I have all the constraints necessary for success.
I first learned the philosophy of constraints in my Operations Research class. I signed up for the class out of curiosity after reading a course description that promised learnings in Math that would help me optimize essentially everything: from the volume and types of cheese manufactured in a factory, to layouts for grid connections, to even stock portfolios. While I wouldn’t say I became the best Operations Research practitioner, I can say that the class helped me understand how the paired forces of production and reduction serve to create optimal outcomes. In a classic maximization example where we want to produce the most of something - profit, returns on an investment or connected nodes in a network - we tend to have an equation that describes our inputs. The goal then, is usually to combine the inputs in a way that creates the maximum output. We call this the act of maximizing the objective function. On the other hand, we also tend to have a function that describes certain costs associated with the inputs, essentially defining a boundary within which we must combine our inputs. This boundary is usually pre-defined and isn’t something we can negotiate, much like the bounds of a basketball court or the amount of damage we can take in a video game. As we seek to maximize our objective function, our goal is usually to minimize the constraints.
The constraints are just as much a part of the hand of cards we are dealt as our aces are - we need them to complete the hand we play. Yet most management theory, success stories and silicon valley lore that the mainstream media feature time and again lean to discussing the maximization process: the doubling down, the hyperscaling and the young prodigies with hit after hit and seemingly no iteration. I don’t blame them - we all sooner or later learn to double down on our strengths which is sound wisdom. Rather than discuss what we’re all familiar with in that regard, I’d like to set my eyes afresh on the constraints, and, in particular, a number of the constraints in my experiences growing up. In this way, I’d like to acknowledge some of the strengths that were so wonderfully seeded in my spawn equation.
Larry Ellison was applying fresh ways of seeing when he said “I had all the disadvantages necessary for success”. I am applying fresh ways of seeing to his statement when I say I have all the constraints necessary for success. My guess is he needed his words and lived experience to be a teachable lesson for all of us, which is why he specifically chose the word disadvantages. I’m going to be a bit milder and call my setbacks constraints, but in both these statements the perspective is that our limitations, if we allow them, can be the enzymes that catalyze character into compounded growth. The same ingredients can floor us or flourish us. And in this, I say timshel.
Growing up in a small town in Central Kenya, things were quiet. That meant more signal and less noise. There were no weekend family fun days in my household, and I only got consistent internet access starting around age 14. But that meant I got used to the quiet, to the lack of stimuli, and could spend more time reading and thinking. Without peers my age constantly telling me what to think a click or swipe away, I spent more time exploring ideas, assessing them myself and drawing up my own conclusions. With only four TV channels and no cable all through my kindergarten and elementary school years, my Dora the Explorer was Richard Quest on CNN, and boy did I love him.
It took me a decade and a half to realize what I had grown up in was Midwestern values with Southern hospitality. They don’t call it that in Central Kenya - the culture is still learning branding. But reading about Buffett and Munger, Sam Walmart and J. Paul Getty, there was the feeling that outside the wealth, these were people I faintly saw hints of growing up. I couldn’t help but compare Bob Kierlin to the local owner of a hardware store, who ran a tight ship, watched their costs and treated suppliers, customers and employees as much more than spreadsheet line items; more than revenue, cost of goods sold and operating expenses.
Family. Religion. Work. Community. Frugality. Food. These were the mainstays of my small, cold, predominantly agricultural town in Central Kenya. But the cold prepared me for even colder weather in snowy Vermont during college, and tangentially observing farmers as I went about my education helped me understand seasons and the importance of being prepared. While attending a high-ceiling, Italian-built cathedral in my younger years impressed upon me my love for craftsmanship, growing up around construction all my life made me comfortable starting small. Moving into our home before we added its finishes made me understand that things don’t have to come together perfectly all at once. Daily additions to our home by construction workers, along with waking up each day to the sound of work at the nearby quarry, created in me a love for works in progress. These atypical sights and sounds imparted in me a builder’s metronome whose sound was that of a chisel cutting away at rock. Growing up in a community where everyone knew or was seeking to know everyone’s business taught me the value of reputation. Our house taking about a decade to complete while our family lived in it made me obsessive about how we can build faster and at higher quality, which led to my interests in engineering, infrastructure and eventually, economic development.
While the constraints in a simple equation remain fundamentally the same as we solve it, the environments and constraints of our lives change as we grow. My Midwestern seed with Southern hospitality germinated and was transplanted, first mentally, into the Internet Age. Before that, I had already been getting some fertilizer via broadcast media. I had learned about design, global music and markets through shows like Project Runway, America’s Next Top Model, MTV, Channel-O and Quest Means Business - licensed and rebroadcast by local TV. Later on, I would not be too surprised by the mask mandates during the Covid pandemic, remembering the pictures on the news of droves of people in masks walking around China in the early 2000s as SARS spread.
Though broadcast media had introduced a variety of programming, it was the internet that allowed me to curate my own preferences and to dive deeper into my interests. Limited funds for fun times with friends after high school meant I had to work, and a lack of in-person work meant I started working remotely right after high school. Bonding over our alienation, shared gaming interests and a lack of funds for high-performing computers with my next door neighbor, Brian, introduced me to overclocking CPUs. Eventually, this led me to how computers worked beyond what we saw on the screen, which led to coding. While I was more interested in business and Brian more in engineering at the time, our parting ways to different countries for college created the necessity for me to build the products I wanted to see in the world myself, given there was no longer another person to rapidly prototype the ideas I explored. As a result, I started improving my engineering skillset. Many more constraints, attitude adjustments, tweaks and iterations later, I am leading the Engineering for a product I want to see in the world.
My chisel metronome is still on, and there’s still so much to build. It hasn’t all been perfect, and even now, I acknowledge that the state of small town living still holds the potential to floor rather than flourish one. Here, I’m no longer specifying my town in Central Kenya but small towns in general. I hope that acknowledging the following small-town constraints will give you the opportunity to find ways to see them afresh.
First, from my town’s perspective, it was not the place to be vocally bold with vision. As a result, most people naturally hide away their ambition or vision for fear of gossip, sabotage or something else. For me, America helped with this, by nurturing my audacity. I viewed my move as an opportunity to grow and to learn from others. Confidence is contagious, and it is even more accessible now with online communities. All the same, dreams, ideas and insights are universally accessible. We just have to be open and looking.
Second, is the alienation. If you think differently from the mean in a small town, you will often feel like there is something wrong with you. This is a universal experience, but it can be even more amplified in communities where people feel closer, so when you don’t see things their way you feel even further away than in big city living where there tends to be more distance between the individual and society. However, if you find ways to seek information and community elsewhere, or alternatively get comfortable being contrarian, the alienation can help you to learn how to think for yourself. It can help you develop your own taste since you are used to drawing different conclusions than those around you. The beauty of making one’s own individual assessment is where the upside is if one is right.
They say a person who has not traveled widely thinks his or her mother is the best cook. Small towns can easily create the rut of one becoming a giant amongst dwarves. It is easy to become the hometown hero but not actually have high standards globally if one is not seeking them, especially when the society one lives in drags ambition down. We could define ambition in this context as one’s desire to reach higher standards. This is part of the reason why it’s so important to have an inner scorecard. Another important reason to have an inner scorecard is because of the small town pressure to “keep up an image”. While status signaling may not be as apparent in small towns in the outward or material sense as it is in the big city, there can tend to be an urge to “keep up an image” in a different way due to gossip. As a result, people easily fall into sunk cost fallacy and feel like they can’t reinvent themselves, or feel the need to show others that “they haven’t changed” when they return, in order not to trigger the gossip. This can make people stuck in identities that no longer serve them for far too long, stifling growth. Paradoxically, this consistency bias can also help with consistency in habit which can cause significant compounding in the long-term.
If you are in a small town, please find a place to break convention, to think outside the box, to grow and to reset your constraints. Remember, Warren worked for a proverbial Mr. Wilson when younger, and when older grew from buying fair businesses at cheap prices into wonderful businesses at fair prices; even with the consistency in his daily approach to work.
Finally, people in small towns often mean what they say, so one can become more easily trusting in one. While I believe this is how life should be, idealism here meets the constraint of reality. Easily trusting the wrong people can become an issue through investing in the wrong relationships. Coming of age in Nairobi helped me get more “street smarts”, and seeking information in college and over my career thus far has improved my understanding of how to build a network focused on value and connection rather than transactionality.
Despite the loud world outside, I’ve kept the insides of my quiet Midwestern seed. That has helped me be more self-reflective. It has also helped me to understand what I want and to be honest about it. My grafting has helped me to learn how to navigate relationships better, to try more, and to be more comfortable being myself, constraints included. I love being a Midwestern seed, grafted with Southern hospitality and transplanted into the internet’s global orchard. With a nod to an earnest Jensen Huang who wished us pain, I wish you all the constraints necessary for your success.