Barış Özmen

Constraints are your friends

Sep 2025 · #MentalModel #ExtremelyImportant #Sketch
tl;dr

Constraints are your friend. ^f45e32 1. Decreases the cognitive load by shrinking the decision space - so you can focus on the things with higher leverage 2. Prevents you to stuck in cycle of non-high-leverage decisions 3. You can embrace constraints as anchors and stepping points for you to arrive new steps (something bigger) 4. Solves paradox of choice - decision fatigue, Hick’s Law, FOMO 4. Makes your tradeoffs explicit 5. Every time you reuse your style, you save time, it's a durable investment 6. Forces you to be creative 1. The Creative Act by Rick Rubin 2. constrained creativity 7. Gives you a style/identity

references

  1. Fred Brooks - The Design of Design by Brooks - Chapter 11 is named Constraints are Friends

    • "Form is liberating" - Artists' Aphorism
    • "I need four walls around me, to hold my life, and keep me from going astray."–James Taylor, “Bartender’S BlueS”
    • "A general-purpose product is harder to design well than a special-purpose one."
    • Constraints shrink the designer's search space
      • removing all constrains makes the task of designing harder
        • Many of us disliked "Write an essay on whatever you want" assignments in junior high school for that reason
        • "Bach understood this. Wolff says, “Bach, predisposed from the very beginning toward traversing conventional boundaries, nevertheless preferred to work within a given framework and accept the challenges it imposed.
          • Wolff [2000], Johann Sebastian Bach, 387. "When not sufficiently constrained by commission or available performance talent, Bach would sometimes adopt quite artificial constraints to stimulate his creativity. An example is the repeated use of the BACH motif (the sequence of notes B-flat, A, C, B-natural)"
      • constrains can stimulate completely fresh creations by challenging the designer
        • David example
        • Blue Ridge Parkway viaduct (had to touch ground as little as possible to minmize environmental damage)
      • artificial constraints have the nice property that one is free to relax them
      • ![[Brooks' categorization of constraints]]
      • General-Purpose artifacts are than Special-Purpose Ones
        • Hardest part of designing is deciding what to design.

  2. DHH

    1. Constraints are your friend. They force you to think differently. You should win by doing less and working less from your competition. (My addition: The way to do is coming up with something very different that no one else is doing in the same way). Stanford link, [youtube](https://youtu.be/cAr-g7gFvxg?si=gwq5rg_KGf-2x9uJ](https://youtu.be/cAr-g7gFvxg?si=gwq5rg_KGf-2x9uJ)**
      1. Underdo your competition–have fewer features
    2. ![[Embrace Constraints (archived)#^constrainst-on-creativity]]
      1. Another reasons constraints are helpful can be that it constraints amount of second type of procrastination in Paul Graham's Good and Bad Procrastination (archived).
        1. This idea comes from Why Is It Hard to Do Real Work (archived)

  3. Design is compromise.md by Kepano

    • prioritizing
      • comprimise is prioritizing
    • choosing the right compromises is what defines good design.
    • tradeoff -> conveys the relationship between strengths and weaknesses
      • You are trading a weakness for a strength.
    • be proud of your compromises
      • Having an opinionated set of tradeoffs exposes your approach to a set of weaknesses. The more you tip the scale on one side, the weaker something else will be. That’s okay! Making those difficult choices is what people pay you for. You should be proud of your compromises.
    • Good design is choosing the right compromise for your audience.

  4. Style is consistent constraint by Kepano

    • Style is a set of constraints that you stick to.
    • having a style collapses hundreds of decisions into one, and gives you focus

  5. The Creative Act by Rick Rubin

    1. ![[The Creative Act by Rick Rubin#^constraints]]
    2. See Temporary Rules section in the book

  6. Taste for Makers (archived) > Good design is simple (Baris: another way of saying good design has constraints).

    • beauty should depend on a few carefully chosen structural elements, rather than a profusion of superficial ornaments.

  7. Design of Everyday Things - Don Norman (book) -> Chapter 4 deals with constraints, and has a section on forcing functions. Read it later and add notes here.

  8. Chamath Palihapitiya's talk on foundational model in All in Pod (Elon Musk reposted)

    1. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1893225864378060989
      2. "pre-training Siri"
    2. Full episode: The Stablecoin Future, Milei's Memecoin, DOGE for the DoD, Grok 3, Why Stripe Stays Private (archived)

  9. Constraints and innovation - Chris Loy (archived)

  10. Relevant: The One Course by Dabeaz (constrained creativity) (original)

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