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The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast
1KHO 789: Complete Freedom Makes Us Less Creative | David Epstein, Inside the Box
00:56:04
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- [00:01]
A
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- [00:31]
B
Welcome to the 1000 Hours Outside podcast. My name is Ginny Yurich. I'm the founder of 1000 Hours Outside, and I have an author here that I have been a fan of for a very, very long time. I read his New York Times bestselling book Range, which is such a fantastic book, I think, for parents because we're always pushing our kids to specialize. And this is about, you know, like having broader interests. So the author, David Epstein is here and he has a new book called called Inside the Box about constraints. Welcome, David.
- [01:00]
C
Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate that very enthusiastic introduction.
- [01:05]
B
Aren't these like such fantastic books for parenting? Like, I see just this push for young kids, you know, to get them specialized to only do one thing or just a lot of push. You talk about in Inside the Box for just like freedom, you know, and in our work, you know, freedom, all we want is autonomy. And you just make such an incredible case for having some construction constraints in your life. Boxing it in. So have you gotten feedback from parents that have said things like. And I know Inside the Box hasn't come out yet, but. But that are using this for their parenting philosophies?
- [01:39]
C
Yeah, I mean, it's so early. Haven't gotten a ton of feedback yet because it's, it's, it's like totally new to the world, but a little bit from the people that have read advance, you know, advanced copies or early copies of the book because I think there's this, this balance in tension. Right. So I wrote one book range about the benefits of having broad experiences and exploring and all these. And then this next book is about, well, you get this broad tools and experiences and you actually channel those into something. So I think between these books, I'm trying to get at this balance of fostering exploration but also giving enough structure that people aren't just drifting freely. And I think about this as a parent, when rain came out, I turned it. Between the time I turned it in and the time it was published, I became a parent. So it was much more in retrospect that I started thinking of it as a parenting book. Whereas with Inside the Box, I was much more cognizant of thinking about this as a parent and doing some of the things that I read in the research, which ranged from kind of everything, from sort of setting up ways that I thought I could help my son learn motor skills better with what's called the constraints led approach to motor skill learning, to creative tasks where I kind of boxed him in and saw his creativity flourish, to assigning him chores. Because one of the main recommendations that came out of the longest study of human development ever, the Harvard Study of Adult Development that's followed people from cradle to grave, was to give kids chores early because it gives them a sense of responsibility and a feeling of competence and of obligation to things other than themselves. So, yes, these have certainly informed my parenting, and I hope that will be the case for other people that read them.
- [03:20]
B
Yeah, I mean, clearly they're for anyone, but I just thought, oh, gosh, there's some really specific things in here that you wouldn't know. You wouldn't know. And then you can apply those to your parenting. And especially today, because what everyone's talking about is we need for people to be creative and we need for them to be flexible. And I guess your first thought would be, well, yeah, well, you need to have no limits on anything you do then. And that's going to help. And what the book teaches you is, actually that's not the case. So I would like to talk about a couple of the specifics. One of the ones that was counterintuitive to me, that I wouldn't have considered until I read the book Inside the Box, is that when you have complete freedom, you're talking about no constraints. You talked about this company, General Magic. They had no budget constraints, there's money pouring in. And I was like, I've never heard of this company. And it just went belly up. You know, they had tons of employees, all the brightest and the best, just no constraints. And then you contrast that with other companies like Pixar, who box themselves in on purpose. So one of the things that you say is complete freedom paradoxically leads to conformity.
- [04:24]
C
Yeah.
- [04:25]
B
Whoa. Can you explain that?
- [04:26]
C
Yeah. So you. We may think that our brains are made for thinking, but as the cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham has pointed out, our brains are actually made to prevent us from having to think whenever possible, because thinking is metabolically costly. And so if you have total freedom, you will just go down what cognitive scientists call the path of least resistance, meaning that you will only do things that you have seen before or experienced before because essentially you're kind of lazy. Like, your brain's kind of lazy. It doesn't want to be pushed unless it really has to be. And so, paradoxically, the only way to do something new and creative is to block the old solutions that you're used to. And that's what forces you into this. This creative path. But it's really. It's deeply counterintuitive. Like, there was just an international survey by psychologists that showed the most popular. It was a survey of creativity myths around the world. So things that we know are not true based on psychological research. And the most popular mistaken belief was that people are most creative when they are most free. And it's just not true. In fact, psychologists have something they call the green eggs and ham effect. This is. So Dr. Seuss famously wrote green eggs and ham based on a bet that he couldn't write a book using only 50 words. And the green eggs and ham effect is the name for this idea that when you sort of restrict people's options and block the familiar solutions, that's when creativity explodes. The fastest way to make someone instantly more creative is to block the solutions that they're used to.
- [05:55]
B
Yeah. So there we go. There's like, if you feel like. And I would say I'm not a super creative person. So there are solutions in here to use. Like, immediately, if you give yourself some constraints, you are immediately going to become. You're going to be forced into deeper problem solving. You gave an example of, you know, imagine life on another planet, and you're like, if there's no restraints, everybody just draws these animals that look just like the ones on Earth. And it just kind of reminded me of our day and age with social media, which in some ways feels like you can post anything, but there is so much conformity. Can you talk then about. So an example of this is universal design.
- [06:38]
C
Yeah.
- [06:39]
B
And how if you focus on a smaller group of people, it actually ends up helping a larger group of people.
- [06:44]
C
Yeah, yeah. So two kind of points there. And what you said the first one about drawing the aliens, these are. These are studies where people were asked to draw life on. Imagine life on other planets and be as creative as you want. And when they're given those instructions, they basically draw things that look like stuff that you'd already see on Earth. But when they're given more specific instructions, like draw alien life but consider how it would have to find food, they'd make much more creative depictions if they're given some really specific directive this is like, there's this famous saying in the advertising world. Give me the freedom of a tight brief. It's like, if you define the problem much more narrowly, people actually explore much more readily so you can become more creative. And I see this, like, with my own son. So I'll take this stuff from studies and say, okay, let's draw. Because we talk about. I was an astronomy minor in college. My son and I talk about, like, aliens all the time. And I studied environmental science and astronomy. And most of his questions are about trees, rocks, and stars. And so right now, I'm like, the coolest I will ever be. I guarantee it. And so I'll try to make the instructions specific and be like, consider how they would get around. And so suddenly, he's focused on the locomotion aspects of the drawing, and he becomes way more creative. So we kind of use that in our own practice. Your other point was about universal design. So universal design is a term that came out of the disability rights movement in the United states in the 60s, 50s, 60s, 70s. And what it means is it's the idea that if you design for users with the most constraints, this could be products, processes, public spaces. You design for users with the most constraints. That could be older people, that could be kids, it could be pets, it could be people with disabilities. You typically end up making something that is actually better for everyone, because the challenges of kids or of older people are really just more extreme versions of challenges that everyone has. And so it turns out that focusing on those constraints is a really, really good design principle for everything from public parks to websites.
- [08:53]
B
It's so interesting. I learned so much. And it does reframe. And if you're a parent thinking, I. We've got. Our youngest is nine. She's always like, what should I draw? What should I draw? Mom, what should I draw? What should I draw? You know, they're always asking those things. And so that's. This is a small, you know, a small little shift in what you're doing, but it's going to help to enhance their creativity when you learn.
- [09:14]
C
Yeah. Give them a specific directive.
- [09:16]
B
Yeah. To respond in different ways. Okay. So then you went through. It's fantastic writing. Of course, you can see why the other one was New York Times bestseller. I'm sure this one will be, too. It's called Inside the Box, How Constraints Make Us Better. You went through all of these examples of people in history. Now, this is similar to range, where you're like, okay, you would think that all of these people who are Winning Nobel. The Nobel Prize. That they're super ultra focused, and you're like, no, they're not. They actually, like, play tennis, and they do all sorts of other things. They have a bride, a broad range of skills. So in Inside the Box, you go through a bunch of really fascinating examples of people who are constrained by their instrument, by the backboard for their basketball, and it made them better. So I would love to talk about two or three examples. There's a lot in the book. The piano one I thought was really cool.
- [10:12]
C
Yeah. So this is the story that opens one of the chapters about Keith Jarrett, the jazz musician, where he shows up to. He's on tour, and he shows up in Cologne, Germany, to play a concert that is being promoted by this kind of dynamic woman who's like a teenager but becomes a professional concert promoter. And he shows up, plays a few notes on the piano at the Cologne Opera House and says, concert's off. This piano is in terrible shape, and it's the wrong piano. So as it turned out, the wrong piano had been delivered. He wanted this incredibly special one called a Bussendorfer Imperial 290. This is one of the fanciest pianos in the world to play this solo concert. And it's the wrong piano. Like, just the wrong one had been delivered. And so the woman promoting the concert, her name was Vera Brandes, is scrambling, and she's running all over the place to try to get another piano, and it turns out she can't get it. And what ends up happening is Jared decides to cancel the concert. She begs and pleads with him, and for whatever reason, he gives in. He was kind of, like, famously ornery. He would stop a concert if he heard a camera click. And he gives in to her. I don't know if it's because, you know, she's a teenager and she's, like, doing this huge thing, and maybe he just has a soft spot. Whatever the case, he gives in to her and decides to play. But because parts of the piano are basically unplayable, like, some of the felt hammers are worn, so the upper register of the piano is tinny. Some of the lower part. This piano has fewer keys than the one that he had actually ordered. It has fewer keys, which is crazy. The one he wanted actually had extra keys. And so he's forced to kind of stick to certain parts of the piano, which forced him to play these repetitive rhythms with one hand and just variations on a theme over and over and over. And he improvs for an hour. And even the piano's not loud enough to fill the concert hall. So he starts doing this thing where he starts slamming his foot against the pedal without pressing it down to add, like, some percussion. And it just turns into this incredible piece of improvisation where the audience is ecstatic. There was a recording crew there, and he basically was gonna dismiss them because he was like, we're never gonna use a recording with this piano. But since they're already there, he lets them record it. And it goes on to become the best selling solo piano album, jazz piano album of all time. Like, no marketing. It's way too long to get played on the radio. It's like an hour long. But people start playing it in record stores and customers going into what is that? And it just absolutely takes off. And as he said later, it was just the imperfection of this piano that forced him to explore rhythm and repetition in a way that he never would have done if he had gotten a perfect instrument. And there are just tons and tons of examples of this. That's a particularly dramatic one, but lots of examples of that in art history.
- [12:59]
B
Yeah. I mean, it is fascinating. It ties in with the. When you have total freedom, it leads to conformity. But with these constraints of this instrument, the pedals were sticky and you wrote.
- [13:11]
C
Yeah.
- [13:12]
B
And someone said that piano did him the biggest favor on the planet. And so you go through example after example. One of them was it Kylie Irving, Kyrie Irving.
- [13:22]
C
Kyrie Irving.
- [13:22]
B
Kyrie Irving. He's playing with half a backboard, you know, so he's having to learn to make better shots.
- [13:28]
C
Yeah. I mean, and he's. He's well known as arguably, you know, certainly one of the greatest finishers in basketball history. And he'll get up in the air. He's not. He's not by NBA standards. He's a small guy. And he'll get up in the air and kind of twist in the air and spin the ball off the backboard in these incredible angles. And he credits that to growing up with a. With a piece of the right side of his childhood backboard missing. And so he would have to curve under the hoop or spin the ball in strange ways. And that's really a perfect example of something in motor skill learning called the constraints led approach, which is actually not a new method for teaching usually kids, but also adults motor skills and sports skills. But it's having a real moment because a few of the most famous athletes in the world, like Victor Wembanyana. Victor Wembanyama. Sorry, that's a tongue twister. Victor Wembun. Yama usually just call him Wemby like everybody else. One of the best basketball players in the world is using it as is Shohei Ohtani, the probably the best baseball player in the world. So it's having this moment and what it's really about is, and I should say, I think the constraints led approach to teaching kids physical skills, teaching anyone again, but really it's, it's a lot of it is focused on kids is a bit of a synthesis of range and inside the box because part of range is about individual variability and how people don't develop in the same way. And so that we shouldn't have a cookie cutter approach for everyone in traditional teaching of physical skills is like you tell somebody what to do, you know, to hit a baseball, you, you put your elbow here and you do the. The constraints led approach views the teacher or the coach as what they call an environment architect. So the idea behind it is everyone's physiology and psychology is different. And so in order to accommodate the individual, we have to foster an environment that pushes them to find their own best solution. And so instead of saying, here's how you do this thing, the coach or teacher sets up constraints in the environment that forces them to explore something like a missing piece of the backboard, maybe, maybe playing in some of the studies they'll be playing on lopsided games in soccer, for example, like maybe you're playing three on five in a little small field or something like that. And it forces people to come up with their own best solutions and to explore the space much more readily. And they start learning these skills in a way that just telling them what to do wouldn't work. I mean, one of the simplest and cool examples I saw was when I was with an Olympic development swimming program in Australia and they were teaching kids to swim. And an important part of swimming quickly is getting your body as linear as possible on your strokes. And they put hoops under the water and of progressively smaller size. And the kids had to try to get through the hoop without touching the side. And so instead of telling them you put your arm here and you do this, it would force them to figure out how to best do it with their own physiology by reaching through the hoop. And it's fun, like it's all gamified. So it's this real combination of fun and individualized learning that that's fortunately kind of having a public moment right now.
- [16:33]
B
I love this book. I love it. There's so many examples. And you can immediately take your own life and you go through other ways of implementing this, you know, for your work life. And you can immediately start to make some changes and you can be excited about those changes. So if you're interested in music, you have music examples, art examples, Monet, Picasso, B, you got the basketball example, the Olympic, if you're interested in sports, all of these different examples, including your own. Your own. David I think for a long time I underestimated how much your outdoor space impacts your day to day life because ours just wasn't working. It felt unfinished. We had a couple mismatched chairs, no real place to sit comfortably. And I've always had this idea that I'd add lighting or make it feel cozy, but never actually got around to it. Then we started looking on Wayfair and it made the whole process feel doable. We found pieces that actually fit our style. 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It was a constraint that actually really led you to this moment to having these New York Times best selling books. This new one that's out inside the box. Can you talk about what happened there that you could have never expected?
- [20:47]
C
Yeah. And this is, I mean it's no secret. I think this book I write more about myself in this book than in the others. I'm not, I'm not a primary focus, but I do come up more than in my previous books. And one of the reasons I was interested in constraints. There's a hefty dose of what I call me search in this book in addition to the research, which is things that I wanted to understand, either get better at in my own life or understand. And the story you're referring to that's in the beginning of the book is when I was in eighth grade. I mean, I was a nutcase for sports, like you said. I would wake up and watch the same Sports center half hour Sports center segment play twice in a row. The literal same segment, like it was identical, just played twice in a row and playing football, basketball and baseball. And I was small, but I was good fast. I could throw really hard. And so I was playing quarterback in just some schoolyard football at gym class in eighth grade and threw a ball as hard as I could. And on the follow through of the throw, my arm snapped in half. It's an incredibly rare injury. We'll never know exactly why. There may have been like an air pocket in my bone, they theorize, but. But we'll never know. It snapped in a spiral on the, on the throw, totally separated the bone. So like when I was turning my shoulder, I was feeling like a phantom hand and all these things. And I ended up having to have my arm strapped to my body for several months, like across my, across my torso. And I was absolutely devastated. It, it. Since sports was so such a big part of my, my life, I was out of sports. Sports. I was not that into school at the time. And one of the first things that happened, of all the parts of school that I was not into, I would say French class was, was probably leading the list. And we had these tests where you had to listen to a recording of someone speaking in French and you had a worksheet with blanks in it. And you had to catch the missing words as they went by and write them and write them down as accurately as you could. And because my writing hand was now strapped to my body, I couldn't do that. And they didn't give me a special dispensation. They just put me in the class anyway. And so I was. Instead, what I tried to do was memorize all of the words that filled the blanks and then go back slowly and write them down with my left hand. And in order to do that, I started using mnemonic devices like as I would I would listen to the word, try to associate it with some sports thing that would help me remember it, and then go back and write it really slowly with my left hand. And I started acing those tests, whereas I had not before. Years later, you know, let's see, maybe 25 years later, I read one of the most famous studies of memory research ever done in which a Carnegie Mellon undergrad is taken from being able to memorize only seven digits in a row to like 80 digits in a row. And he's using sports related mnemonics. It doesn't have to be sports related mnemonics. But the point is, when you're restricted from your usual solution, we have all these sort of cognitive tricks we can use to get better. And mnemonics became central to my educational experience. My ability to remember things just got so much better. And even today, if I give an hour long keynote talk, I memorize every word of it. I feel free to improv off of that memorization, but I memorize it. And it's not because I have a photographic memory. Like if I put my keys down and spin in a circle, I lose them. It's, it's just I learned to use these demonic devices because I was forced to. And so much good in my life actually came out of that unfortunate instance. I was then not able to play football because I couldn't do contact sports for a while my freshman year in high school. So I started running and I ended up running in college. It became a huge part of my life. It still is. It's just all these areas where I was constrained. Like I lived on a boat. I was a, I was training to be a scientist before I was a writer. And I lived on a boat where I learned how to work out with almost no space. I lived in a tent in the Arctic and realized that I really like, don't like having too much. I'm more happy if I don't have tons of stuff. So just looking back to my own life and realizing how important constraints have been to my own educational experience, my athletic experience, and my personal contentment, I
- [24:53]
B
mean, I think there's a lot of people that would relate, that have had their plans or their dreams derailed for whatever reason for one reason or the other. And you wrote, I think this is quite the message. You felt like your life was ruined, but rather than curtailing your athletic career as you feared at the time, it actually extended totally.
- [25:14]
C
It, it did what constraints so often it did the same thing that constraints do in the constraints led approach. Sports learning Studies in the creativity studies. It forced me to explore things that I never would have tried on my own, like running, cross country. I didn't even know what that was. I was not interested, but I was not able to do contact sports. And so I said, I'll do it just to stay in shape. I met people I never would have met. I realized I had a certain talent that I never would have explored if I hadn't tried it. So it's whether it's in drawing, sports, skill learning, or even figuring out where you fit in the world, constraints cause you to explore in a way that you otherwise wouldn't. And had I not done that, you know, I would not have ended up. I mean, I ended up becoming a university record holder as a runner in an event, the 800 meters, that I didn't even know existed, David, until I was forced to explore track and field. So that's the theme of constraints, is they actually force you to explore much more actively than when you're. You just have complete freedom.
- [26:15]
B
Yeah, And I love that the examples include things like J.S. bach, who is a pianist, and he did it on purpose, like he made his own constraint. So you go through the book and talk about ideas for your own constraints. But then this story right here of the broken arm, this is a constraint that wasn't your choice. So no matter how it comes there, it just reframes. It reframes what can happen out of that situation. Can we stick with your personal story just for a brief bit longer? I love that it was woven through. I thought that it really helped me connect with the concepts and the stories. One of the ones that you. Of. Of your stories that you talked about, a situation basically, that I think, especially since COVID actually, maybe really before COVID where people were starting to be like, I live in a van and I travel everywhere, and I. And I work remote. And you know, and you're like, oh, freedom. You know, we converted a bus. We've got complete freedom. And you're really drawn to that. But you talk about that as. As possibly having some potential pitfalls. You wrote, a few years ago, I would have scoffed at the idea that there could be a such a thing as too much freedom. But you say, I am still climbing out of the excessive autonomy I constructed for myself. Can you elaborate on that? Like, to explain why would anybody want to climb out of their autonomy? What could be the problems and how do you climb out of that?
- [27:41]
C
Yeah, it sounds crazy, right? I'm glad you picked up on that. So I was, when I became a writer. My long term goal was basically to get to total autonomy, like using every minute of my day and my own, individualized by my own choice. And in fact, when I was, when I wrote Range, toward the end of Range, I left. It was the first time I left having traditional jobs and was kind of on my own. I went to this writer's retreat and we were all asked to say, what were we optimizing for that year? And I said, autonomy. I want to just totally do whatever I want, whenever I want. And fast forward two years from that, because range did give me the ability to kind of go on my own as an independent writer. And I learned that there is such a thing as too much autonomy. Like, I individualized my schedule so much that I didn't have any kind of structure to the day. My schedule was so my own that I, like, wasn't really syncing up with other people. My life started becoming more virtual and less out in the real world. Because when you have such an individualized schedule, you know, you have to sacrifice some of your autonomy if you want to go sync up on other people's schedules out in the real world.
- [28:53]
B
Right?
- [28:55]
C
And it felt terrible. I mean, I started to struggle in prioritizing what I should be working on because I had a million kind of like medium term priorities because I wasn't really, really working with other people. I wasn't feeling like grounded in my community because I was always doing things according to, according to my own schedule, not to others. I was missing what I refer to as embodied experience with strangers. Like sometimes I want to be in a group with, with strangers and have experience with a group of other people, including ones that I don't know. And I just totally over indexed on. You know, it reminded me of when, when like Mark Zuckerberg was talking about the metaverse and he was like, it's going to be great. We're all going to have our own virtual world that's tailored just to us, you know, only. And I remember thinking like, that sounds terrible. Like you want to live in your own individualized world. Like, we're a hyper social species. That's not how we thrive. And yet. And yet. Then I went and did that to my own life, basically. You know, not in the metaverse, but created my own. Even though I saw when he said that, that I'm like, that sounds awful. That does not fit at all with how humans thrive. And yet then I went and did that and individualized my life. And, and so I've been reeling that back So I decided to work on some projects with other people so they're regular people I could sync up with who I had obligations to, you know, who are depending on me to do certain types of work. I joined the board of an early childhood education center in my community that. That serves, you know, 80% fully subsidized families. And I just started doing stuff. I started taking some dance classes and going to dance meetups so I could have that embodied experience with strangers. More stuff where I was forced to give up some of my freedom to sync with other people's schedules. And those were times when I would live where my feet were instead of on the Internet. And it just made me feel a lot better, like having a dense network of reciprocal obligation with other people. It does curtail your freedom.
- [30:54]
B
Yep.
- [30:55]
C
But it also gives meaning to your days and structure and seasonality to your work. And these are all things that we know humans need to thrive. So, yeah, in retrospect, what seems crazy is that I knew this about human thriving, and yet it's so alluring to be able to do your own thing all the time. And I think we see this in. In what my. My peer, Derek Thompson calls the aloneness crisis, that people are choosing to be alone because, you know, whether it's because the Internet is so attractive or there's all this other stuff that they have to do, or because work is so virtual, whatever it is, because it's alluring to do, even if it's not good for us, like, sometimes we're attracted to things that are not good for us. And so I had to learn this the hard way.
- [31:37]
B
So if you're listening. And that's been sort of a destination for you, which is a place where you have complete autonomy, time autonomy. You don't have to answer to anyone. This gives you a sense of actually, what would that be like. And one of the things that you talk about was that obligations mitigate suicide.
- [31:55]
C
Yeah, that's. And this was first documented by Emile Durkheim, a French sociologist who's known as the father of modern sociology. And in the late 19th century, when governments started keeping statistics on things like suicide, he decided to analyze them. And what he found was that, well, so at the time, suicide was thought of as a personal psychological problem. It's like this person has mental issues. It's just a personal issue. Individual. And what he showed was, no, no, this is a sociological issue. Like, the environment matters. And what he saw was that, for example, when the economic fate of a country declines, there'd be a rise in suicide, no big surprise. But he also showed that when the economic fortunes of a country soar really fast, suicide also increases. The pattern was that anything that upsets the norms and patterns of obligation and responsibility that people are used to causes this increase in anxiety and depression and resulting increase in suicide. And so he would use this term, enemy, which basically means rulelessness, like a lack of norms and rules that keep you grounded. And by the way, Jonathan Haidt, who the famously the author of the Anxious Generation in every one of his books. Durkheim is his favorite thinker. I interviewed him for this book and he really turned me on to Durkheim, honestly. And Anime shows up in all of Heights books where he says it's this, this lack of a grounding in some structure that binds you to other people in a community is what leads people to become anxious and desperate. And you see this in his work on the Anxious Generation, where he talks about what he calls the great rewiring of childhood, which is like taking childhood and making it virtual instead of in the real world. And as he told me, you strip people out of this community where they learn social norms and where they have obligations to other people, and you drop them into this world where he called it a never ending cycle of micro dramas with a rotating cast of characters. Like people enter and leave the community at whim with no responsibility to one another. And as he said, it's just, it's not healthy for anyone to have access to everything everywhere, all of the time. Like, you want people grounded, especially kids, grounded and living where their feet are. And if not, then I, you know, I think we're seeing some of the effects of, of not prioritizing that.
- [34:23]
B
Unfortunately, it just totally reframes your whole focus. It reframed your whole thought toward constraints. And things are like, oh, you know, I wish I wasn't obligated for that. I wish I didn't have to do this. And it, it makes you, like, love them, you know, it makes you see them as something that can really enhance your life. People require constraints for meaning, you wrote. So you're gonna read this book and just get so much out of it. As we move towards summer, everything starts to look a little different. The schedule loosens up. There's more time outside, more travel, more life happening. And that's a really good thing. But it can make consistency a little harder to maintain. Having something flexible that supports learning through those changing rhythms and can make a big difference. And that's where IXL fits in so well. IXL is an award Winning online learning platform offering interactive practice in math, language arts, science and social studies from Pre K through 12th grade. It adapts to each child's level, keeps them engaged, and gives parents clear visibility into progress. What I really appreciate is how simple and organized it is. Everything is laid out by grade and subject so you can quickly find what your child needs, whether that's staying sharp over the summer or getting a head start for the next year. And. And because it's personalized, kids can move at their own pace, which helps keep momentum going in a natural way, make an impact on your child's learning. Get IXL now and 1000 Hours Outside listeners can get an exclusive 20% off IXL membership. We may sign up today at ixl.com 1000hours Visit ixl.com 1000hours to get the most effective learning program out there at the best price. I wanted to talk also about monotasking, which I think is a. I'm not sure if I'd heard that word before. Monotasking. Obviously it's like the opposite of multitasking. Multitasking is the act of distracting yourself. But same thing, you talked about this in a, in a personal way, the monotasking. Can you talk about how do we choose that? It's like this frantic, fast paced world, like we should choose to do one thing at a time.
- [36:24]
C
Yeah, we in fact, and a lot of that chapter in the book is based on the work of pretty remarkable professor named Gloria Mark, who spent decades monitoring people while they were working. And at first that was her like literally standing behind them with a stopwatch. And then it became cameras and computer logging software and all these other, you know, heart rate monitors, all this other stuff.
- [36:44]
B
Yeah.
- [36:45]
C
And what she found in the early 2000s, she, she realized that people were multitasking more at work. And she wrote this famous paper called that, that borrowed a quote from one of her subjects, which was constant, constant multitasking craziness. Because people were just being asked to do more things at once. The trouble is we can't actually multitask. It's really toggling between different things. So your brain has to drop one set of rules and activate another one to switch tasks. And when you do that, there's kind of a. As, as Dr. Mark says, you view your brain as a whiteboard. You erase one thing and then it leaves a little residue that carries over to the next. And the more you're doing that, the more residue there is. So you have more and more trouble really focusing on that next task. And it's Gotten worse and worse. So when she first started studying, like, really tracking activity about 25 years ago, people were switching what was on their screen, on their computer screen every three minutes. Then by around 2010, 2012, that was down to about 75 seconds. By 2022, it was down to 45 seconds. And that's where it's plateaued. It's. Right now it's stuck at 45 seconds. We change. But that is really bad for your performance on what you're doing, and also for stress level. So she would measure things like heart rate variability. We've now even seen an immune function that the more you switch during the day, the higher these biological markers of stress will be at the end of the day, and also the less you will have gotten done. So it's not to say that you can't do different things, but what she recommends is at least monotasking. So, say for a given hour or block of time that you're only doing that one thing. So she found that we check email on average about 77 times a day. And her recommendation is that you batch that into once or twice a day where that's the task you're doing at that moment, and then you switch to another task, and that's the only task you're doing for that half hour or hour or whatever it is. But the way that people are actually doing this is by having all these things open at once and toggling between them. And it's actually the worst way to do it, both for your stress levels and for your performance. So you try to organize those tasks so that they're batched. She also recommends trying not to start your day with email because of something called the Zeigarnik effect, which is this notion that an unfinished task is. It occupies part of your brain until you close that loop. And since your inbox is a constant unending well of unfinished tasks, that she recommends more, leaving that until till later in the day. And she has other simple tips like cognitive. Oh, actually, can I tell you the research in the book that kind of the most terrified me was some of hers?
- [39:26]
B
Yeah.
- [39:29]
C
So what she found that stunned me is that we become accustomed to a certain rhythm of interruption. So whether it's from notifications, messages, calls, other people, whatever it is, you eventually become accustomed to this rhythm of distraction, such that if you say, well, today I'm really going to focus, and you turn off the notifications and you get rid of the distractions, you will self interrupt at the cadence to which you've become accustomed, as if there's some kind of internal distractometer in our brains and so you won't be able to all of a sudden say, well now I'm just going to focus. You actually have to train your focus over time time by trying to batch tasks and limit the frequency of those interruptions. You can see this show up in studies where people are made to do cognitive tests basically and if there's a phone visible, even if they can't use it, it decreases their performance on cognitive tasks. And the more phone dependent they are, the bigger the effect. And so the best thing, you putting it out of the room when you really need to focus is one good step. But really you kind of need to train your attention over time because so much of the virtual world is, is training us to have this level of distraction that we will continue even if, even if the distractors go away. And one thing I would say for everyone to do in the short term is since you can't, since it takes like a few weeks to, to try to train yourself to be able to focus again, put a notepad next to, just on your desk and when these thoughts pop in. So even if you've removed the distractors, you'll have these thoughts that are like, oh, I didn't check that thing, I need to respond to this. Like you'll self interrupt. Yeah, but if you can write that down, it's called cognitive outsourcing and try to get it out of your working memory. That can help somewhat.
- [41:18]
B
It's so practical and so interesting and the entire concept for me, I mean I, I had not considered it. And so I think you, you know, you leave reading the book with all sorts of ideas, different ways to look at the constraints in your life and you talk about, you have, you have made the tweaks that you talk about in the book. You don't start your day with email anymore. You talk about mental fatigue and that you, you were underestimating the switching costs. You talk about how if you're going to go get a surgery, like try and find out when the surgeon's birthday is and don't have it be on that day.
- [41:56]
C
Yes, don't have it, don't have it beyond that day. This is a famous study that found that people are more likely to have complications or die. If a surgeon, if a surgery is done on a surgeon's birthday and the culprit is distractions, it's not just messages of happy birthday but actually also the, the researchers who did this work believe that it's self interruption, it's Thinking about plans later that day, also getting lots of messages, things they have to respond to. And those things take up part of your working memory. And so in my opinion, all surgeons should be given the day off on their birthday because there's obviously, you know, most surgeries still go fine, but there is a. An uptick in complications and death for surgeries that are done on the surgeon's birthday. And so I. I just think they should all have the day off on their birthday.
- [42:49]
B
Interesting. I love when people are like, let's study that.
- [42:52]
C
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's this amazing guy at Anupam, Jenna, who's both an economist and a physician himself at Harvard, who does these kinds of, like, Freakonomics of medicine sort of studies. So I love his work. And so. So I cite some of it in both of my books.
- [43:05]
B
Yeah, fascinating. Okay, so sticking with the theme of work, there's a story that runs throughout the whole book, so people pick it up. It's called Inside the Box, How Constraints Make Us Better of Mendeleyev, which I think is how you pronounce it.
- [43:16]
C
I. Mendeleyev.
- [43:17]
B
Yeah, Mendelave. I remember learning about that in school, you know, about the periodic table. So that's woven through the whole book and kind of like, what actually happened with that? Did he dream it? You know, and this has to do with constraints. So you'll find that in the book. If you are a parent and you're listening, there's a lot of things that you're gonna be able to talk to your kids about either. Like, you could do a study on him. You could do a study on Picasso and learn about the different constraints they had in their life. So super interesting. But sticking with the concept of work, you also talk about Pixar, which, I mean, I think everyone loves Pixar. I mean, I was. I remember. I remember when Toy Story came out and.
- [43:52]
C
Blown Away.
- [43:53]
B
Yeah, Blown Away.
- [43:54]
C
Remember when we didn't have movies like that? And then you see the first one like.
- [43:58]
B
Yeah, Blown Away. And so you're talking about that kind of comparing it to this general magic, which I. You know, like, if you're listening to this, you probably haven't heard of. I never heard of it.
- [44:08]
C
Yeah.
- [44:08]
B
And how Pixar use constraints to be so successful in. Even the. Some of the technology that they came out with, which now is decades old, is still being used. But one of the things that was the sort of critical thing that they did was they kept things as small as they could be for as long as they could, which would Require, I think, a lot of awareness, self control. You know, you talk about how our tendency is just to add and make it bigger. So can you talk about how having those sort of like small tests along the way help them to stay successful and to continue to be here in, you know, in opposition basically to the General Magic Company?
- [44:53]
C
Yeah. So these are some of the stories very early in the book. And General Magic, which is chapter one, after the introduction, is I like to think of as the most interesting company that nobody's ever heard of. And this was a company that basically starting in 1989, saw the future of communications technology with, with unbelievable accuracy what was going to come over the next 40 years. And so they were essentially making the iPhone in starting in like 1989, 1990. And they had so much talent. Like they had the designers, the original Mac, and all these other incredible people. And they had this huge consortium called the Alliance. It was the largest group of international business in American business history. And it was so alluring, this vision they had, that Goldman Sachs took them public in the first ever so called concept ipo, which meant they went public as a company just on the strength of their idea, without a product yet, because how could this fail? And of course it turned into this massive failure because they had so much, they had so much talent, they had so much vision, they had so many resources, they could do anything. So they did do anything. And they kept doing bigger and bigger. Every cool idea somebody had, they, they, they added it. But one of my, my favorite examples in the book is this engineer who's supposed to program a calendar for this personal communicator that they're making. And he writes the calendar, it goes from 1904 to 2096. And he's like, I'm done. And then one of his bosses comes to him and says, no, no, it's got to be way bigger than that. Like people could make apps for tons of other years. So he gets it to go from year zero to 2096. And then another person comes to him and says, why are you tying it into an arbitrary religious context? Why don't you start at the beginning of astronomical time? So he writes a calendar function starting at the beginning of the universe, where it would have been four lines of code if he left it at 1904 to 2096. But because they could do so much and they had the resources and they had the talent. They did. And it grew and grew and then it just completely collapsed under its own weight, became a total, a total disaster. Whereas tiny parts of Their bigger ecosystem, like one low level engineer working there created ebay in house. And they didn't want it because their vision was so much bigger for so many other stuff. So they said, no, no, we don't want it. So he, it was called Auction Web at the time. So he said, well, I'll keep it going. So he took it outside and changed the name to ebay. But it was, you know, it was too small for their big vision. They had another guy who was creating just a writing system. It was called, the app was called Graffiti, where you could make strokes with a stylus on a screen that would turn into writing. And he was just one tiny part of their giant ecosystem. And he spun that off into a device that had just a calendar and contacts and a memo pad. And that was the Palm Pilot, which was a smash hit in the same year. So all of these, and like the people who created Nest, the smart thermostat company and the ipod and the Apple Watch and all these other things came out of that company that could not do less, that failed because they could not do less. And they had this grand vision at the same time as Pixar. So I contrast them to Pixar because it's these two grand visions operating at the same time. Ed Catmull of Pixar, he grew up wanting to be a Disney animator, but he wasn't that great at drawing, which is obviously a problem. And so instead he set the goal of making the world's first fully computer animated feature film. Which turned which 20 years after he set this goal was Pixar first world's first fully computer animated feature film. But what he really made, his mission for his career was to put constraints in place that would channel creative ideas into creative achievement. So Pixar was just, it was like, I like to think of him as putting in place the bumpers in like a bowling alley where you have freedom to move around inside the bumpers, but it's still channeling things in a certain direction. And so they would do things, like you mentioned, keeping things as small as possible, as long as possible. They would let directors spend years with a small team in story development, literal years, refining the core of a story, boiling it down, cutting down the cast of characters. Like for the first inside out, they were going to have characters for ennui which actually showed up in the other, the second inside out. And they were going to have a character for Schadenfreude and all these other characters, but it was making it too complicated. So they spent years simplifying the story, cutting away characters, having daily feedback on what they were doing. And the reason they're allowed to spend that much time, which seems wasteful in development, is because the costs and complexity only explode once they move into production. And so they want to have this, this long period of small iteration in testing before they move into that phase where things explode. And the professor, A professor, an Oxford professor named Bent Flubier, he's a Danish guy who studies how projects go right and wrong. Calls the general magic pattern think fast, act slow, where you have this big idea and you rush it into big existence quickly. And then so you think fast, you skip the part where you can do small iteration and put boundaries in place. And then you'll act slow because things are so big and complex that it'll be really hard to turn and respond to your lessons. And he calls the good version the opposite Pixar planning, which is think slow, act fast, spend a lot of time putting boundaries in place, simplifying the core of what you're doing. And then when you're ready to kick it into action, you'll be able to do it fast because you've, you've put these boundaries in place and you kind of understand what you're doing.
- [50:11]
B
There are so many implications for your daily life. It's fantastic. It's called Inside the Box, How Constraints Make Us Better. Also range why generalist triumph in a specialized world. And there's a sports book, the Sports Gene. I didn't read that one, but that there is also that one as well. Let's wrap it up here with something I thought about throughout the book, which is that historically normal childhoods. So you know, you brought up Jonathan Haidt talking about the play based childhoods or this woman named Charlotte mason from the 1800s. She had this thought, she had a lot of thoughts about kids in education and she said kids should be outside for four to six hours a day whenever the weather's tolerable. And there's a lot of there, there are people who are echoing similar things now that kids should be outside for several hours a day. It's really good for their entire development. And what I was super interested in and this book made me think about are the constraints of nature. So you, you say if you don't have constraints, like this whole book is just about how constraints are going to enhance. They're going to enhance your productivity, they're going to enhance your relationships, they're going to enhance your creativity, they're going to really enhance. It's counterintuitive so if you don't have constraints, add them in. And the current statistic is that kids are outside for four to seven minutes a day on average, but on screens for four to seven hours. And here's what I thought you had this sentence in here that says this. The way instantly to make someone more creative is to force them to explore by limiting their options. And it immediately made me think, David, about kids playing outside.
- [51:49]
C
Yeah.
- [51:50]
B
And how there's nothing there.
- [51:52]
C
Yeah, yeah. And so. And so they have to fill that space because there's nothing there. And I think about the life on. I mean, first of all, that four to seven minutes statistic is shocking, terrifying. And you know, given everything we know about, like, exposure to nature and being outside and, and sunlight and all these things for, for human thriving. But when I think about screens, not that there aren't useful things that can be done on screens, but even, I mean, since the infinite scroll came into existence in the. In kind of the mid to late 2000s international surveys show that young people have been getting progressively more bored since then, which is something I would not have expected with all these options. With all these options, since infinite scrolling starting, they're getting more bored. And that seems to be. Because when you have a million things that you can scroll and swipe through one, you consume very passively. It's kind of. Of somewhat mindless. And also you're constantly comparing what you're looking at to the other thing you could possibly be swiping to, which really undermines the experience of the thing you're watching. So. So there are also studies where you give people a bunch of videos and then say you give them 20 videos. And in another condition you give some people just one of those 20 videos, and the people with the 20 are more bored than the people that just have the one because they're thinking about what else they could be looking for. Whereas when you're out in nature, your imagination is forced to explore. What can I do with this space? What affordances does this environment have? It's not just being fed to you, right, in one condition. It's being beamed into, it's being fed to you. So you take again, what cognitive scientists call that path of least resistance. Because you aren't forced to come up with something when you're outside. And we've all seen this, right, like you get a screen or a million toys and it's kind of. They bounce from one to another, but they don't explore it that much. And then you get them outside with a stick and suddenly the stick is a golf club, or it's a spear, or it's a saxophone, or it's a. A scepter or a magic wand or whatever it. Right. They start figuring, what can this thing be? When they get focused on exploring this one thing. And so I think it's really a difference between giving them so many options that they're, like, passively moving through things versus putting them in an environment that has opportunity for exploration, but they're really forced to explore if they want to make something out of it.
- [54:16]
B
David, this is huge. You know, I've read hundreds of books at this point about kids and nature and getting outside. The things that you talked about. The sunlight is good for them and the movement. And this is a connection that I never would have made had I not read your book, which is that nature is automatic constraints, and constraints enhance creativity. In fact, you wrote, we, you know, we would think. We would think it's the opposite, but you wrote, where's it in my notes? It was such a good sentence.
- [54:46]
C
Hold on.
- [54:50]
B
Okay. Constraints unleash. They unleash. Rather than stifle potential, constraints unleash potential. And where can we find constraints? We can find them outside. He doesn't have 72 toys to choose from, and they don't have an iPad there. And they're going to figure out what are they going to do with the pine cone. And I just. It, like, made so much sense that this is a whole other piece of why this time outside is really going to enhance the life of your child and enhance your own life. You wrote, constraints push the brain beyond its default tendencies, forcing it to engage in deeper problem solving. Total freedom, then, is the enemy of creativity, and constraint is its companion. What a book, David. What a book. It is called Inside the Box, How Constraints Make Us Better. I cannot recommend it more highly. It is fascinating to read, fascinating information. I love all the stories you wove together, including your own. I think you could go down a rabbit hole and study even more of these different people. It's going to make you really intrigued about the constraints in your life, in their. In their lives. And then there's all sorts of practical implications for you as a person, as an employee, as a business owner, as a parent. I loved it. So, David, huge congrats. Huge congrats. The book Inside the Box, How Constraints Make Us Better. We always end our show with the same question. What's a favorite memory from your childhood? That was outside I.
- [56:19]
C
When my. My mother spent a lot of time in Sweden when she was Like a young adult. And so I have people there that I consider family. I call them cousins, even though I'm not blood related. Related. And one of my earliest memories is being in the countryside of Sweden at the side of a pond and like looking at frogs and tadpoles in the pond and looking closer, closer, closer, until I fell right in, face first into the pond. And I was wearing overalls and my mom pulled me up by the back of the overalls just straight out. And I just, I love that place. And I still love being out and like looking at things in the water. And it's one of my earliest memories. Memories that just really stuck. And I think I was surprised. But then it turned into something really funny and like my mom was like, you know, almost going to fall to pieces because she was laughing so hard. So I. That's like a cherished memory. And we have pictures of me in those little overalls by the pond.
- [57:12]
B
I love it. I love it. In that childhood curiosity. David, what a book. I so appreciate you taking the time to be with us today.
- [57:18]
C
It's a total pleasure. And I have to say, when somebody's read something as deeply as you have and you're bringing in, you know, you, you brought in some thinkers that I didn't really know. Charlotte Mason, I think you said, and who I'll now look up. And so my favorite writer, Jorge Luis Borges, says that, that good readers are even more rare than good writers. Someone who reads something and adds to what the writer understands about their own work. And I think you did that for me. So I really appreciate that.
- [57:45]
B
Thanks. Thanks, David. This was such an honor.
- [57:47]
C
It's a total pleasure. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same Premium Wireless for 15amonth plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do@mintmobile.com
- [58:09]
A
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- [58:25]
C
Hi Ma. Thanks for your unfiltered advice. Hi mom.
- [58:29]
B
Thanks for always being by the phone. Hey Mom, Happy Mother's Day.
- [58:34]
A
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