Transcription
It's 1992. Sheila Taormina is a college senior and she's standing on the blocks at the US Olympic swimming trials. She's trained for this her entire life. She's one of the best swimmers at the University of Georgia. Her aerobic engine is elite, one of the best her coaches has ever seen. She does the work, she logs the yardage, she follows the program, she [music] doesn't make the team. She decides to walk away from the pool and retire. But she has one class left to finish before she graduates, Management 577 at UGA. She walks in expecting a degree. What she walks out with is a framework, an idea [music] from a physicist who was trying to fix a factory. Four years later, she's standing on an Olympic podium with a gold medal around her neck. Then she retires. She comes back, wins the national championship in a completely different sport. She goes to the Olympics again and then she retires again. Learns two sports she's never competed in, makes the Olympics a fourth time. She becomes the only woman in history to compete in three different sports across four summer Olympics. And it came from one idea, one class, with one semester left to her degree. She almost didn't take it.
Here's what I've found after years of studying [music] how elite performers actually develop. Most people don't have a discipline problem, they have a focus problem. We work hard, genuinely hard, but we often improve what we're already good at. We double down on our strengths, which sometimes makes sense, but we optimize the parts of the system that are already working well. There may not be that much more to gain. And the one thing that's actually limiting us, we leave [music] it completely untouched. Sheila Taormina didn't stumble into some elite secret available [music] only to Olympic athletes. She learned a framework. By the end of this video, you'll know exactly what it is and you'll know how to find your own bottleneck, the single thing that, if you shifted your focus there, would change everything else.
The theory of constraints, as it's known, was created by an Israeli physicist named Eliyahu Goldratt. Goldratt wasn't studying athletes, he was studying factory operation. He was watching the way a production system moves, how work flows through a series of steps, [music] and he noticed something obvious that everyone kept missing. Every system has one slowest step, one bottleneck, one constraint. >> [music] >> And the output of the entire system is always limited by that single step. No matter how fast everything else moves, that step limits the production [music] of the overall system. Think about a highway. You can widen 10 mi of road, you [music] can repave it, add lanes, you can resurface everything, but if there's a two-lane bridge at mile seven, that bridge is the bottleneck. The whole highway [music] moves at the speed of the bridge. Your improvements upstream of it don't matter. The work just piles up behind the constraint. And here's the part that's counterintuitive. Improving anything other than the bottleneck is wasted effort. You're not moving [music] faster, you're just doing more work that immediately gets absorbed by the constraint that you still haven't addressed. [music] Goldratt wrote this up in a work of fiction, a book he called The Goal. It's genuinely bizarre. He explains his theory [music] through this fictional story of a plant manager who bumps into his old physics professor and gets lessons in the theory of constraints. And yet, Jeff Bezos forced all of his senior executives [music] to read it. He hosted a full-day book club retreat just for this book. It ended up selling 10 million copies. It even spawned a [music] whole industry of increasingly bizarre business novels and a 1,200 page >> [music] >> theory of constraints handbook. And in the forwards of that book, which Goldratt wrote, he asks, "Can I summarize the entire theory of constraints in one sentence?" He said that he could do better than that. He could summarize it in one word. Focus. The constraint tells you where to focus. Everything else is [music] noise.
Back to Sheila Tarmina. She sits in that management class learning about the theory of constraints and the idea lands. She does something almost no athlete does. She applies it. She runs a constraints [music] audit. She lists everything in her training, her strengths, her weaknesses, the whole picture, the whole pipeline of her improvement. Her aerobic endurance, elite, one [music] of the best in the country. Her speed, solid. Her strength and power, limited. She's 5'2. That's really short for a competitive swimmer. She just doesn't have the power that her competitors have. And now [music] she sees it clearly. Her coaches have been training her aerobic engine, the thing she's already exceptional at. All the effort is going there, into [music] the strength of the system, not the bottleneck. So, she decides not to retire after all. She finds a new coach, one who's willing to build a program around that single constraint that she has identified. They spend the [music] next 4 years doing something her old coaches never prioritized. Strength and power work. Weights. New drills. >> [music] >> Using racks that give resistance against her while she's swimming. Everything targeted [music] at the constraint that was actually limiting her performance. Finally, in 1996, [music] the Olympic trials arrive again. The night before she has to compete, Sheila and her coach pull out the plan that [music] they built 4 years earlier, the one that's focused on her constraint. They walk through it. They check every box. They did everything they could to improve her power. The next day, Sheila swims exactly 3 seconds faster than she did in 1992. She makes the team. In the pictures of the relay team with their medals draped around their necks, [music] you can see Sheila's about a half foot shorter than the other three members of the relay team. Just looking at her, you can see what her bottleneck probably was. And now you know [music] what she did about it. She was about to walk away from all of it in 1992, if not for Management 577, that one class, that one framework, and one question. Where is my actual bottleneck?
Sheila's [snorts] story really resonated with me because I had a version of this experience myself. Although, the scale's a bit different. I was a walk-on 800-m runner in college, meaning I wasn't good enough to get recruited. When recruiting was happening, I was 20 seconds slower in the 800, that's a half mile, than the guy that I was eventually paired alongside for training. 20 seconds. [music] That's like, you'd be embarrassed if you saw those two people on the track together. But, because I was a walk-on and nobody was really watching or caring about what I did, I had something unusual, a blessing in disguise. I had freedom to experiment, [music] and I started noticing something. I wasn't recovering well from workouts. I wasn't recovering the way my teammates doing [music] the same work were, not even close. Sometimes two, three, even four days after a hard workout, my legs still felt dead and I was still walking downstairs sideways. I was doing so poorly, I went to see a pulmonologist, and they found that my results were consistent with the earliest stages of emphysema. That was my baseline. Things were not looking good. I think most people that get that result find a different business to be in than running the 800 meters. Now, I didn't know the theory of constraints at the time. I didn't know the terminology, but I found my bottleneck. It was recovery. That was the system constraint, not how hard I could work, but how well I could recover. Once I realized this, I dropped my mileage from a high of 85 miles a week all the way down to about 35 miles a week. The result was that I was doing less. I was doing fewer miles. [music] I was doing fewer workouts, and I started getting better like crazy. I finally officially made the team. I scored at my conference meet, which meant I was one of the top six competitors in the conference. I became a university record holder, and I was twice named NCAA All-East in Division 1. Eventually, I was given an award, and I love how they worded this, for the athlete who achieved significant athletic success in the face of unusual challenge and difficulty. My unusual challenge and difficulty just being that I stunk at first. I I went from medical results consistent with emphysema, which impairs one's ability to breathe, to NCAA All East as an 800 meter runner. Not by working harder in every direction, not even close. I was working less, but by finding my constraint and focusing my strategy there.
For nearly 20 years now, I've been studying how people develop, learn, perform, and adapt. And one of my conclusions is that most people don't actually have a discipline problem. They have a focus problem. They're willing to work hard. They're willing to persevere in many cases, but they're not putting their effort in the right place. They're continuing to work at things that feel like it should make them better, but it's not because they're limited somewhere else. So, all that effort that they're applying in these other places, it doesn't matter if the overall system is still limited by a single bottleneck. That's where the attention should be. The actual bottleneck, the thing that is genuinely limiting the system, it often doesn't get any [music] attention. Goldratt had it right, and not just for factories. The constraint, it's not bad news. It's information. It's helpful. It tells you where to look for improvement. So, it's not that you need to just work harder, it's that you need to focus your effort on the place where it gives the [music] biggest returns. Find your bottleneck and widen it, and that will change everything about your performance.
This story, Sheila Tarmina, Eli Goldratt, the theory of constraints, it's drawn from my new book, Inside the Box, How Constraints >> [music] >> Make Us Better. There's one story that I loved so much, but I ended up cutting it from the book, and I don't know, maybe that was a mistake. But, it's about Southwest Airlines, and it's one of the best real-world examples of constraints forcing a breakthrough. You can get that short story for free at the link in my description. Thanks so much for watching. I'll see you in the next [music] video.