David Epstein: Why Constraints Make You More Creative (Not Freedom)

[00:00:00] Today on The James Altucher Show. The best way to get people to be creative is to block the most convenient solution. If instead you think of a hero's journey, like there's a call to action, the hero rejects it, something big happens that forces the hero to go on his journey, he meets friends and he meets enemies and so on and so on. Like when you force into the structure, then you get Star Wars and Harry Potter and all these other great novels that have happened ever since.

[00:00:26] And there's actually in psychology, basically a model called the green eggs and ham model of creativity, which is this idea that all this psychological research shows that the best way to make someone creative is to restrict their normal means of doing something. This isn't your average business podcast and he's not your average host. This is The James Altucher Show.

[00:00:57] Today on The James Altucher Show, I am excited to welcome back one of my favorite guests, David Epstein, bestselling author of Rains, which completely changed how I think about my own jack of all trades life. In his powerful new book, Inside the Box, How Constraints Make Us Better, David flips the script on creativity. We've all been told that the way to be more creative is to have total freedom. The blank canvas, the blank page, unlimited resources.

[00:01:25] David shows the exact opposite is true. The best way to spark real creativity and breakthrough work is to impose constraints on that work or on yourself. We talk about why general magic with unlimited talent and money completely fell apart while Pixar thrived with strict storytelling rules. We dive into how Dr. Seuss, this is my favorite story actually, how Dr. Seuss wrote green eggs and ham using only 57 words. And how Bach boxed himself into fugues and created masterpieces.

[00:01:54] How the myth of the periodic table was born from a textbook deadline and so much more. This conversation honestly gave me a whole new way to look at my own writing, my own podcasting, my own creative process. So if you ever feel stuck, blocked or overwhelmed by options, you do not want to miss this episode. David Epstein, welcome back to the show.

[00:02:23] It's funny that I remembered the one in the studio more than that one. It kind of shows the importance of being present in person. Totally. I had the same thing. That was exactly the same. Actually, Jay reminded me. So yeah. I'm wondering like if you, if you've noticed this, that, you know, you mentioned in the early on in the book that because you couldn't write with your writing hand because you, you, you know, broke or fractured your arm and a football injury, you had to develop mnemonics like techniques for memory.

[00:02:52] And you developed essentially like almost a perfect memory for your schoolwork that you apply to this day. I'm wondering if as you've built up your career with, with writing and with, you know, all the stuff that you do, that you're forgetting more things because you just have more stuff to do and more experiences that you've had and more stories that you've heard and so on. Yeah. And also getting older. So I think, yes, that's the case. I'm disputing the getting older, but go ahead. Okay. But I actually don't think that's as big an effect, at least for me, as most people think it is.

[00:03:21] But there are still times where I'm consciously using mnemonics, where if I'm trying to remember things from, you know, papers or research or interviews that I want to remember, or for sure when I'm trying to memorize talks, because if I'm going to give an hour long talk, I'm going to memorize it. I'll feel free to improv off that, but I want it memorized. But there are other things where it is just, you know, the volume of stories and the volume of people you meet. And I almost think it's like a survival function that you kind of can't hold on to all of it, right?

[00:03:51] I mean, I've done 1,500 episodes of this podcast, over 1,500 episodes. Yeah. There's no way I remember. This came up because for people who are listening now, we were talking before this started, that we both remembered the time we were in person doing a podcast together, which was before the pandemic in 2019. Neither of us really remembered the time we did a podcast together in between now and then, which was on Zoom. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think for sure there are things.

[00:04:18] But also, I think some of that too is, well, I mean, the experience in person, right? It was like above a comedy club, right? Yeah. And so it was also a really interesting memory, right? There were like a lot of salient features. It was the first time I'd met you. I remember our mutual friend, Maria Konnikova, you had said all these nice things and I was wondering what you were going to be like. Like there were all these sort of things that stood out about the experience that make it very easy to remember. Yeah.

[00:04:46] And I guess for me, range was impactful. Like your first book, Range, was impactful because it expressed something that I was coming to grips with myself. Like I feel like a jack of all trades, master of none. I mean, at the time I owned a comedy club because I was doing stand up comedy and I've also been a writer, a business guy, a hedge fund manager, tournament chess player, like all these different things. Yeah. And so I feel like, oh, but I'm really like world-class great at none of them. And, but I'm better than most people at all of them.

[00:05:16] And so, but I was getting frustrated with this experience and range kind of helped me realize, oh, there's ways to play in these intersections of all these different skills and activities. And that's really worked for me in life. Like stand up comedy, for instance, 10X-ing my public speaking because I had that skill and I was able to apply it to this other skill. Totally. And you've written about this, right? The importance of doing lots of experiments.

[00:05:39] And when you have all these sort of different streams going, I think you're kind of constantly experimenting and often finding ways to improve aspects of what you do or even find new things to do that you just wouldn't have found if you weren't doing those experiments kind of constantly. Especially now with how much work is changing for everyone.

[00:05:55] Yeah. And, and with AI and so on, but, but I would say range kind of helped me, your book range helped me kind of conceive of this idea that, oh, what I've been doing all along is these experiments and sort of then, you know, combining elements from one experiment into others and, and, you know, feeling positive about it instead of feeling negative about it, which is where I was drifting at that point in my life. So, so I thank you for that. And I'm so glad we, you know, we have you on for this book. Let me just get the title in front of me.

[00:06:23] I don't have a perfect memory and I always get nervous that I'm going to say the title wrong. So I, so I kind of momentarily forget titles for every single author, but. And I don't have a perfect memory at all. It's only when I'm like actively trying to remember, like if I put my keys down and spin in a circle, I still lose them. But it's when I'm trying to remember things, I use mnemonics, then I have an excellent memory. So I love this book inside the box, how constraints make us better.

[00:06:48] And I'll try to summarize it in one line, but it's really more than about this, but basically this idea that creativity is enhanced, not when you have as much freedom as possible, but when you put on as many constraints as possible. This is a very rough sentence describing your book. And, and I'll just give one example. It's harder to write quote unquote, the great American novel than, Hey, write about a teenager who finds out he's a wizard. No, absolutely.

[00:07:17] In fact, when people in a mountain of research on creativity, when people are given the proverbial blank slate, basically, all they do is stuff that is not novel at all. Basically because of the way our brains are constructed, which is not so much for thinking as for doing the easiest thing possible, because thinking hard is, is energetically costly basically.

[00:07:41] And so when you're just given unlimited options, your brain will go down what cognitive scientists call the path of least resistance, which essentially means doing the convenient thing, which is easy, maybe because you've done it a bunch of times before you've seen it done before. And so when you're given that super open mandate, it will all actually almost assure that you'll do something incredibly repetitive basically. And so the best way to get people to be creative is to block the most convenient solution.

[00:08:10] I mean, you have a lot of great examples in, in the book. I mean, I love how the general magic example, but what's, what's your, what's your favorite example from, from the book or, or even one that didn't make it to the book of a creative who had absolute freedom and could produce nothing. Or, or produce crap. Yeah.

[00:08:28] I mean, my, my favorite, I think probably was general magic because I came to see it as emblematic for the problem of too much in general, where you're talking about this company that has truly everything, basically unlimited resources for all intents and purposes, unlimited talent. They can do anything. And so they basically do start doing anything. They're trying to build the iPhone essentially, like a generation too early. And because they could do anything, it didn't force them to prioritize at all.

[00:08:58] So every interesting idea that someone had, they, they did it. And you ended up with this absolute incoherent mess where they didn't make anything that was useful to anybody, despite having this incredible vision. They saw the future of communications technology. It's starting in the late eighties. They were trying to build a, this personal communicator and, you know, they went public in the first so-called concept IPO in Silicon Valley history, taken public with an idea, even with a product, no revenue. But, and they really did have the right vision, by the way.

[00:09:27] Like in 1989, the CEO, Mark Peratt, he drew in a notebook, a thin glass rectangle with no protruding buttons and a touchscreen and rectangular apps and labeled it remote a phone pewter. They called it the pocket crystal. The internet didn't exist, right? 15% of American households even had computers. He saw the future and he tried to build a workplace, as he said, where people had total freedom, right? They were limited only by their imaginations.

[00:09:54] And when you do that, what happened is that people couldn't make anything coherent. They couldn't figure out what not to do. So they kind of, every idea they had, they started to pursue it and it never cohered into anything that was useful for anybody. So I came to see it as emblematic of what happens when you have sort of too many resources and too much freedom and aren't forced off that path of least resistance. Yeah, and kind of in contrast to that, you describe Ed Catmull, who famously ran Pixar for many years.

[00:10:22] He wrote a book, Creativity Inc. And Pixar is so famous for almost every one of their first, I forget, 10 dozen movies was like a number one box office hit. Like it was a huge, huge hit. And in part because of all the constraints that the structure of animation gives you, but also Pixar had a lot of constraints on what a story was, what had to be, and what were the elements of a good story. What did you see from Ed's story? You covered him for, or you spent like the day with him and followed him around and talked to him about all these things.

[00:10:52] Yeah, yeah. I interviewed him a few times and hung out in his office and we actually watched a documentary together about General Magic because I wanted to be able to narrate Ed's thoughts, basically. So like, Ed, hit pause and tell me what you're thinking all the time. It took us nine hours to get through the first half hour of the movie because he had a lot to say. But I wanted to contrast Pixar to General Magic. Well, one, because they were evolving at the exact same time. So they were like doing their things in parallel and one was a massive failure and one was obviously a success.

[00:11:19] And what was really interesting to me about Pixar is I sort of thought of it as this place of unfettered imagination, right? Almost synonymous with that. But it turns out it was a place of very many fetters. Technically, culturally. I mean, they had all sorts of cultural standards. Like, you weren't allowed to give notes on a story unless you're also someone in the place who takes notes. So they had all these like cultural rules. But also specific rules that people had to follow, like one they called the three pitches rule,

[00:11:48] where they found that directors would get attached to their first idea and it usually wasn't their best. So they forced them to pitch three ideas at all times. And they kept directors in really small teams. Like, they forced them into really small teams for years where they would simplify the core of a story. It's like this is when they lost the character schadenfreude in Inside Out because it was making it too complicated. So they simplify the story. And that sounds wasteful, I think, to spend time, spend years in that kind of story development.

[00:12:16] But the costs only explode once they move into production. And so they kept things as small as possible at every stage of development until they really worked out the plan for how they would execute. And only then brought in like the big resources. And I also think, you know, the way that Pixar really every story has the same structure in some sense. Kind of like the hero's journey concept of Campbell. And that's a big constraint on storytelling.

[00:12:43] If you just say to a novelist, write about anything, write about your life, you know, in this big general form. There's no structure to the story. If instead you think of the hero's journey like, oh, there's a call to action. The hero rejects it. Something big happens that forces the hero to go on his journey. He meets friends and he meets enemies and so on and so on. Like when you force into the structure, then you get Star Wars and Harry Potter and all these other great novels that have happened ever since. Totally. And George Lucas was an avid reader of Campbell, right?

[00:13:12] He was very consciously attempting to do the hero's journey. There are other writers I've read like Neil Gaiman, for example, who clearly does the hero's journey in all of his writing. But said that when he started reading Campbell, he actually wanted to stop because, yeah, I don't want to know I do. I clearly do this, but I don't want to know, right? So for some creators, I think it maybe comes to them naturally because of the other kinds of stories they've been attracted to.

[00:13:39] And others like Lucas, he said, oh, this is the form. I'm going to work to this form that obviously has worked for time immemorial across cultures. And it does give you – I mean, I found that like having a structure for writing allow – it actually frees you to execute and imagine within that structure. For this book, by the way, this was the first time I ever mapped out a structural plan before I started the book.

[00:14:04] And consequently, one, it was the first time I didn't write 50% over length and have to cut back. So I was way more efficient and turned it in on time. But also, once I had that structure mapped out, I felt really free to move within that and enjoyed the writing much more because I wasn't thinking about the map as much. I had that locked in. And so then I could really kind of spread my wings from a writing standpoint within that. And you write about this towards the end of the book, but can you say what your structure was?

[00:14:31] Yeah, so – and getting to it, by the way, I had 100,000-word what I call master thought lists. It's all these like notes, basically. And then I forced myself to condense it into one page, a structural plan. And that forced me to prioritize ruthlessly. And to get the things in that I wanted, I made a structure that had four sets of three chapters each. Each of the chapters are thematically linked. And each one is preceded by a slice, a new slice of the introductory story, which is about the discovery of the periodic table.

[00:15:00] And so that comes back after every three chapters with a new slice demonstrating a certain type of constraint. And then the next few chapters are linked through that constraint. So I think it also ended up being kind of my most coherent book, also. You know, and I didn't know – it was very fascinating, the story of, I guess, Dmitry Mendeleev. Is that how you say his name? Mendeleev. Mendeleev, who came up with the concept of the periodic table to organize all the elements. And I didn't know that story. And I guess you're saying it there.

[00:15:30] He organized his thinking about the periodic table. He had to organize it because he was writing a book about all the elements. And it was just getting too big. He had too much freedom. And so we had to figure out, well, how can I organize these – how can I basically make an outline that is more organized and efficient? And that basically turned into how organizing all the elements in this periodic table. Totally. And I think his story is emblematic also, not because of what really happened, but because of the story that's typically told.

[00:15:57] The one that I learned in college chemistry was that he was trying to organize all the elements, the building blocks of the universe, and couldn't do it. And he stayed awake for three days. And then he finally fell asleep. And in his dream, the elements snapped together in this pattern where if you move across the grid, the chemical and physical properties repeat periodically, which is why it's called the periodic table. And I thought it was a beautiful story. And it's in Matthew Walker's bestseller, Why We Sleep. And the mattress company Casper used it in marketing, et cetera.

[00:16:26] Like scientific societies celebrate it. But it turns out it's completely false. And what you said is the true story, which is he had a textbook contract to write a two-volume intro to chemistry textbook. And he'd only gotten eight of the 63 known elements into volume one. So he had to get the other 55 into volume two. And so he couldn't keep going one element at a time. He had to start looking for families of elements that he could describe. He was absolutely not looking for a law of nature. He was just looking for a way to organize his textbook. But it got him thinking in these different ways.

[00:16:55] And he stumbled on this law of nature that then pointed the way to new materials, to the discovery of atoms, all these important things. And I think that gap between the myth and reality is symbolic of something important. Basically, that we overvalue complete freedom, like our dreaming brain loosed from the bounds of reality, and undervalue useful constraints. One more example I want to understand a little better.

[00:17:18] Bach versus someone like Duke Ellington, who's, you know, because of his jazz improvisation, is considered, it seemed like he was using a lot of freedom, but both are considered among the greatest musicians of all time. Yeah, and so to contrast them a little bit, I mean, first of all, I think there are, I mean, one of the major constraints Ellington was working under were like the RPMs of records at the time, right? So he was constrained to this like very specific amount of time that each song had to be.

[00:17:46] And later in his life, because of technological change, he was able to make longer songs. And I don't think that necessarily was good for him. If you go through his work, that having that more sort of compressed form was really useful. But jazz is kind of this mixture, right? Where these scales and progressions that everyone has to know. And then within that, they can do all kinds of interesting stuff. I see. So the skill, the constraint, although, again, Bach was a huge constraint.

[00:18:17] Bach was like a constraints zealot. I mean, so he, first of all, picked up this incredibly constraint-ridden form, the fugue, where you have use a very simple melody, and then you just torture it in all these different ways and have multiple lines of melody sort of chasing and interweaving and morphing this original melody. And he did this in a way that nobody else ever had. And he would just, in his sort of magnum opus work called The Art of Fugue,

[00:18:44] it's 14 successive fugues, each getting more and more complicated, starting with this tiny 12-note sequence. And then he flips it upside down, and then he turns it backwards. And with every successive fugue, he layers more constraints on himself until the last one, where he adds a new theme in that's B-flat-A-C-B, which in German musical notation is B-A-C-H. So he puts his own name in, which is a very difficult thing to harmonize with. And in doing that progression,

[00:19:13] it starts forcing him into these musical transitions that had never been heard before. Because he boxed himself into this huge degree, and that's exactly what forced him to go somewhere that he couldn't have envisioned in the past. And it led to this incredible lasting influence where he was, like I mentioned this survey of composers around the world, and he is far and away first place as the most important composer in history. I say his music lives in every note played since his death.

[00:19:41] Even more important than John Williams, who was also in that survey, apparently. He got some votes. He got some votes in the survey as well. Yep. Oh, there was one other example I really like, which is the Dr. Seuss example. Yeah, the Dr. Seuss. So Dr. Seuss, by the way, when I was researching Dr. Seuss, I was reading some other children's literature of the time, and it was so boring. Like, so Johnny walks to school, Johnny ties his shoes.

[00:20:07] I mean, I'm really glad to have become a parent in the post Dr. Seuss, you know, after Dr. Seuss lived. So when he was getting started, at first someone asked him, gave him a vocabulary list for kids and asked him to pick about 200 words and see if he could write a book using only those. And first he starts, he looks at the list and starts complaining to his wife. He says there's no adjectives. And he says, I love this line. He says, it's like trying to make a strudel without any strudels. Because he's like the same guy in his personal life.

[00:20:37] And then he gets frustrated and decides, well, I'm just going to take the first two rhyming words. And the first two rhyming words, cat and hat. And the rest is history. And that actually led to a publisher, a famous publisher, betting him that he then couldn't write a children's book using only 50 words. And that became green eggs and ham. And there's actually in psychology, basically a model called the green eggs and ham model of creativity, which is this idea that all this psychological research shows

[00:21:04] that the best way to make someone creative is to restrict their normal means of doing something. So having a restricted vocabulary forced Theodore Geisel, a.k.a. Dr. Seuss, to experiment with rhythm. And that's when he developed this rollicking rhythm because he couldn't really use that many words. By the way, it's very interesting because I remember from his biography that the 225 words approach, as opposed to the 57 words approach, the publisher actually created two distinct publishing divisions based on those,

[00:21:32] you know, one for ages like four to six and the other ages six to 10 based on those word counts. Absolutely. And Dr. Seuss himself, you know, so he co-founded the Beginner Books imprint, which became this smash and remade all of children's literature. And he included other constraints other than vocabulary lists, like pictures had to be continuous across two pages depicting one scene. And there were color limits, like the cat in the hat was, you know, plain red and plain blue, basically.

[00:21:59] And there were other various limits, like you couldn't picture something that wasn't described in the text. So he would put all these constraints on authors and some of them would complain. And he said, well, okay, you're just, you're not for our imprint then. So those were just rules they either had to follow or find another place to publish. Take a quick break. If you like this episode, I'd really, really appreciate it. It means so much to me. Please share it with your friends and subscribe to the podcast. Email me at Alcatra at gmail.com and tell me why you subscribed. Thanks.

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[00:23:35] and get free shipping on your first order. Just search W-H-A-T, that's what, and N-O-T, not, whatnot, in the app store and start scoring amazing deals. So let's say I'm hearing all this, I'm reading your book. What's a how-to? Let's say I'm a creative and I want to write a book. And like anybody, somebody might have writer's block or painter's

[00:24:05] block, a painter who's sitting down in front of a blank canvas. What are some constraints they can immediately put on themselves other than a deadline? What are some constraints they can immediately put on themselves to kind of spark up that creativity? So let's say if you're a painter, like Ken Dinsky said, everything starts from a dot. So just put something down and then work around it. Like having something down to work around, maybe you don't keep that, but put a splotch on and start turning it into something. And that's how you'll

[00:24:31] start generating ideas because you need something specific. Or as a writer, so there's actually research on this called specific curiosity, where you should find some question to investigate. It doesn't have to be your last question. It doesn't have to be your ultimate question. That doesn't even matter. But you want it to be really specific because that leads to what's called idea linking. So if you start investigating a really specific question, it will lead to sort of other thoughts if it's specific enough. And you may end up somewhere totally different,

[00:25:00] but that's what gets you started on the path. I mean, to use myself in this example, the whole Mandalayov story came because I was wondering why the chemical symbol for tungsten is a W, right? It turns out it's just because it's a German word. But then that led me to reading about how elements are named. And oh, there's an element called Mendelevium. And I go, oh, what's the story behind that? And so there's all this research showing that if you can get people to think through a specific narrow puzzle, they'll start making these jumps that lead to greater

[00:25:27] creativity. So try not to do the blank page thing and try instead to find some very specific question. And don't worry about if it's not the one you're going to end with. It just gets you on this path where you start making these stepping stone links to interesting ideas. That's funny because I've never heard that specifically, but in my own writing, sometimes there might be some story that just sounds ridiculous to me and I'll put it down and then I have to link it to some... My challenge is I always have to link it to something in my

[00:25:57] life so that it becomes a coherent text. And it's an interesting exercise. Totally. You're like building your semantic network, right? You're connecting ideas. And it's having all of these different things connected that usually leads to insights that there's something new. Okay. You mentioned earlier how you kind of pick the structure of your book before you started writing it, but what else do you do to kind of increase your creativity? And then the next question I want to ask you after that is how can this be applied to learning? So constraints

[00:26:25] seems instead of just saying to a kid, learn everything, you know, what are the appropriate amount of constraints to learn something, to be great at something or to be better at something? Yeah. So, okay. So the first question for me is how do I apply this to my own creativity? Yeah. I keep something I call a master thought list. I know it's a dumb name. It's not like for... I was never attempting to brand it for anything. It's just for myself. And when I see interesting

[00:26:50] things, you know, it's a stat, a quote, a study citation, whatever it is, I'll drop it in the list. Sometimes I use Rome Research Now, which is sort of like building a wiki of your own research kind of. And I have, it's so large now because I've been doing this for years that there are certain particular questions that a lot of things orbit, basically. And so I'm often collecting material and thinking like, which of these kind of fundamental questions that I'm really interested in, does this

[00:27:16] one orbit? And I drop it in that area and eventually like things accumulate around certain topics. And that's often how I realize, you know, something that I'm incredibly interested in. My neighbor and friend Dan Pink does this too. He calls it a spark list though, where he keeps this list of things that intrigue him. And then sometimes you notice they're starting to accrete around basically a certain idea. So I'm always doing that. And the result is I have way more ideas that I'm interested in

[00:27:44] investigating than I will ever be able to execute in 10 lifetimes. So my problem is very much deciding what to go execute on. But when I'm doing this and I think things are starting to orbit a certain topic, I try to make that question that they're pursuant to as specific as possible. So I keep going back and saying, what is the question that these are pursuant to? And refining that and refining that and refining that. So it's as specific as possible. And then that becomes like a really generative engine. Once I know the question that I'm investigating, you know.

[00:28:12] Do you remember an example where you honed in on a question starting with many questions around some idea? Yeah. I mean, well, so all of my books have worked this way. So for my first book was about the balance of nature and nurture in developing physical skills, essentially. And this was very much, I was recording things that confused me, say that I saw, you know, why could a good softball pitcher strike out the best major league baseball hitters? I was a national level runner noticing that these Kenyan runners aren't just from Kenya. They're actually from one specific minority

[00:28:41] tribe. And so it's just logging these questions and starting to realize, oh, all of these things are orbiting this question of what's the balance of nature and nurture in developing sports skills. And so anyone who reads that book would probably see I'm coming from all these weird different angles that seem sort of surprising that someone would cast that wide of a net. But it made a lot of sense to me because I had homed in on that specific question

[00:29:08] that all these other smaller questions were basically orbiting. And then the same thing happened again with range where that was a little different, but similar in the sense that it started off with me and Malcolm Gladwell debating again, athletic development and whether it was best to specialize as early as possible or to diversify early and delay specializing. And we came to call it basically the Roger versus Tiger debate because Tiger Woods specialized very early and Roger Federer did all

[00:29:37] this diversification and delayed specializing. And the essential question became when in the rest of life is it better to be a Roger versus a Tiger? And that kind of motivated the, that was like the engine for range. So all the books, there's like typically a pretty much one question to become once I sort of alight on it, I say like, oh, that's the question I'm interested in. And then it's like a blossoming basically from there. By the way, I didn't know that Roger Federer didn't specialize in tennis early on. What did he diversify in?

[00:30:06] He played tennis, but he didn't specialize. He played, see if I can remember, I'm going to see if I can remember all the things Roger played. He played soccer, which was very good at. He almost stuck with soccer instead of tennis. Basketball, badminton, rugby, volleyball, skateboarded, skied, swam, wrestled, table tennis, badminton. Right. I had no idea. Handball. Yeah. His mother was actually a tennis coach, but she declined to coach him because he

[00:30:32] wouldn't like return balls normally. He was like wanting to goof around. And then, yeah, he wasn't super focused at first on being a great, like Sir Tiger Woods, by the time he was three, was saying, I'm going to be the world's next great golfer. Roger Federer, when he got good enough to be interviewed by his local newspaper, the reporter asked him what he'd buy with his first hypothetical paycheck, if he ever became a pro. And he said a Mercedes and his mother was like aghast that she didn't want him putting all his eggs in that basket. She asked the reporter if he could listen to the interview recording. It turned out he said Mercedes in Swiss German. He

[00:31:01] just wanted more CDs, not a Mercedes. So that's funny. Well, and I remember from range also, you talked about Pele, uh, kind of diversifying before focusing on essentially American soccer or football. All of the great. No, not, I shouldn't say all the greats. The typical pattern for the greats is that they diversified earlier, had what scientists tend to call a sampling period where they learn a variety of skills, general skills, general athleticism. Now people are calling it

[00:31:28] physical literacy. It's kind of scaffold later technical skills and they learn about their own interests and abilities and, and delay specializing until later than peers who plateau at lower levels. So there's plenty of variability, but there was actually just a new paper in science, you know, one of the most prestigious journals in the world that looked at about 30,000 different careers of athletes, musicians, and scientists, and backed up this pattern that there is a trade-off between

[00:31:53] short and long-term development. So the factors that predict elite youth development, like early specialization, are negatively associated with elite adult performance. And this showed up even in scientists too, where future Nobel laureates progressed more slowly earlier in their careers because they were more interdisciplinary. So they were like slower to get tenure and they published less and all this stuff. So that, that gets at a lot of what I think range was about, this fundamental trade-off between optimizing for the short term and developing in the long term.

[00:32:21] But you know, you look at like, again, the Tiger Woods example or in chess, the Magnus Carlsen example, like these people who started at the age of three or earlier doing what they were doing and that's become how they became the best in the world. Chess and golf are very poor models of almost everything else that humans want to learn. So I think arguably it does make sense. Well, in chess, in fact, if you haven't started studying, doing pattern study by age 12, your chance of reaching any, any level of master status drops by an order of

[00:32:51] magnitude. Like you have to be studying those patterns. But golf and chess are, are very, what's called kind learning environments where the next steps and goals are given to you. These patterns repeat, they're very pattern-based. Feedback is quick and accurate. You don't have to worry about the rules changing and not, not as much human dynamics involved and all those things. And so those, so there's only a few areas where true prodigies show up. It's basically like golf,

[00:33:16] chess and playing classical music. And so those tend to be poor models of development for other things. Now that they don't have anything, I mean, I think there's tremendous value in some of the skills that you can learn in those things. For sure, they can transfer. But in and of themselves, they're not good models for development generally. Well, tennis too, though, it has similar pattern, right? There's like the rules aren't going to change. There's the forehand, the backhand,

[00:33:42] the serve that you have to learn. Yeah, but the sports that involve what's called anticipatory skills, where you have to do things faster than biology can really accomplish them. So you have to be predicting basically what's going to happen in the future. People who grew up before about the age of 12 who've played three different of those types of sports, then having to, will learn subsequent skills more quickly for any other sports. So it's the sports that involve those so-called

[00:34:11] anticipatory skills where you really want to be diversified. So was Ted Williams diversified? So he was, you know, the only, was he the only 400 batter? I think he was the last one. And so that's an anticipatory thing, hitting a baseball. I guess he diversified. He didn't really start playing. He wasn't at professional level. He was like an adult almost. I actually don't know Ted Williams's, I know he had tremendous eyesight. I don't know what his developmental background was.

[00:34:38] And so, so again, this veers into the learning. Like let's say you have a kid and, and you want the kid to find something he or she is passionate about and, and then learn as quickly as possible, or, or actually have the best chance of being great at something. What kind of constraints would you sort of put on, on your kid? Yeah. And I think this is where we get it kind of the combination of, of range and, and inside the box, which is first you have to explore some things to

[00:35:05] figure out what are your talents and abilities and interests where you fit, right? And the earlier we make people choose, the more likely you put the wrong person in the wrong place. So one of the reasons I think that we see this inverse correlation between elite youth and elite adult performance is that when you're forcing people to pick before puberty, you just have no idea who you're really getting for the most part. And so if it, if it, if it is a, the best match then, and so you have lower what's called match quality, the degree of fit between who you are and what you do.

[00:35:34] Once you get into something, once you've got a lane that seems to fit, then I think the, the most promising learning model is what's called the constraints led approach, which has actually been around for a long time, but it's having a, it's having a public moment because some athletes like Shohei Otani and Victor Wimbanyama and Kelsey Plum have been speaking out about it basically. And it's, it's an opposition to what's normally called blocked, blocking in practice, where you show someone how to do something and then have them do it over and over a bajillion times.

[00:36:04] Constraints led approach conceives of the teacher or the coach as what they call an environment architect. And they're supposed to set constraints that then force the learner to explore and find their own best solution. What's called the, in the literature, it's called self-organizing, which means your physiology and psychology are unique. So your best solution to a given problem is going to be unique. And if you're going to find the best solution, you're going to use your tools

[00:36:31] a little differently than anyone else. And so let me give you a super simple, like maybe the simplest example I've ever seen of this was I was with an Olympic development swim club in Australia and they had young swimmers. And instead of saying, you know, working on freestyle that you put your arm here and your leg here or whatever, they had hoops that they put under the water and they said, get through on your stroke without touching the sides. And they get smaller and smaller. And this would

[00:36:58] force them to figure out how to get in as linear a position as possible using their unique physiology. And so that's like how the constraints led approach work. And it requires more thinking on the part of the teacher or coach, but then it leads to this explosion of experimentation among the learners that ultimately leads them to better solutions.

[00:37:33] Okay. So let's say, let's just pick a random thing. Let's say the kid's interested in, I don't know, astronomy and doesn't know how, you know, let's say anywhere between eight and 13 years old. And then wants to just, just loves it, loves looking at the stars. And so you figure, okay, this is an area where they might be interested in. How would you build constraints so that they become, or they at least have the best chance of becoming like a world-class astronomer? Yeah. I minored in astronomy in college, by the way. So an area of interest for sure.

[00:38:00] I think what I would probably do in that case is do something kind of project-based. So let's say I did my thesis for my minor on evidence that there had been plate tectonics or movements of the surface of the planet in the moons of Jupiter. And that's like a pretty niche thing, obviously. But again,

[00:38:25] having a really specific question made it super fascinating. It's like just, you know, initially, you just want to get a kid fascinated, right? I talk to my kid about astronomy all the time. Like I, my academic background is in environmental science and astronomy, and he's seven. I'll never be cooler to him than I am right now because I can actually answer a fair number of his questions. Why is the sky blue, for instance? Why is the sky blue? Because of Rayleigh scattering, right? Because the shorter wavelengths of blue get scattered backward by things in the atmosphere. So they go to your eyeball, whereas the longer wavelengths of red light can pass right through and go out to space.

[00:38:55] That's why it's the bluest when the sun is directly overhead, because then there's the shortest amount of atmosphere between your eyeball and the sun. Whereas when it's, when the sun is farther down by the horizon, there's a lot more atmosphere between you and the sun. And so some of the, the, the, the radiation that will appear red to your eyes is then getting scattered because having to pass through more atmosphere. Um, so, so I think giving a specific project,

[00:39:21] so like I just, now I'm just trying to fascinate my, my son by astronomy, but I force him first of all to answer questions. Like when he wants to know something that's going to be, I'm, I'm, I'm wary that this will make me sound like I'm some kind of drill sergeant father, but we have a ton of fun with it where if he has a question, like we read new scientists together and I'll stop before some fact about cosmology and make him guess. And then we'll start talking about his guess. He makes me guess everything too. It's called the generation effect. If you force someone to guess something, it doesn't at all matter if they get it right. It doesn't matter if they're

[00:39:51] in the ballpark, but forcing the guess primes your brain for subsequent learning when you then do find the answer. So forcing guessing instead of just handing them over the information, that's called a desirable difficulty. And then having like certain questions you, you investigate once in a while, where it's like a very specific thing. It almost doesn't matter what it is. A light on some question that you see a little spark in your kid and say, all right, instead of bouncing to the next thing, let's keep that as a continuous thread that we keep investigating. Because again, that leads to this

[00:40:20] idea linking where they really start to get invested in, in a line of thinking and have novel thoughts. That's really interesting. So I, you know, thinking about it, I wouldn't know what resources to use so that I would get into this kind of guessing game pattern with a kid. A thing that I would not do is immediately turn to chat GPT on everything. Because there's,

[00:40:45] there's, I think the first line of research that's coming out about how AI affects cognition makes it look a lot like a GPS, where if that's all you use all the time, you don't learn how to get around. And that's okay for your GPS if it's always there. But if you actually need to learn stuff or learn how to think, that's not so good. And that's kind of how it's looking. So I think a constraint, a rule that I would put on them is brain first, tool second. You could absolutely, I mean,

[00:41:13] there'd be great uses of LLMs for having astronomy discussions with your kid or forcing questions they could guess at, but I would make them guess first. And, and, and, and when they're younger, I would try to be analog. I mean, again, we do this, I get new scientists in the mail and we flip through, you know, it's targeted at people who are much older than my son, but, but we can do it together and we'll go through articles slowly together and find things to talk about.

[00:41:41] And does your son use screens a lot? Like, is he playing games on a tablet all day? Very little. When we moved about five years ago houses, we left our TV behind and didn't get another one for several years. And now it's in the basement. So he didn't really have that much exposure to it. And a tablet, like 10 minutes a day, like before he goes to bed. No, he's, he's very low screen. And I think that makes a lot of sense. Like I'm not a Luddite by any stretch. I, I'm using,

[00:42:09] I love using AI for certain things. But I think in the developing brain, it makes a lot of sense to be much more analog than we were even before AI. Like I would take Chromebooks and, and, and technological aids out of classrooms early on, just because you actually want things to be really difficult and inconvenient for developing brain. That's, that's how it learns. It's interesting about this. You want to delay the point where they choose their final interest

[00:42:36] or passion as, as much as possible. So you look at like the educational system in the UK versus here, where they kind of have to pick a career by like what we would call 10th or 11th grade, and then go into a more specialized school. And then that becomes their career in many cases. Whereas in the U S it's not really like that. Like even what your, whatever your major is in college doesn't necessarily become your career in most cases. Almost never does. Yeah.

[00:42:59] And then you can argue the U S has become much more technologically innovative than the UK has been. I don't know if it's related, but maybe it is. I mean, to use something really specific, there was actually a study looking at the higher ed systems of England and Scotland during a period where they were extremely similar, except for, as you said, the students in England had to specialize earlier. They had to like test into a certain program of

[00:43:25] study where the students in Scotland could sample through college if they wanted to. And the, the question in the study was who ends up winning, you know, more of the, the, well, so the earlier specializers do get hired more quickly out of training because they have more domain specific skills and they jump out to an income lead. But the later specializers, they sample more different things. And when they do pick, they have higher match quality or better fit with what they do.

[00:43:51] So their growth rates are higher. And by about six years out, they would in aggregate fly past the early specializers. And then the early specializers would end up quitting their career tracks in much higher numbers, even though they had more disincented from doing so essentially because they were made to pick so early that they more often made poor choices. So that was a direct comparison. And then when work like that was extended to a number of countries where people were matched for, it was about a dozen countries. They were matched for their parents' years of education, their years of education,

[00:44:21] their national test scores when those were available. And this was a random sample. So, you know, a lot of people didn't have tertiary education. And the pattern was basically that the later specializers, you know, so some people got sort of early technical training and some people got broader education. The later specializers, they are behind in income early on, but they're so much more adaptable that they're much more resistant to shocks in their industry, et cetera.

[00:44:46] And they end up doing better. This was measuring earnings over their lifetime. So they're losing the short term and they win in the long run. And the faster growing an economy was in the study, the greater the long-term advantage that accrued to the people who had the general background. That's really interesting. That's very valuable information. So, so look, this is all interesting. I'm going to definitely just like with range your, your last book, I'm definitely going to apply or start thinking more formally about constraints in

[00:45:15] my own work, which is mostly let's say writing or, or public speaking or, or even podcasting, like looking back on it. And as I was reading the book, I was thinking this definitely with my writing, the most successful writing I've done is when I've had put more constraints on myself, as opposed to just, Oh, today I'm going to write. And, and you've given me a way to formally think about this, like how I can put these constraints on. I really think the hero's journey by Joseph Campbell, I don't know if this is necessarily an evolutionary view of the format by which stories

[00:45:45] are successful, but it's definitely a great way to write using that as a constraint, like that model. For sure. And even if you end up deviating it from it, I think starting with it helps you get going and when, and you know, you can, obviously you can do what you want when you're writing your story, but having some model that you're working toward, I think is so much more fruitful than just having something being open and thinking that brilliance is going to pour forth because you've put no restrictions on yourself. It's quite the, quite the opposite. Well, and that, and that's great in the,

[00:46:12] in the Duke Ellington or jazz example, which is that there are a lot of constraints to jazz. There is a musical format, like it's certain chords and, and, and so on. And, and, but then improvising around those constraints is what makes someone successful at jazz. Totally. I mean, I think jazz, even in some of the neuroscience research on jazz, it looks a lot like language in certain ways where there's a clear grammar. And once you've mastered that grammar, you can do all sorts of improvisation just like we do with language.

[00:46:40] I guess like genre fiction, you know, a lot of people look down on genre fiction, like let's say John Grish or Danielle Steele. And, but actually it's really hard because you're given these constraints. Oh, it's gotta be a romance and they've got to meet and then hate each other. And then blow, you know, there's, I think Harlequin romance, they have like, it's like a whole guide to, there's like a hundred different points you have to hit in every single romance novel, but to actually make a romance novel, that that's when the real creative stand out because then to

[00:47:08] make a good romance novel, it's, you know, by all those constraints, you know, you have to improvise and be different within those constraints. You'll break out if you, if you do that well. Yeah. And I mean, so you mentioned some people do look down their nose at so-called genre fiction, but it's also the bestselling authors in the world or in the history of the world. Right. And, and I think the, the one reason people might look down at it is because they view it as a lack of

[00:47:34] creativity. Oh, they're just doing this, this model, right. It's almost like a factory model. But that, that idea that creativity was synonymous with complete originality was not even an idea until the late 18th century romantic period where that was like rebelling against the enlightenment and wanted to portray this idea that creatives are just like struck with lightning from God and have these ideas out of nowhere. Before that, like in Shakespeare's time,

[00:48:02] creativity was associated with taking something the audience already understood and tweaking it in new ways. So you put your spin on it, almost like someone covering a song where, I know this, but they're doing something totally different with it and making it their own. That, that was viewed as how, what was really the epitome of creativity. And it was much more this historical blip that kind of flipped the script and said, oh no, it's, it has to be totally original. And, and so I think there's still some of that streak among, you know, certain literati, I guess,

[00:48:31] who would look down at genre fiction. But I don't think most people do because the most of the people that are reading are reading genre fiction. That's a really good point that basically success in the arts seems to come with more constraints. Like the more constrained the form is that you're being creative in, the more likelihood for there is for financial success, at least if you're good at that form. Yeah. And, and I don't even think it's just financial success. I think it's success with communicating something to an audience that they will receive and understand and think about.

[00:49:00] And that the more, right, this is like Robert McKee in his legendary, probably most famous screenwriting book, I assume maybe by a lot ever story writes, interestingly, like fantasy always has the most conventional plot, what he calls the arch plot because, which is, you know, very much like the hero's journey basically, because if the setting and scenery is going to be super fantastical, then you need to balance that with making the other stuff like the plot really conventional. And if it conversely, if the plot is going to be really unconventional, then you're

[00:49:30] going to want a more conventional kind of setting to balance that because you need something to meet the reader or the viewer part way. That's interesting because then, and then you look at like literary fiction and often it's a conventional setting and a conventional story, like a professor, you know, having problems with his marriage in a university town. And that's like a classic. Are you describing Stoner by John Williams? Oh, you know what? That does describe Stoner, which actually is one of the greatest novels of all time. But it is one of the greatest novels of all written.

[00:49:58] As you read it, I know very few people have read Stoner by John Williams. Yeah. I mean, one of the greatest books ever written and has like almost no plot, right? Because it's, it's writing and it's narrative, it's inner introspection, following a guy from, from birth to death are in some ways revolutionary. And the setting is the most conventional thing imaginable. In fact, my, I love that book. I got a version in anniversary edition where in the back,

[00:50:24] they printed Williams's letters to his agent. And she's like, there's no plot. The publishers are uninterested. And he's like, you know, people might actually read this book. It's actually kind of revolutionary in certain ways, even though it doesn't really have a plot. And it's really interesting seeing him try to, try to convince his agent of that. It's a, it's very interesting you read the book. I find that book to be often a filter on readers because that is a, I don't want to say it's, it's a hard to read book, but it's not, it, it,

[00:50:51] it really is revolutionary in that it's so conventional that it becomes somewhat difficult to read. And, and, you know, the main character is a boring guy basically. Yeah. I mean, the, the execution is exquisite. If you're, if you're going in looking for scintillating plot, right, it's not there. But again, it's that, it's that balance. He's doing something that I had never experienced with his, his narration and his writing, whereas everything else is like, could not be more ordinary.

[00:51:18] And it's kind of funny, like his only other novel that I know of is Augustus, I think was the title. It was a book, a book about a novel, novel version of the Roman emperor, first Roman emperor Augustus. And which is completely, I did not expect from the guy who wrote Stoner. So, and then he didn't write anything else, I don't think. No, yeah, he did. He wrote Butcher's Crossing, like a Western is amazing. I mean, his oeuvre is diverse and it's all amazing. Oh, okay. I, I didn't know that. That's interesting. So, so look, I, well, I have one idea for you

[00:51:47] actually, you should make a kind of workbook somehow of this. So, so for every industry and every form of creativity, you should tell like 10 different or, or however many different stories of a famous artist or creator or whatever, and the constraints that they had on them that led to, so you do this in the book, like you tell these stories, but I would do it almost like in this almost bullet point fashion. Like here's Duke Ellington, here were his constraints, here were the

[00:52:17] results. Interesting. I think that's a great idea. Maybe I will do that. Inspirational. Right, right now I'm going to get through this book lunch and then take a breath, but I'd love to follow up with you and just talk on our own time about that idea a little more if you're interested. Yeah, no, that would be great because then, uh, cause I found that even just talking to you right now, that's like the most inspirational stuff is the way that, you know, Dr. Seuss had these constraints and then created the cat in the hat. Like that makes me think of already in life, all the constraints that one has, whether, you know, like I know of one guy who's been on the

[00:52:45] podcast. He, he wanted to always be a writer, but he was commuting into work, some business job. And the only time he had to write was on the subway while everyone else was reading the newspaper or sleeping. He would write a page a day and he, you know, developed this great, you know, murder mystery series as a result. So people become like really successful by, by having these constraints and even the constraints you naturally have in life. Like he only had time to write on the subway ride, commuting in and out of work was enough of a constraint to make him be a success.

[00:53:15] You know, and I, and I think we often think, oh, if I can do a little bit in this way on the subway, I'd be really great if I, you know, had total freedom and all this other stuff. And I think we're often mistaken in that belief that a lack of restrictions seems great in the abstract, but actually doesn't usually get the best out of us. And so I'm kind of hoping that inside the box is sort of an emotional reframe for people dealing with limits.

[00:53:40] Well, David Epstein, once again, thanks for a great book that I'm sure I'm going to think about for a long time afterwards. Like I still think about range all the time. So thank you for that. And this one is Inside the Box, How Constraints Make Us Better. And good luck with the book launch. Do you have any idea what book you want to write next? What's the next topic? No, I mean, I have a lot of ideas, but I like to take a breath. I've left a long time between my books and that's partly because I sort of want to take a breather after a book comes out and do

[00:54:08] some shorter things and prototype ideas, right? Write some articles, things like that before I fully jump into a next book. All right. Well, David, thanks so much. And again, the book is Inside the Box, How Constraints Make Us Better. Thanks so much for having me. Pleasure.

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