesn’t fix it.

Search sucks because it’s easy for people to manipulate google’s search engine to get the content they want near the top of the results. Because you can make money by having your results near the top of search, it is worth money to have them there.

So, people who can make money by having their results there will spend money and resources to get their results there.

This makes it harder to use Google to find the information you’re looking for, if not damn near impossible.

One example I dealt with in mid 2025 was integrating WhiteWhale into our clients HubSpot & Salesforce CRMs. There are a lot of company that will charge you money (think, $2K or more a month) to do this for you. So, they spend resources flooding the search engine results with articles that explain how hard it is to do this integration yourself and how their solution is the best.

In a classic example of Goodhart’s Law, because Google has a formula for estimating the most useful results, the inputs to that formula stop being useful ways to estimate the most useful results - they’re gamified instead.

This is an underlying problem with search that needs to be fixed. By focusing on summarizing the results their search engine already produces with LLMs, I think google is working on the wrong constraint. Summaries of junk are still junk.

I think this is probably why a lot of people, myself included, use things like GPT for search that go further than summarizing and do multiple searches and follow links. But even these have problems that will likely be exploited more and more over time.

If you enjoyed my reflections on growth, I’m here every week, sharing my thoughts and what’s working for me as I grow my business and try to become a better person.

[When it Clicks]

All that is to say, you shouldn't get into such an analysis paralysis because it's not obvious what the most important thing to change is.

As long as you can find something that will obviously move the needle, even if you think forward progress will be slow, forward progress of any sort is preferable to getting stuck.

We had a wrestling coach visit our jiu jitsu gym the other night. My wrestling defense is okay against jiu jitsu people, but bad against wrestlers; even if I can sync a guillotine, if the person is decent at wrestling and jiu jitsu, they still might pass.

I spent 45 minutes with this coach, though, and my wrestling massively improved all at once. I used to like kind of half ass grab a single leg and then not know what to do with it. I'd over think some specific sweep, but he gave me the heuristic that transcends all: keep pushing into the opponent. Then they kind of just fall!

All of a sudden it clicked, and I swept a guy I'd swept maybe once in half a dozen matches 3 times in a row!

That said, I’ve probably been told what this coach told me in the past, but it just didn’t click. That probably just means that now I happened to have the pieces and training already in place to rapidly internalize that advice. So, even though I had missed this binding constraint for a while, it surely wasn't always the binding constraint, and the other wrestling work I did primed me to have a step function increase.

In this way, it was not all for nothing.

This has happened to our business, WhiteWhale, a number of times: intense product & positioning work followed by one change that failed in the past, like increasing price or allowing for self service, that now all of a sudden works because the other pieces that used to be missing are now in place.

As aggressively as you want to look for the binding constraint, even if you don’t have it, keep doing things that you know will help. Then, when you do find the constraint, you can grow really fast all at once. This is what it means when something just “clicks.”

Live Deeply,