Omar Usman – Embrace Constraints 3 Things I Learned from Rework Jason Fried
AI: Summary ©
In this video, the speaker discusses three things she learned from the book Rework: embrace constraints, focus on the epicenter of what you do, and emulate chefs. She emphasizes the importance of embracing these things and not being afraid of what you might lose. She also suggests that culture develops over time and that rewarding employees by having them unlock their potential is a way to empower people to do their best work.
AI: Summary ©
In this video, I'm sharing 3 things I
learned from the book Rework by Jason Fried
and David Hanson.
Rework is the playbook that they use to
build up their company 37 signals known predominantly
for their software Basecamp. Now this book contains
a lot of lessons for building up your
company, launching your product, all these different things.
And the first lesson that I learned was
to embrace constraints.
Now this sounds counterintuitive sometimes.
Whenever whenever we're working on a project,
constraints are kind of the last thing that
we want to think about. We want to
be able to work without any interruption, without
any limitations
placed on our creativity and what we're able
to do.
But constraints
help to actually drive creative results, and he
gives an example of a haiku.
A haiku is, you know, by definition is
limited to the number of lines, 3 lines,
5 syllables, 7 syllables, 5 syllables in each
line, and that forces you to be creative
with the way that you, you know, the
message that you're conveying, the words that you
use, all these things have to go through
a process to be able to fit within
that constraint.
Contrast that with writing a poem that has
no constraints on length, on rhyme scheme, on
the number of verses, on any of those
things is actually a lot harder to get
started.
The constraints for having those limitations,
it forces you to be creative with the
situation that with what you have. So it's
basically
make do with what you have instead of
worrying about what you don't have. He gives
another really good example,
and that's of Southwest Airlines. They said that
one constraint that they embraced
was that their entire fleet
uses the same model of airplane.
What that does is that it allows for
it actually gives them flexibility,
because now all of their pilots and all
of their staff can be interchangeable between any
flight in their entire company.
Another way of understanding constraints
is focusing on the epicenter of what you
do. And they give a really good example.
If you're opening a hotdog stand,
what do you start working on? You can
work on business cards, you can work on
flyers, you can work on figuring out what
kind of cart you have, how much inventory
to load up on, what your logo is
going to look like, what you're going to
call your cart,
you know, where you're going to be located.
There's a 100,000,000 things that you could be
going through,
but
if your hot dog doesn't taste good,
all of those other decisions were completely irrelevant.
They didn't help to support the core of
what you do. You should have put your
focus on making sure that first the hot
dog tastes good, that is well made, and
then the other things can come.
A lot of times because we're not constrained,
we run wild with all these different things.
We put focus where it shouldn't be put.
One other part of embracing constraints is that
of embracing obscurity. And this is something that
we talked a little bit about when I
talked when I shared 3 things I learned
from Little Bits by Peter Sims, and I'll
put the link to that video in the
description down below.
One thing they mentioned was that when you're
obscure, when there aren't a lot of expectations
on you, and you aren't tied down to
something,
you can experiment much more freely.
Obscurity is not something that anybody wants, especially
not a business. They want attention, they want
customers, they want eyeballs,
but as long as you don't have them
and you're building toward it, embrace that constraint
of not being known to do things you
otherwise wouldn't do. Again, it helps drive a
lot of creativity.
The second thing that I learned was to
emulate chefs. Now if you look at a
celebrity chef or famous chef, what do they
do? They publish all the recipes online or
in a book that can be easily bought.
They have YouTube videos showing how to cook
the recipes. They have TV shows showing you
how to make their dishes and things that
they're the most well known for, their most
prized intellectual property, so to speak, but they
put all of it out there. And the
thing is that they realize
that even if you have the recipe, even
if you have the same tools and all
the same ingredients,
it doesn't mean that you'll suddenly become a
better chef than they are, and that's the
abundance mindset. They're not afraid
of someone stealing their ideas or someone having
the knowledge that they have and now suddenly
displacing them. It's an abundance mindset that I
can share everything I have, I can put
everything that I have out there, and it
doesn't diminish
my ability in any sense. In fact, it
probably enhances my reputation a lot when I
share those things. So emulate chefs,
share what you have, don't be afraid of
what you might lose, but embrace that abundance
mindset. And this also goes along with embracing
obscurity.
Don't be afraid to share what you're working
on even if it's imperfect.
It's that imperfection that gives your work character,
and it lets people know this is not
just robotic. There's a human behind it, and
it helps to establish a connection.
The third thing that I learned from this
book was that culture develops over time. It's
not just simply instilled.
And what that means that we think that
culture sometimes
is you have a company and you just
put in a foosball table, or a pool
table, or some bean bags of a holiday
party, and suddenly we've got a culture.
Culture comes from behavior that's repeated over time.
It's something that's cultivated
over and over again. So for example, if
you want a trusting environment,
you have to reward that behavior of trust.
If you want open communication,
you have to not only openly communicate over
and over and over again, but you have
to reward people that openly communicate.
And when you do that, you start to
establish a culture of how your company operates.
If you want good customer service, you have
to repeat that behavior of good service over
and over and over again until it comes
ingrained in the way that you operate.
One mistake that people make when they're looking
to establish good culture is that they wanna
go and hire only rock stars or only
the super awesome people that they can find.
Now that sounds like a good strategy,
but the reality is that you're not gonna
be able to do that. People in organizations
are of varying degrees, varying strengths, and not
everyone is going to always be at that
level.
So instead, what they say is that you
have to make sure the people that you
have, you unlock their potential to do good
work. How do you do
that? You remove bureaucracy, you remove the red
tape, and you don't treat employees like children.
If you treat them like children, you'll get
those types of results,
but instead empower people to do their best
work because most people genuinely
want to put forth their best effort, They
want to do the best work possible,
eliminate the barriers that keep them from doing
that. Once you do that and you repeat
good behaviors, your company will have a good
culture. That's 3 things I learned from the
book Rework.
If you enjoyed this video, please make sure
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subscribe to the channel. We put out a
new video every week, and I've got links
to the related videos in the book in
the description down below. Thanks for watching.