Back in 2019, David Epstein joined me to talk about his book Range and why generalists often thrive in a specialized world. Now he’s back with a new book that explores a seemingly opposite idea: the power of constraints. In Inside the Box, David argues that limits — deadlines, boundaries, and even setbacks — are often the very things that spark creativity, sharpen focus, and help us actually get meaningful work done.
Today on the show, David shares how, in a world of endless freedom and options, constraints might actually be the thing you need most. He shares the surprising true story behind the creation of the periodic table, explains how a broken arm changed the course of his own life, and explores why giving people too much leeway can actually kill innovation. We discuss what Pixar did right that doomed companies like General Magic got wrong, why brainstorming sessions are usually ineffective, how to identify the bottlenecks holding back your work and life, and why learning to settle for “good enough” may be the key to getting more great things done.
Resources Related to the Podcast
- David’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #512 — Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
- Pixar’s Tin Toy
- AoM Article: Curing Your Restlessness — Limiting Your Choices
- The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt
- David’s This American Life Episode: “Something Only I Can See”
- AoM Article: Via Negativa — Adding to Your Life By Subtracting
Connect With David Epstein
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Transcript
Brett McKay:
Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the AoM podcast. Back in 2019, David Epstein joined me to talk about his book Range and why generalists often thrive in a specialized world. Now he’s back with a new book that explores a seemingly opposite idea, the power of constraints. In Inside the Box, David argues that limits, deadlines, boundaries, and even setbacks are often the very things that spark creativity, sharpen focus, and help us actually get meaningful work done. Today in the show, David shares how in a world of endless freedom and options, constraints might actually be the thing you need most. He shares the surprising true story behind the creation of the periodic table, explains how a broken arm changed the course of his own life and explores why giving people too much leeway can actually kill innovation. We discussed what Pixar did right, that doom companies like General Magic got wrong, why brainstorming sessions are usually ineffective. How to identify the bottlenecks, holding back your work in life and why learning to settle for good enough may be the key to getting more great things done. After the show’s over. Check at our show notes at aom.is/constraints. All right, David Epstein, welcome back to the show.
David Epstein:
Thank you so much for having me back.
Brett McKay:
So we had you on the show back in 2019 to talk about your book Range, which is all about being a generalist, the power of being a generalist and not focusing only on one thing. You got a new book out, it’s called Inside the Box, and this book is about the power of constraints to accomplishing things, getting things done. How are these two ideas connected, this idea of being a generalist and also embracing constraints? How are they related?
David Epstein:
Yeah, as I know on the face of it, it can seem contradictory from one book to the next, but it’s kind of responsive to a question I was getting from a lot of readers after Range, which was, all right, I’ve got these diverse experiences, this broad toolbox now what I am having trouble deciding where to focus, and I put myself in that same boat. And so there’s a hefty dose of me-search in this book. So it’s really about how you channel all those ideas, all those experiences into achievement and actually get something done. And again, hefty dose of me-search. I have been terrible in the past at putting useful boundaries around my own work. So that’s one reason why it’s been so long. It’s like six to seven years between all my books, but what I learned in this book actually gave me a totally new process. And so now I think if I write more books, I could probably do them in about half the time I did in the past.
Brett McKay:
Well let’s dig into the ideas of this book. I thought it was really interesting. What I love about your writing in general, what you do is you find these great case studies from history that cuts across domains, sports, business, arts, technology to show these principles that you’re highlighting in the book. You start off the book with two stories that show how constraints can help us do big things. The first guy you talk about is this Dmitri Mendeleev. He’s the guy who created the periodic table that we’ve all seen in our chemistry classes in high school. What’s the usual story about how he came up with that idea?
David Epstein:
Yeah, the usual story is that he was in the winter of 1869. He was looking for an order for all the elements, the chemical building blocks of the universe, and he worked for three sleepless days and senses something but couldn’t find it. And finally he falls asleep and he drifts off into the most impactful nap in human history. And he dreams about the elements sort of swirling around and they snap together in this grid where as you move across it, the chemical and physical properties of the elements repeat periodically, which is how it got the name periodic table. And it’s not just a poster that hangs in classrooms, it actually pointed the way to where new elements would be. So gaps in the table showed us where to look for new materials and motivated the underlying search for atoms. So what was the cause of this order? So that’s the typical story that it’s this incredible kind of dead end. And then in a dream he sees this vision and just wakes up and writes it down.
Brett McKay:
What’s the real story though?
David Epstein:
Yeah, the real story. So by the way, that’s the story that I learned in college chemistry. It’s in Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep. It’s there to show the power of our brains freed from reality, but the real story is completely different. So that dream story absolutely did not happen. What really happened was that Mendeleev had a publishing contract for a two volume intro to chemistry textbook, and he had only gotten eight of the then 63 known elements into volume one. So he had to get the other 55 into volume two, and he had to do it in a way that was logical for beginners. And you realized he couldn’t continue the way he had been describing one element at a time. So he had to start looking for groups or families where he could describe a representative, family member and then sort of by analogy teach about the rest of the group. And it was in doing that, that he started looking at the chemical world in terms of families and found these groupings that actually had a much greater underlying meaning. He was absolutely not looking for a fundamental law of nature, he was looking for an organizational scheme for his textbook, but that channeled his experimental thinking to start looking in a totally different way that nobody ever had.
Brett McKay:
Alright, so he had two constraints there. So one was that he needed to organize in a way that made sense for a beginner. That was one constraint. The other one he had a deadline, a book deadline that was the second deadline.
David Epstein:
Straight to space constraints of time, and there were other constraints even beyond that. Yeah, yeah.
Brett McKay:
See that shows how once you have this tight constraint, it can get you to think in different ways to actually do something pretty remarkable. You also talk about how a broken arm, your broken arm in eighth grade changed the trajectory of your life and even helped you become a master memorizer. What happened there?
David Epstein:
Yeah, so I was like a crack head for sports when I was a kid. That was the sun around which my world orbited and football, basketball, baseball, the usual and playing I could throw. I had a really strong throwing arm. And so I was playing quarterback in some schoolyard football one day in eighth grade. And as the quarterback, instead of having kickoff, you just throw off as far as you can down to the other side and my arm snapped on the follow through of a throw. Nobody hit me. It was touch football and it just snapped in a spiral. So pretty crazy injury. In fact, nobody believed it was broken because I hadn’t been hit. And I could feel my hand in places where it wasn’t because I was rotating my shoulder, but it was totally separated. I’ve only seen this happen once before. One other time, by the way, major league baseball pitcher and he had to have his arm amputated, but we’ll never know the exact cause because whatever break happened, the evidence for some bone weakness or something was then gone.
But it led to these interesting things where in school we had these French tests I had to take every week where you had to follow along with a recording of a native speaker on a worksheet that had the transcript except then there’d be blanks and you had to catch them and fill them in. And I was okay, I was mediocre at this. And then once I broke my arm, I couldn’t use my writing hand. It was strapped to my body for months. And so I realized I had to start memorizing the words and then go back and write them all down slowly at once with my left hand. And so the way I started doing that was using sports related mnemonic devices. I would hear a word and then I would attach it to some sports fact or memory or image in my mind. And I started acing these things.
And so I started using these kinds of mnemonic devices, which we now know are key to improving your memory all over the place because I couldn’t write quickly enough to remember things and I still use it to this day. I can memorize an hour long keynote word for word in a few days because I used mnemonic devices. And decades later I would come across one of the most famous studies of memory improvement ever done where an undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon was taken from being able to memorize seven digits to 80 digits. And surprise surprise, he too was using sports related mnemonic devices to remember things. So it made me a better student. And because I couldn’t play contact sports for a year, I started running. And long story short, I ended up being a college runner and a university record holder and all these things just, I never would’ve even tried the sport. And that’s what got me interested in physiology, which got me into writing because I was a science writer for Sports Illustrated is just all these things I never would’ve tried if I hadn’t been forced. And sometimes that’s what useful constraints do. They launch you into productive experimentation because the low friction path is blocked.
Brett McKay:
But see, that’s counterintuitive because I think oftentimes we think in order to be creative, accomplish big things, you got to get rid of the constraints. With the idea of the dream, well, you just let your subconscious percolate on it, there’s no constraints there and it’ll just magically spit out this idea. But as you’ve shown that’s not the case, and you highlight this one company that I’m sure a lot of people have never heard of that shows what happens when you have no constraints. You just give everyone in the company or the organization free reign to do whatever they want. This company was called General Magic. What was General Magic and how did having too much money, too much creative license doom the company?
David Epstein:
Yeah, I like to think of it as the most important company nobody’s heard of and not important because of what they ended up doing, but because of the people that came out of it. But this was a company that starting in really the late eighties and then the early nineties was essentially building the iPhone and the internet didn’t exist. 15% of American households had computers at all, and they had so much buzz. It was founded by several of the designers of the original Apple Macintosh. This other visionary guy from Apple named Marc Porat became the CEO. And they absolutely had the vision of what was coming in communications technology over the next half century Porat for his 1976 PhD dissertation at Stanford. It was titled The Information Economy. He coined that term and when I was reading it in research, absolutely eerie, I mean he saw what was coming, the promise and the problems, misinformation, inequality, all this stuff.
But the vision was so compelling. He was basically sketching a thin glass rectangle with no protruding buttons and a touchscreen with rectangular apps in 1989. And the vision was so obviously right that Goldman Sachs took them public in the first so-called concept IPO, where they went public just with an idea, not a product to make this personal communicator. And Porat said the goal of raising so much money was to create heaven for engineers where they were totally free. What more could anyone ask for? He said, and I think the answer was a little less freedom because the company turned into a disaster. They had so much talent and so many resources they could do anything. And so they did. Every time someone had a good idea, they did it and the project got bigger and bigger and it became less and less coherent and they missed deadlines.
And when they finally shipped something, it was a 200 page manual, nobody was really sure what they were supposed to do with it. There was one guy who I think this interview was emblematic of the place where this was an engineer named Steve Perlman whose job was to make a calendar function, and he wrote it to go from 1904 to 2096 and checked it in and thinks he’s done. Then one of the leaders comes to him and says, Steve, you got to make this thing go back farther in case people write historical apps. So he makes it go back to year one, checks it in, then another team comes to him, Steve, why are you starting with this arbitrary religious context of year one? You got to make it go back to the beginning of astronomical time. So he checks it out again and writes a calendar function to go from the big bang into the future, and it ends up taking months when it would’ve been four lines of code if they just left it the way he originally had it. But because they could do all this stuff they did. And so the refrain when I was interviewing former employees from General Magic was I just couldn’t figure out what not to do.
Brett McKay:
This story reminded me of John Boyd. He was a fighter pilot who’s had a big impact on military thinking. He came up with the OODA Loop, if you’ve heard of that.
David Epstein:
Yeah, absolutely.
Brett McKay:
But there was a period where he was working with the Air Force when they were redesigning one of the fighter jets. And Boyd was really big on maneuverability, like a jet needed to be highly maneuverable so you could get in position on your enemy. And to do that, it had to be small, lightweight, et cetera. But what ended up happening is this project was a project by committee and you had all these corporate interests who wanted a, we want to get all of our technology in this thing as much as possible. And they kept on adding and adding and adding to it. And of course it’s the government say almost an unlimited budget. They just kept adding stuff to it and they kind of created this thing that was sort of an albatross. And Boyd was like, no, we got to strip this down and make something more efficient. But yeah, that’s another example of when you have no constraints on anything, things actually can get worse.
David Epstein:
That really resonates. There’s actually not long ago, the Wall Street Journal did a front page story on why the US had gone from being the world’s leader in naval ship building to being such a laggard that we’re trying to outsource it. And basically that was the story. It was that there’s so many cool things that could go on that we never stop making design changes. And so the thing never gets done, and good designers often use a principle called design freeze where you say, okay, we’re going to this point, this date, and then we’re stopping no more changes, and then we’re testing it. We can’t just change endlessly and you stop and you regroup and you collect your lessons. And I think there’s a whole bunch of that in history and in a lot of government projects. When I was reading about some of the history of government works, there was one phase under defense secretary Robert McNamara, who’s the defense secretary during Vietnam where people would talk about paper wars. There was like, they had so much stuff like paper moving all the time on projects that it’s like nobody ever had a point to stop and figure out what it was they had decided to do because they were always changing all the specifications.
Brett McKay:
I imagine this is only going to get worse with artificial intelligence or LLMs because you can just generate new stuff.
David Epstein:
Oh man.
Brett McKay:
You’re doing the vibe coding, right? You’re like, oh, it would be cool if you had this feature. Here’s prompt. I got the feature.
David Epstein:
Now the promise is incredible, but it has never been easier to do too much. And I’ve been seeing this with, so for the last year, just to kind of educate myself, I spent a bunch of time with one particular AI company that helps other companies implement AI. And one of the things I saw is that a lot of companies said, oh, we need AI, right? It’s really alluring. Our competitors have it. And so they implement and it sprawls and it turns into what researchers are now calling work slop where you just generate this insane volume of stuff that never gets finished or just piles up at some bottleneck. Whereas the organizations that I think are having a better run of it start by mapping the jobs to be done or defining a problem and then saying, how does the tool fit this problem? So they lead with the problem instead of leading with the technology and having these sprawling implementations just so much easier for people to start an infinite number of things that they will never finish now. And I think that’s a real challenge and why we’re not seeing in many cases the expected productivity benefits, even while adoption has been really rapid
Brett McKay:
And you highlight research why we have this tendency to keep adding and adding and adding when we don’t have constraints, we actually have a natural bias towards that when we’re given a choice to make something better. Humans typically like to add things, and so yeah, addition can be good sometimes, but what is it about addition that tends to muck things up? I think we talked about one of them, you just get the slop sort of stuff, but what else is going on there?
David Epstein:
Yeah, I mean, you’re right about that. This appears to be a hardwired bias. So there are these series of studies that show that people will overlook solutions that involve subtraction even if they’re obviously better, cheaper, easier, et cetera. And it’s actually called subtraction, neglect bias. So in one of the fun studies, this researcher at the University of Virginia named Leidy Klotz and his colleagues, he gave people this Lego structure and they were supposed to bolster it, so it would balance a masonry brick over the head of a storm trooper action figure, and they could add as many pieces as they wanted, but they had to pay to add pieces. And still most people added pieces and paid when just taking away one piece would’ve solved it instantly because we’re just not programmed to look for subtraction unless someone tells us to do that. And so we pile more things on than can get done.
And typically that leads to work becoming extremely fragmented, which leads to people starting to multitask more. And that gives a feeling of increased productivity. But we actually know that multitasking, since it’s not really possible, you actually have to toggle between things and your brain has to drop one and pick up the other. And every time you do, there’s a cost. And when you’re doing it a lot during a day, the cost compounds. And so you end up doing everything in a mediocre way and modern work is insidious at this, adding more to our plate, more obligations, more dashboards, more meetings, all these things. And they cause people’s attention to be really fragmented, which makes them both worse at what they’re doing, less likely to have their priorities straight for what they’re actually working on. And we now know from physiological measures much more stressed.
Brett McKay:
And I imagine it also adds complexity. The more things you add, absolutely. The more different ways things can interact and they might not interact in the way that you planned on it interacting.
David Epstein:
That’s a great point. And we underestimate that complexity systematically. So this is the famous Brooks’ Law about software projects where if you add people to a project that’s already late, you’ll make it even more late because we underestimate the costs of assimilating people and the coordination costs between people and all these sorts of things. So yeah, complexity, steals clarity. I think of that famous story about Steve Jobs where when he was kicked out of Apple, and then we came back in the late nineties, Apple was making, people don’t probably don’t remember this much, but at the time they had tons of different models of computers. They were making printers, they were making servers, they were making this thing called the Newton. They were just making a ton of stuff. And he comes back and says, what nobody knows, we have no priorities. And so he draws a two by two grid on a whiteboard on one side it says consumer and pro, and on the other it’s portable and desktop. We’re going to have four products. That’s it. Everything else is canceled. And people complained, right, because it canceled things they were working on, but it lent to tremendous clarity to what they were actually doing and saved the company. I mean, they were basically dead about to die before that.
Brett McKay:
And I mean, this not only applies to work life, but it applies to people’s personal lives as well. Our tendency is just to keep piling on stuff. Our kids do more and more activities or we take on more and more responsibilities with organizations we belong to. We want to do more and more vacations when sometimes the answer is just like, you know what? We’re not going to do those things this year. We just need the buffer or the bandwidth to just relax and focus on other things.
David Epstein:
Yeah, man, proactively choosing when to choose. So saying, what are the things we’re not going to do is hugely important, but I think we often push that kind of decision away because it feels limiting. So I think we’re often trying to escape situations that really force us to ruthlessly clarify our priorities because whether it’s productivity tools or just being human and not wanting to face our limited time, that I think we do a lot of things that help give us the illusion that we can get everything done on some time span, but in fact, you need to face up to our mortality and prioritize ruthlessly.
Brett McKay:
So a counter example you gave to General Magic of an organization that put constraints on themselves proactively so they could get stuff done is Pixar. How did Pixar work within constraints to eventually make Toy Story, which would go on to revolutionize animated filmmaking?
David Epstein:
Yeah, I liked using Pixar because their vision was created at the same time as General Magic and unfolded over about the same period basically. But unlike General Magic, so Ed Catmull who led Pixar for many, many years and was the co-founder, he also in the mid seventies decided he wanted make the first fully computer animated feature film. Initially he wanted to be a Disney animator, but he wasn’t that great of a drawer, so a little bit of a problem. And on route to making the first computer animated feature film, which was Toy Story, instead of jumping straight from big idea to big execution like General Magic did, he was relentless. He and his colleagues were relentless about defining what is the next tiny step, okay, here’s the big vision, but what is the next tiny tiny step? They were always making estimates of how many pixels will we need, how many polygons will we need?
Where’s the technology now? How far does that mean it needs to go to get there? Okay, we’re not there yet, so we’re going to work on all these proximate problems. And so it almost seems like when I was spending time with Ed, you’d almost seem like a killjoy in a sense. Yes, we have this great vision, but we can’t rush toward it. And so he was always keeping things as small as possible for as long as possible. And that continued even once Pixar started making movies where they let directors stay with a tiny team in story development for years, simplifying the core of a story because it’s easy to make changes then, and the costs only explode once you move into production. And so they really prioritize staying as small as possible, as long as humanly possible.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, it’s amazing the difference between General Magic and Pixar. Pixar worked within the technology. They had General Magic, got a little head on their skis a little too forward on their skis. So I mean, it’s funny, you can look at Toy Story. The first animated video or film that Pixar did was this thing called Tin Toy. It was about this little toy figure, and it was like the precursor to Toy Story. It was made in 1988, and it was only five minutes long, and it actually looks pretty good. I’ll put a clip of it in the show notes. But they had to work with the processing power that they had at the time, all that stuff. And so it had to be really short. And then they built on that to the point where they can make a full length featured film.
David Epstein:
Those shorts, by the way, I don’t know if people remember, but if you went to Pixar movies in theaters, there were often shorts, five, 10 minutes that would run before the main film. And they used those as their little labs test new animation techniques, test new story techniques. So they were constantly doing things in this really, really small way, even though they had big ideas, they were always looking for ways, what is the smallest possible way we can try this thing out?
Brett McKay:
So it seems like they had a process established in order to avoid that bloat and to maintain those creative constraints.
David Epstein:
And they had a bunch of important rules that were always changing because the staff were changing, the environment was changing. But to go back to that calendar story that I told about General Magic, where it just got bigger and bigger and bigger, even though it was not important, ed told me about something at Pixar. They called the beautifully shaded penny problem where directors are, animators are super conscientious and they want to get all the details. And so they would be obsessing over the shading on a penny that would be in the background of some scene that viewer would never even notice, and they’d be working away on that for weeks and ignoring main characters that still need to be animated. And so they came up with a system, here’s high tech system, popsicle sticks velcroed to a board where each popsicle stick represented the amount of work that one animator could do in one week. And if the director wanted those animators to keep working on that penny, then he had to start taking popsicle sticks away from some other character that needed to be animated. And so again, it was a way to visualize the priorities and force them to be ruthless and General Magic had nothing like that. So they had all these minor priorities competing with major priorities and nobody differentiating them. And so I think Ed and his team were great about that, about forcing people into situations where they had to really clarify their priorities.
Brett McKay:
I imagine everyone’s experienced that shading of the penny problem in an organization. There’s always a group of people or an individual that gets like, okay, this little tiny thing is the most important thing, and it takes up like 80% of the time.
David Epstein:
You get tunnel vision, tunnel vision on those things, especially when it’s your thing. And you don’t see how it connects to the bigger strategy.
Brett McKay:
You got to kill your darlings sometimes. You also highlight another organization that used constraints very effectively to put out a great product. And you actually had an experience with this organization, This American life, the famous NPR radio show with Ira Glass, famous for their driveway moments where they have these shows you’re listening to in your car, and then you get to your driveway and you want to keep listening. What did this American life do with constraints to create those driveway moments shows?
David Epstein:
Yeah, again, like Pixar, I think they had this system that I came to think of as putting bumpers in a bowling alley where you’re not telling someone exactly what to do, but you’re keeping them trundling in the right direction. And I had a story pitch accepted by them, and I had to write a 35 minute radio script. The story was about a woman with two rare diseases of fat and muscle wasting, and she identified one of them in an Olympic medalist sprinter who had fat wasting and explosive muscle growth and felt like they shared some physiological mechanism she turned out to be right. So I’m supposed to write a 35 minute script on this, and I’ve never written one second for radio before. And so I go in, I try to write a script, and we do some interviewing. And the way it works is you do a read through where people get together in a room and Ira Glass is holding a stopwatch, timing it, and you have your producer there, you I’m reading the narration and the producer’s hitting play on the audio anytime it comes to an interview that we want to cut in.
And so it’s sort of listening to a rough draft, and at the end people get to say what they’re confused about. And in my case, people were confused about a lot because I was used to writing a lot of scientific detail. And in a magazine story, people can stop and go back over that, but when it’s flying by in audio, that’s much more difficult. So people were confused and I was seven minutes over length. So they identified all these points of confusion and you are obligated in their process to fix them, but they don’t tell you how. They’re not going to tell you how you have to do it, but you have to do it. You can’t come back without having addressed people’s confusions. You can’t argue and say, no, I think that was clear. If one of ’em says it’s confusing, you have to deal with it.
And then you come back for the next read through, and every time you do it, there’s a new person who’s never heard any of the material before and that person gets to say what they were confused by. And then you do that over and over and over until a new person comes in and says, nah, I got it all. That was all really clear, and you’re not allowed to go on until you’ve satisfied that. And it was an amazing process because it made a complete rookie like me, like a total radio novice look like a seasoned veteran because it just highlighted for me all the points where I had to do problem solving. And once the problems to be solved is made clear to you, it kind of empowers you to go off and be creative and do your thing. Yeah,
Brett McKay:
I mean it’s interesting about that they didn’t solve the problem for you. They gave you the constraints and then you had to figure out how to solve it.
David Epstein:
So it didn’t feel oppressive because it was hard editing. At the time, I was working at ProPublica as an investigative reporter, and when I tried to bring this system over to ProPublica for the writers and they were like, no, no one editor is too much. Nevermind this crazy process. So I mean, it’s really intensive and hard because your impulses, you want to go, I did a great job. I think I want them to just love it, and they come and say, I was lost on this or that. But also you feel like you have a ton of agency, they’re telling you things to do, but it’s really up to you to then spread your wings as a problem solver within that. And so it’s actually kind of a gift to have someone, well define a problem for you and then unleash you on solving it.
Brett McKay:
How long did that whole process take you to refine your piece for This American Life?
David Epstein:
Gosh, I mean, it dragged over months.
Brett McKay:
Oh dang, I was thinking maybe like a week or something.
David Epstein:
No, no, no. So there are a few reasons for that though, because Ira’s attention was at a premium. So there were a lot of different stories going through this process at once. And mine didn’t have a time peg in the news or anything, so there was no need to brush the read-throughs. But also since I was brand new in radio, there were some cases where somebody highlighted some confusion and I realized that the way to fix it was I had to go do some more interviewing, and that often meant lining up schedules and recording and all these things. So it went on and again, it was a 35 minute piece and I was seven minutes over on the first draft. So that necessitated a serious reorganization, but a major reason why it took a long time was just there’s a whole bunch of these in process at any one time. And so you can’t just say, tomorrow I’m doing a read through, you sort of have to get Ira’s attention scheduled.
Brett McKay:
Did that process going through that, did that change your writing at all?
David Epstein:
It did change my writing. I think for one, it made me a lot more likely to look for a naive reader and say, what’s confusing you here? Not one of my own editors who has a lot of similar knowledge in some ways to what I have. It also led me to simplify. I think I had a tendency if I find some scientific, before I was a writer, I was training to be a scientist and I switched careers. And I have a tendency if I think some aspect of science is really interesting to want to get it in no matter what, just get it in. Cause I think it’s really interesting. And I had to cut so much scientific stuff that I thought was interesting from that This American Life piece. And yet the piece turned out amazing. It had probably the best response of anything I’ve ever worked on, maybe along with my previous book. And so I think it showed me that the reader or listener doesn’t know what’s not there. And so what you have to make sure is that the stuff that is there is interesting and really clear. And so I think it made me much more aggressive in cutting back in the interest of clarity.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, this story, it made me like, okay, I need to be better about my editing. My wife edits all of my writing, and sometimes she’ll be like, I’m confused here. I’m like, well, why are you confused? It makes perfect sense in my head. What are you talking about? And she’ll be like, well, it could be confusing to a reader and it would be better if you rework these sentences like this. And I’m like, okay, yeah, that is better.
David Epstein:
There you go. Yeah.
Brett McKay:
Well, let’s talk about the idea of bottlenecks because you highlight a book that I read a long time ago and I forgot about, but I still think about it. I still think about the ideas. This book is called The Goal. It’s all about thinking about our problems and looking for bottlenecks. So the big idea is if you want to be more productive in anything, whether it’s work, I mean this focuses on manufacturing and work, but I think it’s applicable to your personal life as well. You got to look for bottlenecks. Tell us more about this idea in this book.
David Epstein:
Yeah, this book is bizarre by the way, but fascinating. And it was written by this physicist named Eliyahu M. Goldratt, who was studying the behavior of atoms and crystals when a friend of his with a small chicken coop building business asked him to help increase production. And the friend had been hiring new help, but it wasn’t increasing the number of coops they were producing. And so gold rats studied the process and found that that’s because no matter how fast some steps in the assembly process were working, they just piled up at the single slowest step, what he called the bottleneck. And so he ended up moving one worker from a fast step to the slowest step, and it increased overall production by threefold. And this became the core of his idea, what he called the theory of constraints, that every system is limited by its single slowest step or bottleneck.
And so he writes this book, The Goal to try to explain the idea, it’s a business novel where this plant manager is facing shutdown and his Jedi-like physics professor shows up and gives him these Socratic lessons. And he starts to see the whole world in bottlenecks where he takes his son’s Boy Scout troop on a hiking trip and realizes some of the kids are really fast, but this kid, Herbie is really slow and the whole group can only move at the speed of Herbie. So he decides to redistribute the weight from pack, so the fast kids have more, and Herbie has less, and suddenly the whole group is moving faster, and it’s a strange book, and yet it sold 10 million copies. And Jeff Bezos forced all his executives to read it and hosted a full day book club on it. And it just became a phenomenon. But the core idea is really simple. It’s that the constraint, the system constraint shows you where to focus because if you apply energy somewhere else, it doesn’t change the outcome of the overall system because that’s all limited by the single least effective step. And it turned out to become one of the most impactful ideas in management and even spread into personal improvement as well.
Brett McKay:
When we don’t have the output that we want, we typically think, well, we just need to input more. We got to do more and more, and then we’ll get more output. But if there’s a bottleneck somewhere, you can keep putting in more and more input, but the output is going to stay the same. It’s all getting held up at that bottleneck. And so instead of adding more, just remove that bottleneck or somehow widen the bottleneck.
David Epstein:
So the bottleneck shows you where to focus. It’s the highest leverage place to apply energy. In some cases, it’s the only place with any leverage that will make a difference if you apply any energy. But yeah, and so I think it’s a really effective, I dunno if we should get into those stories, but really effective for personal improvement as well. I tell the story of an athlete who applied it, the book, tell us about that. Okay. It also really resonated with my own athletic journey. So the story I tell in the book is about this swimmer named Sheila Taormina. She was at the University of Georgia, and in 1992, it goes to the Olympic trials, tries to make the team the 200 meter freestyle, doesn’t make it isn’t close retires. But then for one of her last classes at University of Georgia, she takes management 5 77 in which she learns about the theory of constraints and decides to do a class project on using it to create a plan to drop three seconds in the 200 meter freestyle.
And so she looks for, she audits her training. And what’s her bottleneck? Well, she determines it’s strength and power. She’s five foot two, which is really small for an elite swimmer. She has an incredible aerobic engine, world-class, and all her coaches have her working on is aerobic endurance and not her strength and power. So she’s continuing to feed the thing that is not limiting her that she already has. So with this class plan, she decides to unretire find a new coach who will work with her on strength and power, and four years later she makes the Olympic team and then is part of the relay team that wins an Olympic gold medal. It’s crazy. If you Google her, you’ll see pictures of her with the other three women in the relay, and she’s about a foot shorter than them. And so she retires after this now as an Olympic champion and then just concerned about her health, she comes out of retirement and starts doing triathlons.
And now she has this new view on training to look for what is her actual limiting factor. And she wins the US National Championship, triathlon goes to the Olympics, finishes sixth, goes to the next Olympics in triathlon retires again, unretires again, takes up fencing and horse jumping and goes to the Olympics. In modern pentathlon, she’s the only woman ever to have competed in four summer Olympics in three different sports. And she was about to retire if she hadn’t learned about the theory of constraints in a management class. So I thought it was an amazing story, and it was very similar to my less illustrious, but I was also a college athlete, not at the level, but had a very similar story where my bottleneck was my ability to recover from workouts. And once I realized that I was an 800 meter runner and scheduled class over one workout a week, so I’d have an excuse not to show up, I improved like rocket fuel. I became a university record holder. I went from walk-on to university record holder by targeting the thing that was limiting me.
Brett McKay:
I think it’s a big takeaway. Well, let’s talk about constraints to make collaboration more effective. So I think all of us have worked in a group, we might’ve done brainstorming sessions. We have those meetings where we’re all just throwing out ideas. And we have probably all experienced, those meetings are not very productive. Why don’t traditional brainstorm sessions work usually?
David Epstein:
Yeah, there are a few reasons. So there was some psychologists recently did an international survey of known creativity myths where things that we know are not true from research and the top two mistaken beliefs where people are most creative when they’re most free. And that brainstorming is the best way to come up with lots of creative ideas. And it doesn’t work for a few reasons. One is because it’s too open-ended and people don’t tend to come up with creative ideas when something is really open-ended much better, giving them a specific problem almost no matter what it is. And they’ll come up with more creative ideas. But also people tend to be confused by the norms of brainstorming. So there’ll be conflicting norms like say whatever comes to mind, but also don’t criticize. Those things can be quite mutually exclusive. And there’s a lot of what’s called production blocking, where people who might have something interesting to say won’t share it because they’re embarrassed or they’re not that eloquent or because of the person who spoke before them. So there’s a term called HPPO would be a highest paid person’s opinion. And once that person shares their opinion in a group, other opinions will tend to coalesce around it, not because it’s a better opinion, just because they’re the highest paid. And so there are all these factors that sort of make the norms of the situation unclear for people. So much so that brain writing works much better where if people are allowed to write ideas separately before they come together and evaluate them.
Brett McKay:
Alright, so that’s a constraint you can put in. Instead of having vocal brainstorm sessions, have everyone write a memo of ideas they have and then they submit it to the group
David Epstein:
First. Yeah, separate it. And really trying to keep sort of equal social norms. So the best team, this shows up in all sorts of research, like Google did all this internal research on it, but in other places that the best teams for problem solving are those that have relatively equal conversational turn taking, not in every task they’re doing, but over the course of a day. So you need to be really careful to put certain constraints in place to make sure that happens. So at Pixar for example, they banned Steve Jobs from certain meetings because they were worried about that HPPO effect. They knew his larger than life persona that his opinion would carry too much weight. And then other people wouldn’t share some of the important things because not every person who has value to add is super eloquent. And so you have to be careful about making everyone feel like they’re going to have a turn. But again, also because you want to give a specific problem, if it’s too open-ended, people do not come up with creative ideas. Yeah.
Brett McKay:
Well, that’s the point I want to talk about you highlight in the book is this idea of settling for good enough that it can help you get more great things done. What’s going on there?
David Epstein:
Yeah, the last chapter gets kind of more personal philosophical, and a major idea in it is called satisficing, which is a word that’s a combination of satisfy and suffice and was coined by Herbert Simon, whose work is sprinkled throughout the book. And he was trained as a political scientist, but he won the highest award in computer science. He was a founder of ai. He won the highest award in psychology and he won the Nobel Prize in economics. And one of his major ideas was Satisficing, where humans do not conform to the rational actor model of classical economics where we evaluate all the options and make the best decision because we have limited cognitive bandwidth, we can’t evaluate all the options, we can’t predict all the repercussions of our decisions. And so what Simon argued is that we should proactively satisfy, we should set good enough rules for our decisions, and when they’re met, make the decision and never look back because the opposite.
If you’re not a satisfier, then the opposite end of the spectrum is what’s called a maximizer who really does try to evaluate every possible option and make the best decision. Maybe we’d call it an optimizer today. And it turns out that in psychological research, it’s almost always bad to be a maximizer. They’re less satisfied with their decisions, less satisfied with their lives, more prone to regret, often prefer reversible decisions, even though it leads them to not really commit one way or the other. And so I think it’s really important in this world of seemingly infinite choice, whether you’re buying a dishwasher or looking for a date to set certain good enough parameters, and maybe things will go way beyond that, but once they’re hit, make the decision and move on, and it gives you the possibility of being satisfied.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, I’ve noticed in my life some people have, they have a constitution or a temperament to be maximizers or satisficers. I imagine if you’re naturally a maximizer, you have to be a lot more intentional or proactive about putting those good enough constraints on yourself.
David Epstein:
Oh yeah. I mean, because I think I have maximizing tendencies for sure. And so setting down these rules ahead of time of what’s good enough for this decision has been really helpful for me. Even in fact, when I started a newsletter, I was reading Simon’s work, and it was very much because I had just had this very successful book and I felt a little paralyzed. I’m like, if I do anything else, it has to be as good at this or better. And so the newsletter was a case where I said, okay, if a book has to be a nine or 10, if I get a newsletter post to six and a half, maybe it’ll fly past that on the first draft maybe. But if I’m confident that it’s at six and a half, I’m sending it. And that became a really important satisficing exercise for me to kind of tamp down some of my maximization. But as maybe it sounds like silly or I don’t know, just weird. But I proactively make satisficing calls, like if I’m trying to buy something and here are the three things I needed to do, that’s the job I want to hire it for. Once I see those three things, I’m done looking. I’m not reading every single review. And that’s been really helpful for me.
Brett McKay:
When do you think maximizing is beneficial or is it ever beneficial?
David Epstein:
It’s a good question because Simon, I mean, he did all these things where he wore one kind of beret only and one color of socks. And he said, you only need three pairs of clothes, one in your body, one in the closet right away and one in the wash. And he at the same breakfast every day, lived in the same house for 46 years. And what he was saying was, look, this freed up my cognitive bandwidth to focus on the things that were really important, like his research. And so I think there are things where he famously said, the best is the enemy of the good. And I think it’s almost always good to be a satisfier in terms of making progress. But I think there are also cases where once you have enough experience to know the kind of things, the ways that you want to spend your time, that it can be okay to be more of a maximizer in trying to craft your work life so that you’re spending more of the time working on something that you think is ideal, basically.
And again, I think aiming for perfection is way too much, but being okay with dithering more on that and saying, how can I really work my way towards spending my time working on things that I think are really important? And again, not that you have to jump to that immediately, but over the course of a working career, not just necessarily saying this is kind of a good enough thing, but once you get to good enough thinking about, well, could I go a little farther? So I think it’s okay to do that, but again, I think it should be done in steps as opposed to maximization right from the beginning.
Brett McKay:
Well, David, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
David Epstein:
Davidepstein.com has links to the book and my free newsletter, all that kind of stuff.
Brett McKay:
You’re on Substack now, right?
David Epstein:
I’m on Substack, yep. And there’s a link for that on my website for all that stuff. And there’s some free sort of tip sheets related to Inside the Box on the site also.
Brett McKay:
Well fantastic. David Epstein, thanks for your time, it’s been a pleasure.
David Epstein:
Pleasure’s mine.
Brett McKay:
My guest today was David Epstein. He’s the author of the book Inside the Box. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can learn more information about his work at his website, davidepstein.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/constraints. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but to put what you’ve heard into action.
