Constraints Make Us Stronger

One of my most powerful and often used reframing phrases is:

Constraints make us stronger.

Growth comes from exposing ourselves to challenges. Constraints, however, is a special type of challenge in that it’s about not having enough of something, be it time, money, health, status, attractiveness, or ability. Constraints is about facing the reality of scarcity and whether that makes you stronger is up to you.

Resourcefulness

Constraints force us to become more resourceful. With business, the most common constraints are money, time, and people. In The Messy Middle, entrepreneur, venture investor, and Adobe Chief Product Officer Scott Belsky said:

“Resources are like carbs. Resourcefulness is like muscle. When you develop it, it actually stays with you and impacts everything you do going forward. Resourcefulness also makes you more creative. Any good designer will tell you that creative constraints help the idea generation process. With fewer resources and options you become more creative with what you have.”

I’d add that resourcefulness, much like dieting and training, also cultivates discipline. This is absolutely true in the tech industry. You might’ve heard of the saying that necessity is the mother of invention. I can’t remember the number of times when tight deadlines pushed Sturfee, my last startup, to think out of the box to overcome technical hurdles that impacted our customer’s experience, which in turn unblocked critical commercial deals and fundraising rounds.

The desperate fight against time and an ever shortening cash runway drove us to make massive improvements to our core AI engine in mere weeks with a tiny team that would’ve taken a large slow-moving company months to accomplish. I (half) joke that the deciding factor for me joining them in the first place was how crappy their office looked at the time. It demonstrated to me that they weren’t squandering their money and instead were investing it into the product and hiring good people who were humble and hardworking (read: not spoiled by Silicon Valley perks and comfort).

The opposite is true as I see how companies flush with $BILLIONS of funding buckle under the weight of their own excess and mismanagement. Katerra, the Softbank-backed modular apartment construction startup, is still being dragged through ruinous lawsuits even after its unsightly death. According to The Information:

“The conflicts, governance lapses, boardroom disputes, ballooning financial losses, and accounting fraud allegations eventually torpedoed the company—and the nearly $2 billion SoftBank invested in it over several years, including about $1 billion after the PwC report that raised red flags. The startup lost an additional $1 billion invested by Greenoaks, Khosla Ventures and more than a dozen other firms. Katerra, which SoftBank valued at nearly $6 billion at its peak in 2019 with more than 8,000 employees, declared bankruptcy last year.

The embarrassing details of Katerra’s failure also mark another black eye for SoftBank and its roughly $100 billion Vision Fund…the Vision Fund invested in other troubled or disastrous firms including office-leasing firm WeWork, lender Greensill Capital, glass manufacturer View, car-sharing startup Getaround, robotic pizza-making developer Zume and dog-walking app Wag, to name a few. A common theme of many of those mistakes was a lack of due diligence before the investment.”

I go for Resourcefulness over Resources any day.

Better, Faster, Stronger

How can constraints make us better? My friend Brian works at Baidu, the Google of China, as the sole US-facing business developer. His Chinese was horrendous when he first joined the company 4 years ago. Given that Mandarin is widely used in the company, his first few months were so rough that he felt like crying after every meeting. In other words, this was a huge constraint of ability.

In this challenging environment, something peculiar began happening. Because it was his responsibility to send out followup emails to every stakeholder, he had to pay close attention to everything that was being said. As a result, he was by far the most engaged person during meetings.

Now from my own experience mind mapping meetings, when you are that attentive, you not only remember the most, but also learn way more than your checked out teammates. Counterintuitively, thanks to the flow-like state, time actually passes faster than if you were browsing your phone on the side. Today, Brian is one of Baidu’s best business executives who’s able to identify major customer pain points and is regularly recognized for his ability to recall all the important details from client calls. In hindsight, it was precisely his lack of Mandarin ability that made him into such a deep listener.

Constraints can also come in the form of ambitious goals that you’re held accountable to. Baidu’s a heavily Steel company that emphasizes revenue generation above all else. This means that he couldn’t just be fluffy with his pitches, for he had to build actual businesses that made money. There was no where to hide either because his strict boss always made him personally accountable to these revenue goals and pushed him to thoroughly understand how the advertising tech industry worked rather than just selling a vision. This ultimately makes him a much more competent and sought after professional in his field, paving the way for career progression both within Baidu and else where when he is ready to move on.

Prioritization & Clarity

Constraints also narrows our focus and clarifies what we need to do from what we want to do. When we truly find ourselves in a bind, things that used to waste our time, attention and money suddenly melt away. It turns out that tightening the belt has a cathartic effect.

This is exactly what happened when I left my tech job last year and went into content creation full time.

When I quit Sturfee last year, my main source of income also dried up, which forced me to rein in my spending, sell unused outdoor gear, and most importantly, eliminate things that distracted me from building a sustainable and rewarding future in this creative field.

That’s the power of reframing. As my friend Larry, a retired genius inventor with over 60 patents worth ~$billion of value, would say: life has always given him what he needed rather than what he wanted. In hindsight, it’s the things we need that contributes most to our growth and wisdom.

The same applies to relationships. When you love someone and that person needs your help, it suddenly becomes a lot easier to say “no” to the 100 other things that seemed so important before. The word “decide” comes from Latin decidere - literally to cut off. Life is about decisions and choosing which things to cut, so that we can dedicate ourselves to what is most meaningful for us. Constraints make decisions easier, a cure to the paralysis and anxiety we face in our modern buffet of options.

Empathy & Humility

A third order effect of constraints is humility and empathy. When I lost my healthcare coverage with my old company, I had to take on a lower cost but much more restrictive insurance that limited which doctors I could see. After a week of frustrating searches and calls back and forth with my insurance and healthcare providers, I finally locked down a primary doctor.

The ordeal gave me greater appreciation for the privilege I had before and empathy for millions of Americans who can’t afford good insurance yet are also the most at risk for health complications that require it. It allowed me to not only understand, but feel their pain. At the end of the day, it’s the emotional understanding that matters most in connecting with others and making societal change.

Similarly, my partner Olivia is bipolar and suffers chronic illnesses resulting from being a premmie (premature born baby) that makes her life physically and mentally harder than that of the average person. Yet at the same time, overcoming these challenges have made her one of the most capable, humble, and empathetic people in my life.

Different Life Paths

The Dalai Lama himself would not have become the most famous Buddhist teacher in the world without the constraint of banishment from his homeland. I wrote in a previous article on the documentary Mission Joy:

In the film, he (the Dalai Lama) notes that it was his misfortune of being exiled from Tibet that freed him from the “Golden Prison” of Potala Palace (the seat of Tibetan government in Lhasa) to reach his current influence. His ability to reframe the suffering he sees is one of his secrets to finding joy.

Previous Dalai Lamas were mysterious figures who lived in isolation with guards, secluded under layers of traditions and expectations. While escaping Potala Palace from encroaching Chinese soldiers was no doubt traumatic, it also served as a catalyst for him to grow new roots elsewhere. He could’ve collapsed into a ball and resented his fate, but instead he reframed his misfortune into an opportunity to serve millions of people.

Constraints in the Dalai Lama’s instance kickstarted a series of events that fundamentally changed his life trajectory and that of everyone he has helped. Perhaps we can turnaround our own misfortunes in the same way. As the Stoic Emperor Marcus Aurelius said:

"True good fortune is what you make for yourself. Good fortune: good character, good intentions, and good actions."

In other words, we are masters of our own fortune, if not our fates. The key word, however, is “good”, for if we don’t face our constraints with good character, intentions and actions, then we are prone to cut corners and resort to unethical means that harm ourselves and others.

Let’s make a positive dent in the world shall we?

😂 Fun story

During a charity event, my friends misheard me saying “condiments make us stronger”. It stuck. GO CONDIMENTS!

📮 Preview of the Newsletter

⚔️ Constraints also have a way of shaping countries’ approach to military readiness and war. The former US military commander in Europe writes about how Russia and Ukraine took very different paths to developing their armed forces. Ukraine started making massive changes to their training in 2014 in response to the Russian invasion of Crimea whereas “the Russians, their recent battlefield failures—their staged maneuvers, lack of leadership development, absence of a logistics plan to support operations, inability to coordinate and conduct air-ground-sea joint operations and continued use of conscript soldiers in critical missions—all indicate a larger failure to modernize their army.”

That said, history is a cycle of actions and reactions. It’s entirely possible that recent events could incentivize Russia to pull itself together just as its invasion of Ukraine could galvanize NATO.

🎭 My friend Ron forwarded me an excellent essay on thick and thin desires where the author argues:

“It seems increasingly hard to develop thick desires—enduring, sustainable, and ultimately fulfilling desires—in a world that is becoming mimetically thin, where the petty rivalries dominate politics and Hot Take Artists sit in their cages, hungrier than ever while inducing hunger in others.”

Thin desires, then, are the opposite: quick, unsustainable, and ultimately unfulfilling in the long run (actually they last less than a day in my experience!). The areas in which our modern society is “thinning out” are education, institutions, politics, technology, sex, work, art, and the media.

The part on education is especially disturbing given universities are caught in defensive positions competing with disruptive new models like online courses that promise mass education at the cost of personalized schooling and opportunities for self discovery and exposure to other walks of life (this exposure as I wrote in Textbook vs Emotional Understanding is critical to societal empathy and cohesion, not to mention racial equality).

My interpretation is that it makes universities follow new fads rather than giving students the fundamentals of how to think for themselves, which was traditionally the role of liberal arts colleges.

I was a double major in Business Administration and Legal Studies at UC Berkeley. To this day, I consider Legal Studies, a philosophy degree that examined the purpose rather than the practice of law, to be far more useful than business because it taught me how to reason based on first principles and exposed me to Slavic, Native American, and Chinese literature and history. Business schools in turn have become some of the biggest followers as they struggle with relevance in an increasingly automated world that’s in need of less, not more, middle management.

I have a feeling that CS (computer science) programs are no better, churning out cookie cutter software developers who expect high paying jobs straight out of college rather than developing well rounded individuals knowledgeable about our world’s systems (history, governments, economics, politics to name a few) and are able to adapt to our increasingly chaotic times.