← The Art of Manliness
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- [00:00]
A
So when we first started the Art of Manliness store, there was definitely that voice in the back of my head, what if nobody buys anything? What if this doesn't work? One thing that made it easier was having Shopify. We've used Shopify for years now to run the AOM store, and it handles everything in one place. Inventory, payments, analytics. So you're not juggling a bunch of different tools. It's the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e commerce in the US from big brands to smaller operations like ours. And Shopify actually helps you find customers. You can run email and social campaigns right from the platform. And that shop pay checkout makes a big difference. Fewer abandoned carts, more completed purchases. And if you ever get stuck, they've got 24. 7 customer support, which matters when you're figuring things out as you go. It's time to turn those what ifs into results with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.commanliness go to shopify.commanliness that's shopify.commanliness our outdoor space has always been fine. It worked, but it wasn't somewhere where you naturally wanted to spend time. You had a couple mismatched chairs, a table that did the job stuff we kept meaning to upgrade but never got around to. Well, lately the weather started getting really nice here in Tulsa and we've been eating outside more. And once you do that a few nights in a row, you start noticing all the little things that could be better. So I've been on Wayfair looking at ways to improve it. Better seating, a table that actually fits what we need, maybe some lighting. What I love about Wayfair is how easy it is to find things you want and need. You can filter by size, price materials, go through tons of reviews, and get a clear sense of what you're buying. And they've got everything in one place. You're not piecing it together across a bunch of different sites. They've also got fast shipping and options for assembly, which makes pulling the trigger a lot easier. It just makes the whole process simpler so you can actually follow through and upgrading your outdoor space. Get prepared for patio season. For way less, head to wayfair.com right now and shop all things home. That's wayfair.com w a Y-F-A-I r.com Wayfair Every style every Home Wayfair Every Style every home. Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the AOM podcast, which since 2008 has featured conversations with the world's best authors, thinkers and leaders that glean their edifying life, improving insights without the fluff and filler. The AOM podcast is just one part of the McKay mission to help individuals practice timeless virtues through thought, word and deed. Also, be sure to explore our articles in artofmanliness.com, read the deeper dives we do in our substack newsletter@dyingbreed.net and turn our content into real world action by joining the Strenuous Life program@strenuouslife.com now on to the show. Back in 2019, David Epstein joined me to talk about his book Range and why generalists often thrive in a specialized world. Now he's back with a new book that explores a seemingly opposite idea, the Power of Constraints. In Inside the Box, David argues that limits, deadlines, boundaries, and even setbacks are often the very things that spark creativity, sharpen focus, and help us actually get meaningful work done. Today in the show, David shares how, in a world of endless freedom and options, constraints might actually be the thing you need most. He shares the surprising true story behind the creation of the periodic table, explains how a broken arm changed the course of his own life, and explores why giving people too much leeway can actually kill innovation. We discussed what Pixar did right, that doing companies like General Magic got wrong, why brainstorming sessions are usually ineffective, how to identify the bottlenecks holding back your work and life, and why learning to settle for good enough may be the key to getting more great things done. After the show is over, check out our shownotes at AWIM is Constraints. All right, David Epstein, welcome back to the show.
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B
Thank you so much for having me back.
- [04:02]
A
So we had you on the show back in 2019 to talk about your book Range, which is all about being a generalist. The power of being a generalist. And not for focusing only on one thing. You got a new book out. It's called Inside the Box, and this book is about the power of constraints to accomplishing things, getting things done. How are these two ideas connected? This idea of being a generalist and also embracing constraints, how are they related?
- [04:30]
B
Yeah, as I know, on the face of it, it can seem contradictory from one book to the next, but it's kind of responsive to a question I was getting from a lot of readers after Range, which was, all right, I've got the. These diverse experiences, this broad toolbox. Now what? Like, you know, I'm having trouble deciding where to focus and I put Myself in that same boat. And so there's a hefty dose of me search in this book. So it's really about how you channel all those ideas, all those experiences into achievement and actually get something done. And again, hefty dose of me search. I have been terrible in the past at putting useful boundaries around my own work. So that's one reason why it's been so long. It's like six to seven years between all my books. But what I learned in this book actually gave me a totally new process. And so now I think if I write more books, I could probably do them in about half the time I did in the past.
- [05:22]
A
All right, well, let's dig into the ideas of this book because I thought it was really interesting. What I love about your writing in general, what you do is you find these great case studies from history that cuts across domains. Sports, business, arts, technology, to show these principles that you're. You're highlighting in the book. You start off the book with two stories that show how constraints can help us do big things. The first guy you talk about is this Dimitri M. How do you say his last name?
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B
Yeah, Russian last name.
- [05:51]
A
Dimitri MF. He's the guy who created the periodic table that we've all seen in our chemistry classes in high school. What's the usual story about how he came up with that idea?
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B
Yeah, the usual story is that he was in the winter of 1869. He was looking for an order for all the elements, you know, the chemical building blocks of the universe. And he worked for three sleepless days and sensed something but couldn't find it. And finally, he falls asleep, and he drifts off into the most impactful nap in human history. And he dreams about the elements sort of swirling around, and they snap together in this grid where, as you move across it, the chemical and physical properties of the elements repeat periodically, which is how it got the name periodic table. And it's not just a poster that hangs in classrooms. It actually pointed the way to where new elements would be. So gaps in the table showed us where to look for new materials and motivated the underlying search for atoms. So what was the cause of this order? So that's the typical story that it's this incredible kind of dead end. And then in a dream, he sees this vision and just wakes up and writes it down.
- [06:58]
A
All right, what's the real story, though?
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B
Yeah, the real story. So, by the way, that's the story that, like, I learned in college chemistry. It's in Matthew Walker's why We Sleep. It's there to show the power of our, our, our brains freed from reality. But the real story is completely different. So that dream story absolutely did not happen. What really happened was that Mendeleev had a publishing contract for a two volume Intro to Chemistry textbook. And he had only gotten eight of the then 63 known elements into volume one. So he had to get the other 55 into volume two. And he had to do it in a way that was logical for beginners. And he realized he couldn't continue the way he had been describing one element at a time. So he had to start looking for groups or families where he could describe a representative family member and then sort of by analogy, teach about the rest of the group. And it was in doing that that he started looking at the chemical world in terms of families and found these groupings that actually had a much greater underlying meaning. So he was absolutely not looking for a fundamental law of nature. He was looking for an organizational scheme for his textbook. But that channeled his experimental thinking to start looking in a totally different way that nobody ever had.
- [08:08]
A
All right, so he had two constraints there. So one was that he needed to organize in a way that made sense for a beginner. That was one constraint. The other one, he had a deadline, a book deadline. Yeah, that was the second deadline.
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B
And then straight to space. Constraint of time. Yeah. And there were other constraints even beyond that. Yeah, yeah.
- [08:23]
A
See, that shows how once you have this tight constraint, it can get you to think in different ways to actually do something. Pretty remarkable. You also talk about how a broken arm, your broken arm in eighth grade changed the trajectory of your life and even helped you become a master memorizer. What happened there?
- [08:41]
B
Yeah, so I was like a crackhead for sports when I was a kid. You know, I just like that. That was the sun around which my, my world orbited. And football, basketball, baseball, the usual. And playing. I could throw. I had a really strong throwing arm and. And so I was playing quarterback in some schoolyard football one day in eighth grade. And as the quarterback, instead of having kickoff, you just throw off as far as you can down the other side. And my arm snapped on the follow through of a throw. Nobody hit me. It was touch football and it just snapped in a spiral. So pretty crazy injury. Like, in fact, nobody believed it was broken because I hadn't been hit. And I could like feel my hand in places where it wasn't because I was rotating my shoulder, but it was totally separated. I've only seen this happen once before, one other time by the way Major League baseball pitcher and he had to have his arm amputated. But we'll never know the exact cause because whatever break happened, the. The evidence for some bone weakness or something was then gone. But it led to these interesting things where like in school we had these French tests I had to take every week, where you had to follow along with a recording of a native speaker on a worksheet that had the transcript, except then there'd be blanks and you had to catch them and fill them in. And I was, okay, I was mediocre at this. And then once I broke my arm, I couldn't use my writing hand. It was strapped to my body for months. And so I realized I had to start memorizing the words and then go back and write them all down slowly at once with my left hand. And so the way I started doing that was using sports related mnemonic devices. Like I would hear a word and then I would attach it to some sports fact or memory or image in my mind and I started acing these things. And so I started using these kinds of mnemonic devices, which we now know are like key to improving your memory all over the place. Because I couldn't write quickly enough to remember things, and I still use it to this day, I can memorize an hour long keynote word for word in a few days because I use mnemonic devices. And decades later I would come across one of the most famous studies of memory improvement ever done, where an undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon was taken from being able to memorize seven digits to 80 digits. And surprise, surprise, he too was using sports related mnemonic devices to remember things. So it made me a better student. And because I couldn't play contact sports for a year, I started running. And long story short, I ended up being a college runner and a university record holder and all these things. It's just I never would have even tried the sport. And that's what got me interested in physiology, which got me into writing because I was a science writer for Sports Illustrated, is just all these things I never would have tried if I hadn't been forced. And sometimes that's what useful constraints do. They launch you into productive experimentation because the low friction path is, is blocked.
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A
But see, that's counterintuitive, I think. Oftentimes we think in order to be creative, accomplish big things, you got to get rid of the constraints. The idea of the dream, well, you just let your subconscious percolate on it because there's no constraints there and it'll Just magically spit out this idea. But as you've shown, that's not the case. And you highlight this one company that I'm sure a lot of people have never heard of that shows what happens when you have no constraints. Like you just give everyone in the company or the organization free reign to do whatever they want. This company is, was called General Magic. What was General Magic? And how did having too much money, too much creative license doom the company?
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B
Yeah, I like to think of it as the most important company nobody's heard of and not important because of what they ended up doing, but because of the people that came out of it. But this was a company that starting in really the late 80s and then the early 90s, was essentially building the iPhone. And this, the Internet didn't exist. 15% of American households had computers at all. And they had so much buzz. It was founded by several designers of the original Apple Macintosh. This other visionary guy from Apple named Mark Peratt became the CEO. And they absolutely had the vision of, of what was coming in communications technology over the next half century. Peratt for his 1976 PhD dissertation at Stanford. It was titled the Information Economy. He coined that term and like when I was reading it in research, absolutely eerie. I mean he saw what was coming, the promise and the problems, you know, misinformation, inequality, all this stuff. But the vision was so compelling. I mean he was basically sketching a thin glass rectangle with no protruding buttons and a touchscreen with rectangular apps in 1989. And the vision was so obviously right that Goldman Sachs took them public in the first so called concept ipo where they went public just with an idea, not a product to make this personal communicator. And Peratt said the goal of raising so much money was to create heaven for engineers where they were totally free. What more could anyone ask for? He said. And I think the answer was a little less freedom because the company turned into a disaster. They had so much talent and so many resources, they could do anything. And so they did. Every time someone had a good idea, they did it. And the project got bigger and bigger and it became less and less coherent and they missed deadlines. And when they finally shipped something, it was a 200 page manual. Nobody was really sure what they were supposed to do with it. There was one guy who I think this interview was emblematic of the place where this was a engineer named Steve Pearlman whose job was to make a calendar function. And he wrote it to go from 1904 to 2096 and checked it in and thinks he's done. Then one of the leaders comes to him and says, steve, you got to make this thing go back farther in case people write historical apps. Okay? So he makes it go back to year one, checks it in, then another team comes to him. Steve, why are you starting with this arbitrary religious context of year one? You got to make it go back to the beginning of astronomical time. So he checks it out again and writes a calendar function to go from the big bang into the future. And it ends up taking months when it would have been four lines of code if they just left it the way he originally had it. But because they could do all this stuff, they did. And so the refrain when I was interviewing former employees from General Magic was, I just couldn't figure out what not to do.
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A
General Magic. This story reminded me of John Boyd. He was a fighter pilot who had a big impact on military thinking. He came up with the OODA loop, if you've heard of that.
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B
Yeah.
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A
But there was a period where he was working with the Air Force when they were redesigning one of the fighter jets. And Boyd was really big on maneuverability. Like, a jet needed to be highly maneuverable so you could get in position on your enemy. And to do that, it had to be small, lightweight, etc. But what ended up happening is, you know, this project was a project by committee, and you had all these corporate interests who wanted, hey, we want to get all of our technology in this thing as much as possible. And they kept on adding and adding and adding to it. And of course, you know, it's the governments. They like almost an unlimited budget. They just kept adding stuff to it. And they kind of created this thing that was sort of an albatross. And Boyd was like, no, we got to strip this down and make something more efficient. But, yeah, that's another example of when you have no constraints on anything, things actually can get worse.
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B
That. That really resonates. There's actually. Not long ago, the Wall Street Journal did a front page story on why the US had gone from being the world's leader in naval shipbuilding to being such a laggard that we're trying to outsource it. And basically, that was the story. It was that there's so many cool things that could go on that we never stop making design changes. And so the thing never gets done. And good designers often use a principle called design freeze, where you say, okay, we're going to this point, this date, and then we're stopping. No more changes. And then we're Testing it. Like, we can't just change endlessly. And you stop and you regroup and you collect your lessons. And I think there's a whole bunch of that in history and in a lot of government projects. Like, when I was reading about some of the history of government works, there was one phase under Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who was the defense secretary during Vietnam, where people would talk about paper wars. There was like, they had so much stuff like paper moving all the time on projects that it's like nobody ever had a point to stop and figure out what it was they had decided to do because they were always changing all the specifications.
- [16:48]
A
Yeah, I imagine this is. This is only going to get worse with artificial intelligence or LLMs, because you can just generate new stuff. Oh, man, you're doing the vibe coding, right? Like, oh, it'd be cool if you had this feature. You know, here's prompt. I got the feature now.
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B
The promise is incredible, but it has never been easier to do too much. And I've been seeing this with. So for the last year, just to kind of educate myself, I spent a bunch of time with one particular AI company that helps other companies implement AI. And one of the things I saw is that a lot of companies said, we need AI, right? It's. It's really alluring. Our competitors have it, and so they implement and it sprawls and it turns into what researchers are now calling work slop, where you just generate this insane volume of stuff that never gets finished or just piles up at some bottleneck. Whereas the organizations that I think are having a better run of it start by mapping the jobs to be done or defining a problem and then saying, how does the tool fit this problem? So they lead with the problem instead of leading with the technology and having these. These sprawling implementations, because it's just like, so much easier for people to start an infinite number of things that they will never finish now. And I think that's. That's a real challenge. And why we're not seeing in many cases the expected productivity benefits, even while adoption has been really rapid. Yeah.
- [18:03]
A
And you highlight research why we have this tendency to keep adding and adding and adding when we don't have constraints. We actually have, like, a natural bias towards that. Like, when we're given a choice to make something better. Humans typically like to add things. And so, yeah, like, addition can be good sometimes, but what is it about addition that tends to muck things up? I mean, I think we talked about one of them. You just get the slop sort of stuff. But what else is going on there?
- [18:29]
B
Yeah, I mean, you're right about that. This appears to be a hardwired bias. So there are these series of studies that show that people will overlook solutions that involve subtraction, even if they're obviously better, cheaper, easier, et cetera. And it's actually called subtraction neglect bias. So, like, in one of the fun studies, this researcher at the University of Virginia named Lydie Klotz and his colleagues had people. He gave people this LEGO structure, and they were supposed to bolster it so it would balance a masonry brick over the head of a stormtrooper action figure. And they could add as many pieces as they wanted, but they had to pay to add pieces. And still most people added pieces and paid when just taking away one piece would have solved it instantly, because we're just not programmed to look for subtraction unless someone tells us to do that. And so we pile more things on than can get done. And typically that leads to work becoming extremely fragmented, which leads to people starting to multitask more. And that gives a feeling of increased productivity. But we actually know that multitasking, since it's not really possible, you actually have to toggle between things, and your brain has to drop one and pick up the other. And every time you do, there's a cost. And when you're doing it a lot during a day, the cost compounds. And so you end up doing everything in sort of a mediocre way because. And modern work is insidious at this. Right. Like adding more to our plate, more obligations, more dashboards, more meetings, all these things. And they cause people's attention to be really fragmented, which makes them both worse at what they're doing, less likely to have their priorities straight for what they're actually working on. And. And we now know from physiological measures, much more stressed.
- [20:10]
A
Yeah. And I imagine it also adds complexity. The more things you add, the more different ways things can interact. And they might not interact in the way that you planned on it interacting.
- [20:21]
B
That's a great point. And we underestimate that complexity systematically. So this is like the famous Brooks's Law about software projects, where if you add people to a project that's already late, you'll make it even more late because we underestimate the costs of assimilating people and the coordination costs between people and all these sorts of things. So, yeah, complexity. Complexity steals clarity. I think of that famous a story about Steve Jobs where, when he was kicked out of Apple, and then we came back in the late 90s, Apple was making. People don't, probably don't remember this much, but at the time, they, they had tons of different models of computers. They were making printers, they were making servers, they were making this thing called the Newton. Like they were just making a ton of stuff. And he comes back and says, what? Like nobody knows we have no priorities. And so he draws a two by two grid on a whiteboard. On one side it says consumer and pro, and on the other it's portable and desktop. You know, we're going to have four products. That's it. Everything else is canceled. And people complained. Right, because it canceled things they were working on. But it, it lent tremendous clarity to what they were actually doing and saved the company. I mean, they were basically dead, about to die before that.
- [21:28]
A
And I mean, this not only applies to work life, but it applies to people's personal lives as well. Our tendency is just to keep piling on stuff. Our kids do more and more activities or we take on more and more responsibilities with organizations we belong to. We want to do more and more vacations, when sometimes the answer is just like, you know what? We're not going to do those things this year because we just need the buffer or the bandwidth to just relax and focus on other things.
- [21:53]
B
Yeah, man. Proactively choosing when to choose. So saying, you know, what are the things we're not going to do is hugely important, but I think we often like push that kind of decision away because it feels limiting. So I think we're often trying to escape situations that really force us to ruthlessly clarify our priorities. Yeah, because whether it's productivity, tools or just being human and not wanting to face our limited time that I think we do a lot of things that help give us the illusion that we can get everything done on some time span. But in fact, we need to face up to our mortality and prioritize ruthlessly.
- [22:33]
A
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Go to peste.commanliness for an extra 10% off your order. That's pesty.com that's P E S T I E.com manliness for an extra 10% off. And now back to the show. So a counterexample you gave to General Magic of an organization that put constraints on themselves proactively so they could get stuff done is Pixar. How did Pixar work within constraints to eventually make Toy Story, which would go on to revolutionize animated filmmaking?
- [27:56]
B
Yeah, I liked using Pixar because their vision was created at the same time as General Magic and unfolded over about the same period, basically, but unlike General Magic. So Ed Catmull, who led Pixar for many, many years and was the co founder, he also in the mid-70s, decided he want to make the first fully computer animated feature film. Initially he wanted to be a Disney animator, but he wasn't that great of a drawer. So a little bit of a problem. And en route to making the first computer animated feature film, which was Toy Story, instead of jumping straight from big idea to big execution like General Magic did, he was relentless. He and his colleagues were relentless about defining what is the next tiny step. Okay, here's the big vision, but what is the next tiny, tiny step? They were always making estimates of how many pixels will we need? You know, how many polygons will we need? Where's the technology now? How far does that mean it needs to go to get there? Okay, we're not there yet, so we're going to work on all these proximate problems. And so it almost seems like when I was spending time with Ed, you'd almost seem like a killjoy in a sense, like, yes, we have this great vision, but we can't rush toward it. And so he was always keeping things as small as possible for as long as possible. And that continued even once Pixar started making movies where they let directors stay with a tiny team in story development for years, simplifying the core of a story because it's easy to make changes then and the costs only explode once you move into production. And so they really prioritize staying as small as possible as long as humanly possible.
- [29:28]
A
Yeah, it's amazing the difference between General Magic and Pixar. Like Pixar worked Within the technology, they had general magic. Got a, you know, little head on their skis. A little too forward on their skis.
- [29:39]
B
Yeah.
- [29:39]
A
And so, I mean, it's funny, you can look at Toy Story, like the first animated video or film that Pixar did was this thing called Tin Toy Toys, about this little toy figure. And it was like the precursor to Toy Story. It was made in 1988 and it was only like five minutes long. And it actually looks pretty good. I'll put a clip of it in the show notes. But they had to work with the processing power that they had at the time, all that stuff. And so it had to be really short. And then they built on that to the point where they can make a full length featured film.
- [30:10]
B
Those shorts, by the way, I don't know if people remember, but if, if you went to Pixar movies in theaters, there were often shorts, you know, five, 10 minutes that would run before the main film.
- [30:20]
A
Yeah.
- [30:21]
B
And they used those as their little labs. Test new animation techniques, test new story techniques. So they, they were constantly doing things in this really, really small way. Even though they had big ideas, they were always looking for ways like, what is the smallest possible way we can try this thing out?
- [30:38]
A
So it seems like they had a process established in order to avoid that bloat and to maintain those creative constraints.
- [30:45]
B
Yeah. And they had a bunch of important rules that were always changing because the staff were changing, the environment was changing. But to go back to that calendar story that I told about general magic, where it just got bigger and bigger and bigger, even though it was not important, Ed told me about something at Pixar they called the beautifully shaded penny problem, where directors or animators are super conscientious and they want to get all the details right. And so they would be obsessing over the shading on a penny that would be in the background of some scene that viewer would never even notice. And they'd be working away on that for weeks and ignoring, you know, main characters that still need to be animated. And so they came up with a system. Here's high tech system. Popsicle sticks velcroed to a board where each popsicle stick represented the amount of work that one animator could do in one week. And if the director wanted those animators to keep working on that penny, then he had to start taking popsicle sticks away from some other character that needed to be animated. And so, again, it was a way to visualize the priorities and force them to be ruthless. And General Magic had nothing like that. So they had all these minor priorities competing with major priorities, nobody differentiating them. And so I think Ed and his team were great about that, about forcing people into situations where they had to really clarify their priorities.
- [31:59]
A
I imagine everyone's experienced that shading of the penny problem in an organization. Like, there's always a group of people or an individual that gets like, all right, this little tiny thing is the most important thing. And it takes up like 80% of the time.
- [32:12]
B
Get tunnel vision, you know, tunnel vision, like on those things. Especially when it's your thing, right, and you don't see how it connects to the bigger strategy.
- [32:19]
A
You know, you got to kill your darling sometimes. You also highlight another organization that used constraints very effectively to put out a great product. And you actually had an experience with this organization, this American Life, the famous NPR radio show with Ira Glass, famous for their driveway moments where they have these shows you're listening to in your car and then you get into your driveway and you want to keep listening. What did this American Life do with constraints to create those driveway moments? Shows.
- [32:46]
B
Yeah, yeah. Again, like Pixar, I think they have this system that I came to think of as putting like bumpers in a bowling alley where you're not telling someone exactly what to do, but you're keeping them trundling in the right direction. And I, I had a story pitch accepted by them and I had to write a 35 minute radio script. The story was about a woman with two rare diseases of fat and muscle wasting, and she identified one of them in an Olympic medalist sprinter who had fat wasting and explosive muscle growth and felt like they shared some physiological mechanism. She turned out to be right. So I'm supposed to write a 35 minute script on this and I've never written one second for radio before. And so I go in, I try to write a script, and, you know, we do some interviewing. And the way it works is you do a read through where people get together in a room and Ira Glass is holding a stopwatch, timing it, and you have your producer there. I'm reading the narration and the producer's hitting play on the audio. Anytime, you know, it comes to an interview that we want to cut in. And so it's sort of like listening to a rough draft. And at the end people get to say what they're confused about. And in my case, people were confused about a lot because I was used to writing a lot of scientific detail. And in a magazine story, people can stop and go back over that, but when it's flying by in Audio, that's much more difficult. So people were confused and I was seven minutes over length. So they identified all these points of confusion and you're obligated in their process to fix them, but they, they don't tell you how. They're not going to tell you how you have to do it, but you have to do it. You can't come back without having addressed people's confusions. Like you can't argue and say, no, I think that was clear. If one of them says it's confusing, you have to deal with it. And then you come back for the next read through. And every time you do it, there's a new person who's never heard any of the material before. And that person gets to say what they were confused by. And then you do that over and over and over until a new person comes in and says, now I got it all. That was all really clear. And you're not allowed to go on until you've satisfied that. And it was an amazing process because it, it made a complete rookie like me, like a total radio novice, look like a seasoned veteran because it, it just highlighted for me all the points where I had to do problem solving. And once the problem to be solved is made clear to you, it kind of empowers you to, to go off and be creative and do your thing.
- [34:59]
A
Yeah, I mean, what it's interesting about that, they didn't solve the problem for you. They gave you the constraints and then you had to figure out how to, how to solve it.
- [35:06]
B
Yeah. So it didn't feel oppressive because it was hard editing. You know, at the time I was working at ProPublica as an investigative reporter. And when I, I tried to bring this system over to ProPublica for the writers and they were like, no, no, we, one editor is too much. Never mind this crazy process. So I mean, it's really intensive and hard because your impulses, you want to go, I did a great job. I think, you know, I want them to just love it. And they come and say like, I didn't, I was lost on this or that. But also you feel like you have a ton of agency, like they're telling you things to do, but it's really up to you to then spread your wings as a problem solver within that. And so it's actually kind of a gift to have someone, well, define a problem for you and then unleash you on solving it.
- [35:46]
A
How long did that whole process take you to refine your piece for this
- [35:50]
B
American Gosh, did that take it I mean, it dragged over months because.
- [35:53]
A
Oh, dang, I was thinking maybe like a week or something.
- [35:57]
B
No, no, no, it dragged.
- [35:58]
A
But.
- [35:58]
B
So there are a few reasons for that, though. Because Aira's attention was at a premium, so there were a lot of different stories going through this process at once. And mine didn't have like a time peg in the news or anything.
- [36:08]
A
Okay.
- [36:09]
B
So there was no need to brush the read throughs. But also, since I was a brand new in radio, there were some cases where somebody highlighted some confusion, and I realized that the way to fix it was I had to go do some more interviewing. And that often meant, you know, lining up schedules and recording and all these things. So. So it went on. And again, it was a 35 minute piece and I was seven minutes over on the first draft, so that necessitated a serious reorganization. But a major reason why it took a long time was just there's a whole bunch of these in process at any one time. And so you can't just say, like, tomorrow I'm doing a read through. You know, you sort of have to get Ira's attention scheduled.
- [36:46]
A
Did that process going through that, did that change your writing at all?
- [36:49]
B
It did change my writing. I think, for one, it made me a lot more likely to look for a naive reader and say, what's confusing you here? Not one of my own editors, you know, who has a lot of similar knowledge in some ways to what I have. It also led me to simplify. So I think I had a tendency, if I find some scientific, you know, before I was a writer, I was training to be a scientist and I switched careers. And I have a tendency, if I think some aspect of science is really interesting, to want to get it in, no matter what, just get it in. Because I think it's really interesting. And I had to cut so much scientific stuff that I thought was interesting from that this American Life piece. And yet the piece turned out amazing. I had probably the best response of, you know, anything I've ever worked on, maybe like, along with my previous book. And so I think it showed me that the reader or listener doesn't know what's not there. And so what you have to make sure is that the stuff that is there is interesting and really clear. And so I think it made me much more aggressive in cutting back in the interest of clarity.
- [37:52]
A
Yeah, that this American Life bit, it made me like, okay, I need to be better about my editing because my wife edits all of our writing and sometimes she'll be like, I'm confused here. I'm like, why are you confused? Because it makes perfect sense in my head. What are you talking about? And she'll be like, well, it could be confusing to a reader, and it would be better if you rework these sentences like this. And I'm like, okay, yeah, that is better.
- [38:13]
B
There you go.
- [38:14]
A
Yeah. Well, let's talk about the idea of bottlenecks, because you highlight a book that I read a long time ago and I forgot about, but I still think about it. I still think about the ideas. This book is called the Goal. It's all about thinking about our problems and looking for bottlenecks. So the big idea is, if you want to be more productive in anything, whether it's work. I mean, this focuses on manufacturing and work, but I think it's applicable to your personal life as well. You got to look for bottlenecks.
- [38:41]
B
Yeah.
- [38:41]
A
Tell us more about this idea in this book, the Goal.
- [38:45]
B
Yeah, this. This book is bizarre, by the way. It's a. It is, but fascinating. And it was written by this physicist named Ellie Goldratt, who was, like, studying the behavior of atoms and crystals when a friend of his with a small chicken coop building business asked him to help increase production. And the friend had been hiring new help, but it wasn't increasing the number of coops they were producing. And so Goldratt studied the process and found that that's because no matter how fast some steps in the assembly process were working, they just piled up at the single slowest step, what he called the bottleneck. And so he ended up moving one worker from a fast step to the slowest step, and it increased overall production by threefold. And this became the core of his idea, what he called the theory of constraints, that every system is limited by its single slowest step, or bottleneck. And so he writes this book, the Goal, to try to explain the idea. It's a business novel where this plant manager is facing shutdown, and his Jedi, like, surprise, surprise, physics professor shows up and gives him these Socratic lessons. And, like, he starts to see the whole world in Bottlenecks, where he takes his son's Boy Scout troop on a hiking trip and realizes some of the kids are really fast, but this kid, Herbie, is really slow, and the whole group can only move at the speed of Herbie. So he decides to redistribute the weight from packs so the fast kids have more and Herbie has less, and suddenly the whole group is moving faster. And it's a strange book, and yet it sold 10 million copies. And Jeff bezos forced all his executives to read it and hosted a full day book club on it. And it just became a phenomenon. But the core idea is really simple. It's that the constraint, the system constraint shows you where to focus. Because if you apply energy somewhere else, it doesn't change the outcome of the overall system because that's all limited by this single least effective step. And it, it turned out to become one of the most impactful ideas in management and even spread into, into personal improvement as well.
- [40:43]
A
Yeah. When we don't have the output that we want, we typically think, well, we just need to input more.
- [40:48]
B
Right.
- [40:48]
A
We gotta do more and more and then we'll get more output. But if there's a bottleneck somewhere, you can keep putting in more and more input, but the output is gonna stay the same. Cause it's all getting held up at that bottleneck. And so instead of adding more, just remove that bottleneck or somehow widen the bottleneck.
- [41:03]
B
Yeah, so the bottleneck shows you where to focus. It's like it's the highest leverage place to apply energy. In some, in some cases it's the only place with any leverage that will make a difference if you apply any energy. But yeah. And so I think it's a really effective. I don't know if we should get into those stories, but really effective for personal improvement as well. I had a. I tell the story of an athlete who applied it in the book that. Okay. Cause it also really resonated with my own athletic journey. So the story I tell in the book is about this swimmer named Sheila Taormina. She was at the University of Georgia and in 1992 she goes to the Olympic trials, tries to make the team. The 200 meter freestyle. Doesn't make it, isn't close. Retires. But then for one of her last classes at University of Georgia, she takes Management577 in which she learns about the theory of constraints and decides to do a class project on using it to create a plan to drop three seconds in the 200 meter freestyle. And so she looks for. She kind of audits her training. And what's her bottleneck? Well, she determines its strength and power. She's 5 foot 2, which is really small for a elite swimmer. She has an incredible aerobic engine, world class. And all her coaches have her working on is aerobic endurance and not her strength and power. So she's continuing to feed the thing that is not limiting her that she, she already has. So with this class plan, she decides to un. Retire, find a new coach who Will work with her on strength and power. And four years later she makes the Olympic team and then is part of the relay team that wins an Olympic gold medal. It's crazy. If you google her, you'll see pictures of her with the other three women in the relay and she's about a foot shorter than them. And so she retires after this now as an Olympic champion. And then just concerned about her health, she comes out of retirement and starts doing triathlons. And now she has this new view on training, right, to look for what is her actual limiting factor. She wins the US national championships, triathlon goes to the Olympics, finishes sixth, goes to the next Olympics and triathlon retires again, unretires again, takes up fencing and horse jumping and goes to the Olympics in modern pentathlon. She's the only woman ever to have competed in four summer Olympics in three different sports. And she was about to retire if she hadn't learned about the theory of constraints in a management class. So I thought it was an amazing story and it was very similar to my less illustrious. But I was also a college athlete, not at the level of Sheila Taormina, but had a very similar story where my bottleneck was my ability to recover from workouts. And once I realized that I was an 800 meter runner and scheduled class over one workout a week so I'd have an excuse not to show up. I improved like rocket fuel. I became a university record holder. You know, went from walk on to university record holder by targeting the thing that was limiting me.
- [43:35]
A
All right, look for bottlenecks. I think that's a big takeaway. Well, let's talk about constraints to make collaboration more effective. So I think all of us have worked in a group, we might have done brainstorming sessions. We have those meetings where we're all just throwing out ideas and we have probably all experienced those meetings are not very productive. Why don't traditional brainstorm sessions work usually?
- [43:56]
B
Yeah, there are a few reasons. So there was some psychologists recently did an international survey of known creativity myths where things that we know are not true from research and the top two mistaken beliefs where people are most creative when they're most free. And that brainstorming is the best way to come up with lots of creative ideas. And it doesn't work for a few reasons. One is because it's too open ended and people don't tend to come up with creative ideas. When something is really open ended, you're much better giving them a specific problem almost no matter what it is. And they'll come up with more creative ideas. But also people tend to be confused by the norms of brainstorming. So there'll be conflicting norms like say, whatever comes to mind. But also don't criticize. Those things can be quite mutually exclusive. And there's a lot of what's called production blocking, where people who might have something interesting to say won't share it because they're embarrassed or they're not that eloquent or because of the person who spoke before them. So there's a term called hippo would be a highest paid person's opinion. And once that person shares their opinion in a group, other opinions will tend to coalesce around it. Not because it's a better opinion, just because they're the highest paid. And so there are all these factors that sort of make the norms of the situation unclear for people. So much so that brain writing works much better where if people are allowed to write ideas separately before they come together and evaluate them.
- [45:15]
A
All right, so that's a constraint you can put in. Instead of having vocal brainstorm sessions, have everyone write a memo of ideas they have and then they submit it to the group first.
- [45:27]
B
Yeah, separate it. And really trying to keep sort of equal social norms. So the best team, this shows up in all sorts of research, like Google did all this internal research on it, but in other places that the best teams for problem solving are those that have relatively equal conversational turn taking, not in every task they're doing, but like over the course of a day. So you need to be really careful to put certain constraints in place to make sure that happens. So at Pixar, for example, they banned Steve Jobs from certain meetings because they were worried about that hippo effect. They knew his larger than life Persona, that his opinion would carry too much weight and then other people wouldn't share some of the important things because not every person who has value to add is super eloquent. And so you have to be careful about making everyone feel like they're going to have a turn, but. But again also because you want to give a specific problem if it's too open ended. People do not come up with creative ideas.
- [46:15]
A
Yeah, well, that's the point I want to talk about. You highlight in the book is this idea of settling for good enough. It can help you get more great things done. What's going on there?
- [46:26]
B
Yeah, this, the last chapter gets kind of more personal, philosophical, and a major idea in it is called satisficing, which is a word that's a combination of satisfy and suffice and was coined by Herbert Simon, whose work is sprinkled throughout the book. And he was trained as a political scientist, but he won the highest award in computer science. He was a founder of AI. He won the highest award in psychology, and he won the Nobel Prize in economics. And one of his major ideas was satisficing, where humans do not conform to. To the rational actor model of classical economics, where we evaluate all the options and make the best decision. Because we have limited cognitive bandwidth, we can't evaluate all the options. We can't predict all the repercussions of our decisions. And so what Simon argued is that we should proactively satisfice. Like, we should set good enough rules for our decisions and when they are met, make the decision and never look back. Because the opposite. If you're not a satisficer, then the opposite end of the spectrum is what's called a maximizer, who really does try to evaluate every possible option and make the best decision. Maybe we'd call it an optimizer today. And it turns out that in psychological research, it's almost always bad to be a maximizer. They are less satisfied with their decisions, less satisfied with their lives, more prone to regret, often prefer reversible decisions, even though it leads them to not really commit one way or the other. And so I think it's really important in this world of seemingly infinite choice, whether you're buying a dishwasher or looking for a date to set certain good enough parameters. And maybe things will go way beyond that, but once they are hit, make the decision and move on. And it gives you the possibility of being satisfied.
- [48:05]
A
Yeah, I've noticed in my life, some people have. They have like a constitution or temperament to be maximizers or satisficers. Imagine if you're naturally a maximizer. You have to be a lot more intentional or proactive about putting those good enough constraints on yourself.
- [48:21]
B
Oh, yeah. I mean, because I think I have maximizing tendencies for sure. And so setting down these rules ahead of time of what's good enough for this decision has been really helpful for me even. In fact, when I started a newsletter, I was reading Simon's work and it was very much because, you know, I just had this very successful book and I felt a little paralyzed. I'm like, if I do anything else, it has to be as good at this or better. And so the newsletter was a case where I said, okay, if a book has to be a nine or ten, if I get a newsletter, post to six and A half. Like, maybe it'll fly past that on the first draft, maybe. But if I'm confident that it's at six and a half, I'm sending it. And that became a really important satisficing exercise for me to kind of tamp down some of my maximization. But. But I as. As maybe it sounds like silly or, I don't know, just weird, but I proactively make satisficing calls. Like, if I'm trying to buy something, here are the three things I needed to do. That's the job I want to hire it for. Once I see those three things, I'm done looking. I'm not reading every single review. And that's been really helpful for me.
- [49:19]
A
When do you think maximizing is beneficial or is it ever beneficial?
- [49:23]
B
It's a good question, because Simon, you know, I mean, he did all these things where, you know, he wore one kind of beret only and one color of socks. And he said, you only need three pairs of clothes, one on your body, one in the. In the closet right away, and one in the wash. And he had the same breakfast every day. Live in the same house for 46 years. And what he was saying was, look, this freed up my cognitive bandwidth to focus on the things that were really important, like his research. And so I think there are things where, you know, he famously said, the best is the enemy of the good. And I think it's almost always good to be a satisficer in terms of making progress. But I think there are also cases where once you have enough experience to know the kind of things, the ways that you want to spend your time, that it can be okay to be more of a maximizer in trying to craft your work life so that you're spending more of the time working on something that you think is ideal, basically. And again, I think aiming for perfection is way too much, but being okay with dithering more on that and saying, you know, how can I really work my way towards spending my time working on things that I think are really important? And again, not that you have to jump to that immediately, but over the course of a working career, not just necessarily saying this is kind of a good enough thing, but once you get to good enough thinking about, well, could I go a little farther? So I think it's okay to do that, but again, I think it should be done in steps as opposed to maximization right from the beginning.
- [50:47]
A
Well, David, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work David
- [50:51]
B
epstein.com got links to the book, free newsletter, all that kind of stuff.
- [50:56]
A
You're on Substack now, right?
- [50:58]
B
I am on Substack, yep. And there's a link for that on my website for all that stuff. And there's some free sort of tip sheets related inside the box on the site also.
- [51:05]
A
Well, fantastic. David Epstein, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.
- [51:07]
B
Pleasure's mine.
- [51:09]
A
My guest today was David Epstein. He's the author of the book Inside the Box. It's available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can learn more information about his work at his website David epstein.com also check out our show notes at AOM is constraints where you can find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic Foreign. Well, that wraps up another edition of the A1 podcast. If you haven't done so already. I'd appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review on the podcast player that you use to listen to the show. And if you've done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member. You think we get something out of it? As always, thank you for the continued support. Until Next Time's Brett McKay remind Listen they want podcast with Brett. Put what you've heard into action. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states.
- [52:30]
B
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