On Constraints

2023.12.03

Lindy Expectancy: 44 Weeks

Meditations: 13/15

I feel like I am at the end of the prologue to my life. One more homework assignment, two more exams, and then I am done with school. 

It has me thinking about constraints quite a lot. This note explores some of them, and how some short term constraints can minimize other, longer term constraints.

Binding Constraints

Here, a constraint is something that impedes your ability to achieve a desired outcome. Some constraints are binding, some are non-binding.

A binding constraint is the one that is currently stopping you from getting to or improving your desired outcome, while a non-binding constraint is one that exists but isn’t currently impacting your ability to get to the outcome. However, it may become a binding constraint in the future if you take care of the current binding constraints.

Think of the binding constraint as the bottle neck. Twoexamples:

1. If you are hungry and at a restaurant that gives small portions and you only want to spend $20, the binding constraint to how much food you can eat is probably the $20.

2. If you’re at an all you can eat buffet, the binding constraint to how much food you can eat is how much food you can eat. That, in itself, is a function of both your will & how hungry you are. 

3. If someone who has never weight lifted but already has a protein heavy diet, their binding constraint on whether or not they can put on 20 pounds of muscle in a year is probably how frequently they can lift.

4. For someone who has lifted for 5+ years, the binding constraint to putting on another 20 pounds of muscle in a year might simply be biological limitations–no more beginner gains.

Even with these lightweight examples, you can see that while it might be a relatively easy concept at the surface level, the constraints aren’t always immediately obvious. There are countless variables in the real world that can completely reframe a situation  

Take the lifting example: since anabolic steroids exist, the binding constraint to gaining 20 pounds of muscle in a year is probably actually whether or not someone who has been lifting for 5 years is comfortable getting “juiced,” as the gym bros call it. Or, take the buffet example: time might actually be the binding constraint on how much food you can consume–even the mightiest among us could not eat the same amount of food in 2 hours as they could in 12 hours. 

So, this constraints not super obvious all the time. This post is more or less a low stakes exploration of some largely binding constraints in the context of my own life, and the long term consequences of taking up constraints.

University as a Constraint

One of my greatest binding constraints over the last four plus years has been being a student at the University of Michigan. Since it has directly bound my time and my location, it has indirectly bound my ability to follow pursuits that require time and different location as an input. 

As you can gather by the fact that I was in Lisbon for 10 days this semester, and also visited New Jersey & Chicago in the last month, the pressure being a student has put on location and time has not been binding on a smaller scale. However, it has limited my ability to go somewhere for much more than a week, and, this semester, at least, has resulted in around 8 hours a week in shallow work and 12 hours a week in deep work being subtracted from my total pool of workable hours. All things considered, this is a binding constraint on my available hours of work… unless, of course, I can increase how many effective hours of work I can do in a week, which, of course, I am working on.

College is a good case study for a characteristic of constraints: sometimes, you accept constraints for a discrete period of time in exchange for some benefit that will reduce constraints later. The big idea here is that investing in yourself is a temporary constraint on your time and maybe other resources that should, ultimately, limit constraints later.

Attending U of M reduced how long it takes me to establish my credibility in different contexts, most strongly with other U of M alumni. Last week, Jack & I sent out maybe 150 or 200 emails to Ross Alumni and got on the phone with over 20 of them; Go Blue, indeed.

On top of that, it’s given me some of the strongest friendships and relationships I’ve ever had, put me in positions where I’ve become much more social adept, and has taught me one or two things in the classroom. So, while I accepted the sometimes binding constraints on time and location, I also was able to do a lot of things that would be much more difficult or impossible outside of the context of a University, like bring a fraternity back to campus. 

And, of course, I had fun, which matters.

The Mind as a Constraint 

Thought patterns can both be the most insidious constraint of all and the most powerful weapon at your disposal.

The good: you can train your brain to see a 0 or low risk opportunity and instinctively take it. This could be talking to people at networking events. In jiu-jitsu, my favorite example of this is the calf-slicer you can hit on your way from top lockdown to back control. 

You can train your brain to be happy after an hour of intense, focused work; the payoff from the effort can feel much better than the payoff from looking at your phone every 30 seconds. 

In this way, thought patterns are not a constraint; if anything, they’re a constraint destroying engine. Sacrificing the time it takes to create these habits (a temporary constraint) gives you fewer constraints later.

On the other end of it, thought patterns can be insidiously constrain your range of motion in ways that you’re not even aware of. As a quick example, maybe you get stressed whenever you feel like you have more things to do than time, and whenever you get stressed, you go and doom scroll. Well, that’s a recipe for disaster; your so-called “solution” just makes the problem worse! Of course you won’t have time to do the work if you’re sitting on your phone.

This puts a constraint on your ability to complete work under stress, and it also puts a constraint on your ability to not be stressed. Talk about a feedback loop from hell. And these sorts of things can be much more subtle; maybe your self confidence goes down whenever you’re in a certain kind of room because of how an event in a similar room had affected you in the past.

Identifying and breaking detrimental thought patterns is hard and the product of a lifetime of effort. So, it probably deserves more than a few paragraphs here; we’ll revisit it in another post.

Time as a Constraint to Learning

When I was acting in a film this summer, I needed to fall without hurting myself. That wasn’t a problem; with hundreds of hours of jiu-jitsu and 5-10 hours of judo training, falling is quite easy for me. If my lack of ability to fall would have been a constraint, there was a stunt coordinator on set to remedy that, but it would have taken time. However, the time it took to adjust to properly falling on a film set was not a binding a constraint–the stunt coordinator had to give me 5 seconds of pointers for the particular fall and we were golden. 

The late and great Charlie Munger was a proponent of thinking in terms of frameworks; how can learning something in one domain be useful in another domain? In this context, I’d say the constraint we're worried about is how much time it takes you to learn something… how can you make learning happen more quickly every time? 

Some facts carry over nicely and can help limit constraints; me having already made some models with statistics by junior year of college made the required Ross class involving statistics a breeze. 

That’s a nice boost, but it’s still not very asymmetric; I think the real key to limiting time as a constraint to learning is by lifting up frameworks from one discipline and bringing them to another. 

There isn’t a “perfect” way to fall that works in every situation–there are a few general principles that you apply to how you fall no matter where you are. It’s a framework for falling. 

Accepting the constraint on my time by learning how to fall while doing martial arts sped up my learning of how to fall in a film setting by 100x AND greatly reduced my risk of injury.

Another incredible framework that I’ve found in entrepreneurship, evolutionary biology, programming, computation, and the meta study of learning in general is iterative hypothesis testing; how can you test, tweak, test, tweak, test, tweak, rinse and repeat until you land at a good answer. I’d say this framework has sped up my learning in countless domains countless times, and, again, probably deserves an entire novel, not just a subsection of this post + my post on it in September.

Accepting Constraints

I really thought I could do five or six big examples of constraints in this post, but a constraint of mine is trying to keep my weekly post at around 1500 words… this one was 1,800 😬.

I also wanted to talk about relationships (a constraint that uniquely removes some constraints), my back injury (a constraint I’ve mitigated), sickness (a recurrent constraint to be robustly mitigated), and sleep (a constraint that creates new constraints if ignored). So many cool examples. 

The point, though, is that what’s constraining you might not be obvious and a constraint isn’t always a bad thing; as a matter of fact, accepting a constraint now can limit constraints later. 

This is an inflection point in my life; certain large constraints I accepted are going away. Now, it’s time to see what sort of benefit yield and what sort of new constraints I’m about to accept. Hence, the end of the prologue and the start of Chapter I.

I have some questions for you that I would love to get feedback on; all you have to do is respond to the email you got this post in.

What did you think about this post’s format, and what have you generally thought about my format over the past few months? I’m debating maybe explicitly spending more time on one idea over the course of a few posts, but also thought it’d be fun to play around with more loosely related ideas such as this. 

Your feedback will only make my writing, and subsequent posts, better.

Live Deeply,