The Campbell Academy Blog (82)

Rate limiting factors

I snuck into the practice last week, even though I'm supposed to be off work, to have a couple of meetings with external people I wanted to see, and we were chatting about rate limiting factors.

Once you get to a certain situation in your life, then pretty much everything is a project: raising kids, working on your marriage, building your house, building a business, training for a marathon, running a football team or any other thing that you might think of.

If you accept that that is true, you'll understand that all of your projects have a potential outcome and endpoint (if they don't have an endpoint, they're not a project. They're something else).

Once you realise that, you understand that there is a series of steps to get to to get as close to the endpoint that you visualise as you can, and you'll realise that along the way, there will be rate limiting factors.

Rate limiting factors are the things that stop you in your tracks or slow you down on your route towards the goal, the vision, the north star that you've created, from the most important thing that day or at that time in that project, because there is no point then in dreaming about the outcome if you're not going to do something about the rate-limiting factor. After all, if you don't fix it, you will never get there, which becomes the work.

It's always easy to cycle downhill.

It's much harder to cycle uphill with the wind in your face and an anvil tied behind your bike.

That day, I had been travelling to work in the car on the same route I always go. It takes me four minutes or so to commute to work, but I can get delayed by up to 25%, taking me five minutes, depending upon the junction at the top of the hill beside Nottingham Knight Island.

Basically, there is a small snake through junction, which takes you onto the two-lane fast A52, but you have to hold up at that junction before you can pull onto the lane before the roundabout.

As often is the case, a car was in front of me on the way to work. It was my rate-limiting factor.

It didn't matter that I could see right down the A52 as to whether the road was clear, and it didn't matter that I could see in front of the car, and the road was clear there.

I couldn't get anywhere until that car moved.

My urge is to watch the road to my right, not paying any attention to the car in front of me, but what happens there is you get a false start and run into the car in front of you when you think that they will move and they don't. That is your rate limiting factor.

All I had to do was sit and wait until the car went, and then I was free to make my own decision to go.

Not understanding rate limiting factors and not paying attention to them leads to us running into the back of them, causing damage to everything and bringing our progress to a halt.