I’m sitting here writing this on my new Intel Macbook, 4GB of RAM and 256MB of video-memory, coming from a 4-year old PPC iBook with 1GB of RAM and 32MB of video-memory. The latter is the very definition of the principle I’m talking about. From the beginning, I’ve had to find creative solutions to doing my work and it’s been incredibly rewarding. I’ve yet to experience a boundary to the Macbook’s abilities. Having total freedom is exhausting. It encourages exploration, rather than getting things done, and it leads to exhaustion. No matter how far you try to go, you’re still inside that box.

I’ve been engaged in three funding proposals in the last two months. The first, ok, more of a business-plan competition than a funding application. The second, applying for a government grant. The third, applying for a large venture capital investment. Of these three, the grant application was my least favourite and I loved the VC application process. Why?

We have an undefined amount of time to apply for the government grant. We had to follow a template with ultra-confusing headings (e.g. I have three sections that want me to describe the market… am I supposed to do it thrice?). And the total had to be no more than 25 pages.

We found out about the VC option very late in the game, 24 hours before the deadline in fact. We had to fill out a webform, which was in total ca. 8 chapters. Each section had a character-limit (not word), ranging from 100 to 4000. One section for the market and business model = 4000 characters. What the company does = 100 characters. A simple form to fill in the finances, focussing on the key-figures only (revenues, EBIT, equity) which forced us to do all of the complicated calculations for ourselves, and a section for what we wanted to give away of the company and why. Instead of doing an unlimited amount of writing, we used whatever extra time we had to discuss the problems and solutions.

I wrote the 8-page piece for the competition in two hours. Because that’s all the time I had left, after handing in the VC proposal that same day. It forced me to focus on the essentials and nothing more.

It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about a productivity-tool like a laptop, making a startup survive, raising kids, educating people, boundaries are the key to ultra-focussed, ultra-creative solutions to the problem at hand. Giving people total freedom rarely leads to the right results; it makes life easier to both in the very short-term. In the long-term it definitely creates more overhead, as you’re constantly chasing after those that you gave the freedom to. “Kid, it’s been a month, where are you now?” “I’m on the introduction, but I have all the time in the world, right?” Kid, for your sake, I hope not.

The end.
Vincent

P.S. looking for the right picture lead to this article on the same topic.

Audience: How do you set yourself boundaries? I’d love to know!

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