Ever feel like everything you are trying to do would be so much easier if it weren’t for all the constraints? Ever think maybe that’s a good thing? I didn’t think so. We tend to think of constraints as the problem. And let’s face it, there is a level of constraint that basically translates into “game over”. But under normal circumstances managing constraints is not getting in the way of doing your job, it is your job. I have heard this expressed by different people in different ways:
“That’s why they call it work.”
“If it was easy no one would be paying you to do it.”
“Find something no one wants to do and do it better than anyone else.”
“Engineering is doing for a dime what any fool can do for a dollar.”
The last one is my favorite because it captures several important ideas. Consider some productive activity – the kind of thing people are willing to pay for. If demand is high and supply is abundant it will be a commodity activity whose price will balance at some fairly stable point. Any new entrant to the marketplace will know what the activity is worth. With a new or emerging innovation price discovery will be inefficient (and the activity will likely be very profitable) – “summertime and the livin’ is easy”. But competition will arise quickly, and it will be relatively easy for people to add incremental value quickly. Things will change quickly right up to the point where adding incremental value is just short of impossible. New attempts will meet with frequent failure. Good enough is never good enough because someone else is willing to put in the work and has the talent to get just a little better. And so, we progress right to the point where we exist on a knife edge of failure. There need to be enough successes to be able to stay in the game, and there will be enough failures that you are only barely in the game. That latter condition is guaranteed because if we aren’t swinging for the fences someone else will be, and the value of what you are doing will decline. All the while, we have to keep doing all of the things that we learned along the way correctly. It can feel quite breathless. But it is your ability to do all those things and the knowledge that they need to be done, that makes you the right person for the job. Given how constrained our work is due to healthy considerations, it is even more important we don’t saddle ourselves with foolish constraints…, but that’s a different topic.