Why The Smartest People I Know Set Constraints, Not Goals

Why the smartest people I know set constraints, not goals.

Green Eggs and Ham is one of the best-selling children's books in history. And it was written on a bet that Theodore Geel, aka Dr. Seuss, couldn't write an entire book using only 50 words. He won that bet.

Star Wars, the most valuable film franchise ever created. It only exists because George Lucas couldn't get the rights to Flash Gordon. That's what he wanted, but he couldn't get it. So, he was forced to invent something original instead.

Michelangelo's David, maybe the most famous work of art in human history, was carved from a block of marble that other sculptors in Florence had already rejected. It was too thin, they said, too flawed. No one else wanted it.

Three of the most iconic creative works ever made. All three built on constraints. That's not a coincidence. That's a pattern.

I've spent the last 20 years studying how people perform and innovate across science, sports, medicine, technology, and the arts. My first book, The Sports Gene, was about the raw materials people start with. My second book, Range, was about why breadth beats early specialization and why the most impactful people are often generalists, not specialists. But the question I kept getting asked after Range was, okay, once you have all that breadth, how do you focus it? How do you turn range into results?

That question sent me down a research path that became my next book. And the answer I kept finding across every domain I studied from Silicon Valley to Renaissance sculpture to jazz to Hollywood to NASA was the same: constraints.

Here's what I've come to believe. The smartest people I know, they don't set goals so much as they set constraints. A goal tells you what you want to achieve, and that's fine. But a constraint tells you how you're actually going to work. Goals are about outcomes that you can't fully control. Constraints are about process, the boundaries and the rules that you impose on yourself to aim your creativity and focus your effort.

And in every domain where the path isn't obvious, where you're doing something genuinely creative or engaged in something uncertain or ambitious, constraints beat goals every time. And I want to show you why. And then I want to show you how to actually do it.

It's the early 1990s in Silicon Valley. A company called General Magic is the hottest thing in tech. Part of the team that designed the original Macintosh has come together to build something totally new. A handheld device that'll let you send messages, seek out information, shop virtually. If you look at their early sketches, they're literally the iPhone 15 years early. They have the best engineers in the world. They have a vision so compelling that Goldman Sachs takes them public before they even have a product. The first so-called concept IPO, money pours in, talent pours in. There's no limits on what they can build. And so they build everything. Whatever anyone thinks is cool, it goes in. Every feature, every direction, every possibility, it's all on the table. The project grows and grows and grows. There are no boundaries. No one says no. No one has to. They have enough resources. They have everything. General Magic becomes one of the most spectacular failures in Silicon Valley history.

Meanwhile, a single third-party app developer who had been working on General Magic's platform looks at the dozens of features that this mega team is building and does the opposite. He picks three things: a memo pad, a contacts list, and a calendar. Strips away everything else and he ships. That product is the Palm Pilot. It became a massive hit. Same era, similar technology. One team has everything, the other has almost nothing. The one with nothing wins. General Magic fails because they have no constraints. The Palm Pilot succeeds because it has almost nothing but constraints.

I've spent the last few years researching stories like this for my next book, Inside the Box, How Constraints Make Us Better. And the pattern keeps showing up in technology, in art, in music, in architecture, in film making. The smartest, most creative people that I encountered in these few years, they don't succeed by setting bigger goals. They succeed by setting tighter constraints, working inside a literal box.

Tony Fidel is the engineer known as the "podfather" for his work creating the iPod and he later co-founded the smart thermostat company Nest. I spent a lot of time talking to him about how he builds things because he was actually at General Magic and he came out of it as a zealot for the importance of constraints. And one story he told me stuck with me.

When Fidel and his team were developing the smart thermostat, he did something unusual. Before they had a product, he made them prototype the packaging. The box, no product, a box. A box for something that didn't exist yet. Fidel's logic was simple: the box is small. It can only hold so much. And whatever goes on that box, the images, the words, the promises to the customer, those are the things that actually matter. If you can't fit it on the box, it's probably not essential.

Working inside a literal box forced the team to figure out their priorities. As Fidel told me, "With these ultra constraint-based things, it makes you think hard. It slows you down, but it forces that thinking." And here's where it connects to something bigger.

When I asked Fidel for the single most important piece of advice that he gives to the new entrepreneurs that he mentors now, he didn't say "think big" or "move fast" or any of those usual Silicon Valley cliches or mantras. He said, "Write the press release first before you build anything. Before you write a line of code, jump ahead a year or two or three and write the press release that you'd want to send when this thing ships. Include the reviews you're hoping to have in the media, the customer quotes, the headline in FAQ, and just make each one one page, two at most. That's it. And that's your bounding box."

That's what Fidel said. It doesn't mean you can't go back and change it. But if you want to add something, you have to swap something else out. You've given yourself guardrails. Amazon has the same practice. They call it working backward. You write the press release before you build the product or start the project. Jeff Bezos also had the famous two-pizza rule. If two pizzas can't feed the team, the team is too big. That's a constraint on coordination costs.

Fidel told me something else I keep thinking about and it fit with what a number of people I've interviewed and who worked with Steve Jobs told me. Fidel said that Jobs was a great constraint setter. He'd set parameters but not dictate the solutions. Now, I think there was a period earlier in his career when he was more of a micromanager. Like after he got forced out of Apple and co-founded NeXT Computers, he insisted that a new computer be a perfect magnesium cube, which was terrible for engineers. But later, at least according to the interviews I've done with people who worked with him, when Jobs came back to Apple, he changed in that way. He became that constraint setter. He defined the boundaries, the timeline, the priorities, what a product had to feel like, and then trust people and let them solve problems within those boundaries. At least from the interviews I've done, it seems like he stopped dictating solutions quite as much and started shaping the space where creative solutions could emerge. That shift from micromanaging outcomes to setting constraints might be the most underrated reason that Apple became what it became.

The pattern repeats. Once you start seeing this, you kind of can't unsee it. Take the iPod. When Fidel pitched Apple on building a music player, the conventional wisdom was that it would take at least a year and a half to develop, probably more. Fidel said no. He showed Steve Jobs a styrofoam model in March and said, "By Christmas, we're shipping." That constraint and absurdly tight deadline meant the team had to iterate quickly and make decisions fast. They couldn't overthink. They couldn't gold-plate features. The tight timeline, it forced them to borrow technology because Fidel didn't want them building everything from scratch like they had at General Magic. So that famous scroll wheel on the iPod, it was inspired by a Danish cordless phone that a team member brought to a meeting and they adapted that rather than inventing it totally from scratch.

It's very much like a NASA mission that Ed Hoffman, NASA's chief knowledge officer, once told me about. The mission was called LCROSS and they had a shoestring budget and a tight deadline to search for water on the moon. So instead of developing custom instruments from scratch, they decided to repurpose imaging equipment from army tanks and engine temperature sensors they literally took from NASCAR and used them for a lunar mission. And it worked. They confirmed the presence of ice and water in a crater on the moon. They might never have found that solution if they'd had a bigger budget or more time because you just don't think of repurposing NASCAR sensors for a moon mission unless you have to.

Without constraints, you follow what cognitive psychologists call the path of least resistance, doing what you've always done. But without resources, you're forced to get resourceful. And this is the paradox of constraints. They feel limiting, and I mean they are, but they actually force a kind of thinking that abundance never does. When you have unlimited options, you settle on the obvious. It's the default. But when options are scarce, you're forced to get creative.

The creative case for constraints. If you had to name the two or three most important writers in Western literature since year zero, so we're not counting Homer, you'd have to include Shakespeare and Dante. Maybe they'd be the top two. Shakespeare forced himself to write in iambic pentameter, a rigid rhythmic structure of alternating stressed and unstressed syllables. That is absolutely not how people naturally speak and wasn't in his time either. Dante went even further. He invented an entirely new rhyme scheme called terza rima in which the lines rhyme in the pattern ABA BCB CDC and he bound himself to it for 14,000 lines of his Divine Comedy. Arguably the two most important writers in Western history and both of them voluntarily put themselves in straightjackets. Not because they lacked the skill to write freely, but because constraints focused and liberated their creativity rather than stifling it. The structure gave them something to push against and the pushing is where the art came from.

You see the same thing in music. Bach, who in a global survey of musicians was chosen as the greatest composer in history and it wasn't even close, was a constraints machine. He would take a single musical idea, just a few notes, and restrict himself to exploring it under increasingly tight rules. In some cases, that musical idea was B-flat A C B, or in German musical notation, B A C H, his own name that he would play with under tight rules. Igor Stravinsky, who ranked second behind Bach in that survey, wrote explicitly about this. He said, "The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself." The more constraints he imposed on himself, the more creative he became.

Miles Davis recorded Kind of Blue, which is often cited as the greatest jazz album ever made, by removing the usual rapid-fire chord changes. He asked his musicians to linger on the same underlying sound for long stretches. Instead of constantly adapting new harmonies, they were confined to a narrow set of notes circling a single tonal center. The box was small, and precisely because of that, they had to dig deeper. They slowed down. They repeated ideas. They let notes hang in the air and explored subtler shades of feeling. The result was something radically different from the busy, chord-heavy jazz that came before. And it was unlike anything jazz listeners had heard before.

And then there's Theodore Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss. His editor bet him he couldn't write an entire children's book using only 50 words. Seuss took the bet. The result was Green Eggs and Ham, one of the bestselling children's books in history. Even before that, another pretty famous book came from similar constraints. Geisel was given a list of vocabulary words that young children could recognize and told to write a book using only about 200 of those words. He was exasperated. There were no adjectives, he said. He complained to his wife in fine Seussian form. He said, "It's like making a strudel with no strudels." And then he made a decision that changed children's literature. He decided he would just take the first two rhyming words on the list and make a book out of those. And the first two rhyming words, they were "cat" and "hat." And the rest is history.

After those successes, Seuss co-founded a book imprint called Beginner Books and handed a set of constraints to every author who wrote for it. Every spread had to be a two-page layout, so the pictures interacted. And you couldn't include anything in the illustrations that wasn't mentioned in the text. There was a word list. There were structural rules. And it became the most successful children's book imprint in history, built on a foundation of constraints.

The business of constraints. This isn't just an art world phenomenon. Blumhouse Productions is one of the most profitable film studios in Hollywood. And their entire model, it's built on constraints. They take interesting filmmakers and give them tiny budgets. That forces the directors to limit the number of speaking parts, the number of locations, and the overall complexity of the production, which means they have to focus almost entirely on story and plot. M. Night Shyamalan's comeback films, The Visit and Split, after years of subpar films, were Blumhouse films. So were critically acclaimed and ridiculously profitable films like Get Out and Whiplash. Their profit margins are insane. And it works precisely because the constraint, that small budget, eliminates the temptation to just throw money at problems instead of solving them creatively.

Pixar operates on a version of this, too. They keep their story development teams as small as possible for as long as possible. A director can spend years working with a tiny team refining a story because the costs only explode once you move into production. The animation, the rendering, the full studio pipeline. So, they stay small and iterate, getting feedback every single day, sometimes for years, literally years, they can stay in development. The directors are allowed to take that time, but again, only with a small team. That's the constraint. Keep it small while you figure out whether the idea works.

They also have what's called the three pitches rule. When someone has an idea for a film, they're not allowed to pitch just one concept. They have to pitch three. The reason is simple: people anchor on their first idea. And your first idea is usually not your best idea. There's research on this. It's called the creative cliff illusion. People think their best ideas come first or not at all, but in fact, the best ideas tend to come later once you've pushed past the obvious. Forcing three pitches is a constraint that breaks that anchoring.

And sometimes entire industries will anchor on a certain solution, not because it's the best, but just because it's familiar. The airline industry had this issue with turning around planes until Southwest Airlines. Because early on, Southwest didn't actually have enough planes to cover their routes. So they couldn't anchor on that familiar solution. That problem of not having enough planes, it should have been fatal. But instead, they asked, "If we can't get more planes, how do we get more use out of the planes we have?" The answer was reducing turnaround time. At the time, turning around a plane between flights took about 2 hours. Southwest got it down to around 10 minutes. Pilots, flight attendants, everyone contributed to cleanup and boarding. That constraint-driven innovation launched roughly 50 consecutive quarters of profitability stretching all the way to the pandemic.

An extremely successful venture capitalist recently told me something that crystallized all this. He said his main investment thesis is to look for bootstrapped companies, not funded ones, bootstrapped companies where the founders have constraints, where money's tight, where they can't just throw resources at problems because those are the companies that actually learn how to be lean and resourceful. The constraints are the education.

Constraints and mastery. Michelangelo's David, arguably the most famous sculpture in history, was carved from a block of marble that other sculptors had already rejected. The marble was too thin. The quality wasn't ideal. Other artists looked at it and said, "No thanks." Michelangelo took those constraints and used them to shape the David. The limitations of the stone dictated certain decisions about the posture and proportions that made the final work what it is, something elegant and contemplative rather than a triumphant battle pose.

And then there was the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo had a hard deadline every single day. The fresco plaster would dry whether he was ready or not. That built-in clock forced him to move fast, commit to bold decisions, and live with far less second-guessing, turned the chemistry of wet plaster into a ruthless but brilliant teacher of his technique. Over time, you can see that pressure actually changing the work itself. The figures grow larger and clearer. The composition's bolder and more legible from the floor. And by the end, he's pulling off whole scenes like God separating light from darkness in single audacious bursts of painting.

Reminds me of a Duke Ellington line that I love. "I don't need time. What I need is a deadline." Ellington, who I think is America's preeminent creative composer of the 20th century. Seriously, listen to "Fugue in G Minor" for a sense of his later stuff. Just had trouble getting down to work without a serious deadline. But once he had one, he could work furiously.

In the early 2000s, LEGO had one of the greatest corporate turnarounds in business history. And the core was subtraction. They'd been adding more and more and more different kinds of bricks, expanding into every possible direction. Then, when the company nearly collapsed, the turnaround was about reducing the number of brick types, constraining the palette. Fewer types of pieces, but vastly more ways to combine them. It was better for the company's supply chain and better for most users. A smaller set of versatile tools beat an enormous set of specialized ones.

Constraints for your own life. So, what does this actually look like at a personal level? Isabel Allende, the novelist, starts every single book on January 8th. That's it. That's the rule. And it works beautifully. Not because there's anything magical about January 8th, but because everyone in her life knows the boundary. Before that date, you can reach her. After that date, she's unavailable. She doesn't have to make a decision every day about whether to write. She doesn't have to negotiate with people about her time. The constraint eliminates hundreds of small decisions. She also lights a candle at the start of her workday and blows it out to signify the end. Her writing space is sacred. She tidies it up every day when she leaves, so the work is waiting for her the next morning, and no one enters once the door closes. Her stories live in that room. These aren't quirks. They're constraints that protect the conditions she needs to do her best work. As she told me when I visited her, "Without the silence and the structure, I couldn't do it." With it, she's produced a best-selling book about every 18 months for the last 40 years, selling 80 million copies in all.

Herbert Simon, as a founding father of AI, won the Turing Award, the highest award in computer science. As a founder of cognitive psychology, he won the Lifetime Achievement Award in psychology. And for good measure, he also won the Nobel Prize in economics. And yet, you'd almost think from descriptions of his daily life that he was an unambitious person. Wore the same few sets of clothes, ate the same breakfast, used "good enough" solutions for every decision that wasn't central to his work. But his trophy case obviously tells a different story. Simon was practicing what he himself had theorized: satisficing, where you set "good enough" criteria and stick to them rather than agonizing over optimizing every decision. He put constraints on all the decisions that only kind of mattered so he could save his cognitive bandwidth for the ones that really mattered. This also helped him defeat what's known as Fredkin's Paradox. The idea that we spend the most time on the least important decisions. Meanwhile, since the options are so close, choosing between them really doesn't matter that much. So, we end up spending the most time and energy on the decisions that matter the least. Simon used constraints in his own life to avoid that.

The stoicism writer and bookstore owner Ryan Holiday does something similar using constraints in his daily life. He schedules his non-work activities: family time, exercise, reading. It's on his calendar as if they're meetings. That's a constraint. If it's on the calendar, it doesn't get displaced by work. And it means he doesn't have to decide in the moment whether to protect that time. The decision's already been made.

Simone Giertz, the inventor and YouTuber known as the queen of shitty robots, actually created a physical tool for this. She made a set of dice with different constraints on each face. When her options feel too open and she can't decide what to build next, she rolls the dice. They tell her the parameters, the material, the function, whatever it might be, and she works within those. She told me it's the only way she can get unstuck sometimes. As she told me, "If I have just an open field of possibilities, I won't come up with any new ideas. I made the dice to create as specific a brief as possible, and you can stray from it, but it gives me enough constraints to get started." It's like, "If you can cook any meal," she said, "you're probably going to cook something you already know. But if you can only cook with these three ingredients, you're going to have to come up with something new."

David Chang, the restaurateur who observed my book on constraints, is huge on constraints in the kitchen. He thinks some of the best food innovation comes when chefs are forced to work with limited ingredients. He deliberately puts his chefs in constrained situations because that's when they invent new combinations instead of falling back on what they already know.

Why this works? So why do constraints work so consistently across so many different domains? A few things are happening.

First, constraints solve the problem of too many options. There's a well-documented phenomenon in psychology where having more choices actually makes it harder to choose when they increase complexity. And this makes people less satisfied with whatever they do eventually choose. And sometimes it just leads them to make purely worse choices. Researchers have found that as healthcare and 401(k) options get really large, people make worse decisions about them. And they're more likely not to participate in a 401(k) at all if the decision set is too large. Constraints shrink the decision space, which paradoxically makes better decisions more likely.

Second, constraints force new ways of thinking. As the cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham has pointed out, your brain isn't made for thinking. It's made for saving you from having to think whenever possible. So with too much freedom, it will only go down a familiar path. But when you can't do the obvious thing, when the obvious path is blocked, you're forced to think around corners. You repurpose, you recombine. You find the NASCAR sensor for that moon mission. That kind of lateral thinking almost never happens when resources are abundant, because there's no reason to look sideways when you can just go straight.

Third, constraints prevent the thing that often destroys projects, even good ones: scope creep. General Magic didn't fail because they lacked talent or vision. They had plenty of that. They failed because nothing was out of bounds. They defined their customer as "Joe Six-Pack," but nobody really knew who the heck that was. So instead, they ended up building for each other. Every cool idea got added. Every direction was pursued. And the project ballooned and ballooned until they couldn't deliver anything on time. And when they did, it was incoherent. The constraint is a decision made in advance. It's a "no" that you don't have to agonize over later.

And fourth, and this might be the most interesting one, constraints protect against anchoring on your first idea. This is a well-documented finding in psychology research. People anchor or fixate on their first idea, and they don't even begin to explore for better ones. So remember Pixar's three pitches rule. It's specifically designed to fight this. The creative cliff illusion tells us that people believe their best ideas come early or not at all. The research says the opposite. The best ideas tend to come later once you've exhausted the obvious ones. Constraints push you past the obvious. They force you to keep going.

The real lesson. Here's what I keep coming back to. We live in a culture that worships optionality. "Keep your options open." "Dream bigger." "Think without limits." Just set audacious goals and manifest them. But the most creative and productive people that I've studied and that I've interviewed, whether that's in art, it's in science, could be tech, could be business, wherever, they don't actually operate that way. Most of the time, they don't chase unlimited freedom. They impose structure on themselves. They shrink that playing field. They decide what's out of bounds, often even before they start even playing.

A goal says, "Here's what I want to achieve." A constraint says, "Here's how I'm going to work." Goals are about outcomes. Constraints are about process. And in any domain where the path isn't clear, where you're doing something genuinely creative or uncertain, focusing on that process, it beats a goal or outcome focus every time. Because you can't control outcomes at the end, but you can control the rules you play by.

Tony Fidel designed the packaging before the product. Shakespeare forced himself to write in iambic pentameter. Isabel Allende starts every book on January 8th. Miles Davis barred certain chord changes. Blumhouse slashes budgets. Herbert Simon wore the same three sets of clothes. None of these people lacked ambition. Obviously, their constraints didn't limit their output. They channeled it.

So, if you're staring at a blank page or an open calendar or a project that could go in any direction, the answer might not be to think bigger or to think outside the box. It might be to build a smaller box and then you can see what fits inside.

Every story I just told you, General Magic, Nest, Dr. Seuss, Michelangelo, Blumhouse. All of it comes from research I've been doing for my new book. It's called Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better. And it's the book I think I've been building toward for the last 20 years. You can order it with the link in the description. And I can't wait for you guys to read it and to hear what you think about it because I think it's my best work yet.