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- [00:01]
Sean Elley
Support for the show comes from ServiceNow. AI is moving fast across the enterprise, but without visibility, it's just chaos. Different tools, different models, different teams using AI in completely different ways. ServiceNow turns that chaos into control. With the AI control tower, you see all your AI across the business in one place, what it's doing, what it's done, and what it's about to do. So you stay in control. To put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com. Recommendations can be great. Maybe someone recommended this podcast and here you are. But home projects are a little different. If the podcast isn't your thing, you might lose a few minutes from your day. But if you hire your cousin's neighbor to mount your tv, you might end up with a lopsided screen and wall damage.
- [00:54]
David Epstein
I know a guy isn't a good
- [00:56]
Sean Elley
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- [01:11]
David Epstein
Hire the right pro today.
- [01:19]
Sean Elley
What is freedom? The simplest definition is something like the absence of limits. Freedom means more options, fewer obligations, no walls, no constraints. It's the ability to keep every door open for as long as possible. And on some level, that makes sense. Nobody wants to feel trapped. Nobody wants to be restrained by arbitrary boundaries or somebody else's idea of how a life should go. But there's another side to this. Too many choices can also become a burden. Too much openness can make it hard, harder to commit, harder to create, even harder to know what you want in the first place. So how do we tell the difference between the limits that oppress us and the limits that free us? I'm Sean Elley, and this is the gray area. Today's guest is David Epstein, a journalist and the author of Range and now Inside the How Constraints Make Us Better. Epstein's argument is that we have badly misunderstood the relationship between freedom and structure. We tend to think constraints are what hold us back. But in work, in art, in relationships, in life generally, the right constraints are often what make meaningful freedom possible. It's a provocative, somewhat counterintuitive argument. So I brought David on the show to walk me through it. David Epstein, welcome to the show.
- [03:30]
David Epstein
Thank you for having me.
- [03:31]
Sean Elley
This is a very interesting book that I think pushes against some pretty basic intuitions that we all have. So let's just start with you just summing up the thesis. What is this thing about?
- [03:48]
David Epstein
The thesis is that we overvalue complete freedom and that useful Limits in our work and in our lives can actually liberate us to be the most creative and satisfied versions of ourselves. And that it's especially important now because I think, quite frankly, it's never been easier to do too much.
- [04:09]
Sean Elley
The book starts with a myth of scientific discovery with which I was not familiar. It's the myth of the Russian chemist Mendeleev, who dreamt up, we are told, the periodic table. Why start with that story? What is it telling us or not telling us about how creativity and discovery actually works?
- [04:31]
David Epstein
I started with it in part because I had learned the famous dream story, which was that Mendeleev was. Was trying to put in order all the elements, the. The chemical building blocks of the universe. And after three tireless days of work, fell asleep and, you know, drifted off into the most impactful nap in human history, where he sees all the elements arrange themselves in this order. And so then I was kind of flabbergasted when I learned the real story, which is that actually Mendeleev had a publishing contract to write a two volume Intro to Chemistry textbook. And he'd 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 realized he couldn't keep going one element at a time. So he had to do it in a logical way, also for beginners. And so he started thinking about elements in terms of families, that he recognized this pattern, the periodic pattern, which is that as you move along the table, chemical and physical properties repeat periodically at certain intervals. And so it struck me as just the exact opposite of the celebrated myth, this freedom of your dreaming brain, you know, loose from the bounds of reality versus really these very tight constraints that forced him into productive experimentation. And I thought that the gap between the myth and the reality was symbolic of something important. The fact that we overvalue complete freedom and undervalue the power of useful constraints both to. To help us clarify priorities and launch into productive exploration that we would never think of otherwise.
- [06:11]
Sean Elley
So what is the best way, what is a simpler, more accurate way to think about the relationship between freedom and creativity?
- [06:21]
David Epstein
In a recent international survey by psychologists of known creativity myths. These are things we know from research are not true. The most popular one was that people are most creative when they are most free. And we know this isn't true. And I like to use the words of the cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham, who said, you know, you may think that your brain is made for thinking, but your brain is actually made for preventing. You from having to think whenever possible, because thinking is energetically costly. And so whenever possible, you will default to convenient solutions, easy solutions, ones you've done before, ones that just readily come to mind. And so, in fact, given complete freedom, it's basically impossible to be really creative, because your brain just goes down what cognitive scientists call the path of least resistance. The easy, familiar thing that's convenient. And so really, the greatest creative prompt you can possibly have is when you're faced with a problem or a challenge or just a task, do the thing that comes to mind, and then basically cross that out and say, I'm not allowed to do that. You force yourself off the path of least resistance, and that's the most reliable way to become creative.
- [07:31]
Sean Elley
I had this mythology in my head, I think a lot of us do, about genius and freedom and creativity, and it's very hard to shake. It's a trope in the history of science. But it's also how we think about artists and performers, that in order to be truly original, truly great, you have to be totally free, totally untethered. And out of that weird, chaotic sauce comes the creative magic or whatever. I'm not a super creative person, so I don't know anything about that, but that's what I hear. Do you see any truth in that story, or do you think it's mostly just a pretty story, but misleads us about what actually is going on?
- [08:20]
David Epstein
I think it's true that great creators are often uninhibited in some of the ways that other people are inhibited. And in fact, we know from there there's like a mountain of research on creativity that shows that great creators are just are willing to experiment more. So. So they will tend to have more bad ideas, but more ideas overall. And so more good ideas. Like, you can see this in patent research, right? People with impactful patents have tons of totally useless ones, but then they're more likely to get hits. But I think there are two things that are mistakes, kind of in the normal portrayal that you described, one of which is that the people are totally original in the first place, where in fact, you know, we will see one creator who explodes. But when someone delves into it, it's really. They're usually building on a lineage. And maybe not everyone got famous in that lineage. So to people that are consuming their content, it looks like they came out of nowhere. But in fact, it's usually like this. Famous art historian George Kubler noted that it's basically always a lineage. And you only see one person who caught on for some reason or another, but they're really just building sort of on their ancestors. And the other thing I'd say is that Patricia Stokes is a psychologist who's done really interesting work on this, where she looked at the history of artistic innovation and what were the common themes. And. And what she came up with was what she said the common theme in artistic innovation is what she called paired constraints. And what she meant by that was that an artistic innovator will first kind of work in the status quo, and then they know what they have to block to do something different. So they'll use a preclude constraint where they block that, and then a promote constraint where they say, here's something I have to use in its place. So to give a simple example, like Claude monetization, you know, knew how to do the status quo art at the time. And then he said, you know what? I'm gonna. To portray impressions of light, painters usually used light and dark shades and mixed things with black. And he said, I'm not gonna do that at all. No black and no light and dark shades. So I'm blocking that. And in its place, I'm gonna use only pure color in close proximity, like a mosaic of color. And I'm gonna try to portray any impression of light that someone can see just using that. So it was actually blocking one thing and forcing himself to use another thing. He blocked black so thoroughly that at his funeral, when there was a black shroud over his coffin, one of his friends started yelling, no black for Monet, and went and grabbed a floral tablecloth to put over his coffin. But so it's really this much more systematic process of saying, I'm blocking that stat. I'm restricting myself from the status quo thing, and I'm forcing myself to use something else in its place. And that's what she found was the theme of artistic innovation in history. So it's. That's a pretty different portrayal than this kind of being struck by a lightning of inspiration that just comes out of nowhere.
- [11:13]
Sean Elley
Do you draw a meaningful distinction between constraints on the one hand and impediments on the other?
- [11:21]
David Epstein
I think it's goes without saying that there's such a thing as too much constraint. Right? Like.
- [11:26]
Sean Elley
Right.
- [11:27]
David Epstein
The word itself is practically synonymous with something that's frustrating. And I think if you're given, you know, if someone tells you what to do and how to do it, and this is clear in all sorts of studies about problem solving, that if. If you say, could I surprise, Could I still surprise myself? And if the answer is no, then you're too constrained. Right. Because the, the usefulness of constraints is it causes you to think in, in different ways and to explore productively. That said, I don't think just because something's an impediment that it's necessarily bad. Like, I'm kind of hoping that the mind set shift, the emotional reframe, if you will, that this book engenders would be to seeing limits as opportunities to clarify priorities and experiment in new ways. So to give an example, this isn't in the book, but one of the first readers was a guy named Ed hoffman who was NASA's first chief knowledge officer. It's like a sort of, sort of like a, the head psychologist who, who's in charge of making sure that the, there's institutional memory at NASA. And he said, oh, I have to tell you about this mission called lcross, where the team ended up with half the time and the budget that they expected. So what do they do? Well, you know, they complain, right. And then they say, well, if we were going to get this done anyway, how would we do it? And so it forced them to, instead of building from scratch, to borrow equipment, to borrow technology. So they took imaging equipment from army tanks and engine temperature sensors from NASCAR and built a probe that confirmed water on the moon. And so did they want that situation? No. Could it have been even more constrained and made it impossible? Yes, but what it actually did was cause them to think in ways that they never would have otherwise.
- [13:18]
Sean Elley
So I want to kind of shift this to more of like the, the more personal existential level and talk about freedom. The simplest and definitely most common definition of freedom we have is the absence of limits.
- [13:33]
David Epstein
Yeah.
- [13:33]
Sean Elley
And that is certainly a kind of freedom, but it seems like you don't think that is the most useful kind of freedom. So I wonder how you would define the ideal of freedom.
- [13:43]
David Epstein
I think the fetishization of total freedom is like completely ahistorical for the things that have made the freest countries in the world. Right. They are completely based upon agreed upon rules that did not exist. So there's one of the thinkers that made a big impression on me while I was reporting inside the box was a guy named Douglas north, who won a Nobel Prize in economics for his work on constraints, essentially on social norms and political and economic structures that constrained human behavior such that strangers became more predictable to one another. And that led to trust across boundaries. Because for much of human history, people only collaborated or did business with their kinship network or with people in their neighborhood. Essentially, and it was these, these social norms and boundaries that allowed people to start trusting strangers. And I have to say, I think there are some pretty ominous signs in our society right now where what north would predict is as these. As these shared social norms that constrain human behavior and make it more predictable break down, or as some of the public rules are more obviously don't apply to everyone, what you start to see is a decline in trust. And trust, by the way, is very tightly related to per capita gdp. If you look at the portion of people in a country that say most strangers are trustworthy, it maps very tightly with per capita gdp. And I just saw a Pew survey that found that majority of adults, a small majority, but a majority of adults say that other people have bad morals. So this is like exactly what Douglas north would have predicted, where there's a breakdown of these shared social norms and constraints on the way that people behave and strangers start trusting each other less. And stranger trust is the foundation of shared prosperity. And so the idea that we should all just do whatever we want, it's certainly not the foundation of shared prosperity in society.
- [15:55]
Sean Elley
You know, there's a very old conservative insight that I used to balk at when I was younger, that maximum freedom is its own kind of bondage. I think the older I get, the more I've come to believe that that's true. It seems like you've landed there too.
- [16:14]
David Epstein
Yeah. And I mean, you said something that's in passing, but that's profound, which is people actually do overvalue freedom in the abstract. There's all sorts of evidence in this in different instance, specific cases of this in research. Like, you know, most people say if they got cancer, they would want to be free to choose their treatment, basically. But then of people who actually get cancer, it's almost nobody that actually wants to be faced with that choice. So that's just kind of one niche example. But there are all these examples where people say that they want all this freedom, but then when it comes down to it, it's actually a burden in many ways, and they don't necessarily want that freedom. And aside from that, on a personal basis. Once I became a writer and I said I want to, you know, the dream is that you become totally independent and you spend all of your time doing things, you know, spending every minute of your day only in a manner of your choosing. In fact, when my. When my last book. Once that was done, I went. I left my job. My. The last time I had a normal journalism job was at ProPublica and then when I left that, I've just been on my own ever since. And I was at a writer's retreat where we were asked to. Everyone had to say, what are you optimizing for this year? And I said, autonomy. And fast forward a few years and I learned there's such a thing as too much autonomy. I had individualized my schedule so much that first of all, I wasn't really syncing with other people. Right. Because syncing with other people is kind of inconvenient. So I was doing everything that was convenient for me. And it was like I had to make every decision about everything that was gonna be done. All these competing. I was just having decision fatigue about everything. And it was just not good for well being. And then I ended up reading a lot of research that's like. Humans thrive in a dense network of reciprocal obligation. Like you want obligations to other people and you want them to have obligations to you, and you want to be synchronizing with people in real life. So I ended up joining a non profit board in my community and going to dance meetups and joining a dinner and discussion club. And all these things are inconvenient. I have to be at a certain place at a certain time physically. But it adds meaning back into your life and structure back into your life. And so I think the. I certainly thought that this thing that I really, really wanted and then I got there and it turned out that it's actually not so great.
- [18:34]
Sean Elley
No, I mean, it's something I used to hear a lot when I was in the military. People would, you know, drill sergeant types would tell you, if you want freedom, discipline is the way you live a very disciplined life. And counterintuitively, that actually frees you up. And again, I balked. I've come to believe that there's real deep truth in that. But I think, and I suspect you would agree, part of the desire for freedom, which is understandable, is people just want choices. They want to have choices, options in life, as many choices as we can get. And it is a hallmark of modernity that we are overwhelmed with choices. We have never had more choices in terms of what to do with our time, what to pay attention to. But that I think has not made us happier. I think it has created more paralysis and more anxiety. What is that about for you? Why does the superabundance of choices actually have the opposite effect on us and create anxiety?
- [19:35]
David Epstein
Yeah, because it seems like it should only be good. More choices. Right. And according to.
- [19:39]
Sean Elley
Right.
- [19:40]
David Epstein
You know, classical economic thinking it has to be good, right? You have more options, which gives you a better chance of making, reaching an optimal decision, essentially. But it turns out that's not at all the way humans actually work. We can't make optimal decisions. We have finite bandwidth to consider all the different options. And so when choice sets reach a certain level of complexity, people start making worse decisions and they're less happy or they just get paralyzed by it. So you know, when, when 401k options surpass a certain level of complexity with lots of choices, people are more likely to just not even participate at all. Like they just, they just like back out of it. And in some ways this is, it's almost sort of hilariously dire. Like since the introduction of infinite scrolling, people have been getting. International surveys show people, particularly young people, have been getting more bored, right? And so in follow up studies to that, people will be given say a set of 20 videos they can watch and they can scroll through and pick and they'll be more bored than the people who are given one video from that same set and said, you have to watch this one. It's like just the possibility that there is some other thing that you could be doing spoils the experience of the moment itself. And since we have so many choices now, I mean this Oxford professor calculated that the consumer choices available to us in modern society are 100 million fold more than pre industrial societies, which dwarfs the increase in wealth. And there's some research now showing that as those consumer choices go up, people start to view all of their purchase decisions as like extensions of their identity. So every decision is, is freighted with, with all this weight. It seems like this can't be bad to have more decisions and certainly you can have too few. But again, it's a case where in the abstract it seems great, but the reality looks different.
- [21:40]
Sean Elley
One of the many unexpected benefits of being a dad to a young kid is getting to observe human behavior in such an intimate way. In. You know, the reason why my wife and I basically just shut down YouTube access, right, is that you could see how watching all these hyper edited, frenetic videos, the ability to start, stop, shift from video to video was not just, it was not just destroying his attention, it was making regular life or anything that didn't mimic that frenetic pace of YouTube intolerably boring.
- [22:16]
David Epstein
The attention issue is a really serious one where people's attention spans are being trained in a way at this point in our history, if you're not structuring your attention, it is being structured for you and not in a good way.
- [22:40]
Sean Elley
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- [26:41]
David Epstein
Yeah.
- [26:41]
Sean Elley
And it feels really connected to what we're talking about now in terms of okay, this is the world we live in. How do we orient ourselves to a world that's giving us too many choices, that is, you know, actually making our lives more anxious and more difficult. So talk about his idea there and how it connects to.
- [26:59]
David Epstein
Yeah.
- [27:00]
Sean Elley
The broader thesis of the book.
- [27:01]
David Epstein
Herbert Simon, who I think is one of the most brilliant minds that I know of, period. He was trained as a political scientist, but he won the highest award in computer science because he was co created the first AI demonstration. He won the highest award in psychology. He was a founder of cognitive psychology, meaning not like therapy, but how our brains solve problems and make decisions. And then he won the Nobel Prize in economics for good measure. And one of one of his. Well, when one of his grad students once asked how do you master all these fields? And he said no, it's just one thing. I'm just studying how humans make decisions. And one of his important ideas was called satisficing, which is a portmanteau of satisfy and suffice. And what Simon was showing is that humans do not behave like the rational actor model of classical economic theory where we evaluate all the different options and pick the best one. We have finite bandwidth, so we have to use shortcuts essentially to make decisions. And we often use good enough shortcuts or we satisfy instead of maximizing or maybe what we'd call optimizing. And Simon said we should be doing this really proactively. You know, we have to do it anyway. We can't make the optimal decisions because we can't evaluate everything and we can't predict the future, but we waste a ton of cognitive bandwidth doing it. And so he called himself an incorrigible satisficer. So he wanted to set good enough rules for just about everything. So he wore the same kind of socks. He always owned one beret. He said, you only need three pairs of clothes, one on your body, one in the closet, ready to wear, one in the wash. He ate the same breakfast. Grapefruit, oatmeal, black coffee. Lived in the same house for 46 years, et cetera. And he said by simplifying all these things to good enough, he saved energy and cognitive bandwidth for the things that he really wanted to focus on. And Simon felt this was increasingly important in a world of information overload. As he said, in an information rich world, there is a dearth of something else, and that something else, the thing that information consumes and information consumes attention. So with a wealth of information, there's a scarcity of attention. So one, it was about saving cognitive bandwidth. But also, he famously said, the best is enemy of the good. And so if you can set these good enough decision rules, I mean, I really took this to heart because I have what would be called maximizing tendencies. So the opposite of satisficing, maximizing trying to get the best. You know, you may like the show you're watching on Netflix, but is there some. Could there be something else better? So you're still switching and surfing or I guess dating apps would be a very obvious one, right? It's infinite ability to swipe. So I. And it's almost always bad to be a maximizer, by the way. In psychological research, maximizers are less happy with their decisions. They are more prone to regret. They're less happy with their lives. They're much more likely to go for reversible decisions, which ends up both making them unhappy and preventing them from kind of committing one way or the other. And so for someone like me, I think it's important to set rules for whether it's like buying something online or whatever it is of here are the few things I need this to do for me to get to good enough and then stick with that and. And make the decision.
- [30:18]
Sean Elley
Well, I love the. What is it? The Fredkin's paradox. Yeah, right. This idea that the more similar Your options are, the less choosing between them matters, but the harder choosing between them.
- [30:32]
David Epstein
So you spend the most time and energy on the least important decision.
- [30:34]
Sean Elley
You spend the most time right on Netflix, like, what the hell am I going to stream? It's all the same thing. But I'm curious what you think about this, because I think a byproduct of all the choices, it's just a fear of closure. I think we all have that, that, that deep seated fear of closure. It's like when you commit to anything, there's this worry that you're. You're missing out on some other thing or some other experience, or you're killing off some potential alternative version of yourself. And if you're prone to overthinking, which I think we all increasingly are, having all these choices, it does not feel like freedom. It just feels like more shit to fret over, which it is.
- [31:12]
David Epstein
Yeah, that was very eloquently put. Hadn't thought of it in that language that you just put it in. But I like that that you're killing off a future self. Right. Because you're choosing a path and you're not choosing the other paths.
- [31:23]
Sean Elley
Right.
- [31:24]
David Epstein
And I think the fact is you're doing that anyway. And so it's important to face up to it and realize that's what you are doing and that's okay.
- [31:32]
Sean Elley
Is this what you're talking about with that distinction in the book between sliding and deciding? Because the people who slide are less happier in life?
- [31:43]
David Epstein
Yeah.
- [31:43]
Sean Elley
Why is that?
- [31:44]
David Epstein
Yeah. And again, this is from research specifically on relationships and what sliding means. And this is apparently a phenomenon that has been increasing among young people. It means kind of in an effort to keep your options open, you kind of sleepwalk into escalating commitment, you know, moving in together, et cetera. Like, you go through all these steps never having decided because you kind of want to keep your options open. But things escalate anyway. Instead of saying, like, I'm committed to this person, like, this is where we're going. And couples that slide into escalating commitment, you know, if they get married, they're more likely to be divorced or they're less happy. And so again, it's this illusion of keeping your options open while they are being closed down. You know, those. You think you're preserving those other versions of yourself, but you're actually having to kill them off. And so putting off the decision and having the feeling that you haven't committed just, just leads to. To worse outcomes versus making a decision one way or the other.
- [32:40]
Sean Elley
Well, you know, we're, again, we're, we're trying to preserve that sensation of freedom, but refusing to actually choose makes the whole thing feel all the more fragile, you know, so you're never really grounded.
- [32:53]
David Epstein
And, and I think some of this, this is me totally philosophical speculation, but I think some of this has to do with, with maybe illusions about mortality and infinitude in general.
- [33:08]
Sean Elley
Say more.
- [33:09]
David Epstein
There's this part of our brain that thinks, you know, if I just got the right system and all these things, I could do everything. I could do it all right, the right productivity hacks, but you can't. You're the bottleneck. And so what you need to do is recognize my time and my life are limited and prioritize ruthlessly, or that, you know, that it's just hard to grapple with how short our lives are in some ways and how few chances we get at certain things. And so I think it's almost this comforting illusion to feel like you're not killing off those alternate versions of yourself, but you are, you are anyway. And so it's that much more important to deliberately make these kind of decisions. So I think it, I think it partly just has to do with the way. And again, this is my philosophical speculation, these illusions that we think we could get everything done if only we, if only we got it all right and that we aren't actually making decisions that are, are, are permanent in a sense.
- [34:17]
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Sean Elley
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- [35:44]
Sean Elley
You thought this was your run club era. Turns out it was more of a thinking about Run club era. The good news? Someone's marathon training is about to start. Sell your workout gear on Depop. Just snap a few photos and we'll take care of the rest. They get their race day fit and you get a payout for trying. Someone on Depop wants what you've got. Start selling now. Depop where Taste Recognizes Taste. I think this may have been one of the more surprising experiences for me reading the book. Pleasantly surprising because it actually helped crystallize for me what it is I dislike most about the digital world. It is that humans have these psychological, emotional vulnerabilities, weaknesses, pathologies, right? Just like habits that undermine us. And it seems like all the technology we live with and under now is designed to exploit all of those things and all of this stimuli which is designed to pull you away from yourself and the things that may actually make your life rich and fulfilling. But what do you think, right?
- [37:14]
David Epstein
I mean there's obviously there's there's huge amounts of money to be made by other people structuring your attention, which is a reason why this is happening. But, but it's also just the convenience of it. And I think it's even, even worse now. So again, it's never been easier to do too much. And I think AI also just really exacerbates that where you have this enormous ability to start a million things that you have no intention of finishing. I don't know if you've seen this new research on work slop where it's causing people to produce these incredible volumes of things that are like mediocre and building up. And so it's just like everything is more, more, more, more, more, more streams of information, you know, more videos, more work products that we can all put out and it just fragments attention in ways that are really unhealthy. I mean, you know, I get into the research by psychologist Gloria Mark, who studies people's attention at work, and 25 years ago, it was about three minutes between task switches when people were working. And even then, the paper she published based on that work was titled Constant Constant Multitasking Craziness. That was a quote from one of the subjects in the research. And then by 2012, it was 75 seconds. And by 2022 is 45 seconds. Every 45 seconds switching. And because multitasking isn't really possible,
- [38:45]
Sean Elley
it
- [38:45]
David Epstein
actually makes people worse at everything and stressed out. Like, really. Yeah. I think it's just incumbent upon us, unfortunately, to have to structure our own attention. And it does require a lot of effort. But the. The good thing is it's. It's doable. And not all of the things you have to do are that hard. And you can make a difference pretty quickly. The downside is so much of the world is kind of conspiring against you.
- [39:09]
Sean Elley
Well, how do you think about the role of. Of ritual, any kind of ritual in modern life? Do you see that as a way to discipline our attention in ways that actually protect it, preserve what matters?
- [39:23]
David Epstein
Certainly. I mean, I think to make making. I think. I think ritual can help make doing the important things easier. Right. If something becomes. Becomes habitual. And because I think. I think the. When we're talking about this attention economy, it's like there's so many things ready to flood into any empty space you leave. So if you. If you have ritual one, it gives a sense of, like, humans were built for seasonality in their work, and maybe this isn't fully seasonality, but having some sense of switching into different modes. And I think that's what ritual often, often does for people. But I think because all of these. These other forms of entertainment or information or whatever they are, are ready to flood into any moment we have where we haven't decided what we're doing, that having a ritual that sets you up for this is what I'm doing now, or this is what I'm not doing now, or this is the mindset I'm in right now can be really important so that you're not just doing the equivalent of mindlessly scrolling all the time. Right. You see this all the time. When people don't have some other particular thing that they've decided to do, then they start beaming all the stuff into their face that's waiting for them. So I think ritual can be really important that way.
- [40:36]
Sean Elley
Any good examples of rituals that come to mind or maybe even rituals that you've adopted?
- [40:41]
David Epstein
Yeah, I mean, my favorite was since I obviously used this book as an excuse to spend time with One of my favorite writers, one of the best living writers in the world, Isabel Allende, who started writing books just before she turned 40. And since then she's now 83. Yeah, 83. She has written a bestseller about every 18 months for the last 43 years. Right? 80 million copies sold and all. She's the most translated female Spanish language author ever. And I spent some time with her and she started writing her first book on January 8th of 1981, called the House of the Spirits. That was a huge hit. And from then on, she started every subsequent book on January 8th. If she had finished her previous book, if she was done with the book she was working on, every January 8th she started a new book. And it turned into this whole kind of cleansing ritual where in the lead up, everyone knew that they had to get to her before January 8th. And she would tie up all of her things and she would clear out her old research materials and go through these various rituals, put a Pablo Neruda book under her computer, just in case inspiration by osmosis is a thing. And then on January 8, she would retreat kind of into this silence where she said her life turned outward, would go away. You know, no more talks, none of those other things. And it would take her a few, a little time, you know, sometimes a few weeks to get into this headspace of doing her work. And then even within the day, there was a ritual like she'd light a candle to start the workday and blow it out to end the workday and close the door. I adopted that, by the way. But I use electric candles because too much paper around. But that sense of ritual, it just gave her time where she always knew, like, she would build up to it. And it was like, almost like her body and her mind would get ready for it, to get into this mode. And. And it gave her life a discipline, a ritual. And even after, you know, she thought she was going to retire from writing after her daughter in her 20s passed away from a rare disease. I think I'm done. And that was the one time she, she had a. A little publishing drought. But then as January 8th was coming up again, she started feeling nervous and could she try again? And she did, you know, and that was, that was decades ago. So this sense of ritual really gave a structure to her life that turned into a discipline that's kind of, you know, quite incredible.
- [43:02]
Sean Elley
There's a. An awesome example in the book, or really a story about Dr. Seuss that I just, I just had to bring up because I never heard this story before, but it's such a good illustration of your argument. And so the story is basically, I guess, an editor at Random House bet Theodore Geisel. Is that how you say his name?
- [43:26]
David Epstein
Dr.
- [43:29]
Sean Elley
He was this editor, bet him that he couldn't write a children's book using only 50 words.
- [43:34]
David Epstein
Yeah.
- [43:35]
Sean Elley
And he was struggling, I guess, before that to. To write the thing. And the result of that bet was Green Eggs in hand.
- [43:41]
David Epstein
That's right.
- [43:41]
Sean Elley
Which is incredible. Like, talk about a lesson in that form may actually matter more than inspiration.
- [43:47]
David Epstein
Yeah. And, I mean, it forced him to experiment with rhythm because he couldn't be expansive with vocabulary. And even before that, though, he was given a vocabulary list for kids at the time when he was working before him, children's literature was born. It was super literal and pretty boring, most of it. And so even before Green Eggs and Ham, he was given his vocab list for kids and asked to use about 200 words from it only and no more. And he looks at the list and starts complaining to his wife because there are very few adjectives. And he says, it's like trying to make a strudel without any strudels, which I love, because it makes it feel like he's kind of the same person in his personal life as in his work. And then he ultimately gets frustrated and just says, I'm just going to take the first two rhyming words on the list and make a book. The first two rhyming words on the list, Cat and hat, and the rest is history. But again, it forced him to rely on this, like, rollicking rhythm because he was restricted in his vocabulary.
- [44:49]
Sean Elley
How different is your life after writing this book? Have you gotten much more intentional about imposing limits and structure in your own life?
- [44:58]
David Epstein
100%. And there are a few different categories, if I may go into them, and you can tell me to stop if it's too much. But, I mean, one of the reasons I wrote this book is because I was bad at putting useful limits in my own life. And it started with my work where, with both of my previous two books, I wrote 150% the length of a book and then had to cut it back to the length of a book. And that's very much because I didn't define the boundaries of what I was doing very well. And, I mean, my first book, I had to cut a trip to Arctic Sweden. You know, once I became a dad, you don't want to be taking trips to Arctic Sweden that you're going to then have to cut from your work. Right. And that just meant I was doing so much more work. So this time around, I actually didn't start. I sort of did it the Pixar way, where you stay small really long. I didn't start writing for a year, just researching and interviewing. And then at the end of that year, I forced myself to make on one page and one page only, a structural outline of the book. I took a hundred thousand word, what I call my master thought list, read it literally, and print it out and read it, and then said, all right, with what's in my head now I'm making it on one page and one page only. And it forced me to prioritize ruthlessly. And so this was the. This book is 20% shorter than my other two. I think it's much more efficient. I was much more efficient with my time and I turned it in early, which I didn't even know was a thing in books because I really defined what I was doing a lot more carefully. So. So that was one way I did it. But also with, you know, I used to think my competitive advantage would be allowing my work projects to swallow every moment of my life. And. But again, I. One, I actually don't even think that's. That's right. It's like you need programmed recovery. But also, again, becoming a parent, I just didn't want to do that. And so I have rituals where I end my workday again, for flipping off the candle, closing the door, so that my workday is contained. And in my personal life, I mean, I mentioned this before, but reeling back some of that autonomy, that was not healthy for me. So I picked things to do where I had to have my feet in a specific place at a specific time and live there, not be, as the MIT professor Sherry Turkle says, forever elsewhere, which is the case when you're living the virtual world. So again, joined a nonprofit board in my community, started going to these dance meetups, joined a dinner and discussion club where I had to be physically in certain places at certain times and had certain obligations. And then I just started. I guess a few other things I did is I started setting satisficing rules for myself because I know my tendencies, so to say, here are the things I'm trying to get done with this decision. Once those are met, no more looking, no more reading every review or whatever it is. Just take it and don't look back. And so that was. Was quite useful for me from. Sorry, I mean it again, I was researching stuff that I wanted to be better at. So there are a Lot of changes I made in my life. I mean, I structure my attention totally different and priorities. Like I used post IT notes to make all my current commitments visible and put them on a wall. And I said, all right, I can see that I could never get all these things done. So if I have to cut something out in the next month, what would it be? And I forced myself to do that constantly subtraction audit. From an attention standpoint, Gloria, Mark's research found that we check. People in offices, check email on average 77 times a day. Maybe you have to answer all that email, but that's not 77 emails. That's 77 different checks, different times. Checking that toggling is terrible. And I realized I was doing. I was toggling with email. And so now I batch it one or two or three batches a day where I'm only doing email. And then when I'm not doing it, I'm not doing it at all. Put my phone outside the room if I don't need it, because if it's even visible, you'll think about checking it. So what she found is that we become accustomed to a certain level of interruption, a cadence. And you'll continue that with self interruption of intrusive thoughts, even if you take the distraction away. So it takes a little time to retrain your attention. So batching all my work so that I'm monotasking in any given block during the day, and I have a pad that I keep next to me so that as those thoughts pop into my head about what do I need to check or didn't do, I write them down. Called cognitive outsourcing. So all these things, I mean. Yeah. So it's changed my. My personal and professional life in many ways, which is not surprising given that I was researching it partly because of what I needed help on.
- [49:25]
Sean Elley
No, I mean, thank you for that. The reason I asked is I just. These ideas are useless if you don't find ways to concretize them.
- [49:32]
David Epstein
Yeah.
- [49:33]
Sean Elley
In your own life so that you actually can create the structures that will lead to actual shifts. Are there areas in life where actually having no constraints, no boxes, no boundaries, is not just good, but essential?
- [49:49]
David Epstein
No boundaries. I don't know if I think that having no boundaries is ever good. I mean, I think what people want, when they think they want tons of choice. I think what they really want is a feeling of agency that they have some control over their fate. Right. So even if a boss, say, gives you some constraints that might actually be good ones, you may bristle against them if you don't, if you feel like it's taking away agency from you. So I think that's really what people want more than this, complete freedom. So, you know, daydreaming without constraints, great. But in most places in life, I think useful boundaries are really going to help people. So, so I, I can't. Nothing pops to mind where I'd say like, absolutely no constraints would. Would be good here except for things like, yeah, sort of daydreaming and musing which, which by the way, I love to do and I think can be kind of important. But do you think of. Is there an area you're thinking of where just having no constraints could potentially be good?
- [50:59]
Sean Elley
No. Which is why I asked, because when the question came to me, I tried to answer it myself and I didn't have an answer. Which isn't to say I may not come up with one later, but I think that alone is instructive. Right. There may be spaces where that argument holds, but the fact that it's so difficult to think of it suggests that those are very, very few and far between that in the vast majority of life, this is practically true. And I think that's revealing.
- [51:35]
David Epstein
That's a good way to put it.
- [51:36]
Sean Elley
All right, let's leave it right there. David, this is great. I really enjoyed the book. I really did. Maybe in part because I had some half baked instincts that actually got validated.
- [51:48]
David Epstein
Just because it's comprehension bias doesn't mean it's wrong.
- [51:51]
Sean Elley
Yeah, that's right. That's right. But it's a great book. I really enjoyed talking to you. Whenever you do another one, we'll get you back on. Thank you.
- [51:59]
David Epstein
I would love to. I'm looking forward to that at some point in the future. I like that. It was very deft transitions. I was, I was impressed.
- [52:07]
Sean Elley
All right, this is the end of the episode. I hope you enjoyed it. As you can tell, I got a lot out of it. As always, we want to know what you think. So drop us a line atthegray areaox.com or you can leave us a message on our new voicemail line at 1-800-214-5749. Please also rate review. Subscribe to the podcast. It helps us grow our show. This episode was produced by Thor New Rider and Beth Morrissey who also runs the show. Engineer by Shannon Mahoney. Fact Check by Colleen Barrett and Alex Overington wrote our theme music. Our executive producer is Miranda Kennedy. The Gray area comes out on Mondays and Fridays. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts if you watch podcasts while you listen, you can do that too. Go to YouTube.com Vox for video versions of the gray area. The show is part of Vox. Support Vox's journalism by joining our membership program today. Go to Vox.commembers to sign up, and if you decide to sign up because of this show, let us know.