The power of constraints (w/ Master Fixer David Epstein)

Summary

Fixable (TED) – "The Power of Constraints"

Guests: David Epstein (investigative reporter, author of Inside the Box)
Hosts: Frances Frei (Harvard Business Professor) & Anne Morriss (CEO, author)
Date: July 13, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this lively episode, hosts Anne Morriss and Frances Frei explore the paradoxical power of constraints in work and creativity with best-selling writer and investigative reporter David Epstein. Drawing from Epstein’s new book, Inside the Box, they challenge the widely held belief that more freedom is always better. Instead, they argue that well-chosen limits can sharpen focus, spark innovation, and lead to an individual and organizational flourishing. With examples spanning sports, tech, and the arts, and a dose of playful debate between the co-hosts, the episode is packed with actionable insights for leaders and teams facing "do more with less" pressures.

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Opening & Theme (01:36 – 04:07)

• Freedom vs. Constraints:
  Anne admits she prizes freedom, while Frances thrives with structure.
  • "You love it. I hate it." (Frances, 01:39)
  • “I need a deadline. I want a small menu,” explains Frances (01:52).
• Episode Premise:
  Constraints, viewed negatively by many, are reframed as engines of creativity and productivity.
• Introducing Guest:
  Anne and Frances effusively introduce David Epstein, noting his skill at making complex science accessible. His new book probes the paradox of how limitations can help us do our best work.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why Constraints Work for Humans (05:18 – 11:48)

• Overvaluing Freedom:
  Epstein argues that "we tend to overvalue complete freedom and that limits can actually be our most powerful tools for clarifying priorities and launching us into productive exploration." (David Epstein, 05:18)
• Attention & Focus:
  Modern life fragments attention—"People have been spending less and less time in any individual task...now it's about 45 seconds before you toggle." (David, 06:02)
  • To rebuild focus: "You actually become accustomed to a certain cadence of distraction." Solution: Train your attention span and use note-taking to offload intrusive thoughts. (06:49)
• Math vs. Human Reality:
  Frances probes the contrast between mathematical optimization (where constraints seem limiting) and real-world productivity. Epstein introduces Herbert Simon’s idea of bounded rationality:
  • “True optimization is not really possible and, in fact, makes us miserable when we try.” (David, 08:16)
  • Introduces "satisficing"—settling for "good enough" to avoid decision paralysis.
  • Simon’s mantra: “The best is the enemy of the good.” (10:36)

2. Constraints in Sports & Skill Development (11:48 – 14:24)

• Constraints-Led Approach:
  Now popularized by elite athletes, coaches act as “environment architects,” setting up constraints that force creative, individualized solutions.
  • "The best thing you can do is set these environmental conditions that launch someone into really productive exploration." (David, 13:54)
  • Examples: Hoops underwater force swimmers to “get as linear as possible”; Kyrie Irving’s creative layups born from an imperfect backboard.

3. Cautionary Tales & Workplace Constraints (17:23 – 22:30)

• General Magic – Too Much Freedom:
  “They could do anything. So they did. And the project just grew and grew... We couldn't figure out what not to do.” (David, 19:20, 19:48)
  • Company failed despite immense talent due to lack of boundaries; a lesson for today’s tech and startup world.
• Modern Mistakes: The AI “Infinite Whip”
  Companies rush to implement AI without specifying problems, leading to “workscope” (more output, but little impact).
  • Frances connects this to “Little’s Law”: More unfinished projects means everything slows down. “You’re just making an infinite whip.” (21:47)
  • David: “Now everybody has an infinite capacity to start a million things they’re never going to finish…” (21:20)

4. Pixar: Constraints for Creativity (24:44 – 27:39)

• Contrast to General Magic:
  Ed Catmull channeled creativity through strict boundaries at Pixar.
  • “His feeling was that there’s actually tons of creative ideas within organizations, but what’s comparatively rare is a process for funneling them into something that can actually be done.” (David, 25:35)
  • Examples: Directors must pitch three ideas each, years of story refinement before expensive production.
  • “Boundaries everywhere.” (David, 27:10)
• Feedback Loops:
  Frances admires Pixar’s “notes” policy: Only those actively producing and receiving notes can give feedback—a guardrail against unhelpful outside interference. (27:11)

5. Tactics for Harnessing Constraints (27:59 – 35:59)

• Making Priorities Visible:
  Epstein suggests individuals and teams physically list all commitments—exposing the overload.
  • “I instantly realized there was way more stuff on that wall than I...too much, too much. Make the whip visible.” (David/Anne, 29:08)
  • Use “satisficing” to pick “good enough” ideas and shelve the rest.
  • “If I rank an idea at 8 on my scale of 1 to 10, I’ll go with it. It doesn’t have to be a 10.” (David, 29:40)
  • Quoting Mihaly Csikszentmihaly: “The great thing about being committed and picking something is you can stop wondering how to live and start living.” (30:49)
• "Do more with less":
  • “Doing more with less sounds bad, but it is the march of human progress, right? That is efficiency.” (David, 31:11)
  • Story of NASA’s LCROSS mission: brutal constraints led to breakthrough by using tank imaging equipment and NASCAR temperature sensors (32:20).
  • “If I were going to get this done, how would I do it?”—a productive prompt for dealing with restrictions. (31:54)

6. Who Gets to Set the Constraints? (33:02 – 35:29)

• Anne admits, "It’s not that I resist constraints and trade-offs, but I want to be the one to impose them. I don't want someone else to give me the filter or the logic." (33:29)
• Epstein: Whether constraints are self- or externally-imposed, both can have benefits, but lack of any agency is problematic.
  • “There’s such a thing as too much autonomy.” (David, 34:10)
  • He shares how he rebuilt structure in his life—with obligations like community board service and dance classes (35:06).

7. Reframing Constraints & the Startup World (35:29 – 37:36)

• Many intuitively know constraints are useful but lack language to explain why:
  • Epstein hopes his book offers a “lexicon for that and some stories and research behind it to make that feeling more productive.” (35:59)
• Frances: In startups, “more die of indigestion than starvation, of too much, not too little.” (36:57, citing Bill Gurley)
  • Constraints may be uncomfortable, but are vital for creative and business survival.

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Notable & Memorable Quotes

• “True optimization is not really possible and, in fact, makes us miserable when we try.”
  — David Epstein (08:16)
• “The best is the enemy of the good.”
  — David Epstein (quoting Herbert Simon) (10:36)
• “We couldn’t figure out what not to do.”
  — David Epstein (on General Magic, 19:48)
• “You’re just making an infinite whip, which means everything will be slowed down.”
  — Frances Fry (21:47)
• “His feeling was there’s actually tons of creative ideas within organizations, but what’s comparatively rare is a process for funneling them into something that can actually be done.”
  — David Epstein (on Pixar, 25:35)
• “If I were going to get this done, how would I do it?”
  — David Epstein (31:54)
• “The great thing about being committed and picking something is you can stop wondering how to live and start living.”
  — David Epstein (quoting Csikszentmihalyi, 30:49)
• “More startups die of indigestion than starvation, of too much, not too little.”
  — Frances Fry (quoting Bill Gurley, 36:57)

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Practical Takeaways

For Individuals:

• Make commitments visible: Use Post-its or similar to reveal overload and clarify true priorities (28:30).
• Impose your own constraints: If possible, design guardrails that focus your attention on what matters most (33:29–33:36).
• Practice satisficing: "If it’s an 8/10, go for it." Don’t wait for the perfect idea (29:40).
• Embrace forced trade-offs: See limits as invitations to ingenuity.

For Organizations:

• Define problems before implementing tech solutions: Especially in the AI race (20:00–21:34).
• Don’t confuse more resources or ideas with better outcomes: Cultivate early boundaries and prioritization processes—Pixar’s story development is a model.
• Feedback among practitioners: Make sure only those actively in the creative trenches can give critical feedback (27:11).

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Memorable Moment

• David Epstein’s Dance Class Example:
  He shares that he now takes shuffle dancing classes—originating from cramped nightclubs—where the style was literally shaped by the space constraint, beautifully illustrating the theme (38:05 – 39:06).
  • "It's also nice to have a space where none of my personal or professional baggage is there. It's just a place I go to be a learner." (David, 38:40)

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Key Timestamps

• 01:36 – 04:07 | Hosts debate “freedom vs. constraints”
• 05:18 – 11:48 | Epstein explains why humans need constraints, not total freedom
• 11:48 – 14:24 | Constraints in sports and skill learning
• 17:23 – 22:30 | General Magic cautionary tale; AI and the “infinite whip”
• 24:44 – 27:39 | Pixar’s creative boundaries; practical applications
• 27:59 – 35:29 | Individual tactics for prioritization; balancing the imposition of constraints
• 35:29 – 37:36 | The startup risk of “too much”; reframing constraints
• 38:05 – 39:06 | Dance class anecdote

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Conclusion

This engaging episode, brimming with wit and wisdom, reframes the narrative around constraints—showing them as creative catalysts rather than hindrances. With illustrations from technology, sports, and creative businesses, listeners get both philosophical perspective and practical tools for thriving under limitations. The core message: The right constraints set us free to focus, innovate, and deliver our best work.

Transcript

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[Nick]

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[Nick]

N E.

[Anne Morris]

Francis, you and I have different relationships with freedom.

[Frances Fry]

Oh yes, you love it. I hate it.

[Anne Morris]

Directionally, I think this is correct. It is one of the things I value most in my life. Freedom of movement. Freedom to decide whatever I'm going to do next.

[Frances Fry]

Yeah, freedom doesn't make me, or even most people I know better off. At least not total freedom. I need a deadline. I want a small menu in a restaurant. I don't want a large menu.

[Anne Morris]

You want to order exactly the same thing that you ordered last time.

[Frances Fry]

Well, please, because I figure out the best thing and repeat it.

[David Epstein]

Look at the evidence.

[Frances Fry]

Every day in our work, we see beautiful things happen when we limit freedom by adding constraints. When people have less time to do something or say something, they often do their best work.

[Anne Morris]

I know we see it every day in the work that we do. And yet people like me still hate to be tied down. My throat closes just thinking about It.

[Frances Fry]

I know, but you need to come over. There's a better way, my love. There's a better way.

[Anne Morris]

We'll find out. Welcome to Fixable, the show where we take problems at work that feel unfixable and figure out how to fix them. I'm Anne Morris.

[Frances Fry]

I'm Frances Fry. And I'm Anne's wife.

[Anne Morris]

Today we are talking about the surprising power of constraints. We tend to think about constraints as negative, at least I do. And we are experiencing more and more of them at work. This is a moment where people are constantly hearing some version of do more

[Frances Fry]

with less or simply, no, you can't do that.

[Anne Morris]

Right? No. Today's brilliant master fixer argues that these kinds of constraints aren't necessarily a bad thing. They certainly feel bad in the moment, but they can also set us up to do our best work. They can spark creative breakthroughs, reveal more elegant solutions, and help us make better decisions. Ooh.

[Frances Fry]

So there might be a reason for your suffering.

[Anne Morris]

Suffering is the reason. And the amazing David Epstein is going to help us understand why. David is an investigative reporter, a prolific and best selling science writer, and someone who has the rare gift of making research feel like a conversation that you don't want to end. His latest book is Inside the How Constraints Make Us Better. It's an amazing resource for anyone trying to lead, create or just function inside a system that never quite gives you what you ask for.

[Frances Fry]

That's the system's job. I'm so looking forward to this conversation.

[Nick]

Foreign.

[Anne Morris]

David Epstein, welcome to Fixable.

[David Epstein]

Thank you so much for having me.

[Anne Morris]

We are very excited to have you on the show today. We have been fans of yours for a long time. Loved your book range.

[David Epstein]

Thank you.

[Anne Morris]

As we've prepped for this interview and learned more about you in the last couple weeks, I have decided that you may actually be the Dos Equis most interesting man alive.

[David Epstein]

That is. I should put that in my bio. Nobody's ever said that. Thank you.

[Anne Morris]

Please do. Please do. You bring so much vitality to your work. You're such a beautiful writer. You lead with curiosity. You are asking questions about all of the things that are most interesting to us about the world. So we are just going to flatter you the entire time, if that works for you.

[David Epstein]

I love this interview already.

[Anne Morris]

We're starting strong. So let's talk about your latest book, Inside the Box. It seems like what you're saying is that constraints are directionally good, not bad, despite the human animal's resistance to them.

[David Epstein]

I think that's absolutely a Fair summary. I mean, the way that I think of it is that we tend to overvalue complete freedom and that limits can actually be our most powerful tools for clarifying priorities and launching us into productive exploration.

[Anne Morris]

Beautiful. What do you know now that you didn't know when you started it?

[David Epstein]

If I want to get really specific about that, there's a chapter about attention and focus. And there was some research that went into that chapter from a psychologist named Gloria Mark, who has been studying people at work for decades that I found kind of scary. So the scary part of our research found that, you know, people have been spending less and less time in any individual task before they toggle to something else for about the last 25 years. So 25 years ago is about three minutes per task. Now it's about 45 seconds before you toggle. And the scary part was if you say, all right, I'm putting away the distraction, I'm turning off the notifications, whatever, now I'm going to focus. It's really hard because you actually become accustomed to a certain cadence of distraction. And it's like you have an internal distraction barometer. And if you suddenly say, well, today I'm really going to focus and you, you put away the phone or turn off the notifications or whatever, you will self interrupt with intrusive thoughts at the cadence to which you've become accustomed.

[Anne Morris]

That's.

[David Epstein]

Yeah. So you actually have to train your attention span if you want to be able to enter deep focus mode again and do things like in that period where you're having intrusive thoughts, have a notepad where you write them down and so you cognitively outsource them to get them out of your brain. So that was a very specific thing that surprised me.

[Frances Fry]

David, I have a question as a math major, so here's what I'm wrestling with. In math, when you have a constrained optimization, you can optimize something, you get the best answer, and then anytime you put in constraints, you're only going to get that best answer or something worse. That is, constraints tend to make things worse in math, but in humans, what we know is people thrive in the presence of constraints that that constraints actually help make things better. Can you help reconcile these two?

[David Epstein]

I think that's a great question. And let me try this out on you. The thinker who was most influential to me in this book was a guy named Herbert Simon, who was trained as a political scientist but won the Turing Award in computer science because he co created the first AI demonstration. He won the highest award you win in psychology because he was a founder of cognitive psychology, and then he won the Nobel prize in economics. And all of his work really revolved around decision making and problem solving. And his most important insight was that the humans and the human brain could not conform to the rational actor model of classical economic theory. That he had learned the idea that we could evaluate all the available options and then choose the best course of action. He first saw that this didn't play out in reality and then became convinced that not only did it not, but it could not because of the way our brains work in our finite capacity. And so he built his career looking at how people actually make decisions and solve problems and what is the best way for them to go about doing so. And in doing that, he called this bounded rationality. This the difference between the model of the human actor and the reality. And he coined this term satisficing, which is a combination of satisfy and suffice to connote what humans actually do, and not only what we actually do, but what he felt we should actually do, because true optimization is not really possible and, in fact, makes us miserable when we try. So other researchers building on his work created this thing they called the satisficer maximizer scale to see how much.

[Anne Morris]

Sorry, I just have to pause. We joke all the time that some of these academics should have just spun around to the marketing department to get

[Frances Fry]

a little branding workshop.

[Anne Morris]

Just a couple of these titles.

[David Epstein]

You're not wrong. It could be a lot of useful rebranding in this department. What they found was that a maximizer, maybe we would call an optimizer. Now, someone who's trying to get the best of all their decisions is almost always a bad thing to be. So maximizers are less satisfied with their decisions. They're less satisfied with their lives. They're much more prone to regret. They're much more likely to opt for reversible decisions just because it gives them the feeling of keeping their options open, even though it means they often don't commit to anything the way they should. And so Simon himself proactively satisfies where he would wear the same brand of socks all the time. He had one beret he always owned. He told his daughter, one needs three sets of clothes.

[Anne Morris]

My wife does not change her. I mean, she changes her clothes, but it's the same thing every day.

[David Epstein]

Yeah, you know, you're following in Simon's footsteps. He said you need three pairs of clothing. One on your back, one hanging in the closet, ready to wear, and one in the wash. Preach. He ate the same breakfast, et cetera, et cetera. He famously said, people don't know this, but the best is the enemy of the good. Most people know that phrase. But he put it in those exact words. And his point was, you want to save your cognitive bandwidth, right, that you should have good enough criteria and once you surpass them, you move on. Otherwise you fall prey to what's called Fredkin's Paradox, where you end up spending the most time on the least important decisions because you're having trouble telling the difference between the options. That's why you agonize over it. But it also means it probably doesn't matter, or at least you can't get any more information to make it matter. So I think maybe that's kind of an analogy to what you were talking about with in theory listeners.

[Anne Morris]

Francis is clapping.

[David Epstein]

In theory, having all the options in the world and evaluating them and optimizing makes a lot of sense. And maybe when we're working with certain types of algorithms, we can tell them to go do that to a certain extent. But for human beings, Herbert Simon built his Nobel career on the fact that we can't do that and actually shouldn't try to.

[Anne Morris]

So let's ground this a little bit and let's go to a world that I think is going to be resonant for both you and Francis, which is the world of sports. So there was a recent article in the New York Times about this phenomenon called constraints led approach. Again, I think this cla, it needs a rebrand. Constraints led approach. I think there's a lot of opportunity marketers. Give us an example in that world of where this is really having an impact.

[Capital One Sponsor]

Yeah.

[David Epstein]

The constraints led approach in sports skill learning has actually been around for quite a while, but it's just having a moment now because some athletes like Victor Wembanyama and Shohei Ohtani have mentioned publicly that they use it.

[Frances Fry]

Kelsey Plum.

[David Epstein]

Kelsey Plum, yeah, absolutely. So, you know, so some of the most visible athletes in the world have mentioned that they're using it now. And the point of it basically is to view the coach or trainer as what they call an environment architect, where instead of doing blocking practice, which is this is how you do it, you move in this way, you do this thing over and over, is that their role is to set up certain constraints that then force the learner to find their own best way to solve the problem. Again, in bad branding. In constraints led approach literature, it's called self organizing, which basically means that the athlete is just finding the individualized solution. Using their own physiological tools. Probably the first time I saw this in action was when I was with an Olympic development swimming club in Australia. And instead of showing these learners, you know, you angle your arm like this for freestyle, they put hoops of different sizes under the water and the, the swimmers had to go through them without touching the sides and the hoops would get progressively smaller. And the point was to force them to get as linear as possible in, in the best way they could do it for their body. Kyrie Irving, you know, one of the greatest finishers in NBA history, famously credited these all these weird angles that he learned to missing a piece of his backboard when he was a kid. So that one wasn't purposeful, but it, if you ever watch him, you know, he'll like reach under the rim and do all these weird spins and things. So that's the idea behind the constraints led approach that the best thing you can do is set these environmental conditions. That launches someone into really productive exploration, which is quite similar to what good constraints do. More generally.

[Anne Morris]

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[Anne Morris]

So let's move to the workplace. In the book you tell this incredible story of General Magic. So walk us through what happened there.

[David Epstein]

General Magic was a company so visionary, so much talent that it became the first so called concept IPO in Silicon Valley history where Goldman Sachs took the company public with just a vision and a lot of talent, not a product. They were starting in the late 80s essentially making the iPhone. You know, I think 15% of Americans had computers at the time. The company was co founded by two of the designers of the original Mac and one guy named Mark Paratt whose job inside of Apple was looking to the future of technology after personal computing. And boy did he see it clearly. I mean I read his PhD dissertation in reporting in 1976. He coins the term information economy on the first page and reading this thing, it's like this guy just saw what was coming. So he was a visionary and he starts sketching in the late 80s, something that would be instantly recognizable to anybody listening to this. It's a thin glass rectangle with a touchscreen and no protruding buttons where you can hit little boxes to download apps. And it'll be a phone and a computer. 1989.

[Anne Morris]

Wow.

[David Epstein]

No, there's no Internet Yet. And so this vision draws this incredible group of talent to him and they go public, they're a stock market darling, and all these things. And he says at the time, per say, why did he raise so much money all these things so early? Well, he wanted to create heaven for engineers where they were limited only by their imagination. And what more could anyone want? The answer, it turned out, is less freedom because it turned into a disaster. They could do anything. So they did. And the project just grew and grew and grew. Every cool idea someone had, they did it. So when the device finally came out, they sold 3,000 units in the first six months, mostly to people they knew. It was ahead of its time, but it had so many features that the user experience was choppy, it was confusing, it came with a 200 page manual and the battery life was terrible, et cetera. The refrain when I was interviewing people that worked there over and over was we couldn't figure out what not to do. They had all these resources, they had all this talent, but they just did not have any helpful boundaries. So it became a disaster.

[Anne Morris]

Yeah, it's such a vivid cautionary tale. When you look around at organizations today, what are the constraints, mistakes that we're making now?

[David Epstein]

One thing that's really top of mind for me because I've been spending some time with a particular AI company mainly to educate myself. And this company helps other companies implement AI and so a lot of the companies they deal with are basically saying, we need AI because it's so alluring and other people are doing it. And so they're implementing AI and it's largely creating, I think, what this MIT research coined as workslope, where people are producing way more content, but that ends up with somebody having to deal with it somewhere. And so what they're not doing is spending time really carefully defining a problem that they have to solve and then looking at in what way can the tool match this. So it's just this broad implementation that is creating, I think, more headaches than efficiencies for a lot of people. And I understand that they feel behind. There's all this FOMO about it. Right.

[Anne Morris]

Mostly it's a lot of the behavior is just fear driven right now.

[David Epstein]

Yeah. And so I think it's a real mistake to not first be super rigorous about defining the problem you're trying to solve and then bringing in the tool as opposed to the reverse AI itself

[Anne Morris]

feels like this crazy experiment in removing constraints.

[David Epstein]

I was just going to say this popular writer and investor named Paul Kudruski. I was talking to him about this a little bit, and he said, now everybody has an infinite capacity to start a million things that they're never going to finish and that aren't really that worthwhile. Right.

[Anne Morris]

So it's.

[David Epstein]

I'm all for experimentation, but I think it's just maybe a little too easy now to. To do things that you haven't really put any thought into. You're almost outsourcing your own thinking. I think that's a little dangerous.

[Anne Morris]

If I can.

[Frances Fry]

If I can bring math back into it. John Little, a great MIT professor, has Little's Law, which is the time anything takes equals the number of things in front of it times the cycle time. And what AI is doing with Paul's quote is you're just making an infinite whip, which means everything will be slowed down because we have added so many intermediate things that because they're never done, are never removed from the system. And so we just have an infinitely long line.

[David Epstein]

An infinite whip. That is such a beautiful phrase. I feel like you should write a book titled the Infinite Whip.

[Frances Fry]

We are. I think we can just re. We should go have a brand consultant. It was born here. Look at us.

[David Epstein]

That's right.

[Frances Fry]

All of us are just thinking about how to brand everything else.

[Nick]

Hey, Yetis, this is Nick and Jack from the Best One yet podcast. Now, the last company we worked at, they used Paylocity and everything just worked. It wasn't until launching our own media business this show that we realized how rare that is.

[Jack]

Because Paylocity is one delicious burrito of operational needs. They roll up HR finance and it seamlessly into one delicious byte.

[Nick]

When everything wraps together like that all at once, your workforce, your tech stack, your business. You don't need more tools. You don't even need cilantro.

[Jack]

You need one sol.

[Nick]

And that is why Paylocity built a single platform to connect hr, finance and IT with AI driven insights and automated workflows that simplify the complex and power what's next.

[Jack]

Or as we call it, a delicious operational burrito.

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[Anne Morris]

I want to go next to this idea of really how people listening can take these ideas and use them to make a difference at work. Before we go there, you write about Pixar, which is a company that we love and we believe has so much to teach the world about many things, including conflict. But you highlight it as an example of an organization that uses constraints well. So talk to us about Pixar.

[David Epstein]

Yeah, One of the reasons I wanted to use Pixar is because we talked about General Magic a little. So this will make sense. Ed Catmull, the co founder of Pixar, at basically the exact same time as Mark Peratt, the co founder of General Magic, had a vision 20 years into the future. In Ed's case, it was making the first fully computer animated feature film. And this was at a time when nothing was even close to that. I mean, when he started it, there were, there were no computer graphics in films whatsoever. And so it was kind of this parallel track with General Magic, also a group of incredibly creative people. And in Pixar's case, it worked out tremendously well. And so when I spent time with Ed, one of the things I learned from him is that he really dedicated a lot of his life to putting in place boundaries that would channel creative ideas into creative achievements. His feeling, I don't know if this is true or not, but his feeling was that there's actually tons of creative ideas within organizations, but what's comparatively rare is a process for funneling them into something that can actually be done. And so they had all these rules in Pixar. They would keep directors in story development for years with a small team, years testing, refining the core of a story, simplifying it, taking out characters like Schadenfreude from inside out because they didn't want the character complexity to be too high. And that seems inefficient, except the costs only explode once they move into production. So making that early phase, slow, and then you can execute quickly. It resonated with me so deeply because when I write a book, I spend a year not writing, only researching and mapping out. And then when I move into execution, I can do it quickly because I've got this planned. You know, they had the three pitches rule. Like they found that directors would get anchored to their first idea, even though it wasn't usually their best. So they forced them to pitch three at once. It's just all these different rules. So it's just like boundaries everywhere.

[Anne Morris]

I love that constraint.

[Frances Fry]

One of my favorite things from Pixar was that you could only attend certain meetings that were to give notes, you know, feedback, usually constructive advice on how to do things differently. You were only allowed to give notes if you were also a recipient of notes in another part of it. So it was only the active producers, none of these, like business people coming in and doing it. You had to be a note giver and a note receiver, which I just thought was so amazing, so good.

[David Epstein]

It's such like a cultural cue too, Right. I think a big part of culture is what you will not accept or what you will not tolerate. Right. And so that's a case where you say, this is something that we are not allowing. And I think it's that kind of boundary is a really crucial for creating

[Anne Morris]

a culture that you want and such a powerful signal. So let's go to the unit of analysis of the individual listening to this conversation going to work somewhere in the hierarchy. I want to start with the human version of the problem Pixar solved, which is let's imagine someone with lots of great ideas for themselves, for their life, for their team. What advice do you have for how to commit and choose a path in that scenario?

[David Epstein]

Yeah, that's a tricky one. I think one useful thing to do for a group or an individual is to make all of their current commitments visible. And this could be current ideas that you think you're working on. I mean, the way I did this, just stealing from a genomics lab that I write about, was literally to take post its and put them on my wall. Each one for a project that I was thinking of taking on or one that I was already engaged in. And what happened to me as what happened to that genomics lab is I instantly realized that there was way more stuff on that wall than I.

[Anne Morris]

Too much, too much. Make the whip visible.

[David Epstein]

Absolutely, absolutely.

[Nick]

And

[David Epstein]

so that had a way of forcing me to clarify priorities. So I started asking myself, if I had to kill one of these in the next month or put it aside, what would it be? And that didn't mean I had to just forget about some good idea. But it could go over to the holding zone. Maybe I never come back to it. That sort of made me feel psychologically okay, like it was stored somewhere. I'm probably never coming back to it, but it just makes me feel okay to move on, I guess. And so when you put all the stuff together, I think it's a lot easier to just say, these are the ones that are really igniting me, or the ones that I think I can get done, or that are more important. I kind of use a bit of satisficing to go back to Herbert Simon at this point where if I rank an idea at 8 on my scale of 1 to 10, I'll go with it. It doesn't have to be a 10. And after range, it's my previous book spread wider than I expected. Basically. It took so much effort. I found it so all consuming that I said, I'm not doing another book ever again unless I find the perfect topic. So I was dipping my toe into all these little ideas because I'm curious about a lot of stuff. And I did that for two years and I wouldn't dive into anything. It was almost like I've never done dating apps, you know, But I imagined that what I was doing was like that, where it was just like, you know, I'm really fascinated by this thing, but there could be something better if I just swipe one more time. And I came across this quote by Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, the psychologist who coined the term flow where he was talking about relationships. But you could apply this to anything. He said the great thing about being committed and picking something is you can stop wondering how to live and start living. You stop wasting your energy wondering if there's something better around the corner.

[Anne Morris]

We hear a lot from people that they are getting signals from their boss or from their organization. Do more with less. So for people who are hearing that and resisting it, give them a David Epstein pep talk for why this isn't necessarily a bad thing.

[David Epstein]

Doing more with less sounds bad, but it is the march of human progress, right? That is efficiency. Doing more with less.

[Anne Morris]

Oh, now we're back to rational man who wants to be productive.

[David Epstein]

And so I think, I hope that again, the mindset shift that this work could engender is from seeing limits as only things that are pressing you to opportunities to clarify your priorities or to try new things. One of the first readers of this book was a guy named Ed hoffman, who is NASA's first chief knowledge officer. It's kind of like the head psychologist at NASA. And he stopped part way and said, I have to tell you about this mission called lcross. And this was this mission where the team ended up with half the time and money that they were hoping to have. And so what did they do? First they complain, and then they said, well, if we were going to get this done, how would we get it done? And it forced them to borrow things in new ways. So they took imaging equipment from army tanks and engine temperature sensors from NASCAR and created the probe that confirmed water on the moon. And so they never would have thought that way if they hadn't been forced to. If there are constraints on someone and they ask themselves, is there room for me to surprise myself? And the answer is no, then there's too much constraint. But otherwise, I think a first mindset can be okay given those parameters. If I were going to get this done, how would I do it can really launch you into a new kind of generative thinking. And so after a little bit of complaining, I think I would try that approach and see what you can come up with. Because even if you don't get all the way there, having the paths that you're used to blocked is kind of the greatest creative prompt imaginable.

[Anne Morris]

I am someone who resists this a lot, like resist this at a theoretical level. And as we're having this conversation, I think probably what's happening is I want to be the one. It's not that I resist constraints and trade offs, but I want to be the one to impose them. I don't want, you like to be the author. I don't want someone else to give me the filter or the logic. I think I actually use them all the time, but I want to be the designer of them.

[David Epstein]

I think whether constraints are externally or self imposed, I think they can still have some of the same beneficial effects.

[Anne Morris]

I think that's the pep talk I need.

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[David Epstein]

And if you look in the history of artistic innovation, for instance, as this psychologist Patricia Stokes has documented in incredible detail, it kind of is the history of someone saying, I want to do something different, so I need to cross out the methods that I've learned and that I'm used to and do something that is the engine of artistic innovation. So. So self imposed constraints are normal in that milieu, a lot less normal in, in most other areas of the world. But I still think it can have the same effects. And I want to be careful. I don't want people to be in a feeling of having no agency. If you just have a bad boss who gives you no feeling of agency in, in anything you're doing and you don't get the sense these constraints are applied to make something better, but just to make your life difficult, you know, I think it's not good for, for people's well being, I'll say. At least for me, I'll just speak personally. When I became a book author, I thought total autonomy was the dream. I want to only projects of my own choosing. Spend every minute of the day by my own choosing and fast forward a few years. And I learned there's such a thing as too much autonomy. And it's a very privileged thing to say. But I had kind of individualized my own life. So I started reeling that back. I mean, I joined a nonprofit board in my community so that I had to be in certain places with certain people. At other times I started taking these dance classes. I tried to rebuild this dense network of reciprocal obligations that I had undone. And that is inconvenient, but it gives meaning and structure to your life. And so I just, I went overboard. Maybe you're a lot better at self imposing constraints than I am, and that's great for you, but for me, I realized I had a tendency to not to put useful constraints in place on my own work and my life.

[Anne Morris]

This conversation is very intuitive and I think the kind of adoption in the sports arena or in the arts or even in the world of chemistry and physics where those constraints are the point how do we work in a world where there is gravitational pull? What we love about the book and the conversation we've had today is you helping us pull those threads into the experience of work, which is where most of us are spending most of our lives.

[David Epstein]

I appreciate that. I mean, one thing I noticed when I started working on this book, in contrast to the last one, where when I told people I'm writing about the benefits of broad experiences in a more specialized world, I would typically get a raised eyebrow. In this case it was much more. I'm writing about how constraints can be useful, not only limiting in bad ways. Oh, that's totally true. But then when I would say, oh really? Like what do you got for me? People have trouble articulating it. And so my sense, or my hope is that there's this thing that people feel is true at a certain level, aren't 100% sure why in some cases. And maybe I can help add a lexicon for that and some stories and research behind it and just make that feeling more productive in the conversations they have and the experiments they try.

[Frances Fry]

I actually love the possibility of your reframe. And when constraints are imposed on us for externalities, we can be sad for a moment, but then it can be really glorious.

[David Epstein]

I appreciate that very much. You reminded me of what the venture capitalist Bill Gurley told me when I first mentioned to him that I was writing about constraints. He said, oh, we have a saying in venture that more startups die of indigestion than starvation of too much, not too little. I'm sure that the startups themselves don't feel that way.

[Anne Morris]

No startup ever.

[David Epstein]

Right. And so it felt to me like an analogy to what you're saying for individuals where it probably feels bad to them but may actually have these incredibly generative consequences.

[Frances Fry]

When I get really excited when I read your work, when you give us not just hope, but even pragmatism, like you're not, you're not just leaving us with the emotional feeling. You're actually practically prescribing some techniques that are kind of thrilling. It's fun to go borrow from someone else's toolkit. It's really fun.

[Anne Morris]

David, last question. Are you still taking the dance classes and what kind of dance?

[David Epstein]

Yes, it's shuffle dancing. And so the way I got interested in it was when I was interested in constraints. I mean, I've always liked dancing and, and learning and I'm big on learning a new physical skill regularly. And I watched this documentary about it where it was this kind of dancing that was created in crowded clubs in Melbourne because they had so little space, they wanted to be able to change directions really quickly in confined space. Oh, I love dancing. This aligns with my interest and constraints. I think that's what's made it good for Instagram because people can change directions

[Anne Morris]

within the windows better than dance videos.

[David Epstein]

So I started going. Of course, I single handedly raised the average age by like five years of each class. But I love that. It's also nice to have a space where none of my personal or professional baggage is there. It's just a place I go to be a learner. And again, that's another thing where it's like inconvenient to get there and, and make sure you're at the time, but also just enriches my life. So, yes, I'm still, I'm still doing it.

[Anne Morris]

Oh, I so love that answer. David, thank you for coming on Fixable.

[Frances Fry]

It was such a pleasure.

[David Epstein]

Thank you. This was really a total pleasure.

[Anne Morris]

If you're enjoying this show, make sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcast and tell a friend to check us out. Fixable is a podcast brought to you by Ted and Pushkin Industries. It's hosted by me, Anne Morris and me, Frances Fry. This episode was produced by Trina Menino. Our team includes Constanza Gallardo, Banban Chang, Daniela Balaurasso and Roxanne Hylash.

[Frances Fry]

Our show is mixed by Louis at Storyyard.

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[Nick]

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[Jack]

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