Using Constraint, Revisited
I was going to just repackage an old post today but found it far more interesting to have a conversation with it
📎 Compare: original 2020 post (published 3 July 2020).
Almost six years ago, in the long flat middle of lockdown, I wrote a post called Using Constraint.
The argument was simple. The artists and athletes we love most are usually the ones who had less, and the constraint wasn’t the obstacle to their best work — it was the cause of it. My examples included Bon Iver alone in a cabin, little Leicester City taking down the Premier League giants, Roger Bannister turning thirty minutes at lunch into the four-minute mile, a bottle episode of Breaking Bad garnering critical acclaim, and Ben Ryan alchemising Fiji’s lack of ‘stuff’ into Olympic gold.
I was going to just give it a light refresh and send it to you. I still think the piece works to some degree. What I didn’t notice at the time is that the piece wasn’t really about the people in it. It was about myself.
When I wrote that post I was a recently retired rugby player with a half-built idea of what came next and an audience of approximately no one. The blog was a portfolio nobody had asked for. I wrote Using Constraint pretending it was an essay, but now I read it, it sounds like I was trying to convince myself I could do something with less — with the affected nonchalance of someone hoping you can’t tell how much is riding on it.
Which, if you go back and read it, is the exact Bannister move I praised in the middle of the piece. He said he,
‘developed the pose of apparent indifference, to hide the tremendous enthusiasm which I felt for running, from the day I set foot in Oxford.’
There’s a word for that, one that’s now commonly applied to men’s fashion — sprezzatura, effort disguised as ease. I was doing the thing while describing the thing, and congratulating other people for it. I thought I was an observer but in fact, I was the observed.
And funnily enough, every constraint I admired in someone else, I had been handed.
I had Justin Vernon’s solitude, except mine was a pandemic. I had Leicester’s lack of credibility. I had Bannister’s shortage of time and resource, and the same choice: ignore the conventional wisdom about how this is supposed to go, or do nothing at all. I had the bottle-episode budget, reflected in an empty room with nothing in it and like Fiji, I battled better-resourced rivals.
And like all of them, I didn’t have the option of waiting for more. There wasn’t going to be more. The rugby wasn’t coming back. The constraint wasn’t going to go away. It was, in fact, the opportunity.
So I used it. Fringes exists because my strange rugby career was the most interesting thing that had ever happened to me and a book was my best and most available form of expression. The newsletter exists because I had no platform and had to build the smallest possible one, one Thursday at a time. Everything else has sprung from a question of what’s the next thing I need and how can I get it. None of it was planned. There was no plan; there was only constraint.
I wrote the original piece in July 2020. By then Fringes had become the No.1 rugby book on Amazon — outselling luminaries of the game while the world sat locked down and reading. That’s a sentence I couldn’t have written back then; I’d have buried it under ‘did alright’. I’d already done the thing but I sat down and wrote a tidy theory about turning loss into work, using five other people as my evidence. The misplaced false modesty of this kind of writing bothers me more now, the stuff of thought-leadership LinkedIn writing and podcast puffery. It’s boring.
Now I feel a little nostalgia for that person, and a little grace. I’d also tell him something I often tell young people when I go into schools to talk to them about books and sport and whatever else.
Be bolder.
The other thing I’d tell him is to stop the listicles and the thought-leadership stuff. I’ve been looking for book concepts and formats I could dovetail with my work with young people and, while I keep alighting on similar stuff to my original piece, I find them underwhelming. Where’s the story? Where’s the colour? Where’s the life?
Where’s the fun?
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