The load bearing constraint
A framework for finding what actually drives outcomes
Last week I wrote about a career pivot I made almost ten years ago. What I didn’t focus on was the part that actually made it work. The easy part was the job search itself. What determined the outcome had been accumulating for years before that:
Failed entrepreneurship
Experiments with different kinds of work through volunteer opportunities and variety of jobs
A lot of reading and thinking with no particular destination in mind
Honest conversations with my wife about personal finances.
None of it looked like progress. It produced nothing visible for a long time, and in fact looked like indulgent exploration. But all of it built the conviction that made decisive action possible when my moment came.
That slow, invisible accumulation was the hard thing. The job search was just the execution.
There is almost always a hard thing and an easy thing. The easy thing is visible, measurable, and comfortable. The hard thing is slow, ambiguous, and almost impossible to justify to anyone watching. And yet the hard thing is almost always the one that matters.
The load bearing constraint.
That’s what this essay is about: how to find it, why we avoid it, and why it’s imperative for you to find out what it is if you lead a team. If you’re a leader, this is addressed to you directly.
But if you’re an individual contributor at any level, understanding this will help you see what good leadership looks like, and what you have every right to expect from the people above you.
