Forcing Functions
And the power of constraints...
Hey Everyone! 👋🏻
Happy Sunday, and welcome back to another edition of The Gunn Show. Hope you all had a fantastic week as always.
It was another good one on my end after spending the back-end of the week at our hitting camp out in Arizona, which served as the final PD specific road-marker for the 2024 season. With the MiLB dead period kicking off yesterday, it’s officially time for the baseball calendar to dial the pace back a couple of notches as we head into the upcoming holiday season. There is still plenty of work ahead - specifically in regards to off-season roster construction and 2025 planning - but I know all of us are looking forward to the opportunity to reset and recharge with family and friends over the coming months.
And yet while the winter months of the baseball calendar come baked in with plenty of moments for recovery, they also present countless more opportunities for something equally important: growth. Because at the end of the day, the off-season is about two dual concepts existing with a constant tension between them - rest & work. It’s something we stress heavily for both our players and staff each year at this time, namely that you must find a balance between refilling the tank and starting to put your foot back on the gas in preparation for the year to come.
Why? Because one of the surest truths about sports at the highest level is that the margins are incredibly thin. Talent is merely the price for admission, and the corollary that follows is that the work you do to maximize that talent is often where the point of separation lies. It’s a hard truth that applies equally whether you are a coach or a player, in your first year or your 20th - but it’s one you must accept the reality of if your goal is to win when competing against the elite. As such, you have to develop a productive paranoia that keeps you focused and moving forward - because if you think someone, somewhere is outworking you - then they probably are.
As such, I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how to get the most out of this unique time in the year. How do you keep moving forward at a time of the year when the environment is more relaxed, where the set of possible choices available to you is more abundant than at any other point in the year
Today’s piece is an attempt to share how I think about solving this problem through the lens of what I call Forcing Functions. It’s a story of vision and focus, of constraints and choices. And ultimately, a story about the power of rules.
Let’s get to it.
- CG
Forcing Functions
Scene Setting
If you are plugged into the world of athlete training at all, you’ve likely become familiar in recent years with a trendy coaching concept: environmental design.
For the uninitiated, the term when used in a sports context represents a newer philosophy for how we can design training environments to get the most out of our athletes. Whereas traditional athletic development has relied heavily on “old-school coaching” - which one can think of simply as “direct coach to player feedback”, similar to what you would see in the movies - environmental design takes a slightly different perspective. Rather than choosing to place priority on the coaching that occurs within the course of the training session, environmental design instead zooms out to focus on the conditions that lead to those coaching opportunities in the first place. Get the system right first, it says, and everything else will fall into place as you go from there.
The philosophy behind this method of training is built on sound logic for how the world operates, specifically is it relates to the recognition that an order of operations exists - environments lead to actions, not the other way around. It’s a hard truth to grasp considering the premium we humans place on the value of “free will” and “choice”, but it is a truth that deals with reality as it is rather than as we’d like it to be.
Why? For a simple reason: the concepts of choices (which lead to your actions) and environments are inextricably linked. Every environment comes baked in with a set of rules or norms, ones that naturally determine the behavior of the people operating within them. These ‘environmental constraints’ in turn make certain actions more acceptable than others depending on the situation, like how crying might be okay for a baby in a nursery but not the best strategy for you during a 1 on 1 with your boss. Regardless of whether you are operating as an athlete, professional, or everyday human, every action you take will be constrained by the rules of the environment in which you take them.
And so, both a challenge and promise follow.
First, the challenge: your environment will shape you, whether you want it to or not. Rules exist for a reason, and you can’t out-will yourself past them any more than you can spit in the face of gravity to take off in flight. To ignore them is merely a recipe for disappointment, so do so at your own peril.
But while environmental rules are a reality, we’d be remiss to neglect the fact that they come packed with powerful potential. Because not only do they constrain - they also clarify. By narrowing the set of possibilities, rules can give us clear direction for getting what we want out of our lives. And when used properly to design your environment, they can create the conditions that make achievement of your goals inevitable.
We underestimate both the power and necessity of setting our own constraints; of crafting our own environments. Too often we go through life on autopilot, living according to the rules of an environment that someone else designed for themselves yet we just happen to find ourselves trapped in the middle of. This is a call to change that - to become the coach practicing “environmental design on your own life”.
Let’s talk about what that looks like.
Theory
To start, you have to recognize that someone else doesn’t always make the rules for you. There will certainly be moments where you have to play someone else’s game, times where you have to do your best to adapt to the situation you find yourself in. But it is important to realize that when it comes to your everyday life you end up having a say much more often than you think. And in those times, the more control you exert over your inputs, the more control you will have over your outputs.
But to do so requires setting the right rules for yourself, ones that drive you closer to the things you want rather than taking you further away. And that’s not always easy.
So when it comes down to designing environments, I find a concept I learned during my days masquerading as a college math major to be instructive: forcing functions. They come from the differential equations branch of mathematics and can be described simply as the following: external functions that drive a system towards a desired outcome.
Every forcing function shares three key components:
They are Additive: They revolve around adding something to a pre-existing system - some new variable, rule, or constraint that combines and interacts with the things that were already present.
They Change the System: When you add a forcing function to an initial system, it creates some sort of shock to the original conditions that will create a different outcome than without it.
The Change They Induce is Inevitable: Forcing functions create an inevitable outcome, moving that initial system in a predictable direction upon being added.
Essentially, forcing functions create ‘non-optional constraints’ on a system by injecting a new variable, almost as if they are saying “I know what this system was before I got here, but none of that matters now - I’m making the rules now.” Injecting one is akin to adding a new ‘top dog’ to the equation, something that changes and supersedes all the prior rules of the game. By simply adding something new to the equation, they give you the power to change an environment in an entirely predictable direction.
Forcing functions are common in many walks of life, especially as they relate to the natural rules of the universe encapsulated by physics. When I drop a pen from a building, I know it will fall to the ground because gravity serves as a forcing function on its motion. Something similar happens when I squeeze a bottle full of water hard enough, knowing it will explode with enough effort thanks to the forcing function of pressure.
But they exist in plenty of other areas of life too, driving human behavior in specific ways. Take deadlines, for example, which force people to accomplish work in time frames they would likely not in lieu of them. Or speeding tickets, which incentivize driving habits to operate within certain speed ranges on the road.
We could go on and on, but you get the point: forcing functions change the rules from one structure to another, instantaneously. So regardless of the domain, we can think about them in the following manner.
Natural Behavior + Forcing Function = New, Predictable Behavior
When taken in the context of human action, this is a powerful model because forcing functions can shape behavior without requiring constant decision making or willpower. When you inject appropriately powerful constraints, you have no choice but to adhere to them. So by merely designing the right environment with the right rules, we can in turn force our outcomes in a pre-specified direction. Doing the work up front can in turn help us make our goals inevitable.
But unfortunately, it is not enough to recognize that we can use forcing functions as an advantage in our lives. We have to take it a step further and understand that we must use them if we are to have any chance of accomplishing our goals.
This is because of a modern conflict: humans thrive under environments of constrained choice, yet we now have more available than ever. It has become harder than ever to make the right choice precisely because of all the other options on the table, resulting in a modern inertia that keeps us mired in a quicksand staring out at our goals far off into the distance.
It is thus as if the world has its own forcing functions in place. And if we want to find a way to surmount them, we have to start enacting some of our own.
Practice
So how do we put them into practice? It’s actually quite simple: we work backwards, from the end to the beginning.
To start building forcing functions into your life, you have to live in the future and ask yourself what it is you want to accomplish. Remember, the entire purpose of a forcing function is to make your desired end state inevitable. At their core they are merely constraints put on an environment meant to influence it to a specific outcome - so in order to ensure you are enacting the right ones, you have to know what your desired end state is in the first place.
That is for you to find out, but once you come to a conclusion you can start aligning the rules in your life to those goals through the lens of the following question:
What rules, were I to put them in place for my life, would make it a near certainty that I would accomplish my end goal?
I’ve been on this journey of tying forcing functions into my life for the past year, so let me provide a couple of personal examples to bring this all into context.
Back in December of 2023, I went through my annual goal-setting process and outlined a number of things I wanted to accomplish over the course of 2024. At the top of that list were the following two items: I wanted to be in the best physical shape I’d been in in my life (even better than my college playing days), and I wanted to start a blog so I could learn how to write and communicate my ideas effectively. To bring each of these goals from mythical targets into reality, I decided I’d put into place some rules for my daily, weekly, and monthly environments to ensure I was making progress towards accomplishing them.
For my health goals, I mapped out the following:
Big Picture Checkpoint Goals → 14% Body Fat DEXA by July 15th, 2024; 75 Hard Challenge completion during Spring Training; 3x yearly bloodwork commitment
Weekly/Monthly Rules → 4x weekly weight lifting sessions; 2x weekly Z2 cardio sessions; 1x weekly Z5 cardio session; Bi-weekly health review (Whoop Biometrics, Weight, Body Composition)
Daily Rules x Checkpoints → 5AM wakeup; 180g protein daily; 30g+ fiber daily; <200g carbs daily
My writing goals followed a similar structure:
Big Picture Checkpoint Goal → 26 articles published by EOY
Weekly/Monthly Rules → Minimum 1 article published every 2 weeks; Track habit execution weekly
Daily Rules x Checkpoints → 120 min writing per week minimum; 30 min daily reading
It was a pretty robust and ambitious roadmap, but as I sit here today I feel pretty confident in saying that it worked. From a health perspective, I was able to complete two 75 Hard Challenges and measured at 14.8% BF at my DEXA in August - down about 6% from when I first started measuring in February of 2023. My bloodwork has been great under the hood as well. On the writing front, I surpassed my goal of 26 pieces way back in July. We are at 46 total and counting, and not slowing down anytime soon.
I share this not to say that I’ve been perfect - far from it, in fact. There have been multiple points in times where I’ve fallen off track slightly, not quite hit my weekly or monthly goals. But the broader direction of the progress arrow has undoubtedly been in the direction I wanted it to go - and I owe that exclusively to the rules I point in place all the way back in December of last year. They’ve constrained the actions I’ve taken throughout the year, forcing me to make sacrifices on the things I thought I wanted for the things I know I wanted.
And from my viewpoint, this is one of the most powerful components of forcing functions: not that they optimize for perfection, but rather that they optimize for inevitability even in a world where perfection is impossible. Gravity is a perfect example of this feature - you can fight it for some point of time, but it will eventually take its course once your energy runs out. Human behavior is no different - with the right set of rules in place, you ensure you stay between the bumper guards for long enough to ultimately take down the pins.
Your Turn
So to bring this to a close and tie it all together, I wanted to present the following question:
Where in your life can you start implementing forcing functions to put your behavior on auto-pilot and make accomplishing your goals an inevitability?
Answering that question will necessitate a little introspection through the lens of the future, the present, and the past. Where are you now? Where do you want to go? And what has been holding you back?
With those answers in hand, you can then shift your focus to the power of rules and starting thinking about yourself as a coach practicing environmental design on your own life.
Because at the end of the day, forcing functions are either working for you or against you. Design them intentionally and you’ll find that success isn’t a question of effort or willpower - it’s one of inevitability.
Outstanding