The Beauty of Constraints
Constraints - natural or self-imposed - can be a good thing when making job or career change decisions.
Let me give first you a glimpse into how my typical session starts. After a short intro and before we get to the actual mock interview, my guest and I usually spend some time setting the scene. We talk about my guest's situation, whether our objective is to get ready for an actual interview or just to "test the waters", etc. I ask a lot of open-ended questions to make the context clear.
Obstacles or constraints?
Among other things, I ask what my guest sees as the biggest obstacle preventing her to succeed in her job/career change endeavor. One of my recent guests, a young and beautiful lady and mother of two young children, surprised me with her answer. She shared her vivid regrets about a role she recently interviewed for but did not get. It seemed however that the role implied extensive working hours and would have been incompatible with her current family situation and her husband's frequent traveling.
Her answer caught me by surprise and got me thinking:
Is it right to see our family situation really as an obstacle if you cannot and will not change it? An obstacle is usually something negative, something we want to get rid of… Here, it is not the case. You are not going to change the fact that your kids are young and require a lot of attention. Your husband might not stop frequent travels unless he changes the role. You are not going to change your core values just to get the job, etc.
Isn't it better to consider the things you cannot / don’t want to change as a mere set of boundaries, constraints? And have no regrets about the "non-opportunities" incompatible with your constraints.
I am not saying that we should never push the boundaries of the possible. If we want and can change something, we should try. My take here is, whenever you have something that you cannot or don't want to change (your origins, your skin color, your age, etc.), there should not be "what if I were….", “If only I… “, "I should have been born…” questions and regrets. A day has 24 hours, period. Be creative about it. Make the most of it.
Cheryl Strayed said it beautifully in “Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who Has Been There”:
You don’t have a right to the cards you believe you should have been dealt. You have an obligation to play the hell out of the ones you’re holding.
It may sound counterintuitive, but constraints are not necessarily a bad thing:
Constraints can make us more creative
Constraints can make us more focused
Constraints can reduce a decision-making burden
Constraints can help us feel happier about our decisions
Let's see how.
Constraints can make us more creative
I like the take on creativity by Austin Kleon in “Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative”:
Creativity is subtraction… Nothing is more paralysing than the idea of limitless possibilities. The idea that you can do anything is absolutely terrifying. The way to get over creative block is to simply place some constraints on yourself. It seems contradictory, but when it comes to creative work, limitations mean freedom. Write a song on your lunch break. Paint a painting with only one colour. Start a business without any start-up capital. Shoot a movie with your iPhone and a few of your friends. Build a machine out of spare parts. Don’t make excuses for not working—make things with the time, space, and materials you have, right now. The right constraints can lead to your very best work.
In the end, creativity isn’t just the things we choose to put in, it’s the things we choose to leave out. Choose wisely. And have fun.
Constraints can make us more focused
Nothing illustrates this thesis better than a famous quote by Steve Jobs brought up by Walter Isaacson in Jobs’s biography:
One of Jobs’s great strengths was knowing how to focus. “Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do,” he said. “That’s true for companies, and it’s true for products.”
The company was churning out multiple versions of each product because of bureaucratic momentum and to satisfy the whims of retailers. “It was insanity,” Schiller recalled. “Tons of products, most of them crap, done by deluded teams.” Apple had a dozen versions of the Macintosh, each with a different confusing number, ranging from 1400 to 9600. “I had people explaining this to me for three weeks,” Jobs said. “I couldn’t figure it out.” He finally began asking simple questions, like, “Which ones do I tell my friends to buy?”…
When he couldn’t get simple answers, he began slashing away at models and products. Soon he had cut 70% of them. “You are bright people,” he told one group. “You shouldn’t be wasting your time on such crappy products.” Many of the engineers were infuriated at his slash-and-burn tactics, which resulted in massive layoffs. But Jobs later claimed that the good engineers, including some whose projects were killed, were appreciative. He told one staff meeting in September 1997, “I came out of the meeting with people who had just gotten their products canceled and they were three feet off the ground with excitement because they finally understood where in the heck we were going.” After a few weeks Jobs finally had enough. “Stop!” he shouted at one big product strategy session. “This is crazy.” He grabbed a magic marker, padded to a whiteboard, and drew a horizontal and vertical line to make a four-squared chart. “Here’s what we need,” he continued. Atop the two columns he wrote “Consumer” and “Pro”; he labeled the two rows “Desktop” and “Portable.” Their job, he said, was to make four great products, one for each quadrant. The room was in dumb silence.
Constraints can reduce a decision-making burden
I like Tim Ferriss’s post “Finding the One Decision That Removes 100 Decisions”, with the key question:
what can I categorically and completely remove, even temporarily, to create space for seeing the bigger picture and finding gems?
One great example of a decision that eliminates hundreds of other decisions is a story of Richard Feynman irrevocably deciding to stay in Caltech, as told in “Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman”:
I realized, as I finally got to my office, that this is where I’ve got to be. Where people from all different fields of science would tell me stuff, and it was all exciting. It was exactly what I wanted, really.
So when Cornell called a little later, and said they were setting everything up, and it was nearly ready, I said, “I’m sorry, I’ve changed my mind again.” But I decided then never to decide again. Nothing—absolutely nothing—would ever change my mind again. When you’re young, you have all these things to worry about—should you go there, what about your mother. And you worry, and try to decide, but then something else comes up. It’s much easier to just plain decide. Never mind—nothing is going to change your mind. I did that once when I was a student at MIT. I got sick and tired of having to decide what kind of dessert I was going to have at the restaurant, so I decided it would always be chocolate ice cream, and never worried about it again—I had the solution to that problem. Anyway, I decided it would always be Caltech.
Constraints can help us make better decisions and feel happier about them
We tend to think that more alternatives is always better and can make us happier. Science tells us it's not necessarily true. Multiple psychological studies and experiments mentioned in “The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less” uncovered intriguing relationships between choice and happiness:
- The more alternatives there are from which to choose, the greater our experience of the opportunity costs will be. And the greater our experience of the opportunity costs, the less satisfaction we will derive from our chosen alternative.
- A greater variety of choices actually makes us feel worse.
- Being forced to confront trade-offs in making decisions makes people unhappy and indecisive. Whenever we are forced to make decisions involving trade-offs, we will feel less good about the option we choose than we would have if the alternatives hadn’t been there.
- The emotional cost of potential trade-offs does more than just diminish our sense of satisfaction with a decision. It also interferes with the quality of decisions themselves.
- We all learn as we grow up that living requires making choices and passing up opportunities. But our evolutionary history makes this a difficult lesson. Learning to choose is hard. Learning to choose well is harder. And learning to choose well in a world of unlimited possibilities is harder still, perhaps too hard.
Accept what you cannot or do not want to change, and make the most of what you already have, now, by staying focused and creative.
Art: Wu Guanzhong, "Tsim Sha Tsui". I chose his work here for a reason. Educated in Europe in the late 1940s and largely influenced by Western art, Wu Guanzhong started with oil paintings. He chose to destroy most of them during the Cultural Revolution for fear of persecution. When the wind changed and it was possible to paint in a Western-style again, Wu chose to self-impose the constraints of traditional Chinese ink and brushwork and brought this art form to incredible new heights…