I don’t care how much power, brilliance or energy you have, if you don’t harness it and focus it on a specific target, and hold it there you’re never going to accomplish as much as your ability warrants.
– Zig Ziglar
Whether your goal is to start a company, meet an amazing guy or girl, or travel the world in a hot air balloon, there are few among us who wouldn’t want to get there more quickly. A powerful tool for speeding up your progress towards any goal is constraints.
A constraint is a rule, restriction, or boundary within which you must operate to achieve a goal. It might be a limit on the manpower you assign to a task, a fixed amount of time you give yourself each day to work on something, or a budget that helps you avoid going broke.
Sometimes constraints are forced upon you. Sometimes you impose them on yourself. Sometimes you inherit them as side effects of other choices. When chosen consciously, constraints stimulate growth by forcing you to take immediate action. They can also help establish consistency, to ensure that you keep moving towards your goal, even after your initial enthusiasm wears off.
Constraints Get You Moving
Without constraints, 30 sleeps would probably not exist.
Over the last several years, I’ve spent a lot of time “thinking about” doing things. I always wanted to be an entrepreneur, but my ideas never crossed the boundary from thought to action. When it came to making my business dreams come true, I was all talk and no action. I spent most of my time honing my procrastination skills: criticizing, aimless internet reading, linguistically flavourful internet flame wars, and other forms of mental masturbation.
As often happens in these situations, I finally sunk so low that I knew I’d have to change my approach if the Yet Another Idea I had–the idea for 30 sleeps–was going to become a reality. I decided to use constraints to get things moving.
I did this in two ways. First, I committed to working on 30 sleeps for one month. This rule gave me a temporal sandbox in which to play around and build something useful, without worrying whether I’d still want to be doing this in six months or a year from now. Second, after starting this site in June, I made the decision that, no matter what, it was going live on July 1, even if the entire website was just:
Obviously, that would have been pretty embarrassing, but when it comes to achieving your goals, you’re better off doing a poor job than not doing at all. Constraints force you to Get Shit Done. You achieve goals much faster if you start with something bite-sized that you can accomplish in a few weeks, rather than going into hibernation for several months to plan something so big that it evaporates into thin air.
In my case, when July 1 came, I rolled out the site. It wasn’t much, but at least it was. For the first time ever, I finally translated a business idea into a living, breathing entity that people could actually use. Even cooler, exactly one month after I started, one of my articles hit the front page of reddit, and later did well on StumbleUpon, bringing me tens of thousands of new visitors.
Had I not forced myself to give birth to this site on July 1, I would never have known that such early success was possible. I probably wouldn’t even be writing this article. This is why I always say that “action is the nuclear weapon”: I think that most of us are capable of astonishing ourselves, if only we would get the hell out of our own way and dive in.
Constraints Create Momentum
Ironically, this article is the product of yet another constraint: the constraint that I must publish at least three articles per week, between Monday and Sunday, for the month of December. Note that the goal is that I want to create content that changes people’s lives, but the rule is to do so at a pace of at least three articles per week.
Last month I made the mistake of not forcing myself to be creative. I just let it flow…and published only five articles, or about 50% of my normal output. This go-with-the-flow mentality was exactly the wrong way around. In any creative pursuit, consistency is critical. Sure, sometimes a great idea just comes to you, but generating high-quality creative output regularly requires deliberate and continual effort.
Constraints are useful for establishing momentum. The more momentum you have, the faster you achieve your goal. I’ve already had a couple moments this month where my three-per-week rule has spurned me on to create new content, where last month, when I didn’t have any publishing quotas to meet, I might have slacked off and not written anything at all in the same situation.
It’s easy to be excited when you first start a new business, lose your first 10 pounds, or take your first shot at social skydiving. Well-chosen constraints give you the momentum to convert your initial enthusiasm into lasting changes.
Constraints and Self-Employment
For someone who’s never been self-employed before, it might seem like a dream come true. You’re your own boss, work on your own schedule, make decisions on all aspects of how things are done, and you don’t have anyone breathing down your neck.
But there’s no better way to stunt your entrepreneurial growth than by overdosing on freedom. Freedom is wasted without good constraints. This includes setting limits on your working hours, having deadlines that force you to focus on truly important features instead of losing yourself down the urgent-but-unimportant rabbit hole, and keeping your expenses in check.
I often use constraints when writing articles. I set a limit of between two and four hours and try hard to finish in the alloted time. This forces me to not only stay focussed when I’m writing, but also encourages me to improve my writing process in general, to create the best content I can in the most efficient manner.
Of course, you can use constraints to help you achieve goals faster regardless of your desired outcome. If you want to meet a great girl, but you’re also the early riser type, you could make a constraint that you won’t go to bars or nightclubs to meet people. If you want to give up alcohol, but aren’t sure you want to commit to that decision for life, you might constrain your obligation to a trial period of a few months and see how it goes.
There’s plenty of room for being creative with the constraints you choose. The key is that if you’re not using constraints to help you stay on track, you’re probably slowing yourself down.
