Created: January 09, 2021
Modified: January 09, 2021
Modified: January 09, 2021
constraints can be good
This page is from my personal notes, and has not been specifically reviewed for public consumption. It might be incomplete, wrong, outdated, or stupid. Caveat lector.- All else equal, constraints prevent you from doing what you'd have otherwise wanted to do, which is bad. But.
- Constraints prevent analysis paralysis and can clarify decision making. Being clear about the constraints you face makes it easier to develop a solid plan, and plans are important. Even though no plan survives contact with the enemy, you still need to make them.
- Constraints inspire creativity. If I hand you a blank sheet of paper and say 'draw something', that's hard. If I say, 'draw a couple getting married on a ship in the ocean in front of a tropical island', now you have somewhere to start. Once the high-order bits are determined, you're free to focus on the low-order bits, and those often contribute a vast majority of the value: every branch has high-value leaves.
- The thing you otherwise wanted to do might not have been the right thing anyway. We constrain kids to do homework even if they'd rather be playing video games, because (we hope) it leads to better outcomes in the end. There is no such thing as an unconstrained life, because you can only do one thing at once, and the constraints you were implicitly going to impose on yourself (sitting inside and playing video games) might ultimately be more limiting than whatever external constraints present themselves. Or it might not: some constraints genuinely do cut off good futures. But again, there are good leaves on every branch.