I always get into this argument with people who always want to "keep their options open". No, that's just refusing to set a constraint, and that's a decision in itself, that usually leads to the most mediocre outcome.
Reminds of something that Paul Graham once wrote: one of the most consequential decisions you can make in life is the city you choose to live in. Now I realize this is just a big constraint you place on yourself: location.
Other big constraints are: marriage, religion, and choosing to go the VC vs. bootstrapped route in a SaaS business. Going the VC route constrains your version of success to extremely high growth (a very successful bootstrapped business would be a VC failure), while going the bootstrapped route constrains your growth rate potential (you might make millions but not billions).
I especially love this heading from the article: Goals are for Games. Constraints are for Worlds. I would add: successful people navigate worlds. Children play games. Many people are still stuck in a game-playing mindset even into their 40s, rather than navigating their world, they are still stuck in a goal-oriented game, such as a "career". Right out of university they look for their next well-defined game. At some point the complexity of the world collapses all your games. Then you hit your mid-life crisis.
> one of the most consequential decisions you can make in life is the city you choose to live in
This seems to have had the reverse effect on me. I always wanted to move to the Bay Area growing up because that’s where the tech industry was. When I finally did, I got distracted by all that California had to offer: nature, good food, an endless supply of places to go and interesting things to see. I moved there for tech but promptly lost interest in tech. I picked up a bunch of fun hobbies totally unrelated to my core motivations in life.
Now that I live somewhere boring again, I spend most of my free time learning about new areas of mathematics and computer science.
I’ve also observed the same paradoxical effect with having children. Prior to kids, I had tons of free time that I essentially wasted. But now that free time is scarce, I wake up at 4 AM to study, practice, or create something before the work day starts.
It’s almost like sub-optimal conditions trigger an instinct to fight against those constraints by producing value. If I actually get what I think I want (living somewhere interesting, having plenty of free time, etc.), it’s like I just lose focus and motivation. Go figure.
You'd find many people (even here on HN) that would argue your time spent among "nature, good food, an endless supply of places to go and interesting things to see" is well worth the lack of focus on your career. Hell, many people hyper focus too much on the latter until they wake up one day wishing they spent more time appreciating the former.
And, it's hard to imagine anyone arguing in good faith that you should give those amenities up and move somewhere boring in order to "spend most of my free time learning about new areas of mathematics and computer science" (not that that's not a noble pursuit in itself).
Harking back to the article, it's more about how you want to see yourself in the future. Do you want to be someone who has an appreciation (and has appreciated) life outside a career, at expense of some potential of said career?
"Hell, many people hyper focus too much on the latter until they wake up one day wishing they spent more time appreciating the former."
And some wake up realising they will still have to die, despite their awesome career and that there is no point in taking their money into their grave and they should have started living at some point. But it might be too late by then.
Like most things in life, it is about the right balance.
> it's hard to imagine anyone arguing in good faith that you should give those amenities up and move somewhere boring
Oh, that's certainly not why I moved haha. We wanted to be closer to family and that was just one of the unfortunate tradeoffs of that decision. The math and CS topics I've been studying are those that I find intrinsically interestingly (e.g., computability theory), but they are unlikely to benefit my career more than tangentially. I didn't really make that clear above.
With "core motivations" I was referring to what I would like to accomplish over a lifetime, which is more about what actually benefits society in some way (and at least so far, that appears to be orthogonal to my career). Personally, I found that moving somewhere less "interesting" helped me to realign with those objectives. Or maybe that's just post-hoc rationalization.
>t’s almost like sub-optimal conditions trigger an instinct to fight against those constraints by producing value.
The beatings will continue until productivity increases!
Very different but this vaguely reminds me of body doubling - the idea that just having another person around you makes you work harder and focus
Great framing. I'd add a strategic layer to this.
From a purely strategic perspective, as in military doctrine or game theory, expanding your set of viable options is almost always advantageous.
The goal is to maximize your own optionality while reducing your opponent's.
The failure mode you're describing isn't having options, but the paralysis of refusing to commit to one for execution.
A better model might be a cycle:
Strategy Phase: Actively broaden your options. Explore potential cities, business models, partners. This is reconnaissance.
Execution Phase: Choose the most promising option and commit fully. This is where your point about the power of constraints shines. You go all-in.
The Backlog: The other options aren't discarded; they're put in a strategic backlog. You don't burn the bridges.
You re-evaluate only when you hit a major "strategic bifurcation point" - a market shift, a major life event, a completed project. Then you might pull an option from the backlog.
This way, you get the power of constraints without the fragility of having never considered alternatives.
The opponent part could use one extra point: reduce your opponent’s options to the range you want them to have, not to none at all.
From Sun Tzu, and put into practice frequently by the Mongols:
When you surround an army, leave an outlet free.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Mohi
Finally, the demoralized soldiers decided to flee. They tried to escape through a gap left open on purpose by the Mongols, and almost all of them were slaughtered.
Sun Tzu was talking about human psychology not about making a strategic choice.
Sun Tzu was saying it is better to give your enemy the illusion of a path to retreat. If you don’t, the enemy will fight to the death. It is for the same reason why you should treat your prisoners humanely. You want them to surrender and end the fighting as quickly as possible.
Choosing a strategic plan only works if you follow through and execute. What is worse than paralysis by over analysis is a boss who constantly changes strategy. That is a sure path to ruin.
Not sure how that is a contradiction. My point was that the goal isn’t necessarily to reduce the options the opponent has, because if you remove all options it’s actually not a good move - as the enemy will then fight to the death, literally or metaphorically.
> I would add: successful people navigate worlds. Children play games.
Seems kind of arrogant. I personally view goals and constraints as different kind of tools that are both helpful.
Yes, to use a very ancient example, the goal of a hunters work is meat. You get it, if succesful, or you don't.
Constraints are where and when and how you can hunt. But the goal of a hunt is the meat.
Maybe goal of the hunter is food. Meat is often end result and what they train for - but if they happen on a ripe raspberry patch they can divert to get food from that instead.
Note that I said maybe. Different cultures have different situations. Sometimes your constraint it meat and you need to walk past those easy to pick raspberries.
No hunter would choose rasperries over meat. You maybe eat some while hunting, or after the hunt failed. But collecting rasperries and hunting requires very different equipment. You wouldn't risk loosing 100kg of meat because you found 50 g of rasperries.
(Rasperries take a lot of time to collect, hard to transport in meaningful quantities and go bad very quickly. If we are talking about ancient hunter tribes - children with women would be the ones doing rasperry picking close by while the men go further away and then carry the meat back to the camp)
Hunting is also a high risk activity - you sometimes don't get anything. Thus some ancient tribes would choose to pick the raspberries - which is to say abort the hunt to bring the women and children to pick with them. Others would turn back to get the women and children and then go on with the hunt. Still others would just go on with their hunt without telling anyone.
The rasperries won't go away if you spot a good patch while following the game.
In either case, the goal would still be to get food.
a lot of hunting isn't following game, it is search for game. If you have game in site that changes the calculation again.
Yes, in ancient context it is search for game - but that means searching for fresh tracks. And when you follow fresh tracks, you don't stop for rasperries until the track turns cold. It would be distracting and like I initially said, only to be considered if the hunt failed (meaning no signs of game at all)
goals imply that achieving the goal will give you the success that the goal is meant to be a proxy of. That's why people go high into debt to obtain that degree - it's a goal, and the proxy for successful job/career. And yet, it seems to not be the case when they discover that this degree isnt the the golden ticket.
it's true that goals in games work - because it was designed to work that way. People setting goals in real life like they might be in a game (such as obtaining some sort of achievement, beating a "level" like passing school etc) might find that these goals don't actually reward them unless they're after intrinsic rewards.
If you fail a goal in games you can restart - which most of us will a few times in playing games. You cannot restart life so easially. We only get an unknown amount of years to live (statistically about 80, but up to about 120 is possible, or down to however many hours old you are right now) I've thought about going back to college several times in life, however as each year goes by the value of a different degree goes down because there is even less time I could use it. Though also as time goes by the cost of "useless degrees" goes down because I have more money saved (though it is saved for retirement).
Often if you fail to reach some goal in life it is gone for good. If you lose out in a promotion to someone else (who might or might not be good) you need to give up on that goal - either find a different promotion you can get next year, or a different job equivalent to that promotion (assuming you are worthy of the promotion)
Sure, degrees don't _guarantee_ you'll be successful. That's just a misguided expectation. You might even create constraints to help you get there.
Not all goals are misguided, and constraints can be misguided, too.
Do constraints somehow reward you more then? I've had both constraints and goals in my life, both have been rewarding and not just intrinsically.
In the US it's mostly the hope that tuition and time studying will have a positive return on investment in terms of future earning potential.
> Other big constraints are: marriage, religion, and choosing to go the VC vs. bootstrapped route in a SaaS business.
This gave me a chuckle. On of these is definitely _not_ like the others.
Which one do you have in mind? For each of those three constraints mentioned, I can think of a reason why it's not like the other two, but there's not one in particular that seems to stick out especially.
> one of the most consequential decisions you can make in life is the city you choose to live in
It's not always quite as simple as it being a choice. E.g. I might be able to move to SF if I liquidated my assets and applied for a green card, but that's not an easy feat. Where we are born & raised limits that choice to a large extent.
Yes, and the idea of separating from siblings and other relatives was a huge factor for us. We've visited SF several times, it would be awesome to live there, but man, the cost and family made the decision easy not to.
The definition of success remains personal. Employing certain biases, too. Being successful in World Choice and Gameplay is relative, but it is also proportional to the biases.
The way "success" is obsessing someone is a big constraint.
People make games actually because they have interest in well defined constraints, and in experiencing what can be achieve or not within some arbitrary rules.
Also anything humans do can be portrayed as some game. That’s no accident the game theory extended and swallowed so many domains in its models.
> At some point the complexity of the world collapses all your games. Then you hit your mid-life crisis.
Thanks for this gem. We're all just learning this game/world of life as we go along, right?
"I'll keep it short and sweet. Family, religion, friendship. These are the three demons you must slay if you wish to succeed in business."
> At some point the complexity of the world collapses all your games. Then you hit your mid-life crisis.
Billionaires famously never have mid-life crises
Location, VC/bootstrapping, marriage all provide real-world tangible trade offs. Religion is an unverifiable claim made about supernatural entities.
Which still provides tangible benefits (comfort, meaning of life, emotional support, coping mechanisms, a community) to many.
I don't subscribe to one myself, but I definitely see the benefits. In a way, I think my life would be better - or at least easier - if I wasn't so skeptical.
Religion is a major factor, that impacts your lifestyle, community, happiness and longevity. In most cases, positively. There are studies proving it.
So yes, most religions if not all are based on unscientific claims, but they make people's lives better.
These are merely correlational studies. Religion often makes people’s lives worse as well: sexual repression, homophobia, religious intolerance, fear of eternal damnation, misplaced guilt/shame, hours wasted on prayer/services/rituals, sheltered upbringings..
I think the underlying issue is whether a person views the objective appraisal of reality as a positive thing or not. For someone who doesn’t, self-deception may seem the better choice.
> These are merely correlational studies. Religion often makes people’s lives worse as well.
I'm not religious, but that doesn't make any sense: those cases would weaken the correlation (or correlate it the other way), and now you're also claiming a causative effect that's opposite to the correlation you don't refute?
I’m not denying it can have beneficial effects but only denying that it necessarily has beneficial effects. That’s why I pointed out that the studies in its favor are merely correlational and why I also list several negative effects it can have (although it won’t necessarily have).
It’s clear that social outcomes always have intertwined retroactive loop with psychological representations.
When we live in a society which publicly announce anyone doubting the dogma is a miscreant who should be tortured through long painful experiments, we will feel safer and better if we are in the camp of the true-sincere-believers™. Indeed it’s far less likely that any of these corrupted souls will come and trouble our peaceful minds. But if we have a ounce of skepticism in our veins, there’s no happy path for us in this society.
In that case, why is that the most rich and developed countries are secular and not religious?
You would expect a population with "better lives" to outperform the rest.
Not OP but perhaps you could consider Manifest Destiny and Capitalism as a religion?
Protestant Scandinavia and Calvinist Netherlands and Switzerland never really consider(ed) Manifest Destiny nor Capitalism as religions. And both regions are becoming increasingly atheist.
The effects of believing something, whether real or not, are tangible and often predictable.
The issue is whether a constraint is positive or negative. Choosing to handicap oneself, for example by wearing a blindfold, is an indeed a constraint with tangible and predictable effects, but these are negative effects. You can’t see what’s in front of you.
The parent comment advocates for adopting a religion you don’t believe in, for the sake of “constraint.” Self-deception is choosing a blindfold.
You are conflating religious belief with religion. Just the word "religion" is underspecified. Historically and reaching to the present, there have been many communities where the church was the mechanism to deliver healthcare, food distribution, some forms of non-religious education, banking, community bonding and growth, etc. They also had religious services, and the religious leader managed how all the other things were done. Does that count as religion?
Many of the "faithful" were not, in fact, faithful. Or they only applied it to very limited parts of their lives. But they still showed up to church on Sunday, and professed to believe the teachings (in general even if not in any of the particulars).
Adopting a religion you don't believe in is quite common and rational. Do you think all those people who marry into a religion or different denomination are getting brain surgery at the altar? Or if you want to run a business in a community, do you want to be the one guy who doesn't go to church? In some places, that would be both stupid and pointless.