David Epstein: Discipline sets creativity free | Full Interview

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.

Chapter 1, General Magic versus Pixar.

Why constraints are necessary.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It was bigger than a phone.

It didn't contain a phone.

It was overloaded with so much other stuff.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What to do and what not to do

because they didn't have a bounding box around what they were doing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

He complains to his wife.

He says, "There's no adjectives.

How can I possibly do this?"

In fine Seussian form, he compared it to making a strudel without any strudels.

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.

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.

And this was her first modernist novel.

It was her breakthrough called Jacob's Room.

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.

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.

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.

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.

For example, when a country underwent an economic collapse, suicide increased.

Not a huge surprise.

But what he also saw was

that when a country went through an economic boom,

suicide also increased.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Satisficing is a term

that he developed that means picking something

that is good enough.

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.

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.

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. 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.

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.

And what you actually need to do is start cutting stuff out

so you can prioritize.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

More communication, more meetings, more apps, more dashboards, more obligations.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

As she told me, without this structure and this rhythm,

I could not do it.

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.

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.

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. have a workday

that started and ended at a certain time,

have certain seasonality to my projects.

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.

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.

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.

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.

And in that nap,

he sees the elements whirling and dancing around him until they snap into columns.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In fact, there were zero periodic tables before 1860.

And then there were six in the next 8 years.

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.

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.

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.

And the problem was the science explained it differently depending on

which one was moving.

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.

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?

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?

Right?

If everything was created in a small amount of time,

we shouldn't be seeing those things.

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.

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.

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.

Problem defining is a skill that's open to a huge number of people

and incredibly important.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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. 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.

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.

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?

Want to support the channel?

Join the Big Think Members community where you get access to videos early

and free.