Constraints make you more creative, not less. Here’s proof | David Epstein: Full Interview

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]I'm David Epstein. I'm the author  of the number one New York Times bestseller Range: Why Generalist Triumph in  a Specialized World. And now the new book, Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better.

[00:00:18]Chapter 1, General Magic versus  Pixar. Why constraints are necessary.

[00:00:25]General Magic was a company that was  conceived in the late 80s and founded by a trio of former Apple employees. Two of  them had been designers of the original Mac and the other had this job inside of Apple. His  name was Marc Porat and his job inside of Apple was looking at the future of technology and  he was an absolute visionary internally. Their innovations were legion. I mean they made an early  form of USB. They made the precursors to emojis, virtual keyboards. They created a virtual meeting  space where devices could communicate to carry out tasks and do commerce. And what did they call that  place in 1990? The cloud. Like they were way ahead of all these things. In fact, in one case, they  gave a demonstration of some of their disruptive technology. It happened to be a software modem  in this case to one of their Japanese partners.

[00:01:18]And one of the Japanese engineers started  banging his head on the table. And so they asked, you know, what's wrong? And another one of the  Japanese engineers said, "You have just obsoleted Katoan's division." So this group of people really  saw the future of communications technology.

[00:01:34]And then they formed this massive alliance  that was a 17 company partnership that covered so much of the communications world that their  meetings had to start with an antitrust lawyer listing all the topics that they were not allowed  to discuss. And Marc Porat the CEO started the process to go public raised more and more money  expanded the team expanded the office. And he said his goal in doing that was to create heaven for  engineers where they were free to play and create with the only limits being their imagination.  What more could anyone ask for? He said and as it turned out a little less freedom was the thing  they really needed because they could do anything.

[00:02:14]They did do anything. The project kept growing  and growing and every time someone had an idea for something that would be cool, they made it.  They started missing deadlines because they kept adding everything and everything got bigger and  bigger. They didn't have a clear idea of who their customer was. So they defined their customer  as Joe Six-Pack. And when the product finally did come out, the first product that ran their  operating system was called the Sony Magic Link.

[00:02:37]It was bigger than a phone. It didn't contain a  phone. It was overloaded with so much other stuff.

[00:02:41]It had so many features that the battery life was  terrible. The user experience was choppy. It had a 200page user manual. And it sold about 3,000 units  in 6 months, mostly to people who they knew. And pretty soon the company uh was was disintegrating.  So they just did not keep a boundary on anything they were doing. Something that I think  was emblematic of the problem, there was an engineer named Steve Pearlman and his job at  General Magic was to create a calendar function.

[00:03:08]So he writes a calendar function. It goes from  1904 to 2096. And he checks it in and he thinks he's done. And then one of the company's  leaders comes to him and says, "Hey, Steve, you know, somebody might make apps that go  farther into the future or or historical apps.

[00:03:22]You have to make this this calendar bigger."  And so he redo the calendar and he starts it from year one. So now it goes from year one  into the future. He thinks he's done again.

[00:03:33]And then a member of another team comes to him  and says, "Look, why are you tying this into an arbitrary religious context? You know, starting  at year 1 or year zero. you should start at the beginning of astronomical time. So then he goes  back again, creates a calendar function that starts at the beginning of the universe. If he  had just stuck between 1904 and 2096, it would have been about four lines of code and instead  it ended up being this long project because it expanded like everything did at General Magic and  it was an enormous waste of time and resources.

[00:04:02]They just could not put any constraints on what  they were doing. When I interviewed a lot of the people who worked there, they kept telling me the  biggest challenge was figuring out what not to do.

[00:04:12]What to do and what not to do because they didn't  have a bounding box around what they were doing.

[00:04:18]If General Magic was built for unbridled  freedom, where people could work on literally anything that their minds could  conceive, Pixar was the absolute opposite.

[00:04:29]One of the founders, Ed Catmull, was going into  grad school about the same time as Marc Porat, the CEO of General Magic. And he had a similarly  audacious vision. Ed grew up wanting to be a Disney animator, but he wasn't that great of a  drawer, which is a problem for that. And so he instead set the goal of making the world's first  fully computer animated feature film. And this was incredibly audacious. When he was starting grad  school in the 70s, like the cutting edge was like shapes rotating on a black screen. And yet 20  years later with the release of Toy Story, he did indeed create the world's first fully computer  animated feature film. And then he made it his mission for the rest of his career to create  an organization that could do that repeatedly.

[00:05:14]And you think of Pixar as this just unbridled  imagination, right? Because that's how the products look. But the way he did that was with  the religious implementation of constraints that were like bumpers in a bowling alley channeling  creative ideas into achievement. As Ed says, he thinks ideas abound in organizations. It's a  process for containing them and channeling them that is more rare. And so as examples of some of  the rules that he and his colleagues implemented, they had one called the three pitches  rule, for example, where a director had to bring three different story ideas. They  could not just bring one because when we have one idea, we get anchored on it. And they didn't  want directors to get anchored on their first idea. So they forced them to bring three. And  once those directors once they picked a story, they kept things as small as possible  for as long as possible. They allowed directors and small teams to spend years in story  development. Years refining the core of a story, slicing it away until it was something simple. And  it might seem excessive to allow directors and a small team to spend years in development, but the  costs and complexity only explode once they move into production. So they wanted to keep them small  for as long as possible. And during that time, they'd have dailies where they show their  work on a daily basis and get feedback on it.

[00:06:30]Brain trust meetings where they bring in people  who haven't been seeing the work every day to get outside advice. And when I went to meet with  Ed and we spent uh like 10 straight hours talking about constraints that he had implemented  and he told me about one problem at Pixar that he called the beautifully shaded penny problem. And  this was an issue where directors and animators conscientiousness would actually work against them  and they would end up getting obsessed with say perfecting the shading on a penny in the  background of a scene that viewers would basically never even notice. But they would keep  working at it, working at it, and they'd start losing time and other things that really needed to  be done. And so, fortunately, Pixar came up with a high-tech solution, popsicle sticks velcro-ed to  a wall. And each popsicle stick represented the amount of work that one animator could do in one  week. And they could keep animating that penny if they wanted, but the popsicle sticks would be set  up next to all the different things that needed to be animated. So they could visually see that  if they wanted to keep working on that penny, they had to start taking away popsicle sticks  from some other character that really needed to be animated. And making the constraint visual solved  the problem instantly. In a way, I think this ties back to General Magic. Like their main problem  was not defining a problem they were solving.

[00:07:51]Their customer was Joe Six-Pack. Nobody knew  the guy. They didn't know what he needed. So they never defined a problem they were solving  which meant that there was never a reason to stop, never a reason not to do certain things. And it  actually plays into a really hardwired human bias.

[00:08:08]It's called subtractive neglect bias.  We overlook subtractive solutions even when they're obviously the best solutions. In in  a fun study that demonstrated this, adults were given a Lego structure and they had to balance a  masonry brick on the top of the structure so that it wouldn't crush a Stormtrooper action figure  that was sitting below. And they could add as many Lego blocks to the structure to bolster it as they  wanted. But they had to pay to add those blocks.

[00:08:37]And yet almost everyone added multiple blocks  when just taking one away that was upsetting the balance would have solved the problem for free and  immediately. And that's what happened at General Magic because they didn't put firm constraints in  place. Every time someone had a cool idea, they did it and it just added and got bigger and bigger  and bigger until it lost any sort of core of what they were building, who they were building it  for, when they were going to get it, how much was it going to cost. They didn't put tight limits on  any of those things. So everything just grew and grew and grew because that's how human psychology  works. if you don't put constraints in place.

[00:09:17]The subtraction audit is this idea that we  have to proactively be made to look at things that we can take away because we have a hardwired  cognitive bias always to add to solve problems and never to take away. So let's say if we're talking  about a team, sitting people down, going through all your types of meetings, your processes, your  obligations, listing things, and you will come up with things that exist purely because of momentum,  right? Maybe they served some purpose in the past, but now they're just hanging around and adding  friction because we never take things away.

[00:09:51]List those things and then stop doing one of them.  get together and say, "If I had to kill one thing in the next 90 days, what would it be?" And you'll  find something that has outlived its purpose.

[00:10:02]And for individuals, the same is we're always  adding adding, right? Like everyone keeps a to-do list until it becomes so long that they just have  to like tear it up and and start over again. So, what can you take away? So, let me let me tell you  how my own to-do list process worked. In the past, I would put down the things I had to do in  a day. they'd be overly ambitious because of something called the planning fallacy, which is  we always underestimate how long it takes to get things done. And so I'd carry some of them over  the next day because they didn't get finished.

[00:10:28]And that would add and add until the list got  longer and longer until I would eventually flip it over on my desk because it made me so  anxious to look at it. And then as it got longer, I would just throw it in the garbage can and start  over. And so when I did a subtraction audit, I was looking at what things really need to get done.  And so many of the things on the list were not that important. So now I start each day one thing  at the top of the list that if this gets done, it will have been a good day. Other things  can be a bonus, but one main thing. And by subtracting all that stuff from my to-do list,  it allowed me to focus. So I wasn't multitasking, which meant I was more productive, less stressful,  and I knew the thing to focus on. And so if we want to have personal satisfaction and  contentment, we have to start putting some guard rails around our choices. I got interested in  constraints via a few routes. One of which is that I felt I needed to be better at them in my  own projects, like draw better boundaries around my own amorphous ideas so that I  could actually execute. Also, just after more than a decade of reading tons of psychology  studies, I started to notice all these studies where people would become more creative when they  were given less choice. Like you'd give inventors uh 20 pieces from a set of hundred and they  would make something more creative than if you gave them all 100. or people would be able  to name more white foods in 20 seconds than they could white things. Why the form of a haiku  liberates creativity rather than stifling it.

[00:11:51]So I was really interested in that. And as the  cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham says, you may think your brain is made for thinking, but  it's actually made for preventing you from having to think whenever possible because thinking is  metabolically costly. And so given full freedom, what you will do is go down what scientists call  the path of least resistance. You will reach for solutions that are familiar, that you have seen  before, that you have used before. And so it is in fact essentially impossible to be creative  unless constraints are forced upon you that preclude the previous solutions that you are used  to. Let's walk through three examples of that.

[00:12:32]Early in his career, Theodore  Geel, or aka Dr. Seuss was given a vocabulary list with words for children  and asked if he could pick about 200 words only and write a book with only those from the list.  And he looks at the list and he complains.

[00:12:49]He complains to his wife. He says, "There's  no adjectives. How can I possibly do this?"

[00:12:53]In fine Seussian form, he compared it to  making a strudel without any strudels.

[00:12:59]And then he decides he's just going to take the  first two rhyming words on the list and whatever they are, he's going to write a book focused on  those. And the first two rhyming words are cat and hat. And the rest is history. In fact,  for Green Eggs and Ham, a subsequent book, he wrote that book on a bet that he couldn't  write a book using only 50 words. And obviously, he did so. And because he had limited  vocabulary, it forced him to experiment with rhythm and meter and explore in all  these ways that other writers had not.

[00:13:33]Virginia Wolf is one of the most phenomenal  cases of creative breakthrough coming from forcibly applying constraints to oneself. She  used what the psychologist Patricia Stokes calls prelude constraints. Basically, Wolf saw that she  was stuck in writing in a traditional form, even though the modern world was growing more complex  and needed something different in its novels. And so, what she did was she outlined the traditional  forms of narrative structure and then said, "I'm not allowed to use any of them." And so, she  wrote a book in which even the omniscient narrator did not really know the main character very well.  Even the narrator was searching for that person in the way that we in our own lives have to take bits  and pieces of people to try to understand them.

[00:14:20]And this was her first modernist novel. It  was her breakthrough called Jacob's Room.

[00:14:24]And her next three novels after that experiment  are three of the hundred greatest novels ever written according to the greatest books.org.  So it was by outlining exactly the old way, blocking herself from it, which forced her to  come up with something totally new and that we now call her stream of consciousness. The Japanese  novelist Haruki Murakami, who is an international phenomenon, didn't start writing until his late  20s. And when he started trying, he realized he had a generic style that he didn't really like.  It wasn't unique at all. And so in frustration, he decided to try writing instead of in his  native Japanese in English, which he barely knew, and then reverse translating it back into his  native Japanese. And it gave him this simple, clear, kind of mesmerizing rhythmic style that  was totally his alone. And that's what he's recognized for. And that's why his books  have been translated all over the world.

[00:15:20]So he said it was that forcing that constraint  on himself to write in the simple English he knew and then translating it backward led to the  creation of a completely new and unique style.

[00:15:31]So these are examples that applying constraints to  people even when they're arbitrary often instantly make them more creative. And this ties back to  general magic. General magic was built to give people complete freedom. No constraints only  the limits of the imagination on what people could try to do. Pixar was built in the exact  opposite way. People come with creative ideas and then they layer constraint after constraint  after constraint on top of them to make sure that that creative idea is channeled into something  manageable that they can actually make.

[00:16:08]Chapter 2, the dangers of too much freedom. The  idea of having too much freedom would have been crazy for most of human history where people were  born into a role and had very little freedom to decide how their life would go. But starting  with kind of the industrial revolution that started to change and in fact you can see that  the idea of too much freedom starts to show up as a preoccupation among some of the greatest  thinkers basically starting in the late 19th and then into the 20th century where people like  Kierkegaard is writing about the dizziness of freedom meaning all of a sudden there's all this  choice religion and rulers are structuring less of our lives so it's more up to us or Eric from  writing about the urge to escape from freedom meaning that we don't feel grounded in a way and  so we often look to be controlled in ways that sometimes can be productive or unproductive and  in the late 19th century Emil Durkheim decided to do an analysis of suicide. What Durkheim found  was that it is actually a sociological phenomenon that you could see different social trends  increasing or decreasing rates of suicide.

[00:17:15]For example, when a country underwent an economic  collapse, suicide increased. Not a huge surprise.

[00:17:23]But what he also saw was that when a country went  through an economic boom, suicide also increased.

[00:17:30]Anything that unmoored people from their identity  anchors, the familiar structures they were used to led to an increase in suicide. One of the terms  Durkheim used was enemy which means essentially rulelessness. Whenever society was thrown into  tumult in a way that removed the normal rules and reciprocal obligations between people and  community grounding and meaning. It didn't matter if the economic fortunes were going up or down.  If it removed those layers of structure, it caused more people to be anxious and desperate and and  to take their own lives. And so it was really a completely new way of looking at the phenomenon of  suicide as a sociological phenomenon. But it gets at a much bigger issue which is that the drive for  ever-increasing freedom which seems on its face like it should be an unadulterated good actually  comes with a lot of collateral damage. And we can see that today when the richest and most  free parts of the world, the richest and most free areas in world history at that have these  incredible rates of anxiety and depression that you wouldn't expect if more freedom and choice  made us healthier and improved our well-being.

[00:18:48]Jonathan height, the social psychologist, he's  written several books about human thriving and well-being. And that idea of enemy again  rulelessness runs through every one of his books really. As he told me, it's not healthy for  anyone to have access to everything everywhere all of the time. We are not equipped to have infinite  choice because our brains are comparison engines.

[00:19:11]And so when there are too many choices, when we  are overwhelmed by choice and possibility, we become unable to be happy with our own decisions  because we're always comparing. Right? It's kind of a classic FOMO that's built into our brains,  but it also occurs at a more sociological level.

[00:19:27]And this gets not just to Jonathan Height's  work, but also to the political scientist Robert Putnam's work in bowling alone. So, as  Putnam famously noted, your chance of dying in the next year is cut in half if you join a single  club. Cut in half. Because social integration, being grounded by obligations to other people,  not having total freedom over your own time, having what's called social control of time in  some cases where you have to be in a certain place at a certain time and have certain reciprocal  obligations to other people is hugely important for well-being. I mean, that's what Putnam raised  the alarm about in his book Bowling Alone. that as people, as the title indicates, as people stopped  being in bowling clubs and having collective entertainment and collective regular meeting  times, this dissolution of these dense networks of reciprocal obligation would have tremendous  effects on health, well-being, and longevity.

[00:20:24]That book came out in 2000, and I would say  it looks absolutely prescient in retrospect where we've become more virtual. We're engaged in  what height calls this online, these endless cycle of micro dramas populated with a cast of rotating  characters, a total lack of social norms, few obligations. We we've we've often hyper tailored  our lives so they're totally individualized just for ourselves. And that feels like something you  would want, but it turns out not to help humans thrive. You can actually go back to the Soviet  Union at one time when they tried to change the work week in a certain way to keep factories  operating all of the time. And so they gave people different work weeks with four days of work  and one day weekend. So very rarely did two people have the same work week. So it decoupled people's  schedules and it was a social disaster. They had to completely undo it. Now on the other hand when  there's kind of forced regulation of time like in Sweden you can see that in periods when a lot of  the country is forced to take time off essentially the dispensing of anti-depressants plummets and  it's proportional to the portion of the country that has time off and importantly it's true even  among retired people. So it isn't just about having time for vacation or having time not  to work. It's about the collective use, the collective enforcement of using time in a certain  way. So, we always think we want more choice and more freedom over our own time, but there's a  mountain of evidence showing that we actually want to give up some of our autonomy to sync with  other people, preferably at a large scale because it's tremendously important for a hyper-social  species like humans, uh, to to thrive. I think one of the ways that people have responded to this  seemingly infinite choice in the modern world is to try to optimize more or what psychologists  call maximize to make the best of everything and to make the best decisions. And in fact, we can  see in research that maximizing behavior which is the attempt to evaluate tons of options and and  make the best decision is actually on the rise. So we know that that's increasing as is perfectionism  is increasing in many parts of the world.

[00:22:34]But that's actually a problem because maximizing,  even though there's like tons of influencers who are showing you all these productivity hacks and  how to maximize and how to get everything done, it makes us miserable and it's an illusion.  And as Oliver Burkeman would say, they're just trying to help you avoid grappling with your  mortality. They give you the illusion that you can actually get everything done if you only have  the right system. But in fact, what you have to do is face the fact that you're mortal. You're going  to die and ruthlessly prioritize based on that and set criteria as Herbert Simon would have said  for satisficing what is a good enough solution instead of looking for what is the best. Herbert  Simon is the thinker who had the biggest influence on this book of anyone. and he was trained as a  political scientist but he won the highest award in computer science the touring award because he  was a founding father of AI. He won the lifetime achievement award in psychology because he was  a founder of cognitive psychology and then for good measure he won the Nobel Prize in economics  and he was what I call an encouragable satisficer.

[00:23:39]Satisficing is a term that he developed that  means picking something that is good enough.

[00:23:46]So it's in contrast to maximizing where you  try to consider all of the options available and pick the optimal one based on evaluating  everything you possibly can. And what Simon showed was that we have finite brains. And so even  though classical economic theory says yes, we evaluate everything about every option and make  the optimal choice, we can't actually do that.

[00:24:05]And when we strive to do it, we end up less happy  and less satisfied with our decisions. So instead, what we should do is proactively satisfice. Set  criteria for what's good enough and then go with that. And Simon did this everywhere. He had the  same few sets of clothes he wore, same breakfast.

[00:24:25]He had simple decision rules that he used for  things. You could almost accuse him of having low expectations if not for his trophy case, which  has the highest awards in economics, psychology, and computer science. What we want to do  is get a system that works well enough.

[00:24:40]think of criteria ahead of time for decisions  that are good enough and then take those because you can't realistically optimize  or maximize anyway. We can't grapple with infinite choice and it just makes us miserable.  So, I don't want to tell you not to be ambitious because that's what it sounds like. But you should  start setting criteria for good enough solutions.

[00:25:02]It's not about having low standards.  It's about having any standards at all that can possibly be met. And it will  make you a happier, more satisfied person and lead you to prioritize in the realization  that you simply can't get everything done.

[00:25:15]And what you actually need to do is start  cutting stuff out so you can prioritize.

[00:25:24]Chapter 3. How to fix bottlenecks. Eli Goldratt  was an Israeli physicist who in the 1970s was studying how atoms behave in crystals when  a friend of his came to him with a comparatively pedestrian problem which was how to increase  production at his chicken coop building business.

[00:25:43]The friend had a small business building chicken  coops and he noticed that even when he hired extra help it didn't increase the overall output  of chicken coops. So he was kind of confused.

[00:25:53]Of course, he asks his physicist friend if he can  study the process, basically an assembly line, and see if he can improve production. And what  Goldratt notices is that in the production of chicken coops, there's always one step that  limits the overall output of the system, no matter what's going on anywhere else. And this  observation became the core of what he called the theory of constraints, which is the idea that  a single bottleneck or the single slowest step in a system limits the overall output of the  system. And so in the case of the chicken coops, he took one individual worker and moved them  from one of the steps that had plenty of people working at it and moved that one worker over to  the bottleneck, the slowest step, and that tripled the overall output of the system. And Goldratt  expanded on this idea in a bizarre novel called The Goal, in which this fictional plant manager  named Alex Rogo has to save a manufacturing plant and his marriage. And luckily, he uh bumps into  his old physics professor who gives him these like Socratic lessons. You know, go figure, of  course, it's his his Jedi like physics professor.

[00:27:01]And it's a very strange book, but Alex starts to  see the world through these kind of bottleneck glasses where when he takes his son's boy scout  troop on a hiking trip, he realizes that some of the kids are really fast hikers, but then  there's Herby, this kid who's really slow.

[00:27:15]And so the fast kids can go way ahead, but  it it doesn't speed up the whole team because the whole team can only go at the pace of  Herby, the slowest hiker. And so he decides to take the backpacks and redistribute some of the  weight so the faster kids have heavier packs and Herby has a lighter one. slows down the fastest  kids but speeds up the overall group because it speeds up Herby who was the bottleneck. So Alex  the plan manager starts to see the whole world in this light and he saves the plant and he saves his  marriage and again it's this quite strange book.

[00:27:43]That said it sold 10 million copies and you know  Jeff Bezos made all of his executives read it and hosted a full day book club on it. It spawned a  whole genre of even more bizarre business novels where people get these lessons from professors  they bump into. And it also gave birth to a 1,200-page theory of constraints handbook. In that  handbook, Goldratt wrote the forward and he asks, "Can I condense all of the theory of  constraints into one sentence?" And he says, "I can do even better than that. I  can condense it into one word, focus."

[00:28:18]The the system constraint shows you where to  focus because if you apply effort somewhere else, it doesn't change the overall fate of the  system. Let me give you an example from a theory of constraints, a case study that I was learning  while I was researching the book. And it's about manufacturing, but it's it's an analogy for  something more broadly relevant. In this case, it dealt with a company that made custom  gear boxes for industry. So, every single one had to be totally customized and they were  struggling essentially. And so, they decided to do a theory of constraints audit. Basically, where  is work piling up? Why are we not able to produce these more rapidly? And it turned out that their  bottleneck was in the tiny 15 person design office where the designs of the gearboxes were made. The  designers were totally ravaged by multitasking.

[00:29:09]They're changing focus more than 50 times  a day. And it turns out that that destroys your ability to get stuff done. It raises stress  levels. It makes you worse at everything you do.

[00:29:18]So it led to errors and eventually it led  to quitting. So they implemented a rule called stop starting and start finishing. You  were not allowed to take in a new design and start it until you had finished one. In a few months,  they were getting three times as many designs out the door. And it dropped the total time for the  company making a gearbox from 1 year to 2 months because that was the bottleneck. But this kind of  focus bottleneck shows up all over the place. Like modern work is insidious. It is just hideously  insidious at adding things to our plate.

[00:29:54]More communication, more meetings, more  apps, more dashboards, more obligations.

[00:30:00]Very rarely do those things get get taken  away. So our attention and our ability to focus becomes the bottleneck. And unless we're  kind of doing what I call subtraction audits, that's just going to grow and grow and grow. So, I  think regularly people should take a look at what they're doing. Try to list things that maybe  have outlived their usefulness. Maybe that's a tool. Maybe that's some type of notification.  Maybe it's some type of meeting. List them. And if there's something that's outlived its  usefulness and is only adding friction, take it away. Subtract it. But we have to do  that regularly because we we just are not wired to solve problems by taking things away. they have  to proactively be attuned to it. So that theory of constraints, that idea of applying effort  at the bottleneck can be incredibly impactful even if the system is just you or an individual.  For example, there's a woman named Sheila Taormina who in 1992 was a swimmer at the University of  Georgia and she tried to make the Olympic team, went to the US Olympic trials, failed to make  it, wasn't even close really, decided to retire.

[00:31:07]But then for one of her last classes at the  University of Georgia, she took management 577 in which she learned about the theory of constraints.  And for her class project, she decided to apply the theory of constraints to her own training and  make a plan to drop 3 seconds from her 200 meter freestyle. So she goes, she does like an audit  of her training. What's my bottleneck? She asks.

[00:31:31]And it turns out it's her strength, her  power. She's only 5'2, which is really small for an elite swimmer. and she has an incredible  aerobic engine, incredible aerobic endurance, but that's what her coaches have her working  on, aerobic endurance over and over and over, but she's already great at that. Whereas, she's  limited by her strength, but they don't have her working on that. She decides to un-retire. She  gets a different coach who's willing to work with her. Four years later, in 1996, she swims  exactly 3 seconds faster, makes the Olympic team, becomes a gold medalist in the relay, and  you can see pictures of her. She's like half a foot shorter than her relay  teammates. She retires again.

[00:32:07]Then she decides to come out of retirement. She  has this new way of looking at her training as what's my limiting factor that I should focus  on. She comes out of retirement, switches to triathlon, wins the US national championship,  goes to the Olympics, finishes sixth. Then she learns fencing and horse jumping and goes to  the Olympics again in modern pentathlon. Becomes the only woman ever to compete in three different  sports in four summer Olympics. and she was going to retire in 1992 if not for learning about the  theory of constraints in a management class.

[00:32:42]Chapter 4, regaining our focus in an  attention economy. As Herbert Simon said, in an information-rich environment, there's  a poverty of whatever it is that information consumes, and that thing is attention. And I would  say we are in a very information-rich environment.

[00:33:00]And so our attention is at risk. You can see  this in all sorts of work like Gloria Mark who did incredible research on attention in people's  workplaces. When she started about 20 years ago, the average worker switched screens about every  2 and 1/2 minutes or so. And then by about 2012, it was 75 seconds. But later on it was down to  about 45 seconds. And that's where it stuck. So, we switch screens about every 45 seconds. And  that turns out to be incredibly stressful. Like, you can measure this in our immune systems, in  our heart rate variability, that the more often we're switching, the higher our stress level is  at the end of the day. And the worse we are at the various tasks because multitasking, it turns out,  is not actually possible. It's actually your brain dropping one set of rules essentially and having  to activate another. But there's a residue left on the brain. As Dr. Mark describes it. Your brain  is like a whiteboard. And when you switch from one thing to another, you erase the whiteboard, but  the residue stays on there. And so the more times you do it during the course of the day, the more  residue there is and the harder it is for you to focus on any one particular thing. And so what are  some of the recommendations? Well, first of all, batching your tasks. Dr. Mark found that people  check email on average about 77 distinct times per day. And that's a lot of multitasking. That's  separate checks. That's not numbers of emails.

[00:34:23]And so instead, you want to batch that email if  you can. So you're you're doing a certain task at a certain time instead of toggling between  many within one hour. Maybe one hours for email and the next hours for something else so that  you're not mixing them all together. And I would be really wary about starting your day in  your inbox. I know that's the first instinct is to go check what's there. But you want to be  wary of something called the ziggarnic effect, which is this psychological effect that unfinished  tasks leave an imprint on your brain that takes some of your cognitive bandwidth until that loop  is closed, until it's finished. And because your inbox is probably a source of an unlimited number  of unfinished things, you might not want to be starting your day that way because you'll already  be using up some of that cognitive bandwidth that you might want to focus for other projects.  Doesn't mean you can't do your email, but maybe shift it after you've done some of whatever  the most important task for the day is. Another is that as you're multitasking, attention is like  a bucket and you want to take breaks before that bucket overflows or else it takes more time to  recover. Maybe the thing that scared me the most in all of the research that I did for this book  was Gloria Mark's research on self interruption.

[00:35:35]That means thoughts that interrupt you when  you're trying to focus. And what she found was that we become accustomed to a certain level  of distraction. So let's say that's notifications from your phone or messages popping up or other  people interrupting you. Eventually, as if you have some kind of internal distractometer, you  become accustomed to that rhythm. And then if you put away all those distractions and silence your  notifications and say, "Now I'm going to focus."

[00:36:02]You will simply self-interrupt with intrusive  thoughts at the same rate to which you've become accustomed. So you will not be able to say,  "Now I'm just going to focus." you you will continue to interrupt yourself at that customary  rhythm. If you're not structuring your focus, then it will be co-opted. And this is why it shows  in studies of cognitive tests where if people have a phone visible, even if it's off, even if  they can't use it or touch it, if it's visible, it decreases their performance on the cognitive  task. And the more phone dependent they are, the bigger that effect. So start by trying to put  it out of the room when you really have to focus.

[00:36:38]But try to alter your cadence of interruptions so  that you can train your ability to focus for at least a half hour and an hour at a time here and  there. And finally, do something called cognitive outsourcing. Put a notebook or a pad on your desk  next to you. And when some intrusive thought pops up about what you should be checking or what you  didn't respond to, write it down. That's called cognitive outsourcing. And it takes that intrusive  thought out of your brain, puts it somewhere else, and improves your ability to focus on the task  at hand. I think one of the big challenges with modern work is that it can become so amorphous,  especially if some of the time you work from home that it can kind of fill every gap in your  life. And that's not really great for your productivity or your your mental well-being. And  so we should set up structures around our work, both seasons. Humans are built for seasonality,  not doing the same thing every season, and for cycling between times of hard work and  and times of rest. As the music producer Rick Rubin has noted, discipline and ritual is actually  the structure that then allows people to do their best creative work. That they don't want to be  totally free in the rest of their life. They want to be free within that box of discipline  and ritual that liberates them to create.

[00:37:49]And so, one of the examples of this I love was  the time I spent with the writer Isabel Allende, who is one of the bestselling writers in history.  She's produced a bestselling book about every year and a half for the last 40 years, 80 million  copies in all. When she's written about, like in magazine features, because she has magical realism  in some of her writing, she's written about often as if she is like a medium who's just these  spirits are speaking through her and because her first book was called The House of the Spirits.  But in reality, when I spend time with her, she thrives on this rigid ritual and structure and  rhythm. She starts every single book on January 8th. And one of the reasons she does that is  because then everyone in her life knows that they better get what they need from her by January  7th because then she's going to be out of touch.

[00:38:39]She goes into a room where she feels her story  lives. She keeps it austere so there's not a lot of distractions. She lights a candle to  start her workday. She blows it out at the end of the workday to signal the end of the day, the  turning off of her brain. She closes the door. She doesn't come back in until she starts the next  day. and she always comes back on January 8th, even when she went through a personal tragedy with  the death of her daughter uh at a young age. And she said, "I I don't know if I ever write again.  I lost the muse. I didn't have the inspiration."

[00:39:07]But January 8th rolled around and she  said, "Well, I have to try because my ritual's coming up." And she did it again and  got going again and wrote more bestsellers.

[00:39:16]As she told me, without this structure  and this rhythm, I could not do it.

[00:39:22]So from the outside it seems that her creation is  this story of boundless creativity but really it's one of boundaries that channel her focus that give  her life seasonality and ritual that keep bringing her back and back and back and back again and  empower her creativity rather than stifling it.

[00:39:40]I myself as an independent writer in the 21st  century have also had this experience of living with more freedom and autonomy than almost anyone  in history. But then have had the experience of going back and putting some constraints in  my life in place and those making me thrive in a way that total freedom absolutely did  not. When I started working on range, I was working as an investigative reporter also  at ProPublica. But toward the end of the book, I left that job because I wasn't going to be able  to finish the book. I was thinking I'd go back, but then the book kind of took on a life of its  own and and I went on my own. And that was a dream in many ways because for years it had been my  goal to get complete autonomy as a professional to be able to spend every minute of my day in the  manner of my own choosing. And so that's what I did. I had total freedom. Fast forward about two  years of that and I realized there is absolutely such a thing as too much autonomy. My life became  so atomized. I had a million different competing priorities and I had no real ritual. So, my  workday expanded to fit every moment that it possibly could. I had no real seasonality in  my life. I had no structure. I had no rhythm.

[00:40:52]And I wasn't really syncing up with other people  either. And I realized instead of doing that, I actually needed to prioritize ruthlessly  and focus on a smaller number of things.

[00:41:03]have a workday that started and ended at a certain  time, have certain seasonality to my projects.

[00:41:10]I needed grounding in my community. So, I joined  the board of a nonprofit in my community, an early childhood education center that served families in  need. I started going to shuffle dance meetups and classes so that I could have embodied experience  with strangers on a regular basis. So that I'm having this embodied experience with strangers  that I want instead of living totally unto myself.

[00:41:37]Chapter 5, the myth of the lone genius. So in  most history books or books about innovation, individual innovations tend to be identified with  individual creators or inventors. And I think part of that is because it makes the story tidy,  right? It's easy to link and also often because one individual wins what science historians call a  priority dispute. Like they fight to be the person who's remembered in the history books, but  it actually is not a good representation of how innovation really happens. The real  story is one of what science historians call multiple discovery. Multiple discovery is a term  popularized by Robert Merton who was kind of the founder of the sociology of science. And what he  noticed was that most world changing breakthroughs are arrived at by multiple people in almost the  same way at almost the same time even though those people are working independently. And he  found that this was the norm with world-changing breakthroughs, not the exception. The light bulb,  the telephone. Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray actually filed with the patent office on  the same day for the telephone. The microphone, the camera, the jet engine, the transistor, all of  these things, even though they're often identified with one individual when the story is told,  multiple people who were not working together were arriving at them at the same time. And what  that tells us about the history of innovation is that we've actually overvalued and over  prioritized the narrative of the lone genius working on their own and breaking through in a  way that nobody else ever has. Because if you look at the actual history, there are lots of  people converging on a solution. So it tells a completely different story that there are these  boundaries that are being set up and channeling people toward a breakthrough. Not that those  geniuses aren't important, but that the context that's pushing them toward a certain problem, put  defining a certain problem and putting it in frame is more important than any individual mind.  Let's walk through three examples of that.

[00:43:45]Dmitri Mendeleev was a Siberian genius  chemist. And the story that's told about him is that in the winter of 1869, he was trying  to find an order to all of the elements, the chemical building blocks of the universe.  And that he thought there had to be some order, but he just couldn't find it. There had to be  some method to nature's prodigious madness.

[00:44:06]So he famously spends three days, three sleepless  days, working to try to order the elements until he can't stay awake any longer. He tips  forward, his unruly beard folds into his arms, and he falls asleep. and drifts off into  the most impactful nap in human history.

[00:44:23]And in that nap, he sees the elements whirling and  dancing around him until they snap into columns.

[00:44:29]And then the columns snap together to form  a grid. And as you move across the grid, the properties of elements repeat predictably and  periodically, hence the name periodic table. So supposedly Mendeleev wakes up and writes it down  as a finished system. That's the periodic table.

[00:44:46]That story is beautiful. The Royal Society  celebrated it. Uh, the mattress company Casper used it in their marketing. Uh, Matthew Walker  in his blockbuster Why We Sleep touted it as the ultimate proof of our dreaming brain loosed from  the bounds of reality. It's a beautiful story.

[00:45:04]It is also utterly false. That did not happen.  And the problem with that telling is that it obscures the real secret to Mendeleev's  success. Mendeleev had a publishing contract for a two volume introduction to chemistry  textbook. He had only gotten eight of the then 63 known elements into volume 1. So he  had to get the other 55 into volume 2 and he had to do it in a way that made sense to  his customers which were intro chemistry students.

[00:45:31]So he was not even looking for a fundamental law  of nature. He was experimenting with a way to save space in his textbook. And so he realized he would  have to start describing families of elements together in order to fit in the space he had  allotted. And it was in doing that as he started sorting elements into families with similarities  that he noticed the periodic pattern. He was a genius. He's the one that's credited in history  books. But he wasn't the only one. Not even close.

[00:45:57]In fact, there were zero periodic tables before  1860. And then there were six in the next 8 years.

[00:46:04]All of which had the general idea. Mendeleev  had some advantages, but all of them got the periodic pattern. Why would that happen? Well, in  1860, there's a meeting in Carl's Rua, a chemistry conference that's called for about a little more  than 100 people because they want to agree on some standards for chemistry. Everyone is doing  things differently. People are using chemical notation differently. They're weighing elements  differently, all these different things, which means that work can't communicate across space  because people aren't working the same standards.

[00:46:35]And at that meeting, an Italian named Stanislau  Kanitsaro says basically, "Here's how we're all going to measure the weight of elements from now  on." And he passes out a pamphlet that says, "Here are the weights." He got some of them wrong, but  that doesn't matter. And here's how we're going to measure them going forward. And that instantly  allowed work in different labs across the world to communicate across space because now people  could compare their work to others and understand what others were doing. If you go back and look at  the history of innovation, that's often the case that setting standards essentially expands the  problem solving team because it allows work to communicate across space. So, it's not very sexy,  but it is very often a precursor for breakthrough.

[00:47:18]The famous story of Einstein coming up with  special relativity involves his thought experiment where he's riding a beam of light. And it's a  beautiful story, but Einstein didn't tell it until decades after it supposedly happened.  It's really unclear if that truly influenced him at the time or if it was really useful at  all. What we know really influenced Einstein was a much more quotidian well-defined problem  that a bunch of scientists had framed and and put into the open for solution. And that was  called the magnet and wire problem. Essentially, it involved moving a magnet and a wire past  one another to induce an electrical current.

[00:47:56]And the problem was the science explained it  differently depending on which one was moving.

[00:48:02]And Einstein didn't like that. He said, why should  the laws of physics be different depending on if the magnet is moving past the wire or the wire  is moving past the magnet? And what he ultimately realized is that the laws of physics didn't have  to be different. Our conception of time and space had to change. And that's the reality  of this breakthrough was that other scientists framing a specific problem that  he could think about led him to something groundbreaking. It wasn't the freedom of this  thought experiment. It was this well-defined problem. And that's very often the case in  the history of innovation that someone just defines a problem really well. And that draws  a bounding box for people's creative thinking.

[00:48:41]We think of Darwin away on this boat on the  Beagle, away from other academics, away from other researchers, totally free to think and create.  And that's how he makes this breakthrough that changes the world. But in fact, he was totally  enmeshed in the thinking of his day. Darwin was not so much a creator as he was a synthesizer. He  was really taking work that already existed and combining it in new ways. There were all these  questions that his peers were laying out in a really well-defined way. things like, why are we  finding marine fossils on the top of mountains?

[00:49:14]Why do the bones in the flipper of a whale  and the wing of a bat and the arm of a human have so much in common? Why are we finding fossils  of animals that don't exist on Earth anymore?

[00:49:26]Right? If everything was created in a small amount  of time, we shouldn't be seeing those things.

[00:49:32]In fact, Darwin would correspond with breeders  and gardeners. He had about 240 pen pals that he would pepper for information. And he learned  that breeders already had a name for spontaneous traits that are passed down from one animal to  another. They called them sports. So Darwin was really taking all this knowledge accumulated  in his day and these questions that had come up and synthesizing them into one coherent hole. And  that was much more his breakthrough than a single creative leap. It was synthesizing the things that  were available and applying them to the questions that other peers around him were were posing.  As groundbreaking as Darwin's ideas were, Alfred Russell Wallace came up with basically the  exact same things at the exact same time. In fact, when he sent some of his writing to Darwin, Darwin  wrote to his mentor and said, "I have never seen a crazier coincidence." Basically, and he said,  "Everything I've written is going to be out before I publish it." Because it was so similar. And  there was one commonality between these two men, which is they had both read the same essay  by Thomas Mouthys, his essay on population, where he argued that humanity would always reach  a crisis point because the population would expand faster than the food supply could expand to  meet it. And so we would always grow and grow and grow and then have a crash because resources  wouldn't keep up with population growth. Now, Malthus turned out to be right for some of human  history, but wrong going forward. But it didn't matter that he was wrong. He framed this problem  in a way that made both Wallace and Darwin, who read it at about the same time, think about  how must species in nature respond to this if they start to outgrow the available food supply. And  the answer was they die. They die out and there's competition for limited resources. And they both  reading that essay, which even though it was wrong about the future of humanity, defined a problem  so well that they both said it was almost like a light bulb going on where all their past work  was channeled into a specific problem. Malthus was what I like to call a problem setter. I think  of setter like the person who sets the ball in a volleyball team for the subsequent spike, which  would be Darwin and Wallace in this case. And when I was going through the history of creative  breakthrough, problem setters don't get a lot of the fame and attention, but they are always there  just before a breakthrough. Someone who defines a problem really well. Sometimes they are wrong  about what they think their own solution is to it, but they're always defining it really well. One  of the great examples was David Hilbert, who's arguably the most influential mathematician of  the 20th century. And around the turn of the 20th century, what he decided to do was basically make  a list, go survey all the mathematics of the day, make a list of about two dozen problems that he  thought were important, define them really well, like really home in on what should  the definition of this problem be.

[00:52:27]He he wrote them out in a pamphlet and he  passed them out at a meeting to his colleagues and it set an agenda for math in the 20th century  and most of those problems went on to be solved.

[00:52:37]As brilliant of a mathematician as he was, and  he's one of the most brilliant who ever lived, it's widely acknowledged that his biggest  influence was collecting a set of problems, defining them really clearly, and it set an  agenda for everything that came since. So that's a that's kind of an extreme example, but everywhere  in history when you see creative breakthrough, you see someone just before who defines the  problem really narrowly and that draw that attracts other minds to the problem. The title of  one of my favorite scientific papers I read while working on this book was called wrong but seinal  and it went through a history of scientific papers where someone would come up with something really  intriguing but that was wrong but because it would lead them to define some certain problem or  challenge it would instantly draw all these other minds to that well- definfined problem and  that would typically lead to some Nobel level breakthrough. So these were problem setters who  may have been wrong about their own solution but they defined a problem. so well that it empowered  other people to start working in a productive way.

[00:53:39]Problem defining is a skill that's open to a  huge number of people and incredibly important.

[00:53:44]And some of that can be as simple as going out  and doing research and characterizing a problem, right? Like this is the best of market research.  You go out and you see some problem. You observe people in their work world. You try to figure  out some problem that they're all orbiting and then define it for them. There's one example  I loved of this actually. There's an engineer named J. Shri Seth. She worked at the company  3M and she's won the Society of Women Engineers Lifetime Achievement Award that, you know, one of  the highest awards you can win. And she described her process as mosaic building. What she would  do is she would go around to colleagues to other inventors, kind of interview them about their  work, look at their work, try to figure out what problem did she think their work might solve,  and then when she would detect a common problem among a bunch of different people who are working  apart from each other, she would get them in a room together and then pitch them and say, "Here's  the problem that I think you're all orbiting."

[00:54:39]And she would try to define that problem and say,  "That's why we should all work on it." So I think some of it is just finding out what people are  doing and trying to as narrowly as possible define what problem it might solve and being being really  specific about it. So there's some research in the new book about what's called specific curiosity  which is when you are not just kind of roaming but taking on a certain question that intrigues  you and going down a rabbit hole on that. And when you're going down those rabbit holes, just  looking for some really specific curiosity that you can well define and even write out and refine  and pitch to someone um that can really prompt other people's creative engines. There  are other businesses like Tony Fidel who was the lead designer of the iPod and he then went  on to co-found the smart thermostat company Nest and he's obsessed with constraints. And so  one of the things he made the team at Nest do was he made them work inside of a literal box,  right? Right? He made them prototype the packaging before they had a product because he said only  things that fit on this package will convey what problem we are solving to the customer who sees  it. So get on this box the features that tell the customer what problem of yours are we solving.  So he was always using these exercises to try to force a team to define the problem they were  solving. I think he mentors entrepreneurs now and his his biggest piece of advice is that  they should write the press release for what they're doing before they start doing it. And it's  really just an exercise that's getting them to try to force them to define the problem they think  they'll be solving before they start working.

[00:56:17]I think problem setting or this problem definition  is a really undervalued skill. There's this one famous saying that people don't want a quarterinch  drill, they want a quarterinch hole in the wall.

[00:56:28]And what it means is when you're trying to  give people a product or service, instead of giving them the thing, you should understand  what is the problem they actually need solved and then you can figure out various ways to attack  it. And I don't think we spend enough time doing this, right? We we much more think about coming up  with ideas as opposed to coming up with problems.

[00:56:45]Let me give you an example. General Magic had  lots of third party app developers because they were creating the app store before the app store.  And one of those third party app developers was named Jeff Hawkins. And Hawkins had created  an app for the General Magic operating system called Graffiti. And what Graffiti did was if you  took a stylus and made some strokes on a screen, it would translate that into letters. When it  became clear that General Magic was going to fail, Hawkins took graffiti and created his own  device. It had three functions: calendar, contacts, memopad. General Magic had all that and  a million things more. What Hawkins did was he identified a clear customer problem. This was busy  professionals wanted to sync their calendars and contacts and take them on the go. And he did three  of the million things that General Magic did, but put them into a coherent device that  showed the users why and how it was going to solve their problem. And that was the Palm  Pilot. And it became a smash hit in the same era as General Magic. Demis Hassabis  who was a founder of Google DeepMind and recently won the Nobel Prize in chemistry  even though he's not a chemist said recently that the most important skill now which is  becoming even more important in the age of AI is defining a good problem finding a good problem  and defining it really well because with the tools we have and the brains we have it's making that  definition narrow enough that you really channel thinking and I think that's a skill that's  only going to become more important important, but it doesn't feel like creation. And so we often  overlook it. This importance of making boundaries around the problem that's trying to be solved. And  if you look at the history of innovation, what the science historian James Burke called the jigsaw  of invention, you can see one well-defined problem passing to the next in kind of a relay race of  invention that leads to things that change the world. In Burke's own work, he had a TV show  called Connections. And one of my favorite episodes was where he draws a line from one  narrow problem to another that goes from medieval castle battlements all the way to film projectors.  Medieval battlements were shaped a certain way in order to get rid of visual blind spots so that you  could see who was attacking you. And when they got rid of those visual blind spots, that meant that  people firing cannons had to move farther away basically. And when they moved farther away, they  needed to see farther to where they were going to shoot. and eventually it led to film projectors.  It wasn't just some giant leap, but it was one tightly defined problem after another. And that  is kind of the march of innovation. It's not single lone geniuses who just break away from  everything in the past. It's much more one problem after another. And the philosopher of  science Thomas Malthus wrote a famous book called the structure of scientific revolutions  in which he talked about paradigm shifts where some creator would come up with something  that was so different than what came before they would essentially leave people on either side  of this break speaking different languages like they couldn't even understand one another. And so  that did feel like it's this lone genius breaking through in a way that changes everything. And that  became very famous that that term paradigm shift.

[01:00:02]sped through politics and business and everything.  But later on, Kuhn was working on a book that he didn't finish by the time he died. But a few years  ago, it was just published. And in that book, he takes a very different tack and he talks  about the evolutionary nature of discovery.

[01:00:18]And the subtitle of the book, I think,  speaks for itself, an evolutionary theory of scientific development. He had nuanced  that view of the paradigm shift into one of successive narrow problems that are solved  one after another. and that lead to breakthrough.

[01:00:32]Of course, that work of his didn't get as famous  because it's not as sexy as the whole paradigm shift thing. But the history of innovation  really is one narrowly defined problem after another. And I think we should all try  to do that. And whatever we're working on, what is the most succinct way that I can  define the problem that I'm trying to work on?

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