Tiago Forte explains the Theory of Constraints: solve one bottleneck and another appears. He moved through three personal ones: fear of publishing, then publishing speed, then idea quality. Companies fail by ignoring which constraint actually matters right now.
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But yeah, I'm curious, like, even in your experience, like, what were the biggest personal creative bottlenecks? If you are, say, building a company with the theory of constraints, which is abbreviated TOC, in mind, every day or week you're just, you're just asking, what is the current constraint? And it's always changing. As soon as you fix one bottleneck, the bottleneck goes somewhere else, and then you fix that one and then it goes somewhere else. It's like constantly just jumping around your organization. One point, uh, the bottleneck was being willing to put my work on the internet. The Fear of criticism was the bottleneck on my entire career. That was limiting everything. Once I started putting my work online, the bottleneck became, how fast can I write? How frequently can I hit publish? Then it was— the bottleneck was the quality. How interesting and impactful of an idea can I write about? And then it took a while to figure that out. So it's just like every solution to a problem, you're like, oh, great, we solved it. That just creates a new problem. And then you solve that one and that creates a new problem. And that goes on forever.