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.
1. Background
How did I understand what the load bearing constraint was behind my career pivot? I think it all started in my first year of law school.
That first semester at Northwestern, I worked harder than I ever did at anything else in my life. I read every single case; highlighted the facts, holdings, etc.; built meticulous outlines; bought all the supplements (I had an unlimited budget for E&Es). By the time finals came round I felt thoroughly prepared.
Unfortunately, my grades told a different story.
So the following semester, I went back to basics. I asked for meetings with my professors & walked through my exam answers, understood where they broke down, and asked what I should do differently. The feedback was consistent: stop passively studying and start simulating the finals experience. Do practice exams under timed conditions. Write the answers. Then go back and analyze what you wrote and where your reasoning failed.
So that’s exactly what I did. And guess what? Second semester my grades improved, despite actually working less hard than I did the first semester.
Turns out that all the highlighting & outlining had felt like preparation. The practice exams felt uncomfortable and exposed. But only one of them was actually building toward the outcome that mattered. That is the pattern I keep coming back to.
In almost any system, there is a load-bearing constraint: the thing that actually determines the outcome. And there is everything else, which can feel rigorous and necessary but doesn’t move the number that matters. The hard part is not the execution. The hard part is correctly identifying which is which, because the work that feels most like progress is often not the work that produces it.1
2. The Load-Bearing Constraint
It would be convenient to blame the law school failure mode on lack of awareness. But when I think back, I remember people telling me to do practice exams. I knew. I just didn’t do it. The hard thing was obvious. It was also uncomfortable, time-consuming, and humbling. So I found other things to do that felt productive.
That’s usually how it works. Most people, in most contexts, have a sense of what the hard thing is. The problem isn’t ignorance. It’s that the work that actually produces results is unpleasant to do, easy to defer, and hard to justify in the moment. So it waits.
In law school, at least you have professors to tell you what matters. Nobody is going to do that for you in a business. The differentiating activity, the “hard thing” in your market (the equivalent of doing practice exams) is something you have to figure out yourself.
Example from my sales career
Having seen this pattern play out at three different scaling startups, the same dynamic shows up every time. Many sales reps believe their closing ability is the load-bearing constraint, and that it’s hard to find.
Sometimes that’s true. A rep who can build trust quickly, navigate a complex buying process, and close in a competitive situation is genuinely valuable and not easy to find. But sometimes the closing ability is less rare than it appears.
The tell is whether the environment was doing the work. When you’re at a company with strong inbound lead flow and a recognized brand, closing feels like the skill. But take that same rep and put them somewhere with thin pipeline and no brand, and the results often tell a different story. The leads were doing the heavy lifting. Closing the deal was just the last step.
So how do you identify whether something is actually the load-bearing constraint? A few questions worth asking:
Can many people with similar backgrounds do it?
Can it be hired for reliably?
Does the skill transfer across environments?
If the answer to those is yes, it is probably not the constraint. The question is never whether the sales rep can close deals; it’s how hard it is to find someone else who closes just as well.
This is why you should pay attention to other organizations
If you look around your market and see that everyone struggles with the same thing, that is a strong signal you are looking at the load-bearing constraint. In startup sales, that’s usually reliable pipeline/lead generation—not closing ability. Hiring a bunch of “strong closers” likely won’t get you the results you want.
Again, just like in law school: if every student is highlighting cases and outlining everything and still struggling on exams, those activities are probably not the bottleneck. They’re not the load-bearing constraint.2
The true source of leverage is wherever the scarce, non-commoditized work lives, and that is almost always upstream. Every system has a load-bearing constraint: the one step that actually determines the outcome. Everything else can be optimized, staffed for, outsourced.3
3. The Leadership Obligation
Identifying the load-bearing constraint is one thing, translating it into organizational behavior is the leadership one. And there, the stakes are much higher.
I’ll use an example from GTM/sales to illustrate what I mean:
Individual sales reps gravitate toward legible work. And the most legible metric in any sales organization is revenue. Which is why reps fight over inbound leads and easy opportunities: when they close them, they generate revenue—the result is visible and the credit is clear. It appears they are valuable. And in a narrow sense, they are.
But the system rarely rewards the difficult-to-measure but far more valuable early indicators: the quality of outreach, the discipline of qualification, the work of building pipeline from scratch in an unresponsive market. These are harder to track, slower to show results, and easy to deprioritize.
And yet if everyone focused on them, the business would be in a fundamentally stronger position.
This is the leadership failure. No one is doing this maliciously. It’s that the organization leadership has not been able to translate the illegible hard thing into something measurable, hireable, coachable, and compensated. The organization defaults to optimizing what it can see.
Key corollary:
The more senior you are, the more your job is thinking: specifically, thinking about what actually matters so that the people working hardest are not working hardest for nothing. Your teammates are grinding. They are doing everything asked of them, often heroically. The question is whether you have given them the right hill to climb.
What good leadership actually requires: identify the constraint with specificity, translate it into something measurable and coachable, build incentive structures and hiring profiles around it, and protect the team’s time and energy for that thing above all others. Then, when the constraint shifts, do the diagnostic again.
4. Conclusion: Slow Down To See Clearly
This is my message to leaders: The individual contributor’s job is to execute well. Your job is to make sure that execution is aimed at the right thing. These are fundamentally different jobs, and yours requires a different kind of work and a certain way of approaching problem.
Your most valuable work doesn’t show up on a timesheet. It doesn’t generate a visible output. It will sometimes look, from the outside, like you are digging into irrelevant details, connecting abstract ideas, and thinking more than executing.
Do it anyway.
The most important investment a leader can make is time spent observing the system before optimizing inside it. Step out of execution mode and ask: what is the actual load-bearing constraint right now? Is the team working on it? Are the incentives aligned to it? This is not a quarterly planning exercise. It is an ongoing discipline.
Two important questions worth building into your diagnostic process:
Where does everyone else consistently fall short?
This is harder to answer than it sounds. Competitors don’t publish their GTM/sales failures. Legal teams at other companies don’t talk about their struggles. The answer requires inference: off-the-record conversations, pattern recognition across interactions, understanding the why behind where the industry struggles, not just the what.
Resist the temptation to copy the moves of whoever looks most successful. The load-bearing constraint for a mature, well-resourced market leader is completely different from the one for a small scaling upstart. Their current constraints are not your current constraints. You need a mental model built from first principles, not from mimicking someone else’s motion.
Where are your people spending disproportionate time, and what is the ROI of that activity?
If your team is grinding hardest on a low-return activity, you have missed the forest for the trees and are rowing hard to stay in place. The goal is to find the valuable gap: the constraint that is hard, that matters, and that the market hasn’t solved.
Identifying this requires more than dashboards. You have to talk to everyone: your team, your customers, your partners. Seek out the scuttlebutt, the off-hand frustrations, the patterns that don’t show up in any report. This is itself the illegible non-scalable leadership work.
It is actually the most diagnostic thing you can do. Feed everything into your mental model. The model is never finished. It gets revised as the market moves and the business matures.
For leaders of legal departments the question is similar: where is the team spending its time, and is it on the work that actually reduces risk and enables the business? If the team is buried in routine contract review while consequential business decisions are being made without legal at the table, that is a constraint misidentification problem. The most important activity rarely comes from knowing more law or working 100-hour weeks. It comes instead from the business partners who will tell you, early on—before problems arise, where they actually need help.4
The goal isn’t to work harder or smarter in the abstract. It’s to ensure that the hardest, smartest work is aimed at the right thing. A leader who does this well gives their team something more valuable than a tight process or a well-resourced budget: they give them the confidence that the hill they are climbing is the right hill.
Everything else is just tidying the house.
Tying this back to my career pivot—the load bearing constraint for finding meaningful work wasn’t “how do I find the perfect job posting.” It was “what type work should I be doing for the next 40 years?” This is why I always recommend to lawyers interested in a pivot to stop searching for the perfect job on LinkedIn; instead you should figure out what type of work you were meant to do (see my previous piece of Game Selection) and then move decisively and aggressively in that direction.
Another example from personal finance: Building net worth is a goal most people share early in their careers. And the natural instinct is to focus on investing: picking the right funds, optimizing allocation, reading about returns. It feels like the sophisticated move. It’s what professional investors do.
But early in your career, investment returns are not the load-bearing constraint. Savings rate is. And savings rate is almost entirely determined by one thing: how much you earn relative to what you spend. A 20% return on a small portfolio is a rounding error compared to what happens if you earn significantly more, spend the same, and put the difference away consistently.
The hard, valuable work at that stage is not optimizing your portfolio. It is becoming dramatically more valuable professionally so that the gap between income and expenses widens.
This is one of the most common scenarios facing founder CEOs. Your conversion rates look weak. Reps are not turning leads into revenue at high enough rates. The natural response is to hire a new VP of Sales, implement a sales methodology, coach the reps, and build out training infrastructure.
But before going down that path, consider whether weak conversion is actually a symptom of a pipeline problem. If your reps are genuinely capable closers, and you know this anecdotally from watching them work, then the conversion numbers may have nothing to do with sales acumen. You simply do not have enough quality leads to work with.
Weaker leads produce weaker conversion rates even with excellent reps. The data points at the sales team. The real problem is upstream.
All of those interventions are relatively straightforward to execute. Doing the difficult work of expanding pipeline with quality leads is not. That asymmetry is exactly why the wrong bottleneck gets fixed first. The solvable problem gets solved. The hard problem waits.
This pattern is especially visible in in-house legal teams managing high contract volume. The team is busy, turnaround times are tracked, redlines go out, deals close. By every visible measure, the function is performing.
But the load-bearing constraint is upstream: which contracts are entering the pipeline, with which counterparties, on which deal structures, and whether legal is involved early enough to shape any of that. A team that reviews contracts quickly but inherits bad deals is optimizing the wrong thing. The throughput looks healthy. The risk profile does not improve.
The work that addresses the real constraint, getting involved before the contract arrives, influencing which deals get pursued, building the commercial playbook that reduces downstream complexity, is illegible. It looks like meetings and relationships and conversations that don’t produce a visible work product. So it gets crowded out by the reviewable, trackable, completable work that fills the queue every morning.
There is also a second-order version of this problem worth naming. Some in-house teams measure themselves on cycle time: how fast a contract moves from intake to signature. Faster is better, the thinking goes.
But cycle time optimization can actually mask the real constraint. If legal is being looped in at the wrong stage, getting faster at reviewing the wrong contracts just means the business makes bad decisions more efficiently. The constraint isn’t speed. It is positioning: being involved early enough that legal judgment actually shapes outcomes rather than just documenting them.
What does the real work actually look like? It means developing genuine fluency in the industry the business operates in. Understanding what the commercial team is trying to accomplish and why. Getting comfortable with the KPIs that drive business decisions, not just the legal risk factors. It means showing up in rooms where the business conversations are happening well in advance of the contracting process. Maybe you need to go to industry conferences instead of legal ones.
That can feel counterintuitive. Going to legal conferences are comfortable: you are among peers, the content is familiar, and the expertise you’ve spent years building is front and center. But those rooms are full of lawyers talking to lawyers. The business partners you need to understand are somewhere else. Finding them, and earning credibility with them on their terms, is the hard thing. It is also the thing that determines whether legal ever gets a seat at the table before the decision is made.