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The mindbodygreen Podcast
661: Why structure is good for your brain | journalist David Epstein
00:53:25
Epstein is the author of the number one New York Times bestseller Range and the New York Times bestseller The Sports Gene. He has master’s degrees in environmental science and journalism and has worked as a senior writer for Sports Illustrated and as an investigative reporter for ProPublica. He lives in Washington, DC. His newest book, Inside The Box, is out now.
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Welcome to the MyBodyGreen podcast. I'm Jason Wakab, founder and co CEO of My BuddyGreen and your host.
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This isn't a running ad from REI because it's mostly walking and occasionally flying. It's hitting your favorite trail with your favorite people who showed up for the same unhinged reason. And it's not just about fastest known times, but finding the funnest times. Because this isn't running, it's trail running. Get your gear for the trail in store or@rei.com hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile.
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Now. I was looking for fun ways to
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See Terms this podcast is sponsored by Berkeley Life. Low nitric oxide is one of the least talked about reasons people feel tired as they age. And it's fixable. Berkeley Life Nitric oxide support is clinically proven to raise your levels. Take it for better energy, circulation and performance. Get your first month for only $10 by visiting B E R K E l e y life.comMBG this podcast is sponsored by Kohler Health. We track our steps, sleep and workouts, but some of the most valuable health signals happen in the bathroom, where they get flushed away. Kohler's Dakota fits discreetly onto your toilet and captures biometric signals to provide insights into hydration, gut health, and more. That's data that our other wearables can't deliver. The info is securely deliver delivered to the Kohler Health app. Learn more@kohlerhealth.com, use code MBG1year for a free one year app membership with your Dakota purchase. What if the biggest breakthroughs in creativity don't come from open ended freedom, but from being forced to work within limits? David Epstein is the author of the new book Inside the Box that explains a science backed framework for unlocking creative performance. His core argument Our brains are wired to take the path of least resistance and the only way to force truly original thinking is to block it. In today's show we get into the neuroscience behind why blank states kill creativity and constraints ignite it. Epstein explains how Dr. Seuss's most iconic book was written on a bet that he could couldn't only use 50 words. And how that restriction forced the signature rhythm that changed children's literature. This one will make you look at every obstacle in your life a little bit differently. Let's dive in. All right, so constraints, you argue that constraints, not freedom, drive creativity. Let's start there. The big idea.
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B
Yeah. So our brains, as the cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham puts it, are not made for thinking, but are made for preventing us from having to think whenever possible because thinking is energetically costly. And so if we are given a blank slate or to too much freedom, we will just go down what cognitive scientists call the path of least resistance. Do the first thing that pops to mind, the familiar thing, the thing you've done before, et cetera. So if you want to be creative, because our brains are wired for convenience, you actually have to block that path of least resistance in order to force yourself into productive exploration. And one psychologist actually refers to this as the green eggs and ham effect, because Dr. Seuss famously wrote green eggs and ham on a bet that he couldn't write a book using only 50 words. And that restriction forced him to experiment with, with rhythm because he couldn't be expansive with vocabulary. And so he developed that, that rollicking rhythm that became his, his signature and changed children's literature. So it's just emblematic of that fact that, that really, until we're, we're restricted in ways that, that, that force us into something new, we, we don't explore to the degree we otherwise could.
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A
And bringing it back to your personal experience, you had the ultimate constraint. You start the book with this. How you were a multi sport athlete, suffered this terrible injury and it opened your eyes to a completely different sport, track and field. You ran the 800 at Columbia. Prolific, I might say. Walk us through that experience and how it opened your eyes to a constraint you probably didn't want to experience at a young age.
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B
No, that's right. CH changed my life academically and athletically, really. So this was in eighth grade. I was football, basketball, baseball guy, and I was playing quarterback in a schoolyard football game and threw a ball as hard as I could and my arm just snapped in two on the follow through in a spiral and freak injury. We'll never know why exactly it happened. I've only seen this actually happen once, one other time to a major league pitcher and he had to have his arm amputated So I guess I came away lucky. But it. I had to have my arms strapped to my torso for months and I couldn't. And I was barred from contact sports for a year. And I didn't care about anything except sports at that stage in my life. I was aggressively uninterested in school and, and two things happened. The first was in the classroom actually, where because I couldn't use my writing hand like I would have these, these tests. I remember the bane of my existence was French class. And the tests were where you'd have a worksheet and you'd have to listen to a recording of a native speaker talking. And you had to follow well enough that on your worksheet there were blanks that you could catch the word and fill it in. And I was mediocre at this. Once I had my arm, my writing hand strapped to my torso, I couldn't even attempt it because I couldn't keep up, you know, writing with my left hand. So instead I started trying to memorize the words as they came by and then go back and write them slowly with my left hand. And the way I started doing that was by attaching the words to sports things using mnemonics. I didn't know that word at the time, but using mnemonic devices and I started acing these tests. And so I started using mnemonic devices and everything. I use them to this day to memorize hour long keyNote talks. And 20 years after that experience, I read one of the most famous studies of memory ever done that took a Carnegie Mellon undergrad from being able to memorize seven digits to 80 digits. And he too was using sports related mnemonics. So it's not that the sports are important, but attaching the new information to some memory. But this is a tactic I never would have explored if I hadn't lost the use of my writing hand. And similarly in sports, I was devastated short term, but I wanted to stay in shape and I was barred from contact sports. So I started running like I did a season of cross country to stay in shape. And I kind of fell in love with it. And it, it was still a winding path, but I came back to track and ended up doing that in college, becoming a university record holder. And, and running is still a really crucial part of my life today. You know, I'm doing it most days and so was these, both academically and athletically. I just would not have explored these other possibilities had I not been forced to. And they ended up really enriching my life in all Sorts of ways in the long term.
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A
Incredible story. A couple of things I want to unpack. So you mentioned sports related mnemonics. Can you walk us through an example so we could all learn?
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B
Yeah. So let's say with numbers, you know the, like in that, in that famous study with the undergrad at Carnegie Mellon, he was a track athlete also. And so he would get these strings of random digits that he was working on memorizing and he would start to do what's called what psychologists call chunking, which is instead of trying to memorize one digit at a time, you take a group of digits and you attach them to some memory. So let's say he gets the first, you know, the three digits, 343 come up. Instead of, instead of remembering three, four, three. He's like, oh, world record in the mile. And you start doing all sorts of things like that. Or Maybe it's a 17, 18 maybe for him. That's close to my 5k PR or something. And so it's even better if you can kind of make them sequential in some way, but it breaks it down so you're not actually remembering X number of unique materials. Maybe people have heard of the strategy of memory palace where you, it's like a physical structure in your brain that you walk through and you attach each new piece of information to something that you see in the house or palace as you're going through. And so it's the act of connecting pieces of information to, to other things that are easy to remember. And it's incredibly powerful for, for memory. It takes, it takes some practice, but is like magic. I mean, when I, after I give keynote talks, people ask me if I have a photographic memory. And like if I put my keys down and spin the circle, I lose them. But when it comes to, you know, if I, if I forcibly have to remember information, then I do these sorts of things and it, it makes me seem like I have this outrageous memory.
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A
It's incredible. Very sage advice. It's essentially attaching meaning to whatever you're trying to memorized, whatever way works for you. So I'm going to come back to what happened to you in eighth grade and the role mindset I, I think played. You know, this, this is something devastating. It's your whole world.
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B
This ca.
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A
This could have caught a couple different ways. You could have just, you know, that's the time maybe kids start experimenting with alcohol or drugs. You could have just went that way or you could have said, you know, this is terrible. I'm going to sit on the couch and, you know, eat Cheetos and watch TV or, you know, screw this. But like, no, you didn't. So, like, I'm sure you've thought about this. Like, how did you turn the lemons into lemonade? What do you think? How do you think you're different? How should we think about adversity? A devastating event that you turn to turn to your advantage and is life changing for you?
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B
Yeah, it's a good, it's a good question. I have wondered about that and I don't know to what extent it's something about me that's just innate because I was achievement oriented. Like, I wasn't interested in school, but I like, I was competitive, know I liked doing well at stuff. And I think the challenge in school, once I had, you know, I couldn't use my writing hand. I think one, I kind of felt a little engaged in the challenge, almost in thinking, well, this is impossible now. And, and so there was also sort of a, a little bit of nothing to lose aspect to it. And, and I felt the same way with running. I was like, well, I don't care about this sport. Like, this isn't a cool sport. You, you don't run into anything, you know. And so I sort of felt like there was nothing to lose a little bit. And I think that took some of the pressure off. And to this day I'm really a huge fan of low stakes practice in general for anything that we're, that we're trying. And so I think maybe it was a combination of my general achievement orientation and, and, and feeling actually more engaged by this, this challenge than I had of doing things the normal way before. And also in a certain way feeling the pressure come off because it's just this totally new situation. They kind of have nothing to lose. So I don't totally know. You know, I'm trying to retrofit my own psychology, my own middle school psychology, but those are things that have occurred to me. I don't know if they sound sensible.
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A
No, they do. And I want to talk more about low stakes practice and the idea of nothing to lose. And it's probably a segue to your previous book range. Also incredible and a must read. But like, how do you think about low stakes practice and nothing to lose today?
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B
Let me give an example. That was really important to me when I switched so my past life, I was training to be a scientist and I got off that track and became a writer. And I was in journalism. And my first job, actually my first stable job was at a Tabloid in New York City, in New York Daily News, where I was the work from midnight to the morning. Nothing happy that's going in that newspaper happens between midnight in the morning. But it involved a lot of talking to strangers and that did not come naturally to me. It comes much more, you know, it's much more easier, it's much easier now for me than it was. But I really needed to work up to that. And so I would, I started by, I would take elevator rides in office buildings in Manhattan and strike up conversation with people. And it's incredibly, it's awkward, but it's incredibly low stakes because within a minute it's over and you're never seeing that person again, right? Because they're getting off at some floor and you can get off at another floor. And so I'm always sort of looking for low stakes practice like that. Even now I have a newsletter that I really use as a place for low stakes practice. It serves a couple purposes for me, but that's one of them where a book is this huge undertaking, right? And I don't really want to jump right into it until I've sort of gotten to try to write about a few ideas and see how it feels and see how people react in a way that's not that important. So I'm always sort of looking for what is the, what is the smallest possible prototype I can do of this thing that I need to try to do. Because it, it, it just takes a lot of the pressure off and I think puts me in the mindset of oh, I'm experimenting here. It's not about the success or failure of this one thing, it's really an experiment.
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A
And how do you think about that idea as it relates to youth sports?
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B
Oh, youth sports. So many things to say about youth sports. I mean, I think the increasing sort of professionalization of youth sports is, is bad on a number of levels. And I think one of those levels is that it does squash the experimentation that kids would naturally do when they were playing in a little more open environment. I mean, I think when it comes to soccer, for example, last, last I lived in New York. I don't live in New York anymore. But when I did, There was a U8 travel soccer team that met near me. First of all, I don't think there's a human being in the world that thinks 7 year olds can't find good enough competition in a city of 9 million people that they need to travel. Okay? So that's in the adults economic interest. They're trying to Build a customer pipeline, right. If you're not on U8, you can't be on U9, et cetera. But when I've been in the countries that produce the, you know, disproportionate number of the greatest soccer players in the world when they're kids, they're almost all playing futsal. A small ball stays on the ground because it's heavier. They're playing on sand one day and cobblestones the next day and on a tennis court the next day. And so first of all, the game is like it's in a phone booth. It's much tighter. So they have to do lots more rapid problem solving and they're playing in different environment almost every day. And that's what I think forces, I mean, now we know. Actually, I've seen research on this. That's what forces these sort of. When you see players that are really creative in their skills, almost always they grew up playing futsal, not learning the set plays that the seven year olds who are meeting near me in New York were learning. You know, there's a, there's a trade off between short and long term development and I think when we extinguish that period of exploration, we, we kind of hamper the development of the athletes in the long term.
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A
So you're hinting on specialization, which I think the science shows at this point is, is not in the best interest of the child at too young of an age. So given your expertise, I'm curious, what is your view? If you zoom out and say, okay, we're going to set a standard for youth sports. What is your perfect scenario? Say, you know, under age 10, under age, you know, 13, under age 16. In terms of what should kids do? How many sports should they play? Organized versus not organized, travel versus. Because there are countries in the Winter Olympics, I think it was, it was, was it Denmark or the Netherlands that had, essentially, they had a, a system for this. There was no competition, I think before age 12.
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B
Norway.
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Yeah, right, Norway. You got it. You, you're. Yeah. So if we've just appointed you minister of, you know, the United States Sports Federation for, for youth or whatever, we're making this up. Tell me what's on your agenda.
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B
Oh, yeah, well, so speaking of Norway, first I would start copying them. I mean, Norway, I think is, has, is right now one of the greatest sports countries ever. If I mean this is a country of 5 million people. They've won more medals than the US and China combined. You know, they, they beat the US and China combined at the last two Winter Olympics. But they've been winning stuff in summer too. I mean they won beach volleyball. Don't usually think about in a recent Olympics. Don't usually think about that. With Norway they have some of the best tennis, golf, runners, soccer. And they view elite early mass participation as aligned with elite performance. So before age 13, coaches are not allowed to score for kids, they're not allowed to rank the kids. And part of the reason they have that is bec. Well one, because they value mass participation. But the earlier you force people, you select people, the more likely you put the wrong person in the wrong place. Especially when that's like way pre puberty. And so I think if I were overhauling our sports system, there's pretty clear evidence it's not so much about how if you play actual different sports, but more about the diversity of your physical problem solving. So we now know there was just this big paper in science looking at this trend again that confirmed the same thing, that there are three buckets of advantage for delaying specialization. One is if you've done is a generalized learning advantage. If you've done different types of what's called anticipatory sports, especially where you have to judge bodies and moving parts and balls before the age of 12, you have an advantage for learning any subsequent skills. So you want to diversify because it causes you to build these general mental models that then help you with skill learning. The second bucket is match quality. That's when you let people try more things and delay choosing a little bit. They end up with a better fit for their interests and abilities. And the third bucket is resistance to physical and psychological burnout. Like there, there are protective effects. Even if you're doing more overall physical activity, there's a protective effect of diversifying it that that helps with both feelings of burnout and physical injury. So I would at least through age 12, adopt the Norwegian system. Basically mass participation, not much travel, because if they end up spending more time traveling than they do actually playing, lessen the pay to play and try to get people sampling at least three different sports before that age of 12, both to build their what we now call physical literacy, but also so that they can get an understanding of what might interest them more.
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A
I couldn't agree more. And something else I'm curious your take on in terms of time commitment. I forget where I read it, but it was something along the lines of whatever the child's age was. That was roughly a good scale to measure time commitment per week. So a 6 year old, 6 hours, 10 year old, 10 hours like how do you think about time?
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B
That's interesting. I mean because those could be like a six year old. Six hours on a particular sport is still quite a lot. I mean like an hour a day,
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A
almost every day, not, not in one, but like diverse like in general total. Because total allotment of time dedicated to.
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B
I don't think that's a, I don't think that's a bad rule. I just, just make sure that you count things that are physical but may not be in some structured way. Right. If they're climbing, things like that, like if they're doing physical things. Because what you want to do is build this physical literacy, these general skills that scaffold later technical skills and that's what you want to do early on. So I would, I would count those things where they're outside doing things at physical. It doesn't have to be formally playing a sport.
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A
And how do you think about structured versus unstructured?
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B
I'd mix some of both. But the way the approach that I like and obviously I'm seeing this through having just written a book about useful constraints, but is this model called the constraints led approach? And it's actually been around for a while, but it's having a moment because some star athletes like Victor Wembanyama and Shohei Ohtani and Kelsey Plumb have identified with it publicly. And in the constraints led approach it conceives of the coach or trainer or, or parent, whoever's monitoring activities as an environment architect where you try to set up boundaries that, that cause the learner to explore and find their own best solutions. And I think that's actually a fantastic model for developing general skills in kids. So in soccer this could be things like playing on an odd shaped field or small sided games where it's five on three for a little while and then you switch and it will force people to explore all these different potential solutions and body movements. I mean I've seen a tennis academy where they had kids playing with balls with different inflation levels, nets of different height, hitting through tree branches and all these things that diversify the problem solving. Where you sort of set up the game in swimming, I think I saw it where kids, they had hoops of different sizes in the water and, and kids had to try to get through without touching and it forced them to get as linear as possible without telling them like put your arm this way and that way. So coming up with those sort of situations where you set the game parameters that force experimentation, it requires a little thought for setting it up. But Then you can kind of let the kids go. So it's this mix of some structure with the kid led activity.
- [21:34]
A
I love it. And so I have to put. You mentioned Wemby and I have to plug. You said the Spurs. We were spurs bought. They did a bulk book buy. Let's talk about, let's talk about the spurs. Why they love this book so much.
- [21:48]
B
Spurs CEO R.C. buford ordered 50 copies. And I know he was a fan of range, so maybe it's just off the back of that, but I think part of it is that because Wemby has been doing all this training in the constraints led approach where he has, he works with this trainer who will set up scenarios that typically block Wemby's preferred move. Right. So it blocks the thing he's already good at. So he's forced to try to come up with these other solutions. And so I think probably they were also attuned because of that is my guess to the benefits of constraints. And so we're interested in this, but I should talk to RC and find out what, what specific. So he's invited me. He's like, come visit us during the playoffs and all this stuff. And. But the book, you know, inside the Box just came out. I'm like, oh my gosh, I would love to, but I'm really. This thing's just coming out. I'm pretty heavily scheduled. So that's, that's my guess.
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A
And as a, as a girl dad, I'm a big fan of Kelsey Plummer. Girls play basketball. What can you share about Kelsey's take?
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B
Yeah, I don't know a ton about how she's actually using it. But there was an article in the Athletic talking about the constraints led approach gaining steam among pro athletes. And I just recall her saying like, this has changed, you know, changed my career. I don't remember if she said the specific drills that she was doing. But, but my, my assumption is that it's similar where it's a setup that takes away the thing that she's used to so you can't rely on whatever's most familiar. And it doesn't obviously that skill, it doesn't go away, but it forces you to diversify your, your, your toolkit, basically. So, yeah, so there's a good article about in the Athletic if you Google her and constraints led approach.
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A
And these are all examples of good constraints. What about bad? What's a bad constraint?
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B
I think the word constraint is practically synonymous with something that's bad. That's why I thought it was interesting to do a bit of a rebrand or see what could be good. So if we're going from, I mean, we know excessive levels of scarcity for people, right? We know that actually if people are financially pressured all the time, for example, it literally takes up cognitive bandwidth where they just, they don't have as much essentially cognitive bandwidth to, to make other decisions well in their life. So that can be bad, that kind of deprivation. No question about it. There are other cases where constraints are double edged swords, like take a deadline, probably the most familiar constraint to everyone in the world, where deadlines can actually enhance creative problem solving. If you or your team or whoever are protected so that you monotask. So you say, oh, this, have this deadline, we have to work on this, we have to clarify our priorities and work on this thing. But if it leads you to multitask, excuse me, which is often the case, then it actually destroys people's productivity and creative problem solving. So it really depends how it's used. And there are also cases where in all this creativity research, for example, if people are basically told, so creativity goes up when constraints are applied until someone is basically told both what to do and more or less how to do it. So if someone says, can I still surprise myself? And the answer is no, then it's, it's gone too far and it's really not doing the two things that, that useful constraints can do, which is force you to clarify priorities and launch you into productive exploration. So there's definitely, definitely such a thing as too much and beyond all that, even some useful constraints, I think if they feel like something that is forced upon someone by a boss, say, it may, it may be a good constraint, but I think it's important for leaders to help people feel a sense of agency and to help them emotionally reframe limits to see them as these opportunities to clarify priorities and experiment as opposed to just something that's being dumped on you and you're told to do more with less.
- [25:41]
A
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Visit simplisafe.com licenses for alarm license information. Tennessee 2012 Interesting. So it feels like time. I didn't hear you mention time. It seems like if you're told, if you have time, seems like possibly productive in terms of limiting time. Everything else is on the table, but instead of a week, we have two days.
- [28:07]
B
Yeah. You know, one of the first readers of Inside the Box was this guy named Ed Hoffman, who was the first chief knowledge officer at NASA, which is sort of like a role for a psychologist who makes sure the organization learns. And he said, I have to tell you about this mission called lcross that I'd never heard of, where the engineers ended up with about half the time and budget that they wanted. And so what did they do? Well, first they complained and then they said, if we were going to get this done anyway, how would we do it? They said, well, we can't build from scratch. We have to borrow. So they took imaging equipment from army tanks and engine temperature sensors from nascar and they built a probe that confirmed water on the moon. And that became a part of their process, like borrowing technology going forward. Now, they never would have done that if they hadn't been forced into it with, with less time and budget. If they had had a quarter of the time in budget, would they have still pulled this off? I don't know. I'm skeptical. So I think there's an art to that of, of what is too much. But I think one of the ways you can kind of balance that is using what one character in the book calls heartbeats, where it's these sort of internal deadlines that are pretty short, where you practice what sometimes people call design freeze you, you go to a certain point and then you stop there and you regroup and look at your lessons and then move on. And I think breaking things down into these smaller time chunks, whether that's within a day, where you say, I'm going to focus for this hour because we can't focus for hours on end, you need breaks. Or breaking a longer project into these smaller sort of pieces where you go to a certain point, then you stop and regroup, can be really helpful for focusing people on the productive work.
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A
So I think what you're hitting on idea is, you know, there's invariably this friction point where people become overwhelmed or scattered where maybe they're working on something and they get like 70, 80% there, but like they end up spending an inordinate amount of time on the last 20% or 10% when like the reality is like, it's pretty darn good. Like, how do you think about constraints in that type of setting that can help people who get overwhelmed focus? Like, because I, I see this all the time and it happens to me, it happens to, to everyone.
- [30:18]
B
I think that kind of getting lost in the. The details at the end and some, some mode meth kind of measure of perfectionism and yeah, yeah, I mean, Hap happens to me like crazy. And I think there are a few things to do about this. Well, so you made. There are a few things. You made me think of a story that Ed Catmull, co founder of Pixar, shared with me when I was spending time with him for this book where he said at Pixar they had a problem called the beautifully shaded penny problem, where the directors would get obsessed with these details in the background of a shot, like the shading on a penny, that the audience might never notice. But they're very conscientious. Right. And their conscientiousness would start working against them because they'd have animators working on it while other things still needed to be done. And so they came up with a system where they had popsicle sticks velcroed on a board. And each popsicle stick represented the amount of work that one animator could do in one week. And if the director wanted to keep animating that penny or working on the shading on the penny, they had to start taking popsicle sticks from some other character that needed to be, to be animated. And making the trade off visible basically instantly solved the problem. And so I think when we are obsessing about those beautifully shaded pennies, I think that speaks well of us. Right? You care, but you're making invisible trade offs between the other ways that you could be using your time and your energy. And so I think trying to make our commitments visible can actually be quite helpful with that. So I try to, I use like post it notes on a wall to try to make my current commitments visible so I can see what the trade offs are if I'm spending an inordinate amount of time on, on, on one task or one project. The other thing I think is, so I, I have what psychologists would call maximizing tendencies that try trying to do the best of everything, make the best decisions, get the best of my choices. And that can be really counterproductive. It turns out that it's actually in, in psychological research, it's almost always a bad thing to be. So maximizers who are looking for the best show to watch, trying to perfect all the things they're doing, typically are less happy with their decisions, less happy with their lives, more prone to regret, more likely to opt for reversible decisions in the interest of keeping their options open, even though it kind of prevents them just from committing one way or the other. And a better way to be typically is, is what's called a satisficer. That's a, that's a portmanteau of satisfy and suffice, which basically means having good enough criteria and then, and then sticking with that. And so for me, I have a newsletter that for me is a satisficing exercise where if a book has to be a nine or ten, a newsletter, if I hit six and a half, I send it. This isn't going to make anybody want to read it, but if I hit six and a half, I send it out. And it's an important regular reminder for me that all the stuff that I didn't include that I'm like, oh, there's so much more stuff I want to put in. Readers don't know it's not there. They don't care. They just want the stuff that is there to be good. And any marginal benefit that I might get, I'm not even. It's not even clear to me that I would from adding in all these other things that I think are interesting. It's a not worth it and not clear. It makes it better. So for someone like me, I think it's important to have these satisficing exercises where you have things in your life where it's very explicitly clear that good enough is actually perfect.
- [33:37]
A
You mentioned adding. Why do you think most of us continue to add more in our life and we should probably be subtracting.
- [33:47]
B
Hardwired cognitive bias. There are two of them. It is, it's called additive bias and its cousin, subtraction neglect bias, where we overlook solutions that involve taking away. And the theory is that this is because in most of human history, having too much of stuff was not a problem, having too little was. And so we're wired to just add and add and collect and collect. And they're really interesting studies of this. One of the famous ones that's a little bit funny involved a LEGO structure that people were asked to bolster so that it would balance a masonry brick over the head of a Star wars stormtrooper action figure. And people could add as many pieces, LEGO pieces as they wanted, but they had to pay or they had to lose part of their reward. Basically, they had to pay from their reward for every piece that they added. And yet most people added multiple pieces when just taking away one. That is very obvious when it's pointed out to you would have solved the problem instantly. And that's because we are, we are wired to overlook solutions that involve taking away. So left to our own devices will always add more tools, more dashboards, more obligations, more productivity hacks, you know, whatever it is more to do list. And so I think it's really important to do regular subtraction audits where you make clear all the thing, all the priorities, all the things you're working on. There's a genomics lab that does this that I write about inside the box where they were a leader in the world. And so they start taking on more and more work and their work becomes chaotic. They're like losing samples and things. And they do that exercise of making all their current commitments visible on a wall. And they realize immediately that there's twice as much as they could get done even in a Best case scenario. And so they make a funnel and they say nothing else is allowed to go in the top of this funnel until something else comes out the bottom. The rule is called stop starting and start finishing. And that increased the number of projects they actually got done massively and it made people less frustrated. So I think we need these systems where we're constantly looking at what's in process and then taking some things away. You know, if you had to cut something in the next 90 days, what would it be? Or at least putting it in a holding pattern because left to our own devices will always just add and add more. And I think a lot of productivity tools, I think this is actually even more insidious than ever because with AI tools and I've seen this, I've spent some time, it's never been easier to do too much than it is now. And I've seen this where I've spent some time with companies implementing AI and the cost of starting stuff is so low that they'll do these sprawling implementations everywhere. And it's leading to what researchers are now calling work slop, this incredible volume of stuff because it, it removes the need to do the hard work of determining what you shouldn't be doing. And that feels really productive. But, but ends up leading to this huge volume of stuff that may or may not be connected to the, to the higher goals or what typically would
- [36:52]
A
be a 10 minute conversation or a couple paragraphs on an important point for the business becomes, you know, a 20 page slide deck.
- [37:02]
B
Have you seen this cartoon where. I'm not sure where it was. Maybe it was in the New Yorker, I'm not sure, but I think it was that style where someone's saying to their colleague, AI is great. I gave it these four bullet points and turned it into a six page memo. And then the person on the other end is saying, AI is great. I gave it this six page memo and it turned into four bullet points.
- [37:24]
A
Yes, I did see that. Yes. So that was a good one. So let's talk about freedom and you talk about the dizziness of freedom. How do you think about, you know, how much freedom is too much? We want freedom. You know, people want to, you know, maybe achieve success so they have more freedom. And, and some people define, you know, what does success look like? Success equals freedom. So how do you think about freedom? What's the fine line of just enough versus too much?
- [38:00]
B
Yeah, the, the idea that there could be too much freedom would have been laughable. For most of human history, people didn't have that many choices, their lives were structured by rulers and religions and, and other forces like that. But beginning in about the 19th century, after the, the, you know, the industrial revolution, the explosion of wealth, and you start to see this show up, this, this concern about too much freedom in the writings of a lot of the preeminent thinkers. So that that phrase, the dizziness of freedom is from Soren Kierkegaard, one of the founders of existentialism. And what he was saying was that suddenly there's so, so the traditional structures in life are fading in importance and, and so now it's up to you to make all these choices about who to be and how to live. And that's this incredible weight that people were struggling with. And some of you know, Eric Fromm, a famous sociologist and psychoanalyst, wrote about the urge to escape from freedom which led to people submitting to authoritarianism around him in Europe because there was just like too much uncertainty in their lives. And so while I think we obviously want huge measures of freedom, we have gotten to the point where freedom as an end to itself is often making people less happy in a lot of ways. So there are, let's say in entertainment options where it seems like having more choice should always be better, right? I mean if you economically modeled rational actor humans, more choice is always better. And yet since the introduction of infinite scrolling, people have been getting progressively more bored. And it in follow up studies on this, if you give people 20 videos they can choose from, they're more bored than if you give them one from that set of 20 that they, and they have to watch that one. And the thinking is that because you just the ability to compare what you're watching to what you could maybe be watching spoils the experience of the moment itself. And, and we suffer from that problem in everything now. There's so it's so easy to compare the other possible choices that, that it makes us less happy with what we're doing. And meanwhile there's been a lot more withdrawal from the networks of obligation that characterize a healthy society. And I did some of this myself, right. I saw when, when I became an independent writer, I thought autonomy was just the end all be all. Like that's what you should go for. Use every moment of your own choosing. I'm wary of saying this is inside the box. Got a really nice review from the Wall Street Journal. But the author did say that she cringed when I talked about this specific topic here. So of having excessive autonomy. So when I became independent, I'm going to spend every moment of my day by my own choosing and working only on things I decide. And fast forward two years and I realized there's such a thing as too much autonomy. I was having trouble deciding what to work on. I wasn't syncing up with people in real life because I was on my own schedule and it was not making me happy. You know, I read about the Soviet union in the 1920s where they did this. They, they, they gave people individualized work weeks for production efficiency. And it was a social calamity because people were no longer syncing their activities with others. So to unwind some of this for me, I joined a nonprofit board in my community where I had to be at certain places at certain times. I started going to dance meetups. I joined a dinner and discussion club. You know, started putting, rebuilding this network where I had obligations to others and they had obligations to me. And that turns out to be hugely important for human thriving and well being. Even though it's inconvenient and curtails some of the freedom you would have over your own time and schedule.
- [41:45]
A
It sounds like whatever you're doing, have a schedule and keep it.
- [41:50]
B
Have a schedule. And also recurring people in your life, you know, other than just the ones who live in your house that you have recurring touch points with. So Robert Putnam, who wrote the incredible book Bowling Alone, that looks incredibly prescient about the how long commutes and individualized entertainment, and he was talking about TV at the time, was, was causing the dissolution of civic engagement and clubs and collective entertainment, things like that, famously noted that if you join a single club, it cuts your risk of dying in the next year in half. And that's kind of a rule of thumb. But work that's followed up on that has, has found that to be true. That, that things like joining a club can have a bigger effect on mortality than quitting smoking among cardiac patients. So this social integration and having humans who you see on a recurring basis, it just turns out to be incredibly important for, for well being and for longevity.
- [42:47]
A
It feels like this is critical for retirement. Like if you're going to retire, keep a schedule. How do you think about more generally across different life stages, exploration versus execution? I think of kids, teens, 20s, 30s, 40s and so on. How do you think this changes as we age?
- [43:08]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think exploration. I mean I'm kind of pro. Exploration at every phase of life because there's, there's a. But I think it certainly slows down later in life. Right. As you figure out the ways that you Want to spend your time the things you're good at. But. But I'm conscious of something called the the end of history illusion, which is the psychology finding that we underestimate future change in our preferences and personalities at every time point in life. So we're kind of always works in progress claiming to be finished. So if you ask people, have you learned a lot based on your past experiences? Of course they say yes, but then they're more likely to say, but now I think I'm. Now I think I pretty much know myself. And change does slow down. So the fastest period of change is about 18 to the late 20s. It does slow down, but it never stops. And so I think there's always. It's good to have a practice of experimentation. Like, I have something I call my book of small experiments. Actually, the current one is sitting here right next to me. I don't know if anyone is watching. It's Alice peeking behind the curtain, where I force myself at least every other month to take on some new experiment. But I do think as we get later in life and we understand what our values are and what motivates us, it's important to have a structured process for engaging in those things. And one of the most common reactions, I mean, this book's only been out like, two weeks, but people who are retired have come up to me and said, you know, at the events I've been doing, and said, I thought this would be the greatest thing. I'd clean up everything as soon as I retired. Like, well, actually, it turns out I just didn't like cleaning stuff up, so I don't do that anyway. And they're looking for a new thing to get engaged in. Right. And so I think structure is more liberating than it is stifling. And it often takes people losing it, as it did for me to. To sort of realize that. So freedom within a framework, I think is the ultimate place you want to be.
- [45:06]
A
I love that. Freedom within a framework. I'm going to borrow that. So what's an example of one of these monthly experiments you're doing?
- [45:13]
B
So one fruitful one was I was, at a certain point, felt stuck in my writing. This is when I was still working as a more traditional investigative journalist. But I was writing Range my last book, and I could tell the writing wasn't working. I didn't really know why, but I just didn't like it. And like, you don't. You don't always have to be doing a good job, but if you don't have taste that's, that's a problem. And so in I said, all right, I want to try some different type of writing, just get myself out of whatever rut I'm in. So I literally pulled a flyer off of a lamppost in Brooklyn and signed up for beginners online fiction writing course. And in that course we had to do exercises where you had to write a short story using only dialogue and also using no dialogue. And the one with no dialogue I was so much better at. And it made me realize that having gotten used to investigative reporting, I was writing really quote heavy. You know, your lawyers want you to use lots of quotes and that kind of writing and that is exhausting at the length of a book. And I also realized that I was using quotes to paper over things I didn't understand well enough to explain. Explain in narration. So I went back and basically tore range my last book down to the studs, if you will, and used where I was very quote heavy to identify spots where I really needed to do more research. And I rewrote every page that I had to that point. I was probably about halfway through the book and so I knew something was wrong, but I didn't really know what could help until I, I went into this experiment. So that one ended up to be, you know, I would say like borderline revelatory, but that's not, that's not usually the case. You know, I re. I much more recently embarked on making long form videos for the first time. And I would say I really thought this was going to be something that I was going to like doing, which is why I. Because I started seeing some things on YouTube. Oh. You know, I'm actually engaging with some long form stuff here that I quite like and I've seen other journalist peers move to that and, and unfortunately so far I've been finding out that I. That I don't really like it. And that's not what I was hoping to find. And I have some ideas for how maybe I could change it so that I do like it. But you know, what I found so far is that I don't want to continue the way that I have been. And so it's not what I was hoping to find, but I think it's been a fruitful experiment in teaching me about what I like.
- [47:42]
A
And then what I don't hearing you speak about both experiences for me to take home is don't be afraid to experiment. And then two, also you have an ability to look critically at what you're doing and zoom out. And a lot of people don't.
- [47:58]
B
I think structured reflection is really important for that. So when I was writing my first book about genetics in sports, I had never written anything longer than 7,000 words maybe. And here I'm trying to write a 90,000 word book. And there was a researcher I came across who studied, she was studying athletes. But what's called self regulated learning where you, which involves a lot of explicit reflection, it's basically often involves sort of like scientific methods. Like you have a hypothesis for what you want to work on, you come up with a way to try that and then you reflect on it. And so she gave me these questions to answer every month. They were, and not that these ones would work for everybody, but they were, what are you trying to do? Why are you trying to do it? Are you sure you want to do it? What do you need to learn to be able to do it? Who do you need to help you learn those things? How can you make sure those people are available to you? And at first I thought I'd answer these the same every month and it turned out I was never answering them quite the same because it forces you just to reflect on what you're doing. And so I adopted that as a practice where I'll have a series of questions, not necessarily those, but that I try to answer repeatedly only for the purposes of forcing me to reflect. Because I think there's pretty compelling research showing that we don't get all of the learning we possibly could just from doing a thing that you, you can magnify that with explicit reflection. And so I, I've been doing that for years now. And so taking a critical look at what I'm doing has become just sort of a natural part of my process.
- [49:27]
A
You know, I, I, I like hearing you walk through it because I think to me what works well is all right, there's introspection and then you quickly segue to action versus getting caught in introspection and reflection which can also be paralyzing if there's no like action we're moving forward.
- [49:45]
B
For me, the reflection component, the purpose of it is to decide what the next experiment is basically. So it's, you know, have a theory about how I can get interested or better at something. Here's the way I'm going to test it, then I'm going to reflect and that's just going to tell me, you know, more of this or something else. It kind of, you know Angela Duckworth, her, who famously did her research on grit. I was in her class recently and she was telling her students about something she called the paramecium principle, which is a little bit of a reframe on her grit research. I think where paramecium is a single celled organism, it just has sensors for warmth and food. And she said, this is how you want to behave in your career. You, you sense a little warmth or food, you pivot toward it, and, and if you sense more, you go that way, and if not, you pivot in a different direction. And she said, the warmth or food in this case is not, is not happiness. It's interestedness, a feeling of interestedness to pivot toward. And as she was describing that, I felt, oh, that's kind of what I do with my perpetual experimentation, practice.
- [50:49]
A
It's very applicable, you know, in terms of running a business, I think. If it's an entrepreneur, what do we try to always do? Where are you having success? What feels good? Let's go. Let's lean a little. Let's lean in, so to speak. Maybe double down. What's not working? What doesn't feel good? Oh, maybe let's take a step back and reassess. That's life.
- [51:06]
B
Yeah. Yeah.
- [51:07]
A
Other than buying Inside the Box and range to two incredible books, what would you like to leave our audience with?
- [51:14]
B
In terms of following my work or wisdom?
- [51:17]
A
Let's do all of it. Following your work and then leave us with wisdom. Both.
- [51:21]
B
Okay, well, I have a substack. Um, all this stuff can be found at my website, David epstein.com, which also has a section with some inside the box tips that you might try. And those are just downloadable PDFs, but I think a really important thing that we haven't talked about is structuring your attention. So to me, this I'll say scariest research that went into this book came from a psychologist named Gloria Mark, who's been studying people at work for 25 years. And when she started in the early 2000s, she found that people were switching tasks about every three minutes on average. And then by 2012, it was every 75 seconds. By 2022, it was every 45 seconds. And she's finding that the typical person in office checks email 77 different times a day. That's not 77 emails, 77 different checks where you switch from something else. And because our brains are like a whiteboard where when you have to switch, you erase, but there's a residue left, it interferes with the next thing, it makes you less productive, but also really increases your stress, as shown in physiological measures. So if you can, you can batch your work so that you're doing that email instead of 77 different times a day, maybe 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 blocks. And then in the next block you're just doing, you're monotasking in each block. You'll be more productive and you'll, you'll lower your stress. But it takes some getting used to because as she found, if you're interrupted by notifications and all this stuff all day, your, your attention will be trained such that if you say, now I'm going to focus, you will self interrupt with intrusive thoughts at the rate to which you've become accustomed. And so when you start out, maybe you can only get 15 minutes. Put the phone out of the room if you don't need it, put a pad next to you where you write down those intrusive thoughts called cognitive outsourcing when they come up and try to get those blocks a little longer and a little longer. Because the productivity aspect of it is one thing. But, but what was really interesting to me is, is showing the impact on stress. And now there's even a little research showing that lots of multitasking or really switching between tasks might have an impact on immune function. So I committed to, to working much more in these blocks. And it's hard at first, but I, I, I do feel the benefit of just, it just doesn't feel as frantic all the time.
- [53:38]
A
Very sage advice. I'm terrible at this. I got a lot of work to do.
- [53:43]
B
Everybody's terrible at this unless everybody's terrible at this unless they're explicitly working at it. We're all terrible at this, which is why she's seeing what she's seeing in her research.
- [53:50]
A
But I'm going to try. David, thank you so much. Pleasure to have you on the show.
- [53:54]
B
It's a pleasure. Thank you for having me.