789: The Counterintuitive Secret to Creativity and Focus, with David Epstein

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:00]:
Kind of seems like we should be the most focused, creative, and innovative when we’re the freest to do whatever we want. Turns out it’s pretty much the opposite. In this episode, why constraints make all the difference. This is Coaching for Leaders, episode 789.

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:20]:
Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, Maximizing Human Potential.

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:29]:
Greetings to you from Orange County, California. This is Coaching for Leaders, and I’m your host, Dave Stachowiak. Leaders aren’t born, they’re made. And this weekly show helps leaders thrive at key inflection points.

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:43]:
I think one of the things that we often think about as leaders is how do we empower people in the best possible way? How do we help them to be creative and innovative and to give them as much freedom as we can to bring the best version of themselves into the workplace? And those good intentions sometimes work against us. Often, what we think about is freedom, and giving people the ability to do whatever they need to do in their work isn’t as helpful as some of the healthy constraints can be. And today’s conversation is going to help us to do a better job at leading to really tap into the creativity and innovation that so many of us seek in our organizations. I’m so pleased to welcome David Epstein to the show. David is the author of the New York Times number one bestseller Range and, The Sports Gene, both of which have been translated into more than 30 languages. He was previously the host of Slate’s popular “How To” Podcast and a science and Investigative Reporter at ProPublica. His TED talks have been viewed more than 10 million times.

Dave Stachowiak [00:01:42]:
His newest book is also a New York Times bestseller, Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better. David, what a pleasure to have you on.

David Epstein [00:01:51]:
Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I’m glad to be here.

Dave Stachowiak [00:01:54]:
I’m sorry to do this to you, but I’m going to take you back to middle school here to start our conversation. And the reason is, is because you had a pretty substantial injury in middle school that you write about in this book, and it really does inform a number of the lessons that you are teaching us and helping us to get better at this. And I’m wondering if you could take us back and share what happened and how it has changed how you think about it today.

David Epstein [00:02:24]:
Yeah, sure, and there’s, there’s a little more of me in this book than the previous two. And so this, this story earlier in the book, I talk about in 8th grade, where I was quite a good athlete, playing a lot of different sports. And it was essentially the only thing that mattered to me was sports at the time. And in a game of schoolyard football, where I was playing quarterback, I threw a ball. I actually was throwing the kickoff actually in this, which is how we played it at that time, and threw a ball as hard as I could. And on the follow-through of the throw, my arm snapped in a spiral, just the upper arm bone straight through.

David Epstein [00:02:59]:
A pretty gruesome injury. I’ve only ever seen it one other time in a major league pitcher. And he had to have his arm amputated.

Dave Stachowiak [00:03:05]:
Oh, wow.

David Epstein [00:03:06]:
Somehow, I got away without that. And we’ll never really know what exactly happened. So they theorized that there was some kind of bone weakness or maybe an air pocket in my bone. But once the break happened that- the evidence disappeared, so we’ll never know. And it led to a few changes in my life. First of all, I was devastated because sports were the sun around which my 8th-grade life orbited.

Dave Stachowiak [00:03:28]:
Yeah.

David Epstein [00:03:29]:
And I was, I was barred from contact sports for a year. So two things started to happen. One, I couldn’t use my writing hand in school. And I had these quizzes. Kind of the bane of my academic existence at the time were these, these French tests, where in French class you had to listen to audio of a native speaker and track it on a worksheet. And then there’d be a blank, and you had to catch the word and fill it in in the blank. And I was mediocre at this.

David Epstein [00:03:59]:
And once I had my- After I broke my arm, I had to have my arm, my writing hand strapped to my torso for several months. And so I couldn’t even close to keep up with my left hand. And so I started trying to memorize the words as they whizzed by, using mnemonic devices, you know, attaching it to things in sports, basically. And I started acing these tests, and then I would just memorize all of the words, and then I would just slowly go back and fill them in with my left hand. And I was acing them for the first time.

Dave Stachowiak [00:04:24]:
Huh.

David Epstein [00:04:25]:
I started using these memory devices, mnemonic devices, attaching information to other ideas in school, in general, and started performing much better. And I use it to this day. I’ll memorize an hour-long keynote talk word for word. I ad lib off. I feel free to ad lib off of that, but I’ll memorize it. And people ask, you know, do I have a photographic memory? And things like that. And 30 years later, I read one of the most famous studies of memory ever done, where a Carnegie Mellon undergrad was taken from being able to memorize seven digits in a row to being able to memorize 80 digits. And he, too, was using sports-related mnemonics.

Dave Stachowiak [00:05:01]:
Oh, interesting.

David Epstein [00:05:02]:
So it was this, this limitation forced me to come up with a new strategy in school and then in my athletic life. Because I couldn’t do contact sports, I started running, and that’s something I never would have explored otherwise. And I ended up becoming a Division 1 runner and a university record holder. And it’s still in a hugely important part of my life. And so that constraint of my broken arm launched me into productive exploration that I never would have attempted if left to my own devices, both in school and in sports.

Dave Stachowiak [00:05:35]:
There’s a quote that starts the book, actually, even before the book starts. It’s from Nobel laureate Herbert Simon. He says: “It is a myth, widely believed, but no less mythical for that, that people are most creative when they are most free”. Tell me about that myth.

David Epstein [00:05:54]:
That is, in fact, in an international survey by psychologists of known creativity myths. So these are things we know from research are not true. The most popular one was that people are most creative when they are most free. And that seems intuitively true, right? That the more space you have to operate, just the more room your imagination has to fill it and go somewhere new. But in fact, because of the way our brains work, it’s kind of the opposite. So as the cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham likes to say, you may think that your brain’s made for thinking, but it’s actually made to avoid thinking whenever possible, because thinking is energetically costly. So what your brain wants to do is take the convenience solution or the first thing that comes to mind, or what neuroscientists call the path of least resistance. Basically, doing, what the same thing that you’ve seen done before. And so if you want to be creative, you actually have to have that blocked.

David Epstein [00:06:52]:
And so one psychologist has started to refer to this as the “Green Eggs and Ham effect”. And she named it that way because Dr. Seuss, Theodore Geisel, Dr. Seuss famously wrote the book Green Eggs and Ham on a bet with a publisher that he couldn’t write a children’s book using only 50 words. And that restriction forced him to experiment with rhythm because he couldn’t be expansive with vocabulary. And that’s where he, he alighted on this kind of rollicking rhythm that gave birth to a new kinds of children’s literature. So that’s just emblematic of the fact that we really need to block the convenient paths if we want people to be creative.

Dave Stachowiak [00:07:28]:
Thinking about what you just said of like, we tend to follow the path of least resistance, unless something stands in our way. And there’s a really interesting effect, which I had never heard of, that you talk about in the book “Einstellung Effect”. Am I pronouncing that correctly?

David Epstein [00:07:42]:
That’s right, yeah. The “Einstellung effect”. That is a term in psychology that refers to the fact that once you’ve solved a problem a certain way repeatedly, you will continue solving problems that way, even if the problem has changed or if there are better solutions available. So it’s a little bit like the psychology version of if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So you’ve done it one way so many times with not that much variation, you’ll keep doing it that way even if you shouldn’t.

Dave Stachowiak [00:08:11]:
Which is great in a world that doesn’t change. Right?

David Epstein [00:08:15]:
That’s right. And I would argue, in some generations past, there was more that was more okay to only have a hammer. Where the work world wasn’t changing as rapidly as it has been for the past few generations. But now, to thrive in this, by almost any metric, the world of work is changing at an increasingly fast rate. And so now we have to do a lot of what psychologists call transfer, which is taking your knowledge and skills and applying them in situations or to problems that aren’t exactly like the ones that you’ve seen in the past. And so in that kind of world where it requires adaptable thinking, the Einstellung effect, that bias to use the same solution over and over, even when the situation has changed, can be very unhelpful.

Dave Stachowiak [00:09:01]:
There are some incredible examples of organizations and systems that have done this so well to be able to drive creativity, and innovation, and movement. But perhaps we start with an organization that didn’t do it well, an organization that I think most people have not heard of because of its spectacular failure at being able to really do things well despite every, despite every privilege, really. It’s an organization called General Magic. Could you tell us a bit about the history and what is it that went wrong with how they approached their work?

David Epstein [00:09:34]:
Yeah, yeah, this is right. This is a story about the problem of overvaluing freedom. And I like to call General Magic the most important company that nobody’s ever heard of, not because of what they did, but because of the people that came out of it. But this was a company that in the mid-1990s became this first so-called concept IPO in Silicon Valley history, meaning Goldman Sachs took them public without a product, just with an idea, because their vision was so incredible. It was founded by three former Apple employees, two of whom designed the original Mac, the third of whom his job inside of Apple was looking at the future of technology. And he was an incredible visionary. I mean, he coined the term information economy in the mid-1970s. I read his PhD dissertation, Stanford, 1976.

David Epstein [00:10:20]:
And he saw the next half century of technological transformation in almost unbelievable, with almost unbelievable clarity. And so in 1989, this guy, his name Mark Peratt, he draws in a notebook a thin glass rectangle with no protruding buttons and a touchscreen with rectangular apps on it and calls it remotaphone Pewter. And I mean the pocket crystal was his, was, was sort of his, his branding name for it. And it was basically the iPhone a generation early. And I mean it looks just like it. And this is 1989, the web didn’t exist yet. Only 15% of American households had computers.

David Epstein [00:10:58]:
And because the vision is so obviously inspiring and correct, money flows in, talent flows in. Every big telecom company in the world wants a piece of it. So they form this huge alliance that’s so big that their meetings have to start with an antitrust lawyer listing all the things that they’re not allowed to talk about. And there’s plenty of innovation internally, but because they have so much talent and so many resources, they can do anything. And so they do do anything. Every idea that someone has, they add it on and it gets bigger and bigger. And meanwhile, they don’t have a clear sense of who their customer is. They called their customer Joe Sixpack.

David Epstein [00:11:36]:
And turns out nobody really met the guy. Nobody stopped to define who that was or what problem they were solving. And so the project just grew and grew and grew out of control. They’re missing deadlines. And when this personal communicator finally came out, it was nobody. It was, it had so many features, nobody could really figure out what they were. It came with a 200-page manual. Nobody could really figure out what problem it was supposed to be solving.

David Epstein [00:11:58]:
And it was a massive, massive flop. I think there was an emblematic interview of how things worked at General Magic. I mean, the company went from stock price doubling on day one to basically worthless in two years. And, this engineer named Steve Perlman was supposed to create a calendar function, and he wrote it to go from 1904 to 2096, and checks it in and thinks he’s done. Then one of the team leaders comes to him and says, Steve, you gotta make this thing bigger. Somebody might write a historical app, okay? So he opens it up and writes it to go from year one to the future and thinks he’s done. Then another team comes to him, says, Steve, why are you starting with an arbitrary religious context? You should make it go back to the beginning of astronomical time.

David Epstein [00:12:37]:
So he opens it up again and writes a calendar function to go from the Big Bang into the future. Right? So it ends up taking months instead of the four lines of code that it would have been if they stuck with 1904 to 2096. And this was just emblematic of, they could do so much. So they did. Of the dozens of employees that I, former employees that I interviewed, I would say three-quarters of them said some version of “I just couldn’t figure out what not to do”.

David Epstein [00:13:02]:
They just didn’t have these boundaries. But the people that came out of there, especially the young people, were scarred and took these incredible lessons about the importance of boundaries and went and designed the iPod, and the iPhone, and Safari, and Nest, and eBay, and LinkedIn, and etcetera, etcetera. So the lessons turned out to be very impactful in the world.

Dave Stachowiak [00:13:20]:
Yeah, indeed. And it’s just really, it’s so interesting because oftentimes we run into a constraint. We don’t have enough resources, we don’t have enough people, we don’t have enough budget. And there are times that those are real constraints that are holding us back, but almost always when we run into them, our initial thought is this constraint is bad, and it’s hurting me, and it’s keeping me from being, or our team, from being as effective and productive and creative as we could be. And how interesting it is that a lot of the time it’s the exact opposite.

Dave Stachowiak [00:13:57]:
It’s actually that by having the constraint, if you use it well, can work towards you, and if you had more, that it wouldn’t necessarily go better. Evidence, General Magic, and so many other examples you talk about in the book.

David Epstein [00:14:09]:
That’s right. I mean, the venture capitalist Bill Gurley, when I was interviewing him, told me he said, ” We have a saying in venture, more startups die of indigestion than starvation. Too much, not too little”. Now, I think there absolutely can be too little. But I hope this book is kind of an emotional reframe for people dealing with limits, because that, if only I had more mindset, I think is in the abstract, that always seems right, but in practical terms, it’s often not the best for us. And I’m not saying there again, that there can’t be too much constraint.

David Epstein [00:14:44]:
But like, I think of one of the two of the really important things that constraints can, can, can lead to is forcing you to clarify priorities and launching you into exploration that you never would have considered otherwise. And I was thinking of one, one of the early readers of this book was a guy named Ed Hoffman, who was the first chief knowledge officer at NASA. So that’s kind of like a sort of a head psychologist, basically. And he told me, ” Oh, you gotta. I gotta tell you about this mission called LCross, where the engineering team ended up with about half the time and money they wanted. So what do they do? Well, first they whine, and then they said, if we’re going to get this done anyway, how would we do it? And they decided they couldn’t build from scratch. So they borrowed imaging equipment from army tanks and engine temperature sensors from NASCAR, straight out of NASCAR, and they built a probe that confirmed water on the moon”.

David Epstein [00:15:34]:
And that borrowing of technology that they were forced in became a central part of their process going forward. Now, had the time and budget been cut by three-quarters instead of half, would that have still been possible? Maybe not. But that, even that exercise of, you know, if we were still going to get this done, how would we do it? Led to this totally new type of thinking and performing.

Dave Stachowiak [00:15:53]:
There are organizations that have become so intentional about systemizing this, thinking about this strategically. Organizations that have done some incredible things. One of the examples you cite is Pixar and their strategy for how they approach ideas and concepts, and making a movie. And they, they have a framework called “three pitches”, which they use in context of this. How does that work?

David Epstein [00:16:23]:
Yeah, the three- So Pixar, I liked contrasting them to General Magic because they were working on their vision at exactly the same time, basically. And I think maybe we think of Pixar as this place of unfettered imagination, but in fact, it is a place of many fetters that channel ideas toward achievement. And that rule you mentioned, they have lots of cultural rules, and one of them is called the “three pitches rule”, where directors have to pitch three story ideas for approval. Because what they found is that if people only pitch one idea, they get attached to it. And their first idea usually is not their best idea. That’s actually another known psychological phenomenon called the “creative cliff” illusion, that we think our best ideas come first, but they typically don’t. And so this was not an option.

David Epstein [00:17:08]:
This was a rule that directors had to abide by. And I think part of the reason it works well is similar to what we talked about with that green eggs and ham effect, where you block the path of least resistance. So let me give you an example of the way that I adapted this for my own book writing, with Inside the Box, where, please, at the beginning of every chapter, I wrote the starting like I opened with what came to mind. But the thing that comes to mind isn’t necessarily the best. It’s just you have to get started, and it’s the thing on the top of your mind. And so I then crossed that out and forced myself to write two other openings for every chapter.

David Epstein [00:17:44]:
And that’s kind of painful because once you’ve started, you kind of, you get attached to the place that you started just because it’s on the page. But three-quarters of the chapter. So, 9 out of the 12 chapters, I ended up using either that second or third opening. And I only got to those because I basically crossed out the path of least resistance. And obviously I stuck with it three times. So I didn’t always think that my first idea was, was not the best one, but most of the time I thought that was the case.

Dave Stachowiak [00:18:12]:
Fascinating. It’s really, it’s interesting how, by intentionally slowing ourselves down by putting those constraints in place, it just forces us to think in different ways. And I was also struck by- You were featured on This American Life, I think, a podcast many people have listened to, certainly know of. And they have a really interesting process of how they put together an episode and uses a whole bunch of constraints, doesn’t it?

David Epstein [00:18:38]:
Yeah, yeah. I was, when I narrated about a 30, 35, it was about 35 minutes, this American Life episode. It was about a woman with rare muscle and fat-wasting diseases who recognized that condition in an Olympic medalist sprinter. And they, they became the subjects of research. But I had never written for radio before. And so here I was facing, doing 35 minutes for one of the biggest radio slash podcast programs in the world.

David Epstein [00:19:08]:
And so I write this story, it has lots of science in it. And they have this, this process called a read-through where you go, and you sit in a room, and some of the staff are there, and Ira Glass, who’s, who’s the head of the show, holds a stopwatch, and you start reading your narration and your, your producer will hit play on interview recordings, you know, wherever those would fit in. And then everyone around the table says what confused them. And so the first time I did this, first of all, I was seven minutes over time because I had no idea how to write for time. Yeah, but people were pointing out all these things that confused them because I was used to writing in print, where readers can slow down or look things up when it comes to scientific ideas in a way that they can’t when it’s whizzing by them in audio. And so I had, I put too much in a little like General Magic. Everything I thought was interesting went in, even if it was confusing.

David Epstein [00:19:56]:
But then what they do is they, the staff, they highlight spots that confuse them. They don’t tell you how to fix them, but you are required to address it. So you can’t say, like, I think this is clear, no problem, you’re required to address it, but then you’re left up to your own devices to address it. And then that process repeats. And every time you do a new read-through, they bring in one person who has never heard it at all, has no familiarity, and that person is asked what confused you. And then you do that as many times as it takes until the new person says, “Nothing. I got everything”. And so the system forces it, like it titrates the confusion out.

David Epstein [00:20:33]:
So even an audio narration beginner like me ended up producing this pretty incredible piece because that system spotted the blind spots for me and also focused my problem-solving where it needed to be.

Dave Stachowiak [00:20:47]:
One of the other fascinating constraints you highlight in your work is the constraint of teaching others how to do something. And I think about that especially because, of course, leaders are often coaching, mentoring, teaching things right? And you talk about something called the “protege effect” and how that shows up as a constraint in a positive way. Tell me a bit more about that.

David Epstein [00:21:10]:
Yeah, so this is a constraint in the sense of a frame that you’re forced to think about. And this is ancient wisdom, as the Stoic philosopher Seneca said: Docendo discomboose. By teaching, we learn. And of course modern psychologists have, have shown that to be true. And what they call the protege effect, which is this idea that when you teach something, just the, just the, even the thought that you’re going to have to teach something causes you to organize information more coherently in your brain while you’re consuming it. The best is if you actually do have to teach it. But in these studies where people are randomized to different conditions, even those who just think they’re going to have to teach but don’t end up having to do it, relate information in more ways in their brain that are more coherently structured, so as if they were going to have to teach it. And so it’s probably a really undervalued tool if we think of teaching only as for the benefit of the person learning, we’re really overlooking an incredible tool for helping us coherently organize information, which makes it more usable and stickier.

Dave Stachowiak [00:22:18]:
I know there are people listening who are having the thought I was having when I was getting into your work, and that thought was, “Well, how do I know if I’m allowing too much freedom with the people I work with, with the team, with the organization, and where are constraints sometimes too much?” And I guess if we take the first part of that first, what’s an indicator that maybe there is too much freedom, that you’re going down the path of a General Magic? Maybe not to that extreme, but the constraints aren’t there nearly as much as they need to be?

David Epstein [00:22:51]:
Yeah, I mean, based on General Magic and some of the other places I reported on, I would say one, if, if you’re starting to hear people, if you are asking them, having trouble figuring out what it is they should be doing, and more importantly, what it is they shouldn’t be doing, that I think is a problem. I think one really useful exercise, and I write about a genomics lab that did this in the book, where they made all of their current constraint, all their current commitments visible. Right? Like post-it notes on a wall. And immediately upon doing that, they saw that there were twice as many things in process as they could possibly get done, even in a best-case scenario. And I’ve tried that with some teams, and it, and it’s not always as dramatic as that, but every time, in the few times that I’ve seen this done, it does people do see there’s too much, we can’t possibly get to all this and that they’re medium priorities competing with high priorities. And so in this lab, they created a funnel on the wall and said okay, here we’re going to pare down. If we have to cut something in the next 30 days, what would it be? And they move some things out of the funnel, and then they created a rule, stop starting, start finishing, where you’re not allowed to start a new thing, whatever it is, before one in process is done.

David Epstein [00:24:06]:
And so I think that if you go through this exercise of listing current commitments and it’s clear that there are too many, then there’s too much freedom in the sense of there are not boundaries that are forcing people to clarify priorities in a way that channels their focus and energy. And that often is- So there are a few problems with too much freedom, but I think a major one is that it doesn’t force people to clarify their priorities. All that stuff they were doing at General Magic, all of it was cool, but they really needed to focus priority. They really need to figure out how to prioritize. I mean, they had a third-party app developer who created an app that you could make strokes with a stylus, and it would be turned into writing. And when it was clear that they were growing out of control, the project size, that developer took the app and said, I’m going to start my own thing. And all it was said, a clear customer problem.

David Epstein [00:25:01]:
Busy professionals wanted their contacts and calendars synced, and they want to take them on the go. And so I’m going to do just a memo pad, calendar, and contacts, period. So 3 of the bajillion things General Magic was already doing and turned them into a device. And that was the Palm Pilot. And it was a hit in the same era because the creator clarified what really are the priorities here. Maybe you can add other stuff later, once you’ve got the priorities done. Actually, a great story in this vein is Tony Fadell, who was one of the young people at General Magic, was scarred by the experience and then became a zealot for constraints. He co-founded the smart thermostat company Nest, and he forced the team to work inside a literal box where he had them prototype the packaging before the product.

David Epstein [00:25:43]:
Because he said, this is what our end user will see. And if it’s, if we can’t fit it on this box, then it clearly it’s not a priority, maybe we can do it later. But those exercises, to force priorities, because when there’s too much freedom and not enough boundaries, you get lots of competing priorities, and that can really harm people’s ability to focus their energies and problem-solving.

Dave Stachowiak [00:26:06]:
And speaking of Fadell, you talk about him in the book, and one of his invitations is “write down your hypothesis before you even begin” because there’s a tendency to go back and revise as things are changing. But if you actually start and write things down, I mean, to the point you just made with the funnel and showing your work. Speaking of middle school, right, showing your work, there’s something really powerful about that. And I was thinking back to what we were talking about earlier with Pixar at one point, I can’t remember who, but one of their competitors at the time when they’re starting off, purchases this massive supercomputer to try to help with animation and they do some back of the envelope math and just decide that actually it’s to their benefit not to make this investment, isn’t it?

David Epstein [00:26:51]:
Yeah, yeah. Ed Catmull, the co-founder of Pixar, who I spent time interviewing, his book was, would always do these estimation exercises. And in that situation you’re talking about, I mean, so Ed’s goal was to create the world’s first fully computer-animated feature film, which he eventually did in Toy Story. And years before that, when one of their competitors bought this Cray 1 supercomputer. And at first, he gets a little worried and says, oh gosh, do we need to chase them? And then the team does this calculation of how many, how many pixels would we actually have to animate to make a feature film of reasonable quality? And based on that calculation, they decide that their competitor would have to buy a hundred of those supercomputers and the cost would be a billion dollars. And so he says, all right, well, there’s no chance that’s happening. So they actually just made a foolish decision, and we’re not even going to worry about that. And we’re going to go on solving these smaller-scale problems en route to this big success. So doing these kind of estimates that kept them focused on what was the next proximate problem was kind of a hallmark of a 20-year-long journey from objects rotating on black screens to Toy Story.

Dave Stachowiak [00:28:03]:
Yeah. Thinking about what you said a moment ago, of just watching for, listening for when people are not knowing what to do, what not to do, some of those constraints aren’t in place. And the starting points for it, when you’ve worked with people and taught them how to get started on this, when you see someone leading a team or organization who starts to nudge in a direction where constraint is helpful, what’s one thing you see them either in their mindset or in their actions that helps to get moving in a productive way on this?

David Epstein [00:28:39]:
Well, first of all, one thing I think is really important is because constraints, I mean, even the word itself, is synonymous with something frustrating. Right? So inside the box, I’m sort of trying to do a bit of a rebrand of constraints, right? But I think because it has such a negative connotation, it’s really important for people to feel, often feel some agency like this isn’t just, you know, they aren’t just being put in chains for no reason and, or even if they don’t have any agency over determining what the constraints are, just that it’s, that it’s being explained to them. And so I think that’s a process that can be done. So, let me give you an example of one CEO who I think is really clever and is obsessed with constraints, and he really wanted to get his. As his business grew, things were going great, but also getting a little more unfocused as they were growing, and, you know, lots of new people coming in and everything like that. And so he started doing this exercise he called the Legacy constraint, where he’d ask his team, if we were going out of business in two years and nobody knew it but us, what would we do differently? And immediately people started saying, ” Oh, well, I’d stop focusing on X, and I’d start focusing more on Y, because that’s where the real value is”.

David Epstein [00:29:55]:
And of course, the culmination of the exercise is, well, maybe you should actually just do that now. And I think because he thought of this generative question to pose to people and kind of made them part of it, that then when it came to saying, okay, we are going to push some of those other things aside. It’s like people were more brought along in the thought process, so it wasn’t this mystery of all of a sudden we’re just laying these boundaries on you, and you’re forced into them. Even if someone is forced into those boundaries, they can often be good for them. But I think it can be difficult for morale if they don’t understand the thought process.

Dave Stachowiak [00:30:31]:
You alluded to this earlier, and I’d love to come back to it, of when are sometimes, constraints too much? Maybe the budget being half is helpful, but if it’s only a quarter of what it needs to be, there’s a point where there’s not only a diminishing return, but it becomes counterproductive. How do you know when a constraint is too much?

David Epstein [00:30:52]:
Yeah, it’s tough, right? This is the art part. But I think there’s one aspect where if we, in studies of creative problem solving, they’re usually when people are getting hemmed in initially first, if they’re given a blank page, they do poorly. And if they’re hemmed in, say in these studies of mechanical problem solving, well, you can only use these pieces from this larger set, and you can only use these pieces, and you have to make a piece of furniture or something. But then, if it goes to, you can only use these pieces, and you have to make a chair. That’s when creativity starts dipping again. So if you’re telling people the what and the how, I think a common one, one way I’ve seen a phrasing this in research was if the person says, ” Could I still surprise myself?” And if the answer is no, then you’ve gone too far.

David Epstein [00:31:43]:
The whole point is to help people think in ways that they wouldn’t have otherwise. And so if they’re so hemmed in that they’re basically being told how to do the thing, then that’s too much constraint. And there are other cases also where, I mean, probably the most familiar constraint to everybody is a deadline. And deadlines actually can be good or bad for creative problem solving. It depends specifically how they’re used. So if a deadline causes an individual or a team to start urgently multitasking in an effort to make it, that’s bad. If it causes them to urgently monotask and focus very specifically on a very important thing, then their creative problem-solving really improves. So there’s even devil in the details of how is this going to be used.

David Epstein [00:32:33]:
And so if you’re someone who’s setting deadlines and they’re tight, you want to make sure that the team or person is also being protected in a way where it’s leading them to monotask as opposed to leading them to multitask.

Dave Stachowiak [00:32:45]:
One big thing I’m hearing there is when the constraint gets put in place, be watching for what’s said, what’s done, what people are thinking about or doing right afterwards. And that’s an indicator then for, okay, is this constraint helpful? Is it counterproductive? It gets you starting to think that it’s not a one-and-done thing, it’s an ongoing process.

David Epstein [00:33:03]:
That’s right. And I think, I mean, I kind of don’t believe in magical tools in general. I sort of think the art of leadership involves taking some of these general principles. You know, how constraints can be useful and really knowing your own turf so that you can apply them in these idiosyncratic ways. Just like a, just like a coach with an athlete. I mean, I was a Division 1 800-meter runner, and everyone knows the training principles. There’s no secrets, and nowadays you just find them all online.

David Epstein [00:33:34]:
And yet it still really, really matters who your coach is, because they take all those principles and just in an ongoing basis, sort of tweak them to fit you and your situation. And so it’s not that there’s, even though you know what all the right principles are, it still requires a leader to keep watch on those and fit them increasingly well to your specific situation.

Dave Stachowiak [00:33:57]:
You talked to a ton of leaders in putting this book together and doing this research. I’m curious, as you did and went through the whole process of thinking about constraints, what, if anything, did you change your mind on?

David Epstein [00:34:11]:
Gosh, well, some big things. Okay. I thought that autonomy, and I can understand why this might sound bad. In fact, I got a really nice review for Inside the Box from the Wall Street Journal. Except it also mentioned that when I said this in the book, the author said she cringed, where there’s such a thing as too much autonomy. And I thought that with total autonomy and freedom, I would do my best work. So after Range, my last book, I became totally independent, and fast forward a few years, and I learned there is such a thing as too much autonomy. I was just having trouble figuring out what to focus on because I didn’t have a lot of structure.

David Epstein [00:34:48]:
I had individualized my own schedule in a way where it was very convenient for me, but it meant I wasn’t syncing up enough with other people. And so in the abstract, I thought I had reached the absolute pinnacle of being a writer, where no structure, everything’s up to me. But in practical terms, that left me just like the General Magic people, wondering, you know, I’m interested in tons of things. My problem isn’t not having enough ideas, it’s figuring out what to execute on. And with no boundaries, with no, no leader watching over me, I got so many ideas going in process that I wasn’t finishing anything. And so I realized I really needed, really needed to put some structure back into my life and work. And this book came out of that. There’s a lot of me search in this book.

David Epstein [00:35:32]:
I was writing the book that I needed, and I just never would have thought. And again, I know this sounds like this incredibly privileged thing to say. I just never would have thought there was such a thing as too much autonomy. And that could lead to something other than your best work. And now it seems obvious to me now, but it didn’t at the time.

Dave Stachowiak [00:35:48]:
David Epstein is the author of Inside the Box: How Constraints Make us Better. David, thank you so much for your work.

David Epstein [00:35:54]:
Thank you for having me.

Dave Stachowiak [00:36:02]:
If this conversation got you thinking, three other episodes that will help with some next steps. One of them is episode 207: How to transform your limitations into advantages. Mark Barden and his colleague years ago wrote a book called A Beautiful Constraint. It lines up so well with what David has talked about in his research in this conversation. And Mark and I talked about this, the reality that a lot of us tend to think about our limitations as obstacles. And Mark and, of course, David show that limitations, yes, obstacles, of course, but the right limitations, thought about the right way, can actually work to our advantage in so many situations if we’re willing to change our thinking about how we typically think about limitations and constraints and obstacles. Episode 207, a great compliment to this conversation. Also, recommended episode 513: Help your brain learn.

Dave Stachowiak [00:36:53]:
Lisa Feldman Barrett was my guest on that episode. One of the top-sided neuroscientists in the world, Lisa reminded us in that conversation that the primary objective of our brain is to keep us alive and to do it in the most energy-efficient way possible. Now, the reason that matters for this conversation is because, given all things being equal, our tendency is to follow the easiest path. That’s why constraints become so important, because if we’re just following the easiest path, it’s not necessarily the way that’s going to get us thinking creatively, innovatively. All the things we talked about in this conversation, and understanding some of the neuroscience behind it is so important. Episode 513 for more of that. And then finally, I’d recommend episode 666: Get people reading what you’re sending. Todd Rogers at Harvard was my guest on that conversation, and we talked about how to actually make it more likely that if you send an email or a text or show up in a webinar, people are going to pay attention to what you are sending out to them. And of course, no surprise, one of the big things is thinking about constraints and where do we bring them into our writing, or texting, or communication.

Dave Stachowiak [00:38:02]:
Episode 666, a great primer for that. So many wonderful principles from Todd you can put into practice immediately. All these episodes you can find on the coachingforleaders.com website, and I invite you today to set up your free membership at coachingforleaders.com, because it’s going to give access to the entire library of episodes that I’ve aired since 2011, all searchable by topic. Plus, it’ll give you access to my FocusFive message. It’s a new message this year that I have been sending out every single week. One email with five points that will be helpful to you. I’m zeroing in on a specific topic, set of resources, episodes, a series of questions, something I think will be able to be helpful to you immediately. You can put into practice right away. To get access to that, plus all of the other benefits inside of your free membership. Just go over to coachingforleaders.com, set up your free membership right there on the homepage, and you’ll have access to everything.

Dave Stachowiak [00:38:56]:
Coaching for Leaders is edited today, as always, by Andrew Kroeger. Next Monday, I’m glad to welcome Daniel Coyle to the show. We are talking about how to help a team flourish. Join me for that conversation with Daniel. Have a great week, and see you back on Monday.