Omar Usman – Embrace Constraints 3 Things I Learned from Rework Jason Fried

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.