Most things in life improve as a byproduct.
Relationships and love don’t become better by trying to make them better directly, they become better by being financially secure, by having a vision, by giving value, by listening and caring.
Happiness is not something you can achieve and can’t be pursued as a goal, it’s emergent from having meaning, goals, treating others well, of progress and self improvement.
A business doesn’t thrive by force, you can’t will it. It thrives by creating a great product that satisfies an unmet market and delivering satisfactory service or product. It’s a formula.
Trying too hard and pushing things away is evident of this.
The pursuit of pleasure can make you less happy.
You can’t change the scoreboard, you can only change how you play the game.
That’s why it’s best to seek goals that are controllable.
But some things are not like that. The outcomes you can’t grab directly, you reach through their causes - but the causes themselves you can work on head-on. Your attention. Your discipline. These improve by working them directly, because they aren’t outcomes downstream of anything. They are root faculties.
We often spend too much time focusing on the scoreboard, and not enough time on improving our root faculties, because the results the success, the relationship are all downstream of that.
Sleep is another example. You can’t force yourself to sleep, but you can set the conditions for it to happen by exercise, diet, and routine.
The great thing is that most root faculties can be improved substantially, especially from an untrained baseline. If working on it for the first time we can see huge gains.
But they all have limits - biological, diminishing returns, and trade-offs - opportunity costs.
It works like a bottleneck in a business. Sales aren’t growing - but the real cause is upstream: you can’t manufacture enough. And that’s because you’re spread across too many businesses without enough talent; and there isn’t enough talent because there isn’t enough time; and there isn’t enough time because you can’t focus. So don’t push harder on sales, improve your focus.
But sometimes it might be because an ad isn’t working, or a salesman is making a simple error in sales calls.
That’s why, like unlocking a bottleneck in a business, it’s essential to identify where along the chain of root faculty to scoreboard the bottleneck is.
Don’t spread yourself thin and try to improve everything at once.
Because any effort spent working on the wrong thing on anything that isn’t the bottleneck, is wasted effort.
Fix the bottleneck, and everything downstream moves.
So like theory of constraints in business, how do you identify where your constraint is?
The bottleneck is the point where, if you improved it, the whole downstream chain would move - and everything you improve other than the bottleneck produces no gain.
What's the one thing that, if fixed, unlocks the most?
Where is the failure point? It’s downstream of that.
Where is there a build up, where are thing stuck.
Notice what everything else keeps waiting on.
Test it - improve the suspected bottleneck and watch if downstream moves.
Try improving root faculties anyway and see how much they can be improved.
Ask what the one thing is that, if fixed, would unlock the most.
Often it can improve multiple recurring bottlenecks.
So let yourself be comfortable working on yourself rather than trying to change the scoreboard. It doesn’t feel intuitive. It feels like you are working on the wrong thing.
Try it.