Loading summary
Transcript110 lines
- [00:02]
Advertiser/Commercial Voice
You stopped waiting for permission and started building yourself your dreams. Your credit Experian Boost could turn your on time payments into instant FICO score gains. Every bill you paid could become proof of your power. Self made, absolutely self funded. Experian could help you get there. Download the Experian app today. Results will vary. Not all payments are boost eligible. Some may not see improved scores or approval odds. Not all lenders use credit information impacted by experian boost. See experian.com for details. Experian
- [00:33]
Adam Grant
this episode is brought to you by ServiceNow. I get to spend my days studying how people think and what it actually takes to change our minds. It's work I find deeply meaningful. But even in meaningful work, there's still busy work. The admin, the repetitive processes, the invisible load that pulls attention away from what really matters. That's where ServiceNow's AI specialists come in. They don't just tell you what you should do about your busy work, they they actually do it. Start to finish, cases closed, requests handled, no extra work for you. To learn how to put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com I went
- [01:08]
David Epstein
to a writer's retreat after my last book came out and there was a question everyone had to answer, which was, what are you optimizing for this year? And I said, autonomy. Fast forward a few years and I learned there's definitely such a thing as too much autonomy. Because I think I caused myself to suffer in certain ways by over indexing on freedom.
- [01:27]
Adam Grant
Hey everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to Rethinking My Podcast with Ted on the Science of what Makes Us Tick. I'm an organizational psychologist, and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking. David Epstein is one of my favorite science writers, a journalist who specializes in understanding success. His last book range was about how generalists are primed to succeed over specialists in our modern world. His new book, Inside the Box, set some boundaries on that by exploring the power of constraints for unlocking creativity and potential. Setting limits wasn't just a professional curiosity for David, it was a personal challenge. When he was outlining this book, he gave himself an unusual constraint. So I have to ask you, there's a rumor going around that you wrote your latest book with an extreme constraint that you had to write the entire book on one sheet of paper.
- [02:31]
David Epstein
I did write, and I actually have right behind me. I forced myself to outline it in a detailed way on a single page of paper because in the past my outlines were really long so it's actually here and.
- [02:40]
Adam Grant
Oh, wow.
- [02:41]
David Epstein
So I set myself this constraint in part because for my first two books I wrote basically 150% of a book to get 100% of a book, which is extremely inefficient. Like I had to cut a trip to Arctic Sweden in my first book. You don't want to do that. So I set this limit for myself both to make a macro structural plan before I started and to have it fit on one page. And as you can probably see from that writing, I tried to cheat my own system by writing as small as possible, but it still had to fit on that page. And if it wasn't there, it is not in the book. And consequently the book is 20% shorter than my other two. My writing process was much more efficient, which was important because I became a parent between the last two books.
- [03:23]
Adam Grant
So I love that you actually held yourself to this discipline because I think I've experienced, as has every other writer I know, the problem of just overshooting and you have way more material than you can possibly use. A lot of people struggle with the opposite though, which is I don't have enough to say. So is this idea of setting a constraint only applicable if you're an over communicator as opposed to an under communicator?
- [03:47]
David Epstein
I don't think it's only applicable. I mean, so for someone like me or someone like you. Right. I think a problem will be going down a bunch of rabbit holes that are really interesting to us, but maybe not as much of service to the reader or don't actually fit in the project that well.
- [03:59]
Adam Grant
Yeah, not even rabbits want to go down some of those holes.
- [04:02]
David Epstein
That's right. But I do think in another way there's this research on so called specific curiosity that shows that if you can get people to think through a really narrow problem, they will actually start to be more creative. Like, they may think what they want is total freedom, but it's actually not so in some of that work, if you induce curiosity in someone, like one of the papers that I cited that I thought was really cool was where people were shown a famous magic trick and then either they were told how it worked or they were basically made to guess and told that they got it wrong and those people would start following up and looking more into it and they ended up doing this more fruitful exploration. And later when they were asked to design tricks, they were much, much more creative having been channeled to think through this sort of narrow problem. So I think it can actually help.
- [04:49]
Adam Grant
So you think we should all be thinking more inside the box, that we actually need more constraints in our lives. Why give me the macro argument?
- [04:57]
David Epstein
Yeah, I think that our intuition is to think that we will always do better with more freedom, that we'll be happier with more freedom, that we'll make better decisions with more freedom, that we will be more creative with more freedom. And I think, you know, I'm gonna speculate here, but based on some of the work about what's called subtractive neglect bias, the idea that we overlook solutions that involve taking things away, my guess is that human history was not, for the most part, full of problems of having too much. It was full of problems of having too little, too little freedom, and too little stuff. And so we just did not adapt to a world where you can have too much information or, you know, too many different things that you might want to try or too many different options. And so I don't think we're well equipped to realize that we often make better decisions when a choice set is smaller. We're often happier with our decisions when we aren't in a situation where we're forced endlessly to compare, and that we'll be more creative if we restrict our decisions. Because, like 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 it's metabolically costly. And so if you have total freedom, you will just go down the path of least resistance doing things that you've already seen before or that are familiar to you. So to a certain extent, it's almost impossible to be really creative unless you're hemmed in, in a way. And so that's. That's kind of separate from the fact that I think it's important for personal satisfaction, which, especially now in the age of social media and AI, where you can compare yourself to other possibilities endlessly, all day long if you want, and where you can start 9 million projects very easily. I think the need for restriction for both productivity and personal satisfaction is almost certainly at a level that it's never been in history before.
- [06:42]
Adam Grant
So that strikes me as the most novel idea when I think about the big picture here. I think most people are familiar with the paradox of choice and, and the idea that you can be overwhelmed by too many options and that can cause you to disengage or feel dissatisfied with what you chose, or both. I think what you're bringing to the table is the idea that if I Want to come up with new ideas, I should actually impose some limits on myself.
- [07:05]
David Epstein
Yeah, absolutely. And I should say part of the reason I took on this topic is me search, right. I spent a period there where I would dip my toe into different topics and say, I don't know if it's perfect and then just go to the next one, the next one. And I did that for quite a long time and realized that I wasn't going to find the perfect topic. It actually dawned on me when I read, I read a quote from Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, you know, famous for coining the term flow for the feeling of immersion in activity. And he was actually talking about relationships or marriage in this quote, but it didn't matter. Like the quote applies more broadly. And he basically said the great thing about being committed if you've done it by choice, is that you can stop wasting energy on wondering how to live and start living. And it was, that was the moment when I was like, I'm writing a book proposal on constraints. And so I think the ability to endlessly look for other ideas is often kind of this illusion of getting somewhere better where like you kind of want to pick something good enough and dive in. And that's where the really interesting stuff comes. I think.
- [08:02]
Adam Grant
What piece of evidence surprised you the most?
- [08:05]
David Epstein
It is the same one that I would say terrified me the most in this book, which was from the research of Gloria Mark, who has famously studied attention span and focus in the workplace. So her work on attention span and focus and all these markers of showing that things are not going so great from the standpoint of people's attention span. But what really surprised me and kind of changed some of the ways that I work was her work on self interruptions where basically if you're interrupted by notifications all day and other people or whatever it is, you will become accustomed to a certain cadence of interruption. And then if you say, all right, I'm going to take my phone and put it away now because today I really have to focus, you will just self interrupt with intrusive thoughts basically at the rhythm to which you've become accustomed, as if you have some kind of internal distractometer that doesn't want to change. And that was a little bit of a wake up call for me to be like, you're training yourself to be very distracted. And so if you want to get better at having sustained focus, you actually have to train that. It doesn't mean not attending to some of the things you have to do, but maybe you Batch those things you do one at a time instead of flitting between them all the time. One of the things that Gloria mentioned to me also was when you're in that training phase where you're trying to get some of your focus back, put a pad next to you, and as those thoughts come into your head where I didn't respond to this thing, you know, I forgot to message that person, write it down, and at least that outsources it from your brain. So that's really surprised me that the problem wasn't just putting away the phone, but actually training your ability to focus over time. So a little scary, but definitely changed some of my habits.
- [09:46]
Adam Grant
Well, we can see the fruits of that labor in the book. I want to talk about a few of the examples and stories that you cover because I think they both illustrate the power of constraints, but they also show how creative we can be in coming up with constraints that actually serve us. I think that was one of my biggest surprises when I was reading Inside the Box was, oh, there's actually ingenuity in figuring out what good limits and productive boundaries look like. I loved your Pixar example of the three pitch rule. Tell me about that.
- [10:14]
David Epstein
Yeah, so one of the reasons I wanted to use Pixar is because, well, I mean, one, I love Pixar. And so it's like to, you know, research a topic that you're interested in, have an excuse to go sit in Ed Catmull's office and all that stuff. But I viewed them also as, when I was thinking of companies, what would people associate with just unbridled creativity? Right. And so the things that come to mind are like NASA and Pixar. And so one of the things I was interested to learn was that Pixar used constraints religiously. I kind of thought of it as putting, like when you go bowling and you put the bumpers in the lane. And one of those rules was called the three pitches rule, where directors had to come with three story ideas for a film. They were not allowed to come with one, because when you only have one idea, you get anchored to it, whether it's the best idea or not, and you get attached to it and you don't want to change. And so they were forced to come up with three legitimate ideas or else they weren't allowed to pitch. And so I thought that was a pretty neat rule among a lot of interesting rules at Pixar.
- [11:14]
Adam Grant
What's also striking about that is they weren't allowed to come with 10 or 20 ideas, which sometimes creative People are tempted to do.
- [11:21]
David Epstein
Totally. I think that's an interesting titration. Right. And I think there's some art in that which is obviously, constraints can be bad. Right. It's almost synonymous with something that's frustrating, essentially. And so I think the art is you want to put some boundaries in place and they want to be fairly tight, but not so tight that they're actually completely stifling. You know, Simone Gatesch, the inventor, you know, she's famous for her. Both her zany robots, but also some legitimately ingenious products that she makes. You look at what she does and you're like, this person is just boundlessly creative. But she said if it's too open of a field, she can't really get started. So she made these dice that have different qualities on them, like a material she has to use a type of object or some functionality, and she rolls the dice and then she has to make, you know, chair out of cardboard that can play music or whatever it is. And that actually channels her to get her going in that case. So I think constraints can be useful there as well.
- [12:16]
Adam Grant
That's so interesting. It makes me think about the classic philosophy distinction from Isaiah Berlin between freedom from and freedom to. And I think traditionally a lot of people think about constraints as something you want freedom from.
- [12:30]
David Epstein
Yeah.
- [12:31]
Adam Grant
And what you're saying is actually there are certain kinds of constraints that can give you freedom from other constraints and other limitations that you might face.
- [12:40]
David Epstein
Yeah.
- [12:40]
Adam Grant
And then in turn free you up to do things you wouldn't have thought to do before.
- [12:44]
David Epstein
Yeah, yeah. I mean, Erich Frum wrote about the freedom from and freedom to also and the urge for people to escape from freedom. So he was writing in the mid 20th century and what he saw was people around him in Germany, when there was some breakdown of society, people craved so much structure that they would readily submit to authoritarianism, basically because they craved some of these boundaries. So they were escaping from freedom. And what he thought was more productive is if you wanted to bind yourself to things, it was a question were you going to find productive things to bind yourself to or not? Like, I don't want to get, like, too lofty, but since we're talking philosophy, like I look back at Robert Putnam's book Bowling Alone, you know, published around 2000, right around then. That seems really prescient in retrospect, where it's saying, as everybody gets into their individualized world, where entertainment is more individualized and people aren't doing things as a community. This breakdown of the dense network of reciprocal obligations to one another that people have in a community will be terrible for health and longevity. And now we see that, right?
- [13:43]
Adam Grant
Well, you know, it seems that some of what you're talking about is also a function of mindset. And I'm thinking about the widely used distinction in psychology between challenge and hindrance obstacles or stressors. It seems that a fair amount of what you're describing is approaching a problem or a task and saying, okay, I've got a limitation. I might have, you know, a time constraint. I might have a budget constraint. And instead of seeing that as a barrier, I'm gonna see that as a challenge to overcome.
- [14:13]
David Epstein
Totally. Totally. And in fact, as you well know, the way that people view those challenges helps determine how that stress affects them, whether it's a growth or negative source. And since we were just on philosophers, I'm not gonna let us get off before. I mentioned my favorite philosopher, Bernard Suits, who was responding to an argument where Wittgenstein said, there's nothing that all games have in common. And Suits said, actually, you're wrong. What they all have in common is. Is an attitude. He called it the lusory attitude. And it's the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles. And what Suits said was, that is what gives the game meaning, right? It's those obstacles that you voluntarily accept are what gives meaning to the entire endeavor. And that's how I like to think of obstacles and why I wanted to highlight a lot of stories like that. I mean, one that I was just thinking about because I was just talking to some folks at NASA, said, oh, we had this mission called lcross, where we had half the time in the budget that we were supposed to have. And so what happened? You know, we whined for a few minutes, and then we said, what can we actually do? And said, well, we can't invent stuff from scratch. So we took imaging equipment from army tanks, and we literally took engine temperature sensors from nascar, put them on our probe, and confirmed that there's water on the moon. And they just never would have done that if they weren't forced to do it and say, okay, we cry for a minute, and now what can we actually do? And since we both know him, David Chang, the restaurateur, he's, like, obsessed with constraints. And he talked about how with his first restaurant, it was so. So tightly packed the space that the fume hood for cooking would take away the cool air from air conditioning in the summer, so they couldn't air condition, and it would suck out the warm air in Winter, so they couldn't keep the temperature of the place. Right. So he said, all right, to balance that out, in summer, we're going to focus on cool dishes, and in winter we're going to focus on warm dishes so the cooking will actually heat the space up. And he said it led to this incredible flourishing of all these dishes that they made, but was completely just coming out of complete necessity. His office at the time, he said, was like a broom closet, and they couldn't afford someone to do reservations and stuff. So that led to the first fully automated booking system where you could go in and buy specific seats like you would buy in a concert. And it was all just because, you know, they said, well, we can't do this, so what is available to us and how can we use that? And it just led to one successful innovation after another.
- [16:36]
Adam Grant
That's such a good example. It reminds me of a paper that Jim Barry and I published years ago called the Necessity of Others is the Mother of Invention.
- [16:44]
David Epstein
That's a great.
- [16:45]
Adam Grant
We had fun with the title. But I think one of the ahas that that I had while we were working on that paper was so often necessity is not the mother of intellectual invention, because we see a problem and we're zoomed in too close, and we can't either define the problem effectively or figure out what might be the right solution because we're trapped with maybe too much constraint or the wrong kind of constraint. And when we see somebody else have a problem, we have a little bit of distance. It's easier for us to identify it and kind of figure out what's causing it and come up with some novel solutions to it. And then we're not just anchored on our own usual way of approaching it. We get to look at their view, too. And I wondered if you got into this at all, that sometimes the best constraints come from having to solve other people's problems.
- [17:37]
David Epstein
I think absolutely. It's the same thing with advice. You give better advice to other people having the same problem that you have. So I try to do that. If I have a problem now, I think of, all right, what advice would I give to a friend? It's often totally different than the advice that I've given to myself. But, yeah, I mean, there are a few things about this one, I think something that was embedded in what you said, which is that defining a problem really well is often the best thing you can do for getting it solved. And I actually don't think we typically take enough time to define problems really well. Like, we kind of have an idea of the problem we're trying to solve, but we're not defining it really narrowly. And one of the examples I mentioned in the book is like David Hilbert, who became probably the most impactful mathematician in the 20th century, where at the turn of the century and around 1900, he basically decided just to survey his field and try to really well define about two dozen problems in math that he thought should be solved. And then he passed them out in a pamphlet and it set an agenda for the 20th century. He defined them really carefully and it led to all these incredible breakthroughs. And I think there are just a lot of examples of that where like, so the first chapter in the book focuses on this company that had all the talent in the world, all the capital in the world, the perfect vision of the future of technology, and completely collapsed in part because they didn't define a problem well. Or like there's that famous adage that people don't want a quarter inch drill, they want a quarter inch hole in the wall. It's like, what's the problem that your service is actually not the thing that you're selling someone, but what is the problem that you're actually trying to solve? And there's a whole chapter in Inside the Box about what's called multiple discovery. This history of the most groundbreaking things in the world being arrived at by multiple people independently at the same time. And what typically precedes that is someone who really well defined the problem first, and it draws all these, these problem solvers to it and often leads to a solution. But those people don't get very much historical credit. It's not nearly as sexy to be the problem definer as it is to be the solver.
- [19:31]
Adam Grant
Yeah, well, you know, I think a lot of these solutions come out of necessity as, as we were talking about. But I was also struck that you described a game as having to overcome unnecessary obstacles. And I was surprised reading the book, at how much creativity could spring from someone imposing an unnecessary constraint. And I thought the best example of that was Dr. Seuss.
- [19:53]
David Epstein
I mean, at one point, Dr. Seuss was given a vocabulary list for kids, told to use only 200 words, which is not very many, and write a children's book. And at first he's looking through it and he starts complaining to his wife, right? He says, there's no adjectives. How am I supposed to write a book with no adjectives? And then in fine Seussian form, he says, it's like trying to make a strudel without any strudels. Which I love because he was the same person in his private notes, apparently as he was in his books. And then he just. He says, I'm just going to take the first two rhyming words and write a book about it. And the first two rhyming words, our Cat and hat. And that restriction, first of all, gives him an idea and a place to start, but also forces him to focus on rhythm because he has so few words. And then it happens again after he does that. He's bet by a publisher that he can't do it with just 50 words. And now he's like, all right, I can do it. And that becomes Green Eggs and Ham, where, again, so few words that he has to focus on rhythm and story and all this other stuff. One of your colleagues, Katronell Trump, calls it the Green eggs and ham effect. This idea that when you box somebody in, they often find more creative solutions. And after that, Seuss, or Theodore Geisel, his civilian name, started this, the most successful children's book imprint co founded, called Beginner Books. And he put all these constraints on the other creators like nothing could be pictured if it wasn't actually also described in the story. And all of the images had to run across two pages so that when you opened it, it was like one story left. He just layered constraints on them. If you look at before Seuss and after children's literature, it's not just him, it's like night and day in how creative and interesting it becomes.
- [21:33]
Adam Grant
How do you know when those constraints are going to unleash creativity versus hold people back?
- [21:39]
David Epstein
Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I think you need to leave people some leeway. You know, NASA actually had, in that anecdote I mentioned, they actually had half the time and half the budget. But I think you could say, what if we had half the time and half the budget and give it a try? What if we had to kill something in the next 90 days? What would it be? I think what a lot of the productive constraints revolve around is what psychologist Patricia Stokes would call a preclude constraint where you block the previous solutions. So if you went into this problem, whatever it is, this problem, this client meeting, what if we were barred from proposing the thing we always propose? What would we do? And I think the idea is that it prompts productive exploration, like wherever you are, right? There's one study that I love, that I'm sure you'll know, that looked at 30,000 games in the NBA, and what happens when a star goes down for a while, and if the star goes down, the other players who are left start spreading the ball around more. So they start experimenting with new strategies and when the star comes back, they give the star the ball a lot, but they don't go all the way back. And the team ends up better in the long term because we just don't productively explore enough. Like, once we find a good enough solution, we'll settle into that and kind of stop exploring enough.
- [22:53]
Adam Grant
I want to say chen Garg 2018 Strategic Management Journal, but don't quote me on it.
- [22:57]
David Epstein
Yeah, I mean I knew you. You're like real life perplexity for studies. But it's so similar to the famous London Tube study where there was a strike for commuters and so they couldn't use their normal commute for a few days and a bunch of them found routes that were better, that saved them time and never went back. But it was just by being forced to not do the autopilot thing that caused them to find these better solutions. So I think once in a while it behooves people to say, if that thing were taken away, what were the things I'd have to experiment with?
- [23:28]
Advertiser/Commercial Voice
This episode is brought to you by Best Western Hotels and Resorts. The way you spend spring break can change over the course of your life. It becomes less about partying and cramming everything in and and more about giving yourself permission to slow down and enjoy where you are. Maybe your spring break doesn't feel like it used to, but that can be a good thing. This spring, Best Western can help you redefine what a break can be. Whether it's a long weekend drive, a low key city stay, or getting back to somewhere you've been meaning to return to, Best Western makes it easy to plan something that feels simple yet still meaningful, which is exactly the kind of break many of us are craving right now. And there's a nice extra incentive too. This spring, stay three nights and get a $50 Best Western gift card. Life's a trip. Make the most of it at best Western. Visit bestwestern.com for complete terms and conditions.
- [24:23]
Adam Grant
Today's episode is sponsored by NerdWallet's Smart Money podcast. Navigating your finances can be stressful, and sometimes you just need some advice from someone you can trust. Imagine if you could have that one money savvy friend on demand for the moments when you just need a little guidance before making a NerdWallet's Smart Money podcast can be like that friend. Their team of trusted journalists breaks down financial decisions to give you research backed insights and clear pros and cons. Whether you're planning a big purchase or just want to grow your wealth, they explain the why behind tricky decisions like investing, home buying and choosing the best credit cards, all while keeping it engaging and humorous. This podcast cuts through the jargon and misinformation that's so often wrapped up with financial advice to get to the clear research backed answers you're looking for. Make your next financial move with confidence. Follow NerdWallet's Smart Money podcast on your favorite podcast app. You have the vision for your business, you have the plan, and you just
- [25:21]
David Epstein
got handed a huge opportunity. But is your business connectivity reliable enough to make a move?
- [25:26]
Adam Grant
Spectrum Business delivers fast, reliable Internet, phone, TV and mobile services, so you're always
- [25:32]
David Epstein
connected when it matters most. Get connectivity packages built for your business
- [25:36]
Adam Grant
with savings that keep your budget in check and with fast, reliable Internet and 100% US based customer support, you'll stay
- [25:44]
David Epstein
connected and ready to bring your vision to life.
- [25:47]
Adam Grant
Learn more@spectrum.com business restrictions apply.
- [25:51]
David Epstein
Services not available in all areas.
- [25:57]
Adam Grant
Okay, I think some of our best nonfiction books are a reaction to somebody kind of taking our previous idea and typecasting it kind of oversimplified and exaggerated
- [26:09]
David Epstein
like straw manning it basically.
- [26:11]
Adam Grant
And if I did that with your previous book Range, I would say this book is a reaction to the exaggerated thesis of range, which is you wrote a whole book about how we shouldn't specialize, we shouldn't constrain ourselves, we shouldn't limit ourselves, we should expand our horizons.
- [26:27]
David Epstein
Yeah.
- [26:28]
Adam Grant
And now you're saying, wait a minute, no, we need to box in more. So was this in part because of range that you felt like you did overexpand?
- [26:37]
David Epstein
Absolutely. I don't know that I would say over expand, but I think it left a lingering question which also happened to be one that I got a lot from readers, which is, okay, I've got this broad toolbox, what do I do with it? Right. And I do worry from range that it could be taken as oh, I should make decisions all the time that just like preserve optionality. And I actually think that can be a mistake, particularly for people who have lots of opportunity, that it's like preserving optionality becomes an end unto itself just to keep your options open, but your options are going to close. And it struck me when I was writing a little bit in Inside the Box about the work of Scott Stanley in relationships where he talked about sliding versus deciding where people will get into a relationship and it starts Escalating without them really making a decision to make a commitment. Like, they want to keep their options open. So it's like, you know, we'll move in, but I'm not really making a commitment. And it's just the illusion of keeping their options open. Right. And they end up sliding into escalating commitment and typically have less happy relationships. So that is one concern that I had of if someone would take range to mean preserve optionality at all costs. Because I don't think that's such a great thing.
- [27:49]
Adam Grant
Yeah. So this book is a correction to that misunderstanding of range in some ways.
- [27:55]
David Epstein
I think so. I mean, it felt like a natural next step to me. Again, I have these very broad interests, and it has been challenging for me to put a bounding box around my work and say, this is where I'm going to channel that stuff. So it was very much driven by that and thinking that a lot of people who would have been interested in range may have that same feeling.
- [28:12]
Adam Grant
I have to say, it's remarkable that we've had an entire conversation without talking about sports and you kind of burst onto the scene, first and foremost as a sports journalist, as an expert on how we pursue excellence as athletes and in fitness. And I'm just curious. We've watched a lot of sports evolve, in part adding constraints. Major League Baseball has been a huge example of that recently. I think there are a lot of people complaining that the basketball season would be more fun to watch if. If there were more limitations. I think the main constraint some people are asking for is just, we want fewer games, so there are higher stakes. But I guess I would just love to hear you riff a little bit about. You get to be the commissioner of any major sports league and you have this lens. That constraint can be liberating. What are the first few things you would love to experiment with?
- [29:04]
David Epstein
For my sport of track and field, where I was most competitive, I would take away the super shoes and sodium bicarbonate and all those things and the wavelight and all these technological performance enhancers and see what people would run with, like the shoes that, you know, running on cinders that like Roger Bannister ran with in the 50s. And so I would like to see that in every sport where, if we went back to old technology, as long as it's not going to hurt anybody, Right. Then if we went back to old technology to see, like, what does this look like, how does it compare? And would have, instead of an All Star Game, which I don't find to be that entertaining at this point I would have a game where I would like take away something that the teams are used to. You know, in basketball it would be a limited number of dribbles or no three pointers. No three pointers. Right. Let's go the opposite of the way that the analytics revolution is done. So I think I would use those All Star Game and exhibition games to do things as an exploration tool and see, you know, what's something that could be really, really different here.
- [30:02]
Adam Grant
Oh, that would be so fun. I would watch the All Star game where you can only shoot threes.
- [30:06]
David Epstein
Yeah. I mean, I just think you could come up with all sorts of things that would be really interesting to see them do.
- [30:10]
Adam Grant
An all hookshots game.
- [30:14]
David Epstein
I don't know if that would be
- [30:15]
Adam Grant
my first one, but that bring back Kareem Abdul Jabbar.
- [30:18]
David Epstein
Yeah. Maybe the game, all the games would have to be played in the style of an individual player. Right. So it's like the Caitlin Clark game. Everyone has to shoot from the logo at all times. Like you can't get closer than 40ft to the basket.
- [30:30]
Adam Grant
You could even vary by quarter. Like you have a different constraint for each quarter and then you get to see different kinds of styles and players shine.
- [30:37]
David Epstein
I think that'd be fun. I mean there's some research where actually athletes will experiment more productively if you do like let's say if you deflated the ball a bunch and you'd see how people would have to start passing in really fast network, you know, you could do things like that that I think would be really interesting or made it heavier where they couldn't throw it as far so they had to do like more picks and coming to one another. I think you'd find that people would explore some things that would turn out to be fruitful.
- [31:01]
Adam Grant
I think this is brilliant. I think this should happen. It reminds me of one other idea which my diving coach Eric Best came up with and I thought it was ingenious. He proposed that the Olympics should have relays that are age bound. So you have to have one runner or swimmer in their 20s, one in their 30s, one in their 40s and then 150 plus.
- [31:24]
David Epstein
Interesting.
- [31:24]
Adam Grant
I think that would be so much more fun to watch.
- [31:26]
David Epstein
That would be great. I think that would be awesome. There should be a little more experimentation, I think, to make some of this stuff interesting. You know, there's a lot of lip service to the things that sports can do for us and I think many of those are true, but some of them I don't think just happened by accident and that we could actually like cultivate them more than we do.
- [31:44]
Adam Grant
This episode is sponsored by Quints. I used to put no thought into my wardrobe. I've gotten a little better at this. I want easy and comfortable but still put together. Quint has been my go to for that. I don't have time to overthink my outfit for the day, so I'm happy to have their quarters at Pullover, which is super comfortable. They have all the perfect wardrobe staples for springtime now too. 100% European linen shorts, cotton tees, and lightweight pants that are breathable and make you look clean and polished. Everything is priced 50 to 80% less than what you'd find at similar brands because Quince works directly with ethical factories and cuts out the middleman so you get premium materials without the markup. Refresh your everyday with luxury you'll actually use. Head to Quince.comRethinking for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Quince.comRethinking for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.comRethinking this podcast is supported in part by Bill, the intelligent finance platform that helps businesses and accounting firms scale with proven results. On this show, we spend a lot of time questioning assumptions, especially the ones we've accepted as just the way things are. One assumption many organizations rarely rethink how their financial operations actually get done. That's why smart leaders turn to Bill with AI powered automation. Bill isn't just moving money, they're reducing the manual work of invoices and expenses for nearly half a million businesses. In fact, Bill reports that over 90 of the top 100 US accounting firms trust them to manage, move and maximize their clients money all in one place. That trust is backed by hard data, as Bill has securely processed over a trillion dollars in real transactions. When the business landscape keeps changing, clarity isn't just helpful, it's strategic. The right systems can free up time, reduce drag, and make growth more intentional. Eliminate the friction and start scaling with a platform built to evolve with you. Visit bill.com proven to talk with an expert about automating your business finances and get a $250 gift card as a thank you. That's bill.com proven terms and conditions apply. See Offer page for details. This episode is brought to you by National Business Furniture. You can find them@nbf.com I've been thinking about how the environment of our workspaces can help or hinder the way we work. So many organizations claim values like productivity and collaboration, but their spaces are built for a different era of work and tell an entirely different story. The truth is, our surroundings don't just influence how we work. They can have an impact on how we think, how we feel, and who we become while we're there. That's where national business furniture comes in. National business furniture is built on a simple idea. Every business deserves furniture that lasts, service that cares, and a partner who gets it at a budget that works. For more than 50 years, they've helped companies like yours create spaces that work best. If you want to create a space where people can really thrive, visit nbf.com and use the promo code POD10 to save 10%. That's nbf.com, a better way to buy office furniture. All right, let's go to a lightning round. First question is, what is the worst advice that people get about constraint?
- [34:58]
David Epstein
To think outside the box. Because that usually means to people brainstorming without a defined problem.
- [35:06]
Adam Grant
Yeah, it means it's vaguely saying don't be obvious, don't be obvious.
- [35:11]
David Epstein
And the best way you could do that is to put a constraint in that blocks the solution that you're used to, which is a pretty serious constraint.
- [35:17]
Adam Grant
What is your favorite advice on how to create a productive constraint?
- [35:23]
David Epstein
Setting good enough rules for most of your decisions so that you accept something that is good enough. Because this helps you avoid Fredkin's paradox, the idea that you will spend most of your time and energy on decisions where the options are so close that you can hardly tell the difference. And that's where your decision matters the least. But that's where we spend the most energy. So setting good enough criteria and just making a decision instead of agonizing, as
- [35:47]
Adam Grant
Barry Schwartz likes to say, choose when to choose.
- [35:49]
David Epstein
Consolidate your caring.
- [35:51]
Adam Grant
Yes, Good. Okay, you're organizing a dinner party of people who are masters of constraint throughout history. Two questions. First one is who are you inviting?
- [36:02]
David Epstein
Well, definitely, I mean, I would invite Tony Fadell, who was the lead designer of the ipod and the co founder of Nest, because when I first called to interview him, he was like yelling at me, if you don't have constraints, create constraints. You know, he's such a zealot for constraints. I think I would also invite Bach, the most important composer who ever lived as decreed by other composers. Actually, Tyler Cowens made the argument that he is the greatest creator of any kind ever. If you look at his output and he was just an absolute zealot for self imposed constraints so he would pick forms where he would take just like a tiny musical phrase and just torture it in every way possible, including encoding his own name, B flat acb, which in German musical notation is Bach. Putting his own name into the music and then just manipulating in all these different ways, boxing himself in more and more and more. And that's what kind of forced him to do things that had never been seen before. Claude Monet, who changed art by deciding that he would a, not use black. Like, he banned black so much that when there was a black shroud over his coffin at his funeral, one of his friends started screaming, no black for Monet, and went into a house and got like a full floral tablecloth and put it over his coffin instead.
- [37:16]
Adam Grant
Wow.
- [37:17]
David Epstein
And Monet said that this was sort of based on an emerging science of perception, that I'm not going to use dark and light shades. Instead, I'm just going to put pure color but in close proximity to one another and see if I can get people to perceive sort of impression of light. Hence impressionism. So I think Bach, Monet, Fidel. I'd be interested to have Einstein just because I'd want to argue with him a little bit. That's not a good spot for me to be in. Arguing with Einstein, but not unlikely to win. Yeah, but really, if you look at his work and it's in his papers, he's actually picking up these incredibly narrowly defined problems that other physicists threw down and offering different explanations for them. And so I think I'd want to talk to him a little bit about, like, maybe. Do you think maybe some of those thought experiments that you started describing many decades after they supposedly happened might have given some of the wrong impression? I'd just be curious to see what he might think about that.
- [38:09]
Adam Grant
That's a hell of a dinner party. Okay, tell me something you rethought while you were writing this book.
- [38:15]
David Epstein
Definitely some of my work habits. I decided not to ever start my day with email. And in fact, I often started using email only after my important workday that did have some negative consequence. Like, I did end up missing more messages than I used to in the past. But it did allow me to focus in a way, because typically I started first with email. I was like, it's like something concrete that I know I'll be getting something done.
- [38:41]
Adam Grant
It's a warmup.
- [38:42]
David Epstein
Yeah, warmup.
- [38:43]
Adam Grant
It builds your confidence, momentum. Yeah.
- [38:45]
David Epstein
But it never ends. And so it always left me with, like, a list of a million things that I felt like I had not attended to. And so I think, you know, working on my own home, office and everything. Working. I have a tendency to eat up the whole day. And I think I thought for my first two books that some of my competitive advantages was that I would work all day. And I actually don't think that was an advantage in the long term. Like, I think I needed periods of recovery to think better. So I rethought my kind of like, puff up my chest idea of I can work all day and that's gonna be the best. And so, you know, it requires a little bit of an identity change, but I think it's better.
- [39:20]
Adam Grant
Okay, Office hours, time. Do you have a question for me?
- [39:25]
David Epstein
Yeah. So I was thinking about, like, a lot of the low friction things we do can be really bad for us as individuals, as a society. Like, it's so easy to have groceries delivered or have food delivered. It's so easy to have the entertainment that's just completely fed to me, it's so easy to have an individualized life for one. Basically, we know that's not good for thriving, where we're often not as anchored in our community as might be good or with real people in the real world. But it's really hard to get people to say, give up some of your freedom for this sort of more amorphous, more abstract thing. But how do you go about telling people or trying to convince them they should actually give up some of their freedom and it will be better for them because it's higher friction, it doesn't feel good. So I think it's a hard sell.
- [40:10]
Adam Grant
Oh, this is a fun question to think through. So I'm going to define the problem differently.
- [40:16]
David Epstein
Okay.
- [40:17]
Adam Grant
I don't think you have to convince people to give up their freedom, nor do I think you're going to succeed if that's right. That's a.
- [40:23]
David Epstein
That's a losing press release there. Sorry.
- [40:25]
Adam Grant
What is more American, what is more Western than the value we place on our freedom? I find myself wanting to encourage you to look at this from a completely different angle and say, I don't think the goal is to give up freedom. I think the goal is to say, where do I need freedom? Where is it important to me? Because we don't want freedom in every part of our lives. No one would ever get married if people wanted complete freedom, romantically. No one would ever take a job that was more than a day or a week or a month contract. And we do those things because we value security, we value connection, we value commitment. And so I guess the way that I would want to approach this problem is I would want to think about freedom in tandem with other values that people hold dear. And instead of saying, give up your freedom, say, the way that you're pursuing freedom is actually causing you to compromise your interest in connection and commitment. It is jeopardizing your desire for predictability and security. It is potentially undermining your ability to be supportive of other people and make a contribution. And so I think that this is, you know, ironically, given where our conversation went earlier, I guess my nudge to you is think about this as an addition, not a subtraction.
- [41:46]
David Epstein
How.
- [41:47]
Adam Grant
How do I elevate other values that need to exist in tandem with freedom rather than trying to lower the importance people place on freedom?
- [41:54]
David Epstein
That's a great way to frame it, because obviously, like, give up your freedom is a loser, especially in this country. But a loser in general. Right. It's provocative, but it's a loser. But to help people see that there are these other values that they have that just necessitate syncing with other people's schedules. You know, but, like, when I started going to these dance meetups, I started going to. It's just so that I can give up some of my own scheduling freedom to have some, like, grounding in the real world. It's, like, kind of annoying to get there and everything, and it's on somebody else's schedule. But otherwise I was having no embodied experience with strangers at all. And that is something that I really wanted to have. So, you know, I would be thinking about it in that framing much less as well. This is kind of an annoying thing where I'm giving up some schedule autonomy, as this is a really important value to me. This is a place where I'm choosing to have an anchor or a schedule annoyance or whatever it is.
- [42:46]
Adam Grant
Yeah. And I almost want to look at that through the lens of the Schwartz value circumplex or values wheel, where I'm sure you know, the research where he identified roughly 8 to 10 core values that exist in every major culture around the world. And you see that there are other values that autonomy sort of goes hand in hand with, like, pleasure, but it's sort of often in tension with anything that connects you to a collective, whether that's tradition, community, and friendship, whether that might be some degree of helping others, and even the pursuit of certain kinds of pleasure requires us to say, okay, I want to balance out freedom with some degree of security and controllability and predictability. And. And I think that as you get people thinking about those kinds of examples where they're not giving up freedom, they're choosing to have freedom within a particular bubble as opposed to not create the bubble in the first place. That just makes it to me much more compelling.
- [43:47]
David Epstein
Totally. And it's like choosing that like I love the phrase consolidate your caring.
- [43:51]
Adam Grant
Agreed. Well, David, thank you as always. Thought provoking and idea stimulating and congrats on the book. I think it's going to challenge a lot of people in the best possible.
- [44:02]
David Epstein
Thanks so much.
- [44:05]
Adam Grant
Rethinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant. The show is produced by Ted with Cosmic Standard. Our producer is Jessica Glaser. Our editor is Alejandra Salazar, our engineer is Asia Pilar Simpson, our technical director is Jacob Winick, and our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Our team includes Eliza Smith, Roxanne Hylash, Banbam Chang, Julia Dickerson, Tansika Sung Manivong and Whitney Pennington Rogers. Original music by Hans Dale Su and Alison Layton Brown. Ooh, it says recording. Look at that. Do you feel a power surge when you press a button? And it works. This is the table, the one with the view. This is how you reserve exclusive tables with Chase Sapphire Reserve. This is your name on the list. This is the chef sending you something he didn't put on the menu. This is 3 times points on dining with Chase Sapphire reserve and a $300 dining credit that covered the citrus pavlova and drinks and the thing you didn't think you liked until you tasted it, Chase Sapphire Reserve now even more rewarding. Learn more@chase.com Sapphire Reserve cards issued by JP Morgan, Chase bank and a member FDIC subject to credit approval. This is Robert Mase from the Athletic Football Show. Men's Wearhouse is here to make you look and feel good no matter the occasion. From formal to casual, dressed down to dressed up. Their in store experts will help you find the right outfit for that thing you got on the calendar and their on site tailors will make sure the fit is perfect for your body. Suits, tuxes, sport coats, jeans, shorts, chinos, T shirts, polos, loafers, sneakers, sandals, underwear. Get ready to look and feel good for anything from head to toe by visiting Men's Wearhouse today. Men's Wearhouse Love the way you look.
- [45:51]
Advertiser/Commercial Voice
Healthcare can feel complicated. That's why Optum uses technology to connect the people and processes that make healthcare easier, more affordable and more effective. We're making it clearer for you to know exactly what your benefits cover and to help you better manage your health. We're coordinating care between your doctors and your technology. We believe better, simpler health care is always possible. Possible. That's healthy optimism. That's Optum. Visit optum.com to learn more.
- [46:21]
Paige Desorbo
Hey, it's Paige Desorbo from Giggly Squad. Okay, wait, have you ever had one of those moments where you're like, I should be doing something fun tonight and then you just don't because you don't have what you need? Because Same. But recently I've been trying to be more of a yes person. And honestly, Amazon prime has been enabling that energy. Like the other night I randomly decided I was going to host a last minute girls night. No planning, no groceries, nothing. And. And instead of spiraling, I just ordered everything I needed and got it that day. Snacks, drinks, even like random hosting things I absolutely didn't need. But emotionally I did. And suddenly it went from maybe next time to yes tonight. That's what I love. Prime Same day delivery makes it so you can say yes before the moment slips away. Because let's be real, the only thing worse than a bad plan is a plan you never make happen.
- [47:09]
Advertiser/Commercial Voice
Same day delivery.
- [47:10]
David Epstein
It's on Prime.
- [47:11]
Advertiser/Commercial Voice
Available in select areas.
- [47:12]
Adam Grant
Terms apply. So if you're trying to be more spontaneous or just less chaotic, go to
- [47:16]
Advertiser/Commercial Voice
amaz Amazon.com prime to find millions of items delivered fast.