Let's say you have a goal: to "drive my car as fast as possible". So, you head out to a lonely stretch of road, or maybe a wide Interstate, and you let 'er rip. Let's say the particular car you drive gets up to 130 MPH and goes no higher (you've got the gas pedal mashed to the floor): you've hit the physical limit of the vehicle. In this case, a limit is a measurement or place that you can go no further. Now, let's say you work on the car, make it lighter, correct some aerodynamic deficiencies, etc. and you take it out again and this time you reach 135 MPH; you've found a way to exceed your prior limit. In both instances, you reached your goal.

Take the above example, but this time, the best road you can find is not completely straight, and you have to slow down for curves (or hills, or whatever) and the best you can do is 120 MPH. You have not hit the physical limit of the car but rather encountered a barrier to your goal of going faster. The fix for this is to find a better road. :-) In this case a barrier is a reality that is keeping you from your goal.

Finally, let's take the above example and change it so that as you start to accelerate on the open road, you come upon two fully-marked police cars in both lanes of the road you are on and they are doing the speed limit; you've hit a "rolling roadblock". There's no getting around this roadblock. It's not a physical limit, or a barrier, you can't work to exceed it, you can't overcome it. It's definitional and finite.

Taking these three in general, we can state any particular goal and then work out what the limits, barriers, and/or roadblocks that might be before us. We can then work on ways to minimize or eliminate them. Making this a principle in how you run your life could be the start of a personal philosophy. In business and industry, it is a recognized process and even a science. In the '50s and '60s it was called "bottlenecking": you looked at the slowest point on the assembly line that was causing you a production limit and then addressed it. Many larger companies have process engineers and mechanical, electrical, and chemical engineers whose sole job is to design around potential/existing bottlenecks. In the '70s and '80s we saw the introduction of TQM (Total Quality Management) which was a defined way to view the total function of the business or line. We even have the Malcolm Baldridge Award: The award focuses on performance in five key areas: Product and process outcomes. Customer outcomes. Workforce outcomes. Leadership and governance outcomes. Financial and market outcomes. Now we have Agile and Lean and Scrum and Six Sigma, etc. which are hyper views of dealing with unknowns, waste, and process/development control.

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