Limiting Factor

## Limiting factor → units\*hierarchies

1. the more units can be removed from one hierarchy before it starts to become a limiting factor, the lower the worth per unit (usually)

## Why Your Limiting Factor Should Be Your Top Priority

### Abstract

A limiting factor is something that prevents other processes to happen at all, or to a certain degree.

**An example of a limiting factor in fitness is,** when you do pull ups your limiting factor could be your grip, or maybe your upper back. The thing is, when you are doing pull ups with the goal of strengthening your upper back, but your limiting factor is your grip strength, you won’t train your upper back as effectively as when your limiting factor was your upper back.

**So what do you do?** You do extra exercises to train your grip strength in order to not make it a limiting factor anymore. In this chapter, I want to give more examples on the importance of developing your limiting factors (including those outside fitness) in order to give your development a bigger boost.

### Example: doing pull ups without working on your limiting factor

So what happens when you want to grow your upper back through pull ups, but your grip strength holds you back and you don’t work on your grip strength specifically? Well, your grip strength, as it is a limiting factor and is used during pull ups, will grow over time even if you don’t do grip exercises separately. Your goal, growing your upper back, however, won’t grow as fast because it is held back by your limiting factor, grip strength.

**I am trying to say that you don’t have to work on your limit factors *per se*,** the things will catch up (hopefully), and working on your limiting factors does speed up development, but it also requires more time and energy. So it’s not always a must.

### Example: time as a limiting factor, long-term > short-term

Let’s say you are studying hard or working hard, but time seems to be a limiting factor i.e. you can’t finish your projects within the time given. Well, what do you do? First, we have to remind ourselves to not **sacrifice the future for a “better” present.** It has to be the opposite, namely to sacrifice the present for a better future. Examples of that rule can be saving money for retirement or doing fitness (whether you like it or not **in the present**) in order to still have a fit body well after your 60s.

Now, **extreme examples of sacrificing the future for a better present,** are things like gaming all day or partying all day (although this depends on your life goals), or even smoking tobacco.

So again, you are studying or working hard, but time is a limiting factor. **Sometimes, it is a good thing to step back, earn a bit less money or take a break from your studies, while keeping in mind that this is a temporary thing, because we don’t want to sacrifice our futures for a “better” present.** Why do we have to step back? Because just as working on your grip strength requires extra exercises besides pull ups, which in turn requires more time and energy, so it is with finding ways to be able to do your study or job within a certain given amount of time.

Maybe you are learning the wrong way i.e. not knowing how to learn or maybe you are (lightly) depressed, bad sleep, etc. All kinds of possible limiting factors.

### Examples of “objective” limiting factors

1. **Lack of** time;
2. Energy;
3. Money;
4. (Mental) health;
5. Muscle group strength e.g. grip;
6. Knowledge.

### Examples of “subjective” limiting factors

1. **Lack of** (life) purpose;
2. Curiosity;
3. Motivation;
4. Discipline;
5. Confidence;
6. Body-image.

So these are all kinds of limiting factors, but what is important is to **discover your limiting factors,** and work on them one at a time. You could also try to imagine how much that limiting factor is holding you back and how much it would boost your development if it were no longer a limiting factor.

**A lack of life purpose as a limiting factor can cause all kinds of things,** like stress, depression, insecurity, motivation, etc. and just working on that can do wonders. Many people seem to underestimate the negatives of a lack of life purpose.

### Limiting factor versus weaknesses

So I actually prefer saying something is a “limiting factor” rather than something is a “weakness” because it reminds me of the concept of what a limiting factor is in certain fields such as biology, namely something that **affects a lot of things as well as preventing certain processes to occur at all.** When I say to myself “confidence is a weakness of mine” I do think of how it affects certain situations like approaching girls, but it doesn’t cause me to think *automatically* of the idea how that weakness affects much more than that.

It’s somewhat the same as changing the words “multiple personality disorder” into “dissociative personality disorder” (something which officially happened). The latter wording just feels and **is** much more accurate to describe the concept i.e. we all have “multiple personalities” because we aren’t the same in any different environment, but we aren’t necessarily “dissociating” (I hope I described this well). This reminds me of the following quote:

> “I am not who you think I am;
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> I am not who I think I am;
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> I am who I think you think I am ”
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> ― Cooley, Inscriptions: Prairie Poetry
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See for more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social\_mirror\_theory — *Social mirror theory*

### Afterword

So even though the concept of limiting factor is somewhat the same as naming your weaknesses, I still hope that it made some more neural connections between different ideas and concepts as well as providing more depth.

## Finding your limiting factor(s)

The first step is to define your goal. Then write down all the requirements for that goal and cross them one by one until you got the weakest one out of all of them.

Maybe it won't be the most limiting bottleneck, but it gets close.

## Limiting factor → learning

Try to reduce/remove the limiting factor in learning (e.g. memory/processing speed, etc.)

Aim → increasing manipulable information → intelligence

E.g. don't try to increase memory when it's not the most multi-order limiting factor.