

“OK, but there are two rules…” - speek
http://andyswan.com/blog/2011/01/05/two-rules/

======
redthrowaway
I appreciate the message, but am I the only one for whom the "fail fast"
mantra is becoming grating? It seems like it was originally a good idea: if
your startup is dead, let it die. Don't cling to a failed idea. Now, however,
it's almost used _instead_ of a plan, or as an excuse not to carefully
consider your options. It seems as if it appeals to our innate laziness: "Take
a shot. If you miss, oh well, better luck next time." There's no hunkering
down, no in-the-heat-of-the-crucible, just give up and try something else. It
feels like a truism packaged for the Twitter generation.

~~~
andyswan
Fail fast was just a side benefit. The point I was trying to make was to force
yourself into creative and innovative solutions.

~~~
redthrowaway
No, and I think your point was valid. I wasn't taking issue with your article,
but I always twitch a little bit when I see someone saying how great it is to
"fail fast".

------
GFischer
Mark Rosewater, the lead developer of the card game Magic:The Gathering
constantly talks about how restriction breeds creativity.

"The explanation he gives is simple: when someone is building a house, the
more tools they have, the better off they are. But when someone is looking for
something, the more space they have to explore, the worse off they are"

from:

<http://lesswrong.com/lw/3ir/narrow_your_answer_space/>

and the original article (on Magic:The Gathering design, but with useful
information - scroll down to the "Design Tool #1: Restrictions" header where
he discusses this point):

[http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/dai...](http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/mm/92)

------
phamilton
I remember taking an English class my freshman year of college. We had to
write a research paper, and the professor proposed that we make a rule that we
can't use the internet. The class shot it down hard. While not a policy, he
recommended that we give it a shot if we are up to it. I gave it a shot and it
was actually quite a good experience. Libraries are not obsolete, and I was
very able to write about new and contemporary issues. The restrictions made it
a better experience for me.

Though that was for school, where the point is often to create things that are
neither novel nor profitable.

------
idheitmann
Another great parallel is from photography:

Many film cameras used to be sold with only a fixed 50mm or a 35mm lens. The
restriction forced people to think about what was in or outside the field of
vision. Today's cameras that have 10x zooms do not force the same
consideration, and I suggest that amateur photography has suffered as a
result.

A friend of mine is a house-painter by trade, and has set himself the
restriction to never use a brush when he paints a canvas. This forces him to
consider what he really wants and how he can get there, instead of simply
smearing paint around the canvas until he gets bored.

We have too many choices these days. Getting rid of a few can make results
much more deliberate.

~~~
m0nastic
Zoom lenses have been the predominant kit lens for cameras for the better part
of twenty years. I think the migration to digital (where the cost of shooting
is ridiculously low) has had a much greater impact on the worsening of amateur
photography.

That coupled with the ubiquity of sharing pictures on the internet has created
a perfect storm of shittiness.

Professional photographers love to lament about this, and while much of it is
elitist posturing; there is truth to it (I say that as someone who splits my
time about 50/50 as a professional photographer).

~~~
dominostars
Digital cameras didn't make amateurs worse, they just increased the amount of
amateurs. And I'm sure it increased the amount of good photographers too, so
I'm not sure what the complaint is here.

If old cameras took better pictures, then I implore professional photographers
to use them.

~~~
m0nastic
The complaint was that the parent poster was postulating that amateurs have
gotten worse recently, and that that could be explained by the increased usage
of zoom lenses.

If I accept that the first statement is true (that amateurs have gotten
worse), I disagree on the cause (that it's because of zoom lenses, as zoom
lenses have been the norm on SLR's since the 80's).

I don't know objectively if amateur photographers are better or worse. I know
that nowadays I see a lot more bad pictures than I used to (and while there is
also an increase in good pictures, it hasn't increased nearly as much as the
bad ones have). I am postulating that this is more likely due to the
proliferation of digital and the ease at which photos can be shared (most
people's crappy photos would only get viewed by their family members over the
holidays when they dug out the slide projector).

I'm don't think it matters if old cameras took better pictures (for the most
part, they did; although the other benefits of digital tend to make up for
it).

------
hnal943
Mr. Swan misses the point here. The success of the new bourbon was not because
random restrictions were applied (e.g. Open a pizza place with NO CHAIRS), but
because a high standard was enforced.

~~~
andyswan
I don't know....a "makers mark single barrel" would have had pretty high
standards and a really "me too" feel.

I'll stick by my argument that self-imposed restrictions can really help
people get innovative and avoid the me-too traps of entrepreneurship.

~~~
varikin
I would agree with this. High standards result in great products, but not
necessarily innovative products.

Restrictions can and do lead to restrictions. Think of all the limited
resources in a computer 20 years ago and all the tricks played with memory and
registers and bit-shifting and such to push the limits of what the hardware
could do.

------
thrdOriginal
I took the tour at Makers Mark distillery a few months ago (highly
recommended), and they told a mostly similar story about Makers 46 (named
after the number of attempts it took to get it right), but spun it as Bill
Samuels, Jr. desire to "leave his mark." Although it is fun to find business
lessons in everything (especially bourbon), I came away with a slightly more
concrete example in brand loyalty after being introduced at the distillery to
Marker's Mark's Ambassador program. It is pretty interesting: essentially it
allows you to place your name on a barrel and recieve updates about its
progress. When its finally ready, you have now earned the right to purchase
your "own" bottle.

~~~
andyswan
From what I understand the "46" is a shout-out to their supplier, because it
is the product number of the wood staves used in the finishing process....

------
davidmathers
I learned this concept from George Lucas when I was a child.

Star Wars Budget: $13M

Return of the Jedi Budget: $32M

I'm not joking when I say that juxtaposition influenced the way I think about
life.

Now the idea almost seems like a trivial commonplace to me. Everyone from John
Paul Sartre to David Heinemeier Hansson has written about it.

~~~
deadmansshoes
But the best film of the trilogy was Empire Strikes Back - at $25M.

~~~
davidmathers
No, $18M according to imdb.

------
iamwil
Sometimes, the restrictions come at being underfunded, or with a lack of time,
which takes less discipline to enforce than self-restriction.

------
cdr
"Restrictions breed creativity" is hardly a new concept, but one worth
repeating.

~~~
Andrew_Quentin
the original sounds much better:

necessity is the mother of invention. There are plenty of restrictions already
I think, due to necessity, whether it is time, money, skills, why be even
harder on yourself.

------
gfodor
There are restrictions that foster creativity as well as those that inhibit
it. The trouble is you don't know which is which until you actually try
building something within them. Additionally, you only see the success stories
where these constraints resulted in something special, you don't see the
failures that would have been successes if only the creators were given a bit
more intellectual freedom.

I'm struggling with this right now. When building web applications, there are
some constraints that are interesting and useful ("the user should be able to
do everything without logging in") that might result in great stuff being
built, and others ("it has to use this particular technology stack or this
particular algorithm") that are less obviously beneficial to the creative
process.

------
Eliezer
"Originality isn't easy, but it is simple. Just don't do stuff that's already
been done."

------
ivey
And now I want bourbon.

Is 1:30 too early?

~~~
corin_
Personally I'd pick a nice Scottish malt, but either way: the only time during
which it is "too early" for whisky is between when you woke up at 11:30am.

~~~
rfugger
Luckily I'm always asleep between the time I woke up and 11:30 am.

------
littleidea
Meh.

Be dismissive without rolling your eyes...

Ready? Go!

~~~
nostrademons
I would respond to your comment, but really, there's nothing worth responding
to there..

------
ambirex
Actually the runkeeper idea without any inputs sounds like a pretty
interesting problem.

------
teyc
Jobs: Make it work with one button

------
brianpan
I think it's worth mentioning that in this case, the restrictions weren't
arbitrary. There was insight in the two rules- designed perhaps to stay true
to Makers (the "best bourbon") and still create something truly innovate and
distinct.

Arbitrary restrictions can also inspire creativity and create focus
(timeboxing, learning to say no), but creating restrictions can be an
opportunity to frame the problem in a purposeful way.

------
Umalu
Enhancing creativity through artificial restriction is an old idea. The
"Oulipo" movement in literature tried things like removing random letters from
writing (try writing a story without using "e"), or transposing random words.
When you put in restrictions like this, you get a much higher variance in
outcome, with the bad being truly awful and gimmicky but the good occasionally
being sublime.

------
bergie
Build a CMS, no forms allowed.

~~~
spokey
Arguably Posterous fits this criterion.

------
blahblahblah
It's not too hard to see why this works if you think about it as a
mathematical optimization. You have a very bumpy fitness function in parameter
space. When you apply arbitrary constraints on the parameters you are
selecting a subspace to examine for local maxima of the fitness function. This
is an easier problem to solve than the original global maximization problem.

~~~
andrew1
Although you then have to solve two problems; optimizing the constraints, and
then optimizing within the constraints.

If I applied the arbitrary constraint that x must be an odd multiple of pi,
then I'm not going to get a very good answer to trying to maximise cos(x)...

~~~
blahblahblah
The example you gave is a degenerate case that isn't really representative of
the real world situation. Making x to be an odd multiple of pi in your example
is an excessive constraint on the problem. Real world problems requiring
creativity exist in highly multidimensional spaces and their fitness functions
often exhibit fractal behavior.

For example, let P be the set of all English-language poems of N lines, where
each line is a semantically and syntactically valid expression in English and
N>0\. P is an incredibly huge set. We want to find solutions of high aesthetic
fitness on the set P. Applying a few arbitrary constraints reduces the size of
the search space but has little effect on our ability to find solutions with
high aesthetic fitness. For example, we could arbitrarily restrict our search
to the space of English poems with N=14, 10 syllables per line, an alternating
pattern of an unstressed and stressed syllables in each line (iambic
pentameter), and a rhyme pattern a-b-a-b-c-d-c-d-e-f-e-f-g-g in the terminal
words of each lines. We've now drastically reduced the size of the search
space such that we are now searching only the space of valid Shakespearean
sonnets. However, even with our arbitrary constraints in place, we're still
solving a highly unconstrained optimization problem and the arbitrary
constraints we applied don't prevent us from finding solutions of high
fitness.

We could say that the bumpiness of the fitness function is fractal -- the
shape of the fitness function on an arbitrary subspace resembles the shape of
the fitness function taken over the whole space, providing that the subspace
is itself "large" in some sense. The point is that there's nothing special
about the arbitrary constraints we imposed. We could instead choose to work in
the space where N=16, the number of words per line is between 4 and 7, the
first four lines are all questions, and the last line is constructed in the
form of a direct object followed by a subject and a verb and a repetition of
the direct object (e.g. "Yoda, you seek Yoda"). There are still many aesthetic
and unaesthetic solutions in this space, perhaps there are even some solutions
with greater fitness than any of the 154 solutions that Shakespeare discovered
with his set of arbitrary constraints.

------
wildmXranat
Alcohol. It sells. Brand recognition helps as well.

------
vilya
Unfortunately the comment "Running a real estate website? OK... you’re not
allowed to show the asking price or address of any home. Go." describes some
of the most annoying real estate websites I've come across.

While restrictions can encourage innovation, sometimes they really do just get
in the way.

~~~
Vivtek
That was my reaction too! Every real estate ad in Puerto Rico does this; it's
to make sure you're tethered to the broker, who is the only way you gain
access to the market. Maddening.

(Well: I say "every", but it's changing even in Puerto Rico.)

------
ctdonath
FYI: Knob Creek just announced their "Single Barrel Reserve".
[http://www.uncrate.com/men/culture/drinks/knob-creek-
single-...](http://www.uncrate.com/men/culture/drinks/knob-creek-single-
barrel-reserve/)

------
bitwize
I eat at a no-tables-and-chairs pizza place sometimes: Sal's in Boston. Real
popular with the Suffolk U kids. You order your pizza and to eat it, you stand
at one of the high counters running alongside the plate-glass windows.

------
mcantor
_Design is the successive application of constraints until only a unique
product is left._

\- Donald Norman, The Design of Everyday Things

------
bluekeybox
I guess the analogy with mobile Apple products is obvious (which I presume is
why this post is on HN at all), but in hindsight I just realized that I have
been following a similar strategy in my personal life all along (never let
myself play video games or really watch TV except movies).

~~~
Psyonic
Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see how not playing video games or
watching TV is a creative constraint. I can see it helping with time
management, but I don't see how it directly helps you improvise. Also, TV is
in a golden age right now. If I had to pick, I'd take the quality episodic TV
shows coming out of HBO, Showtime and the like over movies anyday.

~~~
bluekeybox
> I don't see how [not playing video games or watching TV] directly helps you
> improvise

Let's just say it makes me less immersed in today's era when it comes to
matters of visual taste/preference, which in turn lets me make creative
choices that some people may find surprising (or at least that's what my self-
serving bias tells me).

I do understand the importance of keeping up with trends though, but I
restrict my trend-seeking to people who I personally perceive as trendy (and
which tend not to be on TV).

~~~
Psyonic
I can see that to a degree, though I think some video games (especially indie
ones) could be inspiring as well. But I appreciate that we all have our chosen
muses.

