Why your brain needs constraints with David Epstein | ReThinking

1. 0:00 – 1:41

   When too much autonomy backfires: writing with a single-page outline

   1. DEDavid Epstein0:00

      I went to a writer's retreat after my last book came out, and there was a question everyone had to answer, which was, "What are you optimizing for this year?" And I said autonomy. Fast-forward a few years, and I learned there's definitely such a thing as too much autonomy, 'cause I think I, like, caused myself to suffer in certain ways by over-indexing on freedom. [upbeat music]

   2. AGAdam Grant0:20

      So I have to ask you, there's a rumor going around that you wrote your latest book with an extreme constraint, that you had to write the entire book on one sheet of paper.

   3. DEDavid Epstein0:31

      I did write, and I actually have right behind me. I forced myself to outline it in a detailed way on a single page of paper, because in the past, my outlines were really long. So it's actually h-here. Uh, and-

   4. AGAdam Grant0:44

      Oh, wow

   5. DEDavid Epstein0:45

      ... so I set myself this constraint in part because for my first two books, I wrote basically 150% of a book to get 100% of a book, which is extremely inefficient. Like, I had to cut a trip to Arctic Sweden in my first book. You don't wanna do that. So, so I set this limit for myself both to make a macro structural plan before I started and to have it fit on one page. And as you can probably see from that writing, I tried to cheat my own system by writing as small as possible, but it still had to fit on that page. And if it wasn't there, it is not in the book. Uh, and consequently, the book is 20% shorter than my other two. My writing process was, was much more efficient, which was important because I became a parent between [chuckles] the, the last two books.

   6. AGAdam Grant1:28

      So I, I love that you actually held yourself to this discipline because I think I, I've experienced, as has every other writer I know, the problem of, you know, just overshooting. And you have way more material than you can possibly use.

   7. DEDavid Epstein1:40

      Yeah.

2. 1:41 – 3:03

   Constraints aren’t just for over-communicators: narrow problems can spark creativity

   1. AGAdam Grant1:41

      Um, a lot of people struggle with the opposite, though, which is, "I don't have enough to say." Is this idea of setting a constraint only applicable if, if you're an over-communicator [chuckles] as opposed to an under-communicator?

   2. DEDavid Epstein1:52

      I don't think it's only applicable. I mean, so for s- for someone like, like me or someone like you, right, I think a problem will be going down a bunch of rabbit holes that are really interesting to us, but, but maybe not as much of service to, to the reader or don't actually fit in the project that well.

   3. AGAdam Grant2:06

      Yeah, not even, not even rabbits wanna go down some of those holes.

   4. DEDavid Epstein2:09

      But I do think in another way, there's this research on so-called specific curiosity that shows that if you can get people to think through a really narrow problem, they will actually start to be more creative. Like, they may think what they want is total freedom, but it's actually not. So in some of that work, if you induce curiosity in someone, like one of the, one of the papers that I cited that I thought was really cool was where people were shown a famous magic trick, and then either they were told how it worked or they were basically made to guess and told that they got it wrong, and those people would start following up and looking more into it. And they ended up doing this more fruitful exploration, and later when they were asked to design tricks, they were much, much more creative, having been channeled to think through this sort of narrow problem. So I think it can actually, can actually help. And that, that was a little bit, uh, a little bit of a wake-up call for me to be like, you're training yourself to be very distracted.

3. 3:03 – 5:22

   The macro case for “thinking inside the box” in an age of too much

   1. AGAdam Grant3:03

      So you think we should all be thinking more inside the box, that we actually need more constraints in our lives. Why? Give me the macro argument.

   2. DEDavid Epstein3:10

      Yeah. I think that our intuition is to think that we will always do better with more freedom, that we'll be happier with more freedom, that we'll make better decisions with more freedom, that we will be more creative with more freedom. And I think, you know, I'm gonna speculate here, but, but based on some of the work about what's called subtractive neglect bias, the, the idea that we, we overlook solutions that involve taking things away, my guess is that human history was not, for the most part, full of problems of having too much. It was full of problems of having too little. Too little freedom and too m- too little stuff. And so we're, just did not adapt to a world where you can have too much information or, uh, you know, too many different things that you might want to try or too many different options. And so I don't think we're well-equipped to realize that we often make better decisions when, when a choice set is smaller. We're often happier with our decisions when we aren't in a situation where we're forced endlessly to compare, and that we'll be more creative if we restrict our decisions. Because, like, as the cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham says, "You may think your brain is made for thinking, but it's actually made for preventing you from having to think whenever possible because it's metabolically costly." And so if you have total freedom, you will just go down the path of least resistance, doing things that you've already seen before or that, that are familiar to you. So in, in, in, to a certain extent, it's almost impossible to be really creative, um, unless you're, unless you're hemmed in in a way. And so that's, that's kind of separate from the fact that I think it's important for personal satisfaction, uh, w- which especially now in the age of social media and AI, where you can compare yourself to other possibilities endlessly all day long if you want, and where you can start nine million projects very easily, I think the, the need for restriction for both productivity and personal satisfaction is almost certainly at a level that it's never been in history before.

   3. AGAdam Grant4:58

      So that, that strikes me as the most novel idea, um, when I think about, you know, the big picture here. I think most people are familiar with the paradox of choice and the idea that you can be overwhelmed by too many options, and, you know, that can cause you to disengage or feel dissatisfied with what you chose or both. I think what you're bringing to the table is the idea that if I wanna come up with new ideas, I should actually impose some limits on myself.

4. 5:22 – 6:18

   Commitment as a constraint: stopping the endless search for the perfect option

   1. DEDavid Epstein5:22

      Yeah, absolutely. And, and I should say, like, part of the reason I took on this topic is me search, right? And so I spent a period there where I would dip my toe into different topics and say, "You know, I, I don't know if it's perfect," and then just go to the next one, the next one. And I did that for quite a long time and realized that I wasn't gonna find the perfect topic. It actually dawned on me when I read, [chuckles] I, I read a quote from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, you know, the, the famous for coining the term flow for the feeling of immersion in an activity. And he was actually talking about relationships or marriage in this quote. It wasn't-- But it didn't matter. Like, the quote applies more broadly. And he basically said The great thing about being committed, if you've done it by choice, is that you can stop wasting energy on wondering how to live and start living. That was the moment when I was like, "I'm writing a book proposal on constraints." And so I think the, the ability to endlessly look for other ideas is often, often kind of this illusion of getting somewhere better, where, like, you kind of wanna pick something good enough and dive in, and that's where the really interesting stuff comes, I think.

5. 6:18 – 7:57

   The most surprising evidence: self-interruptions and training attention

   1. AGAdam Grant6:18

      What piece of evidence surprised you the most?

   2. DEDavid Epstein6:21

      It is the same one that I would say terrified me the most in this book, which was from the research of Gloria Mark, who, who has famously studied, uh, attention span, um, and focus in the workplace. Her work on attention span and focus and, and all these markers of showing that things are not going so great from the standpoint of, of people's attention span. But what really surprised me and kind of changed some of the ways that I work was her work on self-interruptions, where basically if you're interrupted by notifications all day and other people or whatever it is, you'll become accustomed to a certain cadence of interruption. And then if you say, "All right. I'm gonna take my phone and put it away now 'cause today I really have to focus," you will just self-interrupt with intrusive thoughts basically at the rhythm to which you've become accustomed, as if you have some kind of internal distract-ometer that doesn't wanna change.

   3. AGAdam Grant7:15

      [laughs]

   4. DEDavid Epstein7:15

      And so if you wanna get better at having sustained focus, you actually have to train that. It doesn't mean not attending to some of the things you have to do, but maybe you batch those things. You do one at a time instead of flitting between them all the time. One of the things that Gloria mentioned to me also was when you're in that training phase, when you're trying to get some of your focus back, put a pad next to you, and as those thoughts come into your head where, "I didn't respond to this thing," uh, you know, "I forgot to message that person," write it down and at least that outsources it from your brain. So that's really surprised me. Th- the problem wasn't just putting away the phone, but actually training your ability to focus over time. So a little scary, but definitely changed some of my habits.

   5. AGAdam Grant7:54

      Well, we can, we can see the fruits of that labor in the book.

   6. DEDavid Epstein7:57

      [laughs]

6. 7:57 – 10:33

   Pixar’s ‘three pitches’ rule: using constraints to prevent creative anchoring

   1. AGAdam Grant7:57

      I wanna talk about a, a few of the examples and stories that you cover because I think they both illustrate the power of constraints, but they also show how creative we can be in coming up with constraints that actually serve us.

   2. DEDavid Epstein8:09

      Mm-hmm.

   3. AGAdam Grant8:09

      I think that was one of my biggest surprises when I was reading Inside the Box was, oh, there's actually ingenuity in figuring out what good limits and productive boundaries look like. Uh, I loved, I loved your Pixar example of the three pitch rule. Tell me about that.

   4. DEDavid Epstein8:23

      Yeah, so this... One of the reasons I wanted to use Pixar is bec- well, I mean, one, I love Pixar, and so it's like to, uh, you know, research a topic that [laughs] you're, you're interested in and have an excuse to go sit in Ed Catmull's office and all that stuff. But, um, I viewed them also as, when I was thinking of companies, what would people associate with just unbridled creativity, right? Uh, and so the things that come to mind are like, you know, NASA and, and Pixar. And so one of the things I was interested to learn was that Pixar used constraints religiously. I kind of thought of it as putting, like when you go bowling and you put the bumpers in the lane. And one of those rules was called the three pitches rule, where directors had to come with three story ideas for a film. They, they were not allowed to come with one because people, when you only have one idea, you get anchored to it, whether it's the best idea or not, and you get attached to it and you don't want it to change. And so they were forced to come up with three legitimate ideas or else they, they weren't allowed to pitch. And so I thought that was a, a pretty, a pretty neat rule among a lot of interesting rules at Pixar.

   5. AGAdam Grant9:27

      What's also striking about that is they weren't allowed to come with 10 or 20 ideas-

   6. DEDavid Epstein9:32

      That's right. That's right

   7. AGAdam Grant9:33

      ... which sometimes creative people are tempted to do.

   8. DEDavid Epstein9:34

      Totally. And I think that's, that's an interesting titration, right? And I think there's some art in that, which is you... Obviously constraints can be bad, right? It, it's almost synonymous with something that's, that's frustrating essentially. And so I think it's that the, the art is you wanna put some boundaries in place, and they wanna be fairly tight, but not so tight that they're actually completely stifling. Simone Giertz, the, uh, the inventor, you know, she's famous for her, both her zany robots but also some legitimately ingenious products that, that she makes. You look at what she does and you're like, "This person is just boundlessly creative." But she said if it's too open of a field, she can't really get started, so she made these dice that have different qualities on them, like a material she has to use, a type of object, or some functionality, and she rolls the dice, and then she has to make, you know, a, a chair out of cardboard that can play music or whatever it is, and that actually channels her to get her going in, in that case. So, so I think constraints can be useful there as well.

7. 10:33 – 12:01

   Designing the right boundaries: ‘freedom from’ vs ‘freedom to’

   1. AGAdam Grant10:33

      That's so interesting. It makes me think about the classic philosophy distinction from Isaiah Berlin between freedom from and freedom to.

   2. DEDavid Epstein10:41

      Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

   3. AGAdam Grant10:41

      And I think traditionally a lot of people think about constraints as something you want freedom from, and what you're saying is actually there are certain kinds of constraints that can give you freedom from other constraints [laughs] and-

   4. DEDavid Epstein10:54

      Totally

   5. AGAdam Grant10:54

      ... other limitations that you might face.

   6. DEDavid Epstein10:56

      Yeah.

   7. AGAdam Grant10:56

      And then in turn free you up to do things you wouldn't have thought to do before.

   8. DEDavid Epstein11:00

      Yeah. I mean, Erich Fromm wrote about the freedom, freedom from and freedom to also, and, and the urge for people to escape from freedom. So he was writing in the mid-20th century, and what he saw was people around him in Germany, th- there was, uh, when there was some breakdown of society, people craved so much structure that they would readily submit to authoritarianism basically because they, they craved some of these boundaries. So they were escaping from freedom and, and what he thought was more productive is if you, you wanted to bind yourself to things, it was a question of were you going to find productive things to bind yourself to or not. Like, I, I don't wanna get, like, too, too lofty, and since we're talking philosophy, like, I look back at Robert Putnam's book "Bowling Alone," you know, published ar- around 2000, right around then, that seems really prescient in retrospect, where it's saying as everybody gets into their individualized world where entertainment is more individualized and people aren't doing things as a community, this breakdown of the dense network of reciprocal obligations to one another that people have in a community will be terrible for health and longevity. And, and now we see that.

8. 12:01 – 14:55

   The ‘lusory attitude’: voluntary obstacles as a source of meaning—and innovation

   1. AGAdam Grant12:01

      Well, you know, it se- it seems that some of what you're talking about is also a function of mindset. And I'm thinking about the widely used distinction in psychology between challenge and hindrance, obstacles or stressors. It, it sounds like a fair amount of what you're describing i- is approaching a problem or a task and saying, "Okay, I've got a limitation. Uh, I might have, you know, a time constraint, I might have a budget constraint. Uh, and instead of seeing that as a barrier-"

   2. DEDavid Epstein12:29

      Yeah

   3. AGAdam Grant12:29

      "... I'm gonna see that as a challenge to overcome."

   4. DEDavid Epstein12:31

      Totally. Totally. And in fact, as, as you well know, the way that people view those challenges d- helps determine how that stress affects them, whether it's a growth or a, a negative source. And since we were just on philosophers, I'm not gonna let us get off before I mention my favorite philosopher, Bernard Suits, who was responding to an argument where Wittgenstein said, uh, "There's nothing that all games have in common." And Suits said, "Actually, you're wrong. What they all have in common is an attitude." He called it the lusory attitude, and it's the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles. And what Suits said was that is what gives the game meaning, right? You, y- it's, it's that volun- those obstacles that you voluntarily accept are what gives meaning to the, the entire endeavor. And that, that's how I like to think of obstacles and why I wanted to highlight a lot of stories like that. I mean, one that I was just thinking about, because I, I was just talking to some folks at NASA, said, "Oh, we had this mission called LCROSS where we had half the time and the budget that we were supposed to have. And so what happened? You know, we whined for a few minutes, and then we said, 'What can we actually do?' And said, 'Well, we can't invent stuff from scratch,' so we took imaging equipment from Army tanks, and we literally took engine temperature sensors from NASCAR, put them on our probe, and confirmed that there's water on the moon." And they just never would've done that if they weren't forced to do it and say, "Okay, we cry for a minute, and now what can we actually, what can we actually do?" And since we both know him, David Chang, the restaurateur, he's, like, obsessed with constraints. And he talked about how with his first restaurant, it was so, so tightly packed, the space, that the fume hood for cooking would take away the cool air from air conditioning in the summer, and it would suck out the warm air in winter, so they couldn't keep the temperature of the place right. So he said, "All right. To balance that out, in summer we're gonna focus on cool dishes, and in winter we're gonna focus on warm dishes so the cooking will actually heat the space up." And he said it led to this incredible flourishing, uh, of all these dishes that they made, but was completely just coming out of complete necessity. Uh, his office at the time, he said, was like a broom closet, and they couldn't afford someone to do reservations and stuff, so that led to the first fully automated booking system where you could go in and buy specific seats like you would buy in a concert, and it was all just because, you know, they said, "Well, we can't do this, so what is available to us and how can we use that?" And it just led to, you know, one successful innovation after another.

9. 14:55 – 17:58

   Better constraints often start with better problem definition

   1. AGAdam Grant14:55

      That's such a good example. It, it reminds me of a paper that Jim Berry and I published years ago called "The Necessity of Others is the Mother of Invention." We had fun with the title. But, um, I think one of the, the a-has that, that I had while we were working on that paper was so often necessity is not the mother of invention because we see a problem and we're zoomed in too close.

   2. DEDavid Epstein15:15

      Yeah.

   3. AGAdam Grant15:16

      And we can't either define the problem effectively or figure out what might be the right solution because we're, we're kind of, we're trapped with maybe too much constraint, um, or the wrong kind of constraint. And when we see somebody else have a problem, we have a little bit of distance. It's easier for us to identify it and kinda figure out what's causing it and come up with some novel solutions to it, and then we're not just anchored on our, you know, our own usual way of approaching it. We get to look at their view too. And so I wondered if you got into this at all, that sometimes the best constraints come from having to solve other people's problems.

   4. DEDavid Epstein15:54

      Absolutely. I think it's the same thing with advice, how you give, uh, better advice to other people having the same problem that, that you have. [chuckles] Um, so I try to do that. If I have a problem now, I think of, "All right, what advice would I give to a friend?" It's often totally different than the advice that I've given to myself. Um, but yeah. I mean, there's, there are a few things about this. One, I think th- something that, that was embedded in what you said, which is that defining a problem really well is often the best thing you can do for getting it solved, and I actually don't think we typically take enough time to define problems really well. Like, we s- we have a, we kind of have an idea of the problem we're trying to solve, but we're not defining it really narrowly. And one of the examples I mention in the book is, like, David Hilbert, who became probably the most impactful mathematician in the 20th century, where at the, at the turn of the century, in around 1900, he basically decided just to survey his field and try to, uh, really well define about two dozen problems in math that he thought should be solved, and then he passed them out in a pamphlet, and it set an agenda for the 20th century.

   5. AGAdam Grant16:53

      Wow.

   6. DEDavid Epstein16:53

      He defined them really carefully, and it, it led to all these incredible breakthroughs. And I think there are just a lot of examples of that where, like... So the, the first chapter in the book focuses on this company that had all the talent in the world, all the capital in the world, the perfect vision of the future of technology, and completely collapsed, in part because they didn't define a problem well. Like, there's that famous adage that people don't want a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole in the wall. It's like, what's the problem that your service is actually... Not the thing that you're selling someone, but what is the problem that you're actually trying to solve? And there's a whole chapter in "Inside the Box" about what's called multiple discovery, this history of the most groundbreaking things in the world being arrived at by multiple people independently at the same time. And what typically precedes that is someone who really well defined the problem first, and it draws all these, uh, these problem solvers to it and, and, and often leads to a solution. But those people don't get very much, you know, historical credit. It's not nearly as sexy to be the problem definer as it is to be the-

   7. AGAdam Grant17:52

      [chuckles]

   8. DEDavid Epstein17:52

      ... the solver.

   9. AGAdam Grant17:53

      Yeah. Well, you know, I think a lot of these solutions come out of necessity as, as we were talking about. But-

   10. DEDavid Epstein17:58

       Yeah

10. 17:58 – 20:02

    Dr. Seuss and the ‘Green Eggs and Ham effect’: creativity from self-imposed scarcity

    1. AGAdam Grant17:58

       ... I was also struck that you described a game as having to overcome unnecessary obstacles. And I, I was surprised reading the book at [laughs] how much creativity could spring from someone imposing an unnecessary constraint, and I thought the best example of that was Dr. Seuss.

    2. DEDavid Epstein18:15

       Yeah. Dr. Seuss. I mean, at one point, Dr. Seuss was given a vocabulary list for kids, told to use only 200 words, which is not very many, and, and write a children's book. And at first, he's looking through it and he starts complaining to his wife, right? He says, "There's no adjectives. How am I supposed to write a book with no adjectives?" And then in, in fine Seussian form, he says, "It's like trying to make a strudel without any strudels," which I love, because he was the same person-

    3. AGAdam Grant18:43

       [laughs]

    4. DEDavid Epstein18:43

       ... in his private notes apparently as he was in his books. And then he just... He says, "I'm just gonna take the first two rhyming words and, and write a book about it." And the first two rhyming words are cat and hat. And that restriction, first of all, gives him an idea and a place to start, but also forces him to focus on rhythm because he has so few words. And then it happens again. After he does that, he's bet by a publisher that he can't do it with just 50 words. And now he's like, "All right. I, I can do it." And, and that becomes Green Eggs and Ham, where again, so few words that he has to focus on rhythm and story and all this other stuff. One of your colleagues, Katrin Elltromp, calls it the Green Eggs and Ham effect, this idea that when you box somebody in, they often find more creative solutions. And after that, Seuss or Theodor Geisel, his, his, his, uh, civilian name, um, started this, the most successful children's book imprint, co-founded, uh, called Beginner Books, and he put all these constraints on the other creators. Like, nothing could be pictured if it wasn't actually also described in the story, and all of the images had to run across two pages so that when you opened it, it was like one story line. He just layered constraints on them, and it kind of changed... If you look at before Seuss and after children's literature, it's not just him. It's like night and day in how creative and interesting it becomes.

11. 20:02 – 21:56

    When constraints help vs hurt: preclude constraints and forced exploration

    1. AGAdam Grant20:02

       How do you know when those constraints are gonna unleash creativity versus hold people back?

    2. DEDavid Epstein20:07

       Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I think you need to leave people some, some leeway. NASA actually had in that, that anecdote I mentioned, they actually had half the time and half the budget. But I think you could say, "What if we had half the time and half the budget?" and, and give it a try. What if we had to kill something in the next 90 days? What would it be? I think what a lot of the productive constraints revolve around is what psychologist Patricia Stokes would call a cr- preclude constraint, where you, you block the previous solution. So if you went into this problem, whatever it is, this problem, this client meeting, what if we were barred from proposing the thing we always propose? What would we do? And I think the idea is that it prompts productive exploration, like wherever, wherever you are, right? There's one, one, one study that I love that I'm, I'm sure you'll know, that looked at 30,000 games in the NBA and what happens when an, a star goes down for a while. And if the star goes down, the other players who are left start spreading the ball around more. So they start experimenting with new strategies. And when the star comes back, they give the star the ball a lot, but they don't go all the way back, and the team ends up better in the long term because we just don't productively explore enough. Like, once we find a good enough solution, we'll settle into that and kind of stop exploring enough.

    3. AGAdam Grant21:21

       I wanna say Chen and Garg 2018, Strategic Management Journal, but don't quote me on it.

    4. DEDavid Epstein21:26

       Yeah, I mean, I, I, I knew you'd... It's like you're, you're, you're like real-life, uh, perplexity for, uh, uh, studies.

    5. AGAdam Grant21:33

       [laughs]

    6. DEDavid Epstein21:33

       But... And then it, it's so similar to the London, the famous London Tube study where there was a strike for commuters.

    7. AGAdam Grant21:39

       Yeah.

    8. DEDavid Epstein21:39

       And so they couldn't use their normal commute for a few days.

    9. AGAdam Grant21:41

       Yeah.

    10. DEDavid Epstein21:41

        A bunch of them found routes that were better, that saved them time, and never went back. But it was just by being forced to not do the autopilot thing that caused them to find-

    11. AGAdam Grant21:49

        Mm-hmm

    12. DEDavid Epstein21:49

        ... these better solutions. So I think once in a while it behooves people to say, "If that thing were taken away, what were the things I'd have to experiment with?"

12. 21:56 – 24:16

    From Range to Inside the Box: optionality traps and ‘sliding’ without deciding

    1. AGAdam Grant21:56

       I, I think some of our best nonfiction books are a reaction to somebody kind of taking our previous idea and typecasting it in a kind of oversimplified and exaggerated way.

    2. DEDavid Epstein22:07

       Like strawmanning it, basically.

    3. AGAdam Grant22:08

       And if I did that with your previous book, Range-

    4. DEDavid Epstein22:10

       Mm-hmm

    5. AGAdam Grant22:10

       ... I would say this book is a reaction to the exaggerated thesis of Range, which is you wrote a whole book about-

    6. DEDavid Epstein22:18

       Yeah

    7. AGAdam Grant22:18

       ... how we shouldn't specialize, we shouldn't constrain ourselves, we shouldn't limit ourselves. We should expand our horizons.

    8. DEDavid Epstein22:25

       Yeah.

    9. AGAdam Grant22:25

       And now you're saying, "Wait a minute. No. We need to box in more." So w- was this in part because of Range that you, you felt like you did overexpand?

    10. DEDavid Epstein22:35

        Absolutely. I, I don't know that I would say overexpand, but I think it left a lingering question, which also happened to be one that I got a lot from readers, [laughs] uh, which is, "Okay, I've got this broad toolbox. What do I do with it," right? You know, I do worry from Range that it could be taken as, oh, I should make decisions all the time that just, like, preserve optionality, and I actually think that that can be a mistake, particularly for people who have, who have lots of opportunity, that it's like preserving optionality becomes an end unto itself just to keep your options open. But the... Your options are, are going to close, so that's just an illusion of keeping your options open. And it, it struck me when I was writing a little bit in Inside the Box about the work of Scott Stanley in relationships, where he talked about sliding versus deciding, where people will get into a relationship and it starts escalating without them really making a decision to make a commitment. Like, they wanna keep their options open, so it's like, "You know, we'll move in, but I'm not really making a commitment." And it's just the illusion of keeping their options open, right? And they, they end up sliding into escalating commitment and, and, and typically have, uh, less, less happy relationships. So that is one concern that I had of i- if someone would take Range to mean preserve optionality at all costs, 'cause I don't think-

    11. AGAdam Grant23:51

        Mm-hmm

    12. DEDavid Epstein23:51

        ... that that's such a great thing.

    13. AGAdam Grant23:53

        Yeah. So th- this book is a, a correction to that misunderstanding of Range in some ways.

    14. DEDavid Epstein23:58

        I think so. It felt like a natural next step to me. I have these very broad interests, and I have... It has been challenging for me to, to put a bounding box around my work and say, "This is where I'm gonna channel that stuff." Um, so it, it was very much driven by that and thinking that a lot of people who would've been interested in Range may, may have that same feeling.

13. 24:16 – 27:57

    Sports as a laboratory for constraints: rule experiments and technology rollbacks

    1. AGAdam Grant24:16

       I, I, I have to say, it's remarkable that we've had an entire conversation without talking about sports.

    2. DEDavid Epstein24:21

       [laughs]

    3. AGAdam Grant24:22

       And you kind of burst onto the scene first and foremost as a sports journalist, as-

    4. DEDavid Epstein24:26

       Mm-hmm

    5. AGAdam Grant24:26

       ... you know, an expert on how we pursue excellence as athletes, um, and in fitness. And I'm just curious, we've watched a lot of sports evolve, um, in, in part adding constraints. Major League Baseball-

    6. DEDavid Epstein24:39

       Mm-hmm

    7. AGAdam Grant24:39

       ... uh, has been a huge example of that recently. I think there are a lot of people complaining that the basketball season would be more fun to watch if there were more limitations. I think the main constraint some people are asking for is just we want fewer games so they, they're higher stakes.

    8. DEDavid Epstein24:53

       Mm-hmm.

    9. AGAdam Grant24:53

       But I guess I, I would just love to hear you riff a little bit about, you know, you get to be the commissioner of any major sports league, and you have this lens that constraint can, you know, can be liberating. Uh, what are, what are the first few things you would love to experiment with?

    10. DEDavid Epstein25:08

        You know, for my sport of track and field where I was most competitive, I would take away the super shoes and the sodium bicarbonate and all those things and the wave light and all these technological performance enhancers and see what people would run with, like, the shoes that, you know, running on cinders that, like, Roger Bannister ran with in the '50s.

    11. AGAdam Grant25:22

        [laughs]

    12. DEDavid Epstein25:23

        Um, and so I would like to see that in every sport where if we went back to old technology, i- as long as it's not gonna hurt anybody, right? Then if we went back to old technology to see, like, what does this look like? How, how does it compare? And would have instead of an All-Star game, which I don't find to be that entertaining at this point, I would have a game where I would, like, take away something that the teams are used to. You know, in basketball it would be-

    13. AGAdam Grant25:49

        Line of folded

    14. DEDavid Epstein25:49

        ... a limited number of dribbles or no three-pointers. No three-pointers, right? Let's go the opposite of the way that the analytics revolution has done. So I think I would use those All-Star game and exhibition games to, um, do things a- as, as an exploration tool and see, you know, what's something that could be re- really, really different here.

    15. AGAdam Grant26:06

        Oh, that would be so fun. I would watch the All-Star game where you can only shoot threes.

    16. DEDavid Epstein26:10

        Yeah, I mean, I think that you could come up with all sorts of things that would be really interesting to see them, uh, you know, to, to see them do.

    17. AGAdam Grant26:16

        An all hook shots game.

    18. DEDavid Epstein26:18

        [laughs] All hook shots game. I don't know if that would be my personal, but that-

    19. AGAdam Grant26:22

        They bring back Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

    20. DEDavid Epstein26:23

        Yeah, maybe the game, all the games would have to be played in the style of an individual player, right? So it's like, uh, the Caitlin Clark game. Everyone has to shoot from the logo at all times, like you can't pass, uh, get closer than 40 feet to the basket.

    21. AGAdam Grant26:35

        You could even vary by quarter. Like, you have a different constraint for each quarter, and then you get to see different kinds of styles and players shine.

    22. DEDavid Epstein26:42

        I think that'd be fun. I mean, and there's some, there's some research where actually athletes will experiment more productively if you do... Y- like, let's say if you deflated the ball a bunch and you'd see how people would have to start passing in really fast network. You know, you could, you could do things like that that I think would be really interesting. Or made it heavier where they couldn't throw it as far, so they had to do, like, more picks in coming to one another. I think you'd find that people would, uh, explore some things that would turn out to be fruitful.

    23. AGAdam Grant27:07

        I, I, I think this is brilliant. I think this should happen. It reminds me of one other idea which my, my diving coach, Eric Best, came up with and I thought it was ingenious. He proposed that the Olympics should have relays that are age bound. Um, so you have to have one runner or swimmer in their 20s, one in their 30s, one in their 40s, and then one 50 plus.

    24. DEDavid Epstein27:29

        Hmm. Interesting.

    25. AGAdam Grant27:29

        And I think that would be so much more fun to watch.

    26. DEDavid Epstein27:32

        That would be great. I think that would be awesome. And you know, and there should be a little more experimentation, I think, to make some of this stuff interesting. You know, there's a lot of lip service to the things that sports can do for us, and I think many of those are true, but some of them I don't think just happen by accident and that we could actually, like, cultivate them more, uh, than, than we do. Just so that I can give up some of my own scheduling freedom to have some, uh, uh, like grounding in, in the real world.

14. 27:57 – 32:38

    Lightning round + rethinking habits: ‘good enough’ rules and not starting with email

    1. AGAdam Grant27:57

       All right, let's go to a lightning round. First question is, what is the worst advice that people get about constraint?

    2. DEDavid Epstein28:03

       To think outside the box because that usually means to people, like, brainstorming without a defined problem.

    3. AGAdam Grant28:12

       Yeah, it means, it just, it's vaguely saying don't be obvious.

    4. DEDavid Epstein28:16

       Don't be obvious, right.

    5. AGAdam Grant28:17

       Now what?

    6. DEDavid Epstein28:17

       And the best way you could do that is to put a constraint in that blocks the solution that you're used to, which is a pretty serious constraint.

    7. AGAdam Grant28:23

       What is your favorite advice on how to create a productive constraint?

    8. DEDavid Epstein28:28

       Setting good enough rules for most of your decisions so that you accept something that is good enough, um, because this helps you avoid Fredkin's paradox, the idea that you will spend most of your time and energy on decisions where the options are the, so close that you can hardly tell the difference, and that's where your decision matters the least, but that's where we spend the most energy. So setting good enough criteria and just making a decision instead of agonizing.

    9. AGAdam Grant28:52

       As Barry Schwartz likes to say, "Choose when to choose."

    10. DEDavid Epstein28:55

        Choose when to choose. Co- consolidate your caring.

    11. AGAdam Grant28:58

        Yes. Good. Okay. You're organizing a dinner party of people who are masters of constraint throughout history. Two questions. First one is, who are you inviting?

    12. DEDavid Epstein29:08

        Well, definitely, I mean, I would invite Tony Fadell, who was the lead designer of the iPod and the co-founder of Nest, because [laughs] when I first called to interview him, he was like yelling at me, "If you don't have constraints, create constraints." He's such a, um, zealot for constraints. I think I would also invite, uh, Bach, the, you know, most important composer who ever lived as decreed by other composers. Actually, Tyler Cowen's made the argument that he is the most, the greatest creator of any kind ever if you look at his output. And he was just, he's again, absolute zealot for c- self-imposed constraints. So he would pick, pick forms where he would take just like a tiny musical phrase and just torture it in every way possible, including encoding his own name, B flat ACB, which in German musical notation is BACH, putting his own name into the music and then just manipulating it in all these different ways and boxing himself in more and more and more, and that's what kind of forced him to do things that had never been, um, never been seen before. Um, Claude Monet, who changed art by deciding that he would, A, not use black. Like, he banned black so much that when there was a black shroud over his coffin at his funeral, one of his friends started screaming, "No black for Monet," and went into a house and got like a floral, uh, tablecloth and put it over, uh, his coffin instead.

    13. AGAdam Grant30:29

        Wow.

    14. DEDavid Epstein30:29

        And Monet said That this was sort of based on an emerging science of perception, that I'm not going to use dark and light shades. Um, instead I'm just gonna put pure color but in close proximity to one another and see if I can get people to perceive, um, any, any sort of impression of light, hence im- impressionism. So I think Bach, Monet, uh, Fidel. I'd be interested to have Einstein just because I'd wanna argue with him a little bit because his... Right, that's not a good spot for me to be in, arguing with Einstein, but [laughs]

    15. AGAdam Grant31:00

        Yeah, not unlikely to win, but keep going.

    16. DEDavid Epstein31:02

        Yeah. But really, if you look at his work, and it's in his papers, he's actually picking up these incredibly narrowly defined problems that other physicists threw down and offering different explanations for them. And so I think I'd wanna talk to him a little bit about, like, maybe, do you think maybe some of those thought experiments that you started describing many decades after they supposedly happened might have given some of the wrong impression? Uh, I'd just be curious to see what, what he might think about that.

    17. AGAdam Grant31:26

        That's a hell of a dinner party. [laughs] Tell me something you rethought while you were writing this book.

    18. DEDavid Epstein31:30

        Definitely some of my work habits. I decided not to ever start my day with email. And in fact, I often started using email only after my important workday. That did have some negative consequence, like I did end up missing more messages than I used to in the past. But it did allow me to focus in a way, um... Because typically I w- I started first with email. I was like, it's not, it's like something concrete that I know I'll be getting something done, where sometimes my book writing tasks are kind of more amorphous.

    19. AGAdam Grant32:01

        It's a warm-up. Builds your confidence-

    20. DEDavid Epstein32:01

        Yeah

    21. AGAdam Grant32:02

        ... momentum, yeah.

    22. DEDavid Epstein32:03

        But it, it never ends. And so it always left me with, like, a list of a million things that I felt like I had not attended to. And so I think, you know, working on my own home office and everything, work can have a tendency to eat up the whole day.

    23. AGAdam Grant32:16

        It's, it's great.

    24. DEDavid Epstein32:17

        And I think I thought for my first two books that some of my competitive advantage was that I would work all day, and I actually don't think that was an advantage in the long term. Like, I think I needed periods of recovery to think better. So I rethought my kind of like puff up my chest idea of I can work all day, and that's gonna be the best. And so, you know, it requires a little bit of an identity change, but I think it's better.

15. 32:38 – 37:53

    Office hours: reframing ‘give up freedom’ as balancing autonomy with connection and security

    1. AGAdam Grant32:38

       Okay. Office hours time. Do you have a question for me?

    2. DEDavid Epstein32:42

       Yeah. So I was thinking about, like, a lot of the low friction things we do can be really bad for us as individuals, as a society. Like, it's so easy to have groceries delivered or have food delivered. It's so easy to call up the, uh, uh, to have the entertainment that's just completely fed to me. Um, it, it, it's so easy to have an individualized life for one, basically. We know that's not good for thriving, like where w- we're often not as anchored in our community as might be good or with real people in the real world. But it's really hard to get people to say, "Give up some of your freedom for this sort of more amorphous, more abstract thing." Like, how do you go about telling people or trying to convince them they should actually give up some of their freedom and it will be better for them? Because it's higher friction, it doesn't feel good, so I think it's a hard sell.

    3. AGAdam Grant33:30

       Oh, this is a fun question to, to think through. I'm gonna define the problem differently.

    4. DEDavid Epstein33:34

       Okay.

    5. AGAdam Grant33:35

       I don't think you have to convince people to give up their freedom, nor do I think you're gonna succeed if that's your goal.

    6. DEDavid Epstein33:41

       Right. Right. [laughs] That's a lo- that's a, that's a losing press release there. Sorry, Tommy. [laughs]

    7. AGAdam Grant33:44

       [laughs] Like what, what is more American, what is more Western than the value we place on our freedom?

    8. DEDavid Epstein33:49

       Yeah.

    9. AGAdam Grant33:50

       I find myself wanting to encourage you to look at this from a completely different angle and say, I don't think the goal is to give up freedom. I think the goal is to say, "Where do I need freedom? Where is it important to me?" 'Cause we don't want freedom in every part of our lives. No one would ever get married if people-

    10. DEDavid Epstein34:10

        Right

    11. AGAdam Grant34:10

        ... wanted freedom, you know, complete freedom romantically. No one would ever take a job that, you know, was more than a day or a week or a month contract.

    12. DEDavid Epstein34:19

        Mm-hmm.

    13. AGAdam Grant34:20

        And we do those things because we value security, we value connection, we value commitment. And so what, I guess the way that I would want to approach this problem is I would wanna think about freedom in tandem with other values that people hold dear. And instead of saying, "Give up your freedom," say, "The way that you're pursuing freedom is actually causing you to compromise your interest in connection and commitment. It is jeopardizing your-

    14. DEDavid Epstein34:47

        Mm-hmm

    15. AGAdam Grant34:47

        ... desire for predictability and s- and security. It is potentially undermining your ability to be supportive of other people and make a contribution." And so I think that this is, you know, ironically, given where our conversation went earlier, I guess my, my, my nudge to you is think about this as an addition, not a subtraction.

    16. DEDavid Epstein35:08

        Mm, mm. No.

    17. AGAdam Grant35:08

        Think about this as a how do I elevate other values that need to exist in tandem with freedom rather than trying to lower the importance people place on freedom.

    18. DEDavid Epstein35:18

        Mm-hmm. That's a, that's a great way to frame it because obviously, like, give up your freedom is a loser, [laughs] especially in this country, but a loser in general, right?

    19. AGAdam Grant35:25

        It's provocative.

    20. DEDavid Epstein35:26

        To, to help people... But it's a loser. It's provocative, but it's a loser. Um, but to help people see that there are these other values that they have, um, that just necessitate syncing with other people's schedules, you know? But, um, like when I, when I started going to these, even these dance meetups I started going to, it's like kind of annoying to get there and everything, and it's on somebody else's schedule. But otherwise, I was having no embodied experience with strangers at all, and that is something that I really wanted to have. So, you know, I would be thinking about it in that framing much less as-

    21. AGAdam Grant35:58

        Yeah

    22. DEDavid Epstein35:58

        ... well, this is kind of an annoying thing where I'm giving up some schedule autonomy as this is a really important value to me. Th- this is a place where I'm choosing to, uh, have an anchor or a schedule annoyance or, or whatever it is.

    23. AGAdam Grant36:09

        Yeah. And I, I almost wanna look at that through the lens of the, the Schwartz values circumplex or, or values wheel, where, you know, I, I'm sure you know the research where he identified roughly, you know, eight to 10 core values that exist in every major culture around the world. And you see that, you know, there are other values that autonomy, you know, sort of goes hand-in-hand with, like-

    24. DEDavid Epstein36:32

        Yeah

    25. AGAdam Grant36:32

        ... pleasure.

    26. DEDavid Epstein36:33

        Mm-hmm.

    27. AGAdam Grant36:34

        But, you know, it, it's sort of, you know, often in tension with, um, anything that connects you to a collective, uh, whether that's tradition, whether that is, you know, community and friendship, uh, whether that might be some degree of, you know, helping others. And even the pursuit of certain kinds of pleasure requires us to say, "Okay, I wanna balance out freedom with, you know, some degree of security and controllability and predictability."

    28. DEDavid Epstein37:01

        Yeah.

    29. AGAdam Grant37:01

        And I, I think that, you know, as, as you get people thinking about those kinds of examples where they're not giving up freedom, they're just, you know, they're, they're choosing to have freedom within, uh, you know, a particular bubble as opposed to-

    30. DEDavid Epstein37:14

        Yeah, yeah

Episode duration: 37:53