The book’s main idea is that constraints can be good for us while too much freedom bad. I share his views. But since I’ve came across many of the stories and ideas previously, this book doesn’t bring too much new insights for me. His recent podcasts or interviews are good places to get the gist of the book.
Excerpts:
Years after her Olympic gold, Taormina wrote a short reflection about her Management 577 class for a book about applications of the theory of constraints. The benefit of the process, she wrote, “is the identification of core problems and a logical way to find a win-win solution.” When her athletic career ended, Taormina wrote a well-regarded book on developing a powerful swimming stroke. Tellingly, in the introduction she wrote that swimmers often work on things “that have minimal to zero impact on their times, because they were never accurately told what is most important.” Hunting for bottlenecks isn’t rocket science, but we typically don’t do it in a systemic way.
[On Allende’s routine] Her year, she says, actually starts on January 7, with a ritual of clearing and silencing. That’s when she prepares the room for the next day. She cleans out everything connected to the previous projects…The next day, she lights a candle–which she will blow out at the end of each session–and begins. Her life “turned outward,” as she calls it, ends: no more lectures, or trips for book promotion, or being surrounded by people. She will turn down six-figure checks to give a forty-five-minute talk. Overnight, her energetic world becomes quiet.
She needs the silence. Without it, she cannot hear the voices that she channels onto the page…On January 8, she starts by sitting alone, silent, for several hours, as the noise and confusion of the rest of life fade away. Sometimes it takes weeks before she writes anything that she intends to keep, but it always comes, eventually…The January 8 ritual had brought her back again, and again and again thereafter. Now in her ninth decade of life, she still has a new bestseller out about every eighteen months.
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