Life

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. ...

My twenties have been an especially interesting season of back-to-back transitions under varying levels of uncertainty. One thing I’ve learned with each transition, across school, work, cities and even relationships, is the importance of genuine friends. Many years ago while I was still a bright-eyed college student, I was fortunate enough to receive wonderful advice from a tenured finance executive at a conference. She said, “treat your relationships like a garden and tend to it”. I’ve held on to this advice since, bringing a long-term view and intentionality to my relationships. ...