The Art of Manliness - How Constraints Help You Focus, Create, and Finish

00:00:00.000 So our outdoor setup has always been one of those, well, we'll get to it eventually things.

00:00:03.500 It wasn't terrible, just a mix of older stuff that didn't quite work together.

00:00:06.560 The kind of setup you use, but don't really enjoy.

00:00:09.000 But lately with the weather being so nice here in Tulsa, we've been outside more and

00:00:12.480 it's finally felt worth fixing.

00:00:14.340 So I've been spending time on Wayfair, looking on how to upgrade our outdoor space.

00:00:18.520 What's nice about Wayfair is you can actually find everything in one place, seating, tables,

00:00:22.680 lightning, and you can sort through it quickly.

00:00:24.740 On Wayfair, you can filter by size, materials, price, and then read through tons of real

00:00:29.020 reviews, which helps you figure out what's actually going to hold up in a real backyard.

00:00:33.460 And Wayfair has so many options that you can put something together there that actually

00:00:36.620 fits how you use your backyard instead of just settling for whatever's available locally.

00:00:40.880 They also make it easy once you decide to purchase something, fast shipping, and options

00:00:44.580 for assembly if you don't want to deal with it yourself.

00:00:47.500 Wayfair makes it easier to finally follow through on upgrading your outdoor space.

00:00:51.440 Get prepped for patio season for way less.

00:00:53.760 Head to wayfair.com right now and shop all things home.

00:00:57.080 That's Wayfair.com, W-A-Y-F-A-I-R.com.

00:01:01.800 Wayfair, every style, every home.

00:01:04.780 Wayfair, every style, every home.

00:01:06.920 Our outdoor space has always been fine.

00:01:09.280 It worked, but it wasn't somewhere where you naturally wanted to spend time.

00:01:12.720 We got a couple mismatched chairs, a table that did the job,

00:01:15.480 stuff we kept meaning to upgrade but never got around to.

00:01:18.020 Well, lately, the weather started getting really nice here in Tulsa,

00:01:20.260 and we've been eating outside more.

00:01:21.920 And once you do that a few nights in a row,

00:01:23.440 you start noticing all the little things that could be better.

00:01:25.700 So I've been on Wayfair looking at ways to improve it.

00:01:28.420 Better seating, a table that actually fits what we need, maybe some lighting.

00:01:32.240 What I love about Wayfair is how easy it is to find things you want and need.

00:01:36.060 You can filter by size, price, materials, go through tons of reviews and get a clear

00:01:40.340 sense of what you're buying.

00:01:41.760 And they've got everything in one place so you're not piecing it together across a bunch

00:01:45.140 of different sites.

00:01:45.960 They've also got fast shipping and options for assembly, which makes pulling the trigger

00:01:49.560 a lot easier.

00:01:50.780 It just makes the whole process simpler so you can actually follow through on upgrading

00:01:54.340 your outdoor space.

00:01:55.700 Get prepared for patio season for way less.

00:01:58.680 Head to Wayfair.com right now and shop all things home.

00:02:02.100 That's Wayfair.com, W-A-Y-F-A-I-R.com, Wayfair, every style, every home.

00:02:09.980 Wayfair, every style, every home.

00:02:13.280 Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the AOM Podcast,

00:02:16.700 which since 2008 has featured conversations with the world's best authors, thinkers, and leaders

00:02:21.360 that glean their edifying, life-improving insights without the fluff and filler.

00:02:25.700 The AOM Podcast is just one part of the McKay mission to help individuals practice timeless

00:02:29.680 virtues through thought, word, and deed. Also, be sure to explore our articles in

00:02:33.780 artofmanliness.com, read the deeper dives we do in our Substack newsletter at dyingbreed.net,

00:02:38.680 and turn our content into real-world action by joining the Strenuous Life program at

00:02:42.200 strenuouslife.com. Now on to the show.

00:02:45.060 back in 2019 david epstein joined me to talk about his book range and why generalists often

00:02:57.780 thrive in a specialized world now he's back with a new book that explores a seemingly opposite idea

00:03:02.500 the power of constraints and inside the box david argues that limits deadlines boundaries and even

00:03:08.840 setbacks are often the very things that spark creativity sharpen focus and help us actually

00:03:13.720 get meaningful work done. Today in the show, David shares how, in a world of endless freedom

00:03:17.920 and options, constraints might actually be the thing you need most. He shares the surprising

00:03:22.260 true story behind the creation of the periodic table, explains how a broken arm changed the

00:03:26.360 course of his own life, and explores why giving people too much leeway can actually kill innovation.

00:03:31.480 We discuss what Pixar did right that doomed companies like General Magic got wrong,

00:03:35.320 why brainstorming sessions are usually ineffective, how to identify the bottlenecks

00:03:39.280 holding back your work and life, and why learning to settle for good enough may be the key to

00:03:43.380 getting more great things done. After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash

00:03:47.840 constraints. All right, David Epstein, welcome back to the show. Thank you so much for having

00:04:05.460 me back. So we had you on the show back in 2019 to talk about your book range, which is all about

00:04:11.620 being a generalist, the power of being a generalist and not focusing only on one thing.

00:04:16.600 You got a new book out. It's called Inside the Box. And this book is about the power of

00:04:22.200 constraints to accomplishing things, getting things done. How are these two ideas connected,

00:04:28.200 this idea of being a generalist and also embracing constraints? How are they related?

00:04:34.220 Yeah, as I know, on the face of it, it can seem contradictory from one book to the next,

00:04:38.960 but it's kind of responsive to a question I was getting from a lot of readers after range,

00:04:43.280 which was, all right, I've got these diverse experiences, this broad toolbox. Now what?

00:04:48.780 Like, you know, I'm having trouble deciding where to focus. And I put myself in that same boat.

00:04:54.040 And so there's a hefty dose of me search in this book. So it's really about how you channel

00:04:59.560 all those ideas, all those experiences into achievement and actually get something done.

00:05:05.100 And again, hefty dose of me search. I've been terrible in the past at putting useful boundaries

00:05:11.260 around my own work. So that's one reason why it's been so long. It's like six to seven years

00:05:15.940 between all my books. But what I learned in this book actually gave me a totally new process. And

00:05:21.100 so now I think if I write more books, I could probably do them in about half the time I did

00:05:25.360 in the past. All right. Well, let's dig into the ideas of this book because I thought it was

00:05:28.680 really interesting. What I love about your writing in general, what you do is you find these great

00:05:32.880 case studies from history that cuts across domains, sports, business, arts, technology,

00:05:39.060 to show these principles that you're highlighting in the book. You start off the book with two

00:05:45.180 stories that show how constraints can help us do big things. The first guy you talk about is this

00:05:50.840 Dmitry Mendeleev. How do you say his last name? Mendeleev. Mendeleev. Yeah, Russian last name.

00:05:55.840 Dmitry Mendeleev. He's the guy who created the periodic table that we've all seen in our chemistry

00:06:00.020 classes in high school. What's the usual story about how he came up with that idea?

00:06:05.600 Yeah, the usual story is that he was in the winter of 1869, he was looking for an order

00:06:11.920 for all the elements, you know, the chemical building blocks of the universe. And he worked

00:06:16.180 for three sleepless days and sensed something but couldn't find it. And finally he falls asleep and

00:06:24.380 he drifts off into the most impactful nap in human history. And he dreams about the elements

00:06:30.320 sort of swirling around and they snap together in this grid where as you move across it,

00:06:35.380 the chemical and physical properties of the elements repeat periodically, which is how it

00:06:39.880 got the name periodic table. And it's not just a poster that hangs in classrooms. It actually

00:06:44.100 pointed the way to where new elements would be. So gaps in the table showed us where to look for

00:06:49.240 new materials and motivated the underlying search for atoms. So what was the cause of this order?

00:06:54.060 So that's the typical story, that it's this incredible kind of dead end.

00:06:58.340 And then in a dream, he sees this vision and just wakes up and writes it down.

00:07:02.660 What's the real story, though?

00:07:04.440 Yeah, the real story.

00:07:05.660 So by the way, that's the story that I learned in college chemistry.

00:07:09.420 It's in Matthew Walker's Why We Sleep.

00:07:11.200 It's there to show the power of our brains freed from reality.

00:07:14.800 But the real story is completely different.

00:07:16.940 So that dream story absolutely did not happen.

00:07:19.180 What really happened was that Mendeleev had a publishing contract for a two-volume intro

00:07:25.320 to chemistry textbook, and he had only gotten eight of the then 63 known elements into volume

00:07:31.560 one, so he had to get the other 55 into volume two, and he had to do it in a way that was

00:07:36.740 logical for beginners, and he realized he couldn't continue the way he had been, describing

00:07:40.960 one element at a time, so he had to start looking for groups or families where he could

00:07:45.140 describe a representative family member and then sort of by analogy teach about the rest of the

00:07:50.920 group. And it was in doing that, that he started looking at the chemical world in terms of families

00:07:57.460 and found these groupings that actually had a much greater underlying meaning. So he was absolutely

00:08:02.720 not looking for a fundamental law of nature. He was looking for an organizational scheme for his

00:08:07.180 textbook, but that channeled his experimental thinking to start looking in a totally different

00:08:11.340 way that nobody ever had. All right. So he had two constraints there. So one was that, you know,

00:08:15.160 he needed to organize in a way that made sense for a beginner. That was one constraint. The other

00:08:19.040 one, he had a deadline, a book deadline. Yeah. That was the second deadline. Constraint of space,

00:08:23.720 constraint of time. Yeah. And there were other constraints even beyond that. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah,

00:08:27.220 it shows how once you have this tight constraint, it can get you to think in different ways to

00:08:31.300 actually do something pretty remarkable. You also talk about how a broken arm, your broken arm in

00:08:38.560 eighth grade changed the trajectory of your life and even helped you become a master memorizer.

00:08:43.920 What happened there? Yeah. So I was like a crackhead for sports when I was a kid. You know,

00:08:49.280 I just like that, that was the sun around which my, my world orbited and football, basketball,

00:08:57.180 baseball, the usual and playing. I could throw, I had a really strong throwing arm. And so I was

00:09:03.320 playing quarterback in some schoolyard football one day in eighth grade. And as the quarterback,

00:09:07.720 Like, instead of having kickoff, you just throw off as far as you can down the other side.

00:09:11.740 And my arm snapped on the follow through of a throw.

00:09:15.080 Nobody hit me.

00:09:16.220 It was touch football.

00:09:17.820 And it just snapped in a spiral.

00:09:20.220 So pretty crazy injury.

00:09:22.400 Like, in fact, nobody believed it was broken because I hadn't been hit.

00:09:26.620 And I could like feel my hand in places where it wasn't because I was rotating my shoulder,

00:09:30.640 but it was totally separated.

00:09:32.020 I've only seen this happen once before.

00:09:33.900 One other time, by the way, Major League Baseball pitcher, and he had to have his arm amputated.

00:09:37.260 but we'll never know the exact cause because whatever break happened to the evidence for

00:09:43.300 some bone weakness or something was then gone. But it led to these interesting things where

00:09:47.260 like in school, we had these French tests I had to take every week where you had to follow along

00:09:53.840 with a recording of a native speaker on a worksheet that had the transcript, except

00:09:57.740 then there'd be blanks and you had to catch them and fill them in. And I was okay. I was mediocre

00:10:01.940 at this. And then once I broke my arm, I couldn't use my writing hand. It was strapped to my body

00:10:06.060 for months. And so I realized I had to start memorizing the words and then go back and write

00:10:11.400 them all down slowly at once with my left hand. And so the way I started doing that was using

00:10:15.360 sports related mnemonic devices. Like I would hear a word and then I would attach it to some

00:10:19.080 sports fact or memory or image in my mind. And I started acing these things.

00:10:24.220 And so I started using these kinds of mnemonic devices, which we now know are like key to

00:10:28.960 improving your memory all over the place because I couldn't write quickly enough to remember things.

00:10:33.700 And I still use it to this day. I can memorize an hour-long keynote word for word in a few days

00:10:39.860 because I use mnemonic devices. And decades later, I would come across one of the most famous

00:10:44.340 studies of memory improvement ever done, where an undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon was taken

00:10:48.680 from being able to memorize seven digits to 80 digits. And surprise, surprise, he too was using

00:10:53.540 sports-related mnemonic devices to remember things. So it made me a better student. And

00:10:57.900 because I couldn't play contact sports for a year, I started running. And long story short,

00:11:03.360 I ended up being a college runner and a university record holder and all these things.

00:11:07.100 It's just, I never would have even tried the sport.

00:11:09.620 And that's what got me interested in physiology, which got me into writing because I was a

00:11:12.740 science writer for Sports Illustrated.

00:11:14.220 It's just all these things I never would have tried if I hadn't been forced.

00:11:18.080 And sometimes that's what useful constraints do.

00:11:20.920 They launch you into productive experimentation because the low friction path is blocked.

00:11:27.180 But see, that's counterintuitive because I think oftentimes we think in order to be

00:11:30.180 creative, accomplish big things, you got to get rid of the constraints. The idea of the dream,

00:11:34.820 well, you just let your subconscious percolate on it because there's no constraints there and

00:11:38.660 it'll just magically spit out this idea. But as you've shown, that's not the case. And you

00:11:45.060 highlight this one company that I'm sure a lot of people have never heard of that shows what happens

00:11:50.660 when you have no constraints. You just give everyone in the company or the organization

00:11:55.840 free reign to do whatever they want. This company was called General Magic. What was General Magic

00:12:02.740 and how did having too much money, too much creative license doom the company?

00:12:09.760 Yeah, I like to think of it as the most important company nobody's heard of and not important

00:12:12.940 because of what they ended up doing, but because of the people that came out of it.

00:12:16.420 But this was a company that starting in really the late 80s and then the early 90s was essentially

00:12:21.380 building the iPhone. And the internet didn't exist. 15% of American households had computers

00:12:26.340 at all. And they had so much buzz. It was founded by several designers of the original Apple

00:12:31.820 Macintosh. This other visionary guy from Apple named Mark Peratt became the CEO. And they

00:12:38.040 absolutely had the vision of what was coming in communications technology over the next half

00:12:42.780 century. Peratt, for his 1976 PhD dissertation at Stanford, it was titled The Information Economy.

00:12:48.480 He coined that term. And like when I was reading it in research, absolutely eerie. I mean, he saw

00:12:55.400 what was coming, the promise and the problems, you know, misinformation, inequality, all this

00:13:00.000 stuff. But the vision was so compelling. He was basically sketching a thin glass rectangle with

00:13:04.940 no protruding buttons and a touchscreen with rectangular apps in 1989. And the vision was

00:13:10.440 so obviously right that Goldman Sachs took them public in the first so-called concept IPO, where

00:13:15.680 they went public just with an idea, not a product to make this personal communicator.

00:13:20.560 And Peratt said the goal of raising so much money was to create heaven for engineers where

00:13:23.880 they were totally free. What more could anyone ask for? He said. And I think the answer was

00:13:28.840 a little less freedom because the company turned into a disaster. They had so much talent and so

00:13:35.680 many resources, they could do anything. And so they did. Every time someone had a good idea,

00:13:39.860 they did it. And the project got bigger and bigger and it became less and less coherent.

00:13:44.560 and they missed deadlines. And when they finally shipped something, it was a 200-page manual.

00:13:49.700 Nobody was really sure what they were supposed to do with it. There was one guy who I think

00:13:53.600 this interview was emblematic of the place, where this was an engineer named Steve Perlman,

00:13:59.120 whose job was to make a calendar function. And he wrote it to go from 1904 to 2096 and checked it in

00:14:03.980 and thinks he's done. Then one of the leaders comes to him and says, Steve, you got to make

00:14:08.280 this thing go back farther in case people write historical apps. Okay. So he makes it go back to

00:14:12.440 year one, checks it in. Then another team comes to him, Steve, why are you starting with this

00:14:17.040 arbitrary religious context of year one? You got to make it go back to the beginning of

00:14:20.340 astronomical time. So he checks it out again and writes a calendar function to go from the big bang

00:14:24.420 into the future. And it ends up taking months when it would have been four lines of code

00:14:28.880 if they just left it the way he originally had it. But because they could do all this stuff,

00:14:33.360 they did. And so the refrain when I was interviewing former employees from General

00:14:37.180 Magic was, I just couldn't figure out what not to do. General Magic, this story reminded me of

00:14:44.020 John Boyd. He was a fighter pilot who's had a big impact on military thinking. He came up with

00:14:50.520 the OODA loop, if you've heard of that. But there was a period where he was working with the Air

00:14:56.260 Force when they were redesigning one of the fighter jets. And Boyd was really big on

00:15:01.580 maneuverability. Like a jet needed to be highly maneuverable so you could get in position on your

00:15:06.940 enemy. And to do that, it had to be small, lightweight, et cetera. But what ended up

00:15:12.060 happening is, you know, this project was a project by committee and you had all these

00:15:17.540 corporate interests who wanted a, we want to get all of our technology in this thing as much as

00:15:21.800 possible. And they kept on adding and adding and adding to it. And they, of course, you know,

00:15:25.740 it's the government say like almost an unlimited budget. They just kept adding stuff to it. And

00:15:29.120 they kind of created this thing that was sort of an albatross and Boyd was like, no, we got to

00:15:33.760 strip this down and make something more efficient. But yeah, that's another example of when you have

00:15:38.380 no constraints on anything, things actually can get worse.

00:15:43.300 That really resonates. There's actually not long ago, the Wall Street Journal did a

00:15:47.700 front page story on why the US had gone from being the world's leader in naval shipbuilding

00:15:53.280 to being such a laggard that we're trying to outsource it. And basically, that was the story.

00:15:59.100 It was that there's so many cool things that could go on that we never stop making design

00:16:03.600 changes.

00:16:04.480 And so the thing never gets done.

00:16:06.440 And good designers often use a principle called design freeze, where you say, okay, we're

00:16:11.140 going to this point, this date, and then we're stopping, no more changes, and then we're

00:16:16.640 testing it.

00:16:17.580 Like we can't just change endlessly and you stop and you regroup and you collect your

00:16:22.860 lessons.

00:16:23.640 And I think there's a whole bunch of that in history and in a lot of government projects.

00:16:27.320 Like when I was reading about some of the history of government works, there was one phase under Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who was the Defense Secretary during Vietnam, where people would talk about paper wars.

00:16:38.300 There was like they had so much stuff, like paper moving all the time on projects, that it's like nobody ever had a point to stop and figure out what it was they had decided to do because they were always changing all the specifications.

00:16:51.640 Yeah. And I imagine this is only going to get worse with artificial intelligence or LLMs because

00:16:56.760 you can just generate new stuff. You're doing the vibe coding, right? You're like, oh,

00:17:01.040 it'd be cool if you had this feature. Here's prompt. I got the feature now.

00:17:05.640 The promise is incredible, but it has never been easier to do too much. And I've been seeing this

00:17:12.000 with... So for the last year, just to kind of educate myself, I spent a bunch of time with

00:17:16.320 one particular AI company that helps other companies implement AI. And one of the things

00:17:22.100 I saw is that a lot of companies said, we need AI, right? It's really alluring. Our competitors

00:17:26.900 have it. And so they implement and it sprawls and it turns into what researchers are now calling

00:17:31.580 work slop, where you just generate this insane volume of stuff that never gets finished or just

00:17:36.660 piles up at some bottleneck. Whereas the organizations that I think are having a better

00:17:41.620 run of it, start by mapping the jobs to be done or defining a problem and then saying,

00:17:47.160 how does the tool fit this problem? So they lead with the problem instead of leading with the

00:17:51.720 technology and having these sprawling implementations. Because it's just like

00:17:55.080 so much easier for people to start an infinite number of things that they will never finish now.

00:17:59.520 And I think that's a real challenge and why we're not seeing in many cases the expected

00:18:04.160 productivity benefits, even while adoption has been really rapid. Yeah. And you highlight research,

00:18:08.680 why we have this tendency to keep adding and adding and adding when we don't have constraints.

00:18:13.720 We actually have like a natural bias towards that. Like when we're given a choice to make

00:18:18.620 something better, humans typically like to add things. And so, yeah, like addition can be good

00:18:24.600 sometimes, but what is it about addition that tends to muck things up? I mean, I think we

00:18:29.640 talked about one of them. You just get the slop sort of stuff, but what else is going on there?

00:18:33.060 Yeah. I mean, you're right about that. This appears to be a hardwired bias.

00:18:37.800 So there's these series of studies that show that people will overlook solutions that involve

00:18:42.980 subtraction, even if they're obviously better, cheaper, easier, et cetera.

00:18:46.820 And it's actually called subtraction neglect bias.

00:18:49.700 So like in one of the fun studies, this researcher at the University of Virginia named Leidy Klotz

00:18:54.120 and his colleagues had people, he gave people this Lego structure and they were supposed

00:18:57.740 to bolster it so it would balance a masonry brick over the head of a stormtrooper action

00:19:03.100 figure.

00:19:03.360 and they could add as many pieces as they wanted, but they had to pay to add pieces.

00:19:08.100 And still most people added pieces and paid when just taking away one piece would have solved it

00:19:12.920 instantly because we're just not programmed to look for subtraction unless someone tells us

00:19:17.780 to do that. And so we pile more things on than can get done. And typically that leads to work

00:19:24.080 becoming extremely fragmented, which leads to people starting to multitask more. And that gives

00:19:31.340 a feeling of increased productivity. But we actually know that multitasking, since it's not

00:19:36.460 really possible, you actually have to toggle between things and your brain has to drop one

00:19:40.100 and pick up the other. And every time you do, there's a cost. And when you're doing it a lot

00:19:43.940 during a day, the cost compounds. And so you end up doing everything in sort of a mediocre way

00:19:51.380 because, and modern work is insidious at this, right? Like adding more to our plate,

00:19:56.000 more obligations, more dashboards, more meetings, all these things. And they cause people's attention

00:20:02.320 to be really fragmented, which makes them both worse at what they're doing, less likely to have

00:20:07.560 their priorities straight for what they're actually working on. And, and we now know from

00:20:12.200 physiological measures, much more stressed. Yeah. And I imagine it also adds complexity.

00:20:17.360 The more things you add, the more different ways things can interact and they might not interact

00:20:22.360 in the way that you planned on it interacting.

00:20:25.080 That's a great point.

00:20:25.760 And we underestimate that complexity systematically.

00:20:28.620 So this is like the famous Brooks's Law

00:20:31.480 about software projects,

00:20:33.260 where if you add people to a project that's already late,

00:20:37.380 you'll make it even more late

00:20:38.580 because we underestimate the costs of assimilating people

00:20:42.060 and the coordination costs between people

00:20:44.100 and all these sorts of things.

00:20:46.300 So yeah, complexity steals clarity.

00:20:49.520 I think of that famous story about Steve Jobs,

00:20:51.740 where when he was kicked out of Apple

00:20:53.360 and then we came back in the late 90s,

00:20:55.480 Apple was making,

00:20:56.340 people probably don't remember this much,

00:20:57.740 but at the time,

00:20:58.420 they had tons of different models of computers.

00:21:01.040 They were making printers.

00:21:02.160 They were making servers.

00:21:03.560 They were making this thing called the Newton.

00:21:06.240 Like they were just making a ton of stuff.

00:21:07.820 And he comes back and says,

00:21:09.540 what, like nobody knows,

00:21:11.460 we have no priorities.

00:21:12.660 And so he draws a two by two grid on a whiteboard.

00:21:15.280 On one side, it says consumer and pro.

00:21:17.400 And on the other, it's portable and desktop.

00:21:19.140 We're going to have four products.

00:21:20.560 That's it.

00:21:20.980 everything else is canceled. And people complained, right? Because it canceled things they were

00:21:24.940 working on, but it, it lent tremendous clarity to what they were actually doing and saved the

00:21:29.340 company. I mean, they were basically dead, about to die before that. And I mean, this not only

00:21:33.820 applies to work life, but it applies to people's personal lives as well. Our tendency is just to

00:21:37.600 keep piling on stuff. Our kids do more and more activities or we take on more and more responsibilities

00:21:42.420 with organizations we belong to. We want to do more and more vacations when sometimes the answer

00:21:47.800 is just like, you know what, we're not going to do those things this year because we just need

00:21:52.080 the buffer or the bandwidth to just relax and focus on other things. Yeah, man, proactively

00:21:58.620 choosing when to choose. So saying, you know, what are the things we're not going to do

00:22:03.720 is hugely important. But I think we often like push that kind of decision away because it feels

00:22:10.940 limiting. So I think we're often trying to escape situations that really force us to ruthlessly

00:22:17.580 clarify our priorities. Yeah. Because whether it's productivity tools or just being human and

00:22:23.800 not wanting to face our limited time, that I think we do a lot of things that help give us

00:22:29.460 the illusion that we can get everything done on some time span. But in fact, we need to face up

00:22:34.680 to our mortality and prioritize ruthlessly. We're going to take a quick break for your

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00:27:50.580 and now back to the show all right so a counter example you gave to general magic

00:27:57.040 of an organization that put constraints on themselves proactively so they could get stuff

00:28:04.040 done is pixar how did pixar work within constraints to eventually make toy story which

00:28:09.840 would go on to revolutionize animated filmmaking yeah i liked using pixar because their vision was

00:28:16.620 created at the same time as general magic and unfolded over about the same period basically

00:28:23.140 but unlike general magic so ed catmull who led pixar for many many years and was the co-founder

00:28:28.200 he also in the mid 70s decided he wanted to make the first fully computer animated feature film

00:28:32.980 initially he wanted to be a disney animator but it wasn't that great of a drawer so a little bit

00:28:36.080 of a problem and en route to making the first computer animated feature film which was toy story

00:28:41.180 Instead of jumping straight from big idea to big execution, like General Magic did, he was relentless. He and his colleagues were relentless about defining what is the next tiny step. Okay, here's the big vision, but what is the next tiny, tiny step? They were always making estimates of how many pixels will we need? You know, how many polygons will we need? Where's the technology now? How far does that mean it needs to go to get there? Okay, we're not there yet. So we're going to work on all these proximate problems.

00:29:08.540 And so it almost seems like when I was spending time with Ed, you'd almost seem like a killjoy in a sense, like, yes, we have this great vision, but we can't rush toward it. And so he was always keeping things as small as possible for as long as possible.

00:29:22.800 And that continued even once Pixar started making movies where they let directors stay in with a tiny team in story development for years, simplifying the core of a story because it's easy to make changes then.

00:29:37.660 And the costs only explode once you move into production.

00:29:40.460 And so they really prioritize staying as small as possible as long as humanly possible.

00:29:45.780 Yeah, it's amazing the difference between General Magic and Pixar.

00:29:48.920 Like Pixar worked within the technology they had.

00:29:51.320 yeah general magic got a you know a little head on their skis a little too forward on their skis

00:29:56.380 yeah and so i mean it's funny you can look at toy story like the first animated video or film that

00:30:02.120 pixar did was this thing called tin toy it was about this little toy figure and it was like the

00:30:07.020 precursor to toy story it was made in 1988 and it was only like five minutes long and it actually

00:30:13.880 looks pretty good i'll put a clip of it in the show notes um but they had to work with the processing

00:30:19.040 power that they had at the time, all that stuff. And so it had to be really short. And then they

00:30:23.500 built on that to the point where they can make a full length featured film. Those shorts, by the

00:30:28.740 way, I don't know if people remember, but if you went to Pixar movies in theaters, there were often

00:30:33.380 shorts, you know, five, 10 minutes that would run before the main film. And they used those

00:30:39.600 as their little labs, test new animation techniques, test new story techniques. So they

00:30:45.000 were constantly doing things in this really, really small way. Even though they had big ideas,

00:30:51.300 they were always looking for ways like, what is the smallest possible way we can try this thing

00:30:55.100 out? So it seems like they had a process established in order to avoid that bloat

00:30:59.920 and to maintain those creative constraints. Yeah. And they had a bunch of important rules

00:31:05.120 that were always changing because the staff were changing, the environment was changing.

00:31:08.640 But to go back to that calendar story that I told about General Magic, where it just got bigger and

00:31:14.080 bigger and bigger, even though it was not important. Ed told me about something at Pixar

00:31:19.660 they called the beautifully shaded penny problem, where directors or animators are super conscientious

00:31:25.420 and they want to get all the details right. And so they would be obsessing over the shading on

00:31:29.740 a penny that would be in the background of some scene that viewer would never even notice. And

00:31:33.360 they'd be working away on that for weeks and ignoring main characters that still need to be

00:31:38.080 animated. And so they came up with a system. Here's a high-tech system. Popsicle sticks velcroed

00:31:43.760 to a board where each Popsicle stick represented the amount of work that one animator could do in

00:31:49.380 one week. And if the director wanted those animators to keep working on that penny, then he

00:31:54.000 had to start taking Popsicle sticks away from some other character that needed to be animated.

00:31:58.240 And so again, it was a way to visualize the priorities and force them to be ruthless.

00:32:02.580 And General Magic had nothing like that. So they had all these minor priorities competing with

00:32:07.060 major priorities, nobody differentiating them. And so I think Ed and his team were great about

00:32:12.160 that, about forcing people into situations where they had to really clarify their priorities.

00:32:17.000 I imagine everyone's experienced that shading of the penny problem in an organization. Like

00:32:21.660 there's always a group of people or an individual that gets like, okay, this little tiny thing is

00:32:26.240 the most important thing. And it takes up like 80% of the time. You get tunnel vision, you know,

00:32:31.060 tunnel vision, like on those things, especially when it's your thing. Right. And you don't see

00:32:35.000 how it connects to the bigger strategy. You got to kill your darling sometimes. You also highlight 1.00

00:32:39.540 another organization that used constraints very effectively to put out a great product. And you

00:32:44.480 actually had an experience with this organization, This American Life, the famous NPR radio show with

00:32:49.900 Ira Glass, famous for their driveway moments where they have these shows you're listening to in your

00:32:54.740 car and then you get to your driveway and you want to keep listening. What did This American Life do

00:32:59.400 with constraints to create those driveway moments shows.

00:33:04.160 Yeah. Again, like Pixar, I think they had this system that I came to think of as

00:33:07.680 putting like bumpers in a bowling alley where you're not telling someone exactly what to do,

00:33:12.160 but you're keeping them trundling in the right direction. And I had a story pitch accepted by

00:33:16.820 them and I had to write a 35 minute radio script. The story was about a woman with two rare diseases

00:33:23.460 of fat and muscle wasting. And she identified one of them in an Olympic medalist sprinter

00:33:30.000 who had fat wasting and explosive muscle growth and felt like they shared some physiological

00:33:35.380 mechanism. She turned out to be right. So I'm supposed to write a 35 minute script on this,

00:33:38.860 and I've never written one second for radio before. And so I go in, I try to write a script

00:33:43.740 and, you know, we do some interviewing and the way it works is you do a read through where people

00:33:48.060 get together in a room and Ira Glass is holding a stopwatch, timing it, and you have your producer

00:33:52.420 are there, I'm reading the narration and the producer's hitting play on the audio anytime,

00:33:58.160 you know, it comes to an interview that we want to cut in. And so it's sort of like listening to

00:34:01.780 a rough draft. And at the end, people get to say what they're confused about. And in my case,

00:34:06.320 people were confused about a lot because I was used to writing a lot of scientific detail.

00:34:10.460 And in a magazine story, people can stop and go back over that. But when it's flying by in audio,

00:34:16.760 that's much more difficult. So people were confused and I was seven minutes over length.

00:34:21.260 So they identified all these points of confusion and you're obligated in their process to fix them

00:34:27.180 But they they don't tell you how they're not going to tell you how you have to do it

00:34:30.120 But you have to do it

00:34:30.920 You can't come back without having addressed people's confusions like you can't argue and say no

00:34:35.160 I think that was clear if one of them says it's confusing

00:34:37.300 You have to deal with it and then you come back for the next read-through and every time you do it

00:34:41.560 There's a new person who's never heard any of the material before

00:34:44.820 And that person gets to say what they were confused by and then you do that over and over and over until a new person comes in

00:34:51.240 and says, no, I got it all. That was all really clear. And you're not allowed to go on until

00:34:56.300 you've satisfied that. And it was an amazing process because it made a complete rookie like

00:35:01.240 me, like a total radio novice, look like a seasoned veteran because it just highlighted for

00:35:07.660 me all the points where I had to do problem solving. And once the problem to be solved is

00:35:12.300 made clear to you, it kind of empowers you to go off and be creative and do your thing.

00:35:17.080 Yeah. I mean, what it's interesting about that, they didn't solve the problem for you.

00:35:19.340 They gave you the constraints and then you had to figure out how to, how to solve it.

00:35:24.080 Yeah.

00:35:24.240 So it didn't feel oppressive because it was hard editing.

00:35:27.500 You know, at the time I was working at ProPublica as an investigative reporter.

00:35:30.780 And when I, I tried to bring this system over to ProPublica for the writers and they were

00:35:34.940 like, no, no, we, one editor is too much.

00:35:36.940 Nevermind this crazy process.

00:35:38.720 So, I mean, it's really intensive and hard because your impulses, you want to go, I did

00:35:42.640 a great job.

00:35:43.200 I think, you know, I want them to just love it.

00:35:44.960 And they come and say like, I didn't, I was lost on this or that.

00:35:47.760 but also you feel like you have a ton of agency like they're telling you things to do but it's

00:35:53.080 really up to you to then spread your wings as a problem solver within that and so it's actually

00:35:57.900 kind of a gift to have someone well define a problem for you and then unleash you on solving

00:36:02.660 it how long did that whole process take you to refine your piece for this american gosh did

00:36:07.980 that take it i mean it dragged over months because oh dang i was thinking maybe like a week or

00:36:13.340 something. No, no, no. So there are a few reasons for that though, because Ira's attention was at

00:36:17.980 a premium. So there were a lot of different stories going through this process at once

00:36:22.580 and mine didn't have like a time peg in the news or anything. Okay. So there was no need to

00:36:28.420 rush the read-throughs, but also since I was a brand new in radio, there were some cases where

00:36:33.240 somebody highlighted some confusion and I realized that the way to fix it was I had to go do some

00:36:37.880 more interviewing. And that often meant, you know, lining up schedules and recording and all these

00:36:42.580 things. So, so it went on. And again, it was a 35 minute piece and I was seven minutes over

00:36:47.380 on the first draft. So that necessitated a serious reorganization. But a major reason why it took a

00:36:54.100 long time was just, there's a whole bunch of these in process at any one time. And so you can't just

00:36:58.500 say like, tomorrow I'm doing a read through, you know, you sort of have to get Ira's attention

00:37:02.200 scheduled. Did that process going through that, did that change your writing at all?

00:37:06.800 It did change my writing. I think for one, it made me a lot more likely to look for a naive

00:37:11.760 reader and say, what's confusing you here? Not one of my own editors, you know, who has a lot

00:37:17.400 of similar knowledge in some ways to what I have. It also led me to simplify. So I think I had a

00:37:25.480 tendency if I find some scientific, you know, I, before I was a writer, I was training to be a

00:37:30.180 scientist and I switched careers. And I have a tendency, if I think some aspect of science is

00:37:34.320 really interesting to want to get it in no matter what, just get it in. Cause I think it's really

00:37:38.060 interesting. And I had to cut so much scientific stuff that I thought was interesting from that

00:37:43.600 This American Life piece. And yet the piece turned out amazing. It had probably the best response of

00:37:47.300 anything I've ever worked on, maybe like along with my previous book. And so I think it showed

00:37:55.040 me that the reader or listener doesn't know what's not there. And so what you have to make sure is

00:38:00.360 that the stuff that is there is interesting and really clear. And so I think it made me much more

00:38:05.400 aggressive in cutting back in the interest of clarity. Yeah. That this American life bit that

00:38:11.940 made me like, okay, I need to be better about my editing. Cause I, my, my wife edits all of our

00:38:16.780 writing and sometimes she'll be like, I'm confused here. I'm like, well, are you confused? Like,

00:38:19.940 cause it makes perfect sense in my head. What are you talking about? And she'll be like, well,

00:38:23.720 it could be confusing to a reader and it would be better if you rework these sentences like this.

00:38:28.280 And I'm like, okay, yeah, that is better. There you go. Yeah. Well, let's talk about the idea

00:38:33.180 of bottlenecks because you highlight a book that I read a long time ago and I forgot about,

00:38:38.420 but I still think about it. I still think about the ideas. This book is called The Goal. It's

00:38:42.920 all about thinking about our problems and looking for bottlenecks. So the big idea is if you want

00:38:48.460 to be more productive in anything, whether it's work, I mean, this focuses on manufacturing and

00:38:53.600 work, but I think it's applicable to your personal life as well. You got to look for bottlenecks.

00:38:58.420 Yeah. Tell us more about this idea in this book, The Goal.

00:39:00.960 Yeah, this book is bizarre, by the way, but fascinating. And it was written by this physicist

00:39:10.940 named Ellie Goldratt, who was like studying the behavior of atoms and crystals when a friend of

00:39:15.940 his with a small chicken coop building business asked him to help increase production. And the

00:39:20.740 friend had been hiring new help, but it wasn't increasing the number of coops they were producing.

00:39:26.260 And so Goldratt studied the process and found that that's because no matter how fast some steps in the assembly process were working, they just piled up at the single slowest step, what he called the bottleneck.

00:39:37.280 And so he ended up moving one worker from a fast step to the slowest step, and it increased overall production by threefold.

00:39:44.520 And this became the core of his idea, what he called the theory of constraints, that every system is limited by its single slowest step or bottleneck.

00:39:52.240 And so he writes this book, The Goal, to try to explain the idea.

00:39:55.060 And it's a business novel where this plant manager is facing shutdown and his Jedi-like

00:40:00.840 surprise, surprise physics professor shows up and gives him these Socratic lessons.

00:40:05.500 And like, he starts to see the whole world in bottlenecks where he takes his son's Boy

00:40:09.080 Scout troop on a hiking trip and realizes some of the kids are really fast, but this

00:40:13.220 kid Herbie is really slow and the whole group can only move at the speed of Herbie.

00:40:16.980 So he decides to redistribute the weight from packs.

00:40:19.380 So the fast kids have more and Herbie has less.

00:40:21.280 And suddenly the whole group is moving faster.

00:40:22.900 and it's a strange book and yet it sold 10 million copies and jeff bezos forced all his

00:40:30.620 executives to read it and hosted a full-day book club on it and it just became a phenomenon

00:40:34.180 but the core idea is really simple it's that the constraint the system constraint shows you where

00:40:40.600 to focus because if you apply energy somewhere else it doesn't change the outcome of the overall

00:40:46.180 system because that's all limited by this single least effective step. And it turned out to become

00:40:53.060 one of the most impactful ideas in management and even spread into personal improvement as well.

00:41:00.540 Yeah. When we don't have the output that we want, we typically think, well, we just need to input

00:41:04.600 more, right? We got to do more and more and then we'll get more output. But if there's a bottleneck

00:41:09.480 somewhere, you can keep putting in more and more input, but the output is going to stay the same

00:41:13.540 it's all getting held up at that bottleneck. And so instead of adding more, just remove that

00:41:17.840 bottleneck or somehow widen the bottleneck. Yeah. So the bottleneck shows you where to focus.

00:41:22.260 It's like, it's the highest leverage place to apply energy. And some, in some cases it's the

00:41:26.700 only place with any leverage that will make a difference if you apply any energy, but yeah.

00:41:31.940 And so I think it's a really effective, I don't know if we should get into those stories, but

00:41:35.200 really effective for personal improvement as well. I had a, I tell the story of an athlete who

00:41:39.260 applied it in the book. Okay. Cause it is also really resonated with my own athletic journey.

00:41:44.440 So the story I tell in the book is about this swimmer named Sheila Tarmina. She was at the

00:41:49.400 university of Georgia. And in 1992, she goes to the Olympic trials, tries to make the team,

00:41:54.900 the 200 meter freestyle, doesn't make it, isn't close, retires. But then for one of her last

00:41:59.740 classes at university of Georgia, she takes management five 77 in which she learns about

00:42:04.020 the theory of constraints and decides to do a class project on using it to create a plan to

00:42:09.200 drop three seconds in the 200 meter freestyle. And so she looks for, she kind of audits her

00:42:14.880 training and what's her bottleneck? Well, she determines its strength and power. She's five

00:42:18.280 foot two, which is really small for a elite swimmer. She has an incredible aerobic engine,

00:42:23.140 world-class, and all her coaches have her working on is aerobic endurance and not her strength and

00:42:28.000 power. So she's continuing to feed the thing that is not limiting her, that she already has. So

00:42:33.180 with this class plan, she decides to unretire, find a new coach who will work with her on strength

00:42:39.600 and power. And four years later, she makes the Olympic team and then is part of the relay team

00:42:45.320 that wins an Olympic gold medal. It's crazy. If you Google her, you'll see pictures of her with

00:42:49.080 the other three women in the relay and she's about a foot shorter than them. And so she retires after

00:42:54.360 this now as an Olympic champion. And then just concerned about her health, she comes out of

00:42:59.120 retirement and starts doing triathlons. And now she has this new view on training, right? To look

00:43:03.680 for what is her actual limiting factor. She wins the U.S. National Championships triathlon, goes

00:43:07.880 the Olympics, finishes sixth, goes the next Olympics in triathlon, retires again, unretires

00:43:12.500 again, takes up fencing and horse jumping and goes the Olympics in modern pentathlon. She's the only

00:43:17.740 woman ever to have competed in four summer Olympics in three different sports. And she was about to

00:43:23.440 retire if she hadn't learned about the theory of constraints in a management class. So I thought

00:43:27.600 was an amazing story and it, it was very similar to my, my less illustrious, but I was also a

00:43:33.360 college athlete, not at the level of Sheila Tower Mina, but had a very similar story where my

00:43:37.360 bottleneck was my ability to recover from workouts. And once I realized that I was an 800 meter runner

00:43:42.280 and scheduled class over one workout a week. So I'd have an excuse not to show up. I improved

00:43:46.580 like rocket fuel. I became a university record holder, you know, went from walk-on to university

00:43:49.960 record holder by targeting the thing that was limiting me. All right. Look for bottlenecks.

00:43:53.520 I think that's a big takeaway. Well, let's talk about constraints to make collaboration more

00:43:57.920 effective. So I think all of us have worked in a group. We might've done brainstorming sessions.

00:44:02.540 We have those meetings where we're all just throwing out ideas and we have probably all

00:44:06.500 experienced those meetings are not very productive. Why don't traditional brainstorm sessions work

00:44:12.440 usually? Yeah, there are a few reasons. So there was some psychologists recently did an international

00:44:17.340 survey of known creativity myths where things that we know are not true from research. And

00:44:22.620 the top two mistaken beliefs where people are most creative when they're most free and that

00:44:26.860 brainstorming is the best way to come up with lots of creative ideas. And it doesn't work for a few

00:44:33.160 reasons. One is because it's too open-ended and people don't tend to come up with creative ideas

00:44:37.360 when something is really open-ended. You're much better giving them a specific problem almost no

00:44:42.180 matter what it is and they'll come up with more creative ideas. But also people tend to be

00:44:47.900 confused by the norms of brainstorming. So there'll be conflicting norms, like say whatever comes to

00:44:53.520 mind, but also don't criticize. Those things can be quite mutually exclusive. And there's a lot of

00:44:58.320 what's called production blocking, where people who might have something interesting to say won't

00:45:02.480 share it because they're embarrassed or they're not that eloquent or because of the person who

00:45:07.360 spoke before them. So there's a term called HIPPO, highest paid person's opinion. And once that

00:45:12.160 person shares their opinion in a group, other opinions will tend to coalesce around it, not

00:45:16.600 because it's a better opinion, just because they're the highest paid. And so there are all

00:45:20.020 these factors that sort of make the norms of the situation unclear for people so much so that brain

00:45:26.920 writing works much better where if people are allowed to write ideas separately before they

00:45:31.400 come together and evaluate them. All right. So that's a constraint you can put in instead of

00:45:34.800 having vocal brainstorm sessions, have everyone write a memo of ideas they have, and then they

00:45:41.480 submit it to the group? First, yeah, separate it and really trying to keep sort of equal social

00:45:47.940 norms. So the best team, this shows up in all sorts of research, like Google did all this

00:45:51.420 internal research on it, but in other places that the best teams for problem solving are those that

00:45:56.480 have relatively equal conversational turn taking, not in every task they're doing, but like over the

00:46:01.600 course of a day. So you need to be really careful to put certain constraints in place to make sure

00:46:05.980 that happens. So at Pixar, for example, they banned Steve Jobs from certain meetings because they were

00:46:11.260 worried about that hippo effect. They knew his larger than life persona, that his opinion would

00:46:14.960 carry too much weight. And then other people wouldn't share some of the important things

00:46:18.780 because not every person who has value to add is super eloquent. And so you have to be careful

00:46:22.540 about making everyone feel like they're going to have a turn. But again, also because you want to

00:46:28.780 give a specific problem. If it's too open-ended, people do not come up with creative ideas.

00:46:32.540 Yeah. Well, that's the point I want to talk about you highlight in the book is this idea

00:46:36.440 of settling for good enough that it can help you get more great things done what's going on there

00:46:42.760 yeah this the last chapter gets kind of more personal philosophical and a major idea in it

00:46:48.840 is called satisficing which is a word that's a combination of satisfy and suffice and was coined

00:46:55.760 by herbert simon whose work is sprinkled throughout the book and he was a trained as a political

00:46:59.880 scientist but he won the highest award in computer science he was a founder of ai he he won the

00:47:05.340 highest award in psychology and he won the Nobel prize in economics. And one of his major ideas was

00:47:09.940 satisficing where humans do not conform to the rational actor model of classical economics,

00:47:16.120 where we evaluate all the options and make the best decision because we have limited cognitive

00:47:20.780 bandwidth. We can't evaluate all the options. We can't predict all the repercussions of our

00:47:24.400 decisions. And so what Simon argued is that we should proactively satisfy, like we should set

00:47:30.240 good enough rules for our decisions. And when they're met, make the decision and never look

00:47:34.880 back. Because the opposite, if you're not a satisficer, then the opposite end of the spectrum

00:47:39.000 is what's called a maximizer, who really does try to evaluate every possible option and make the

00:47:43.300 best decision. Maybe we'd call it an optimizer today. And it turns out that in psychological

00:47:48.120 research, it's almost always bad to be a maximizer. They are less satisfied with their decisions,

00:47:53.600 less satisfied with their lives, more prone to regret, often prefer reversible decisions,

00:47:59.640 even though it leads them to not really commit

00:48:02.520 one way or the other.

00:48:04.060 And so I think it's really important

00:48:06.160 in this world of seemingly infinite choice,

00:48:08.240 whether you're buying a dishwasher

00:48:09.700 or looking for a date

00:48:11.540 to set certain good enough parameters.

00:48:14.660 And maybe things will go way beyond that,

00:48:16.980 but once they are hit,

00:48:18.060 make the decision and move on.

00:48:20.040 And it gives you the possibility of being satisfied.

00:48:22.560 Yeah, I've noticed in my life,

00:48:23.400 some people have,

00:48:24.800 they have like a constitution or temperament

00:48:26.760 to be maximizers or satisficers.

00:48:28.960 I imagine if you're naturally a maximizer, you have to be a lot more intentional or proactive

00:48:35.120 about putting those good enough constraints on yourself.

00:48:38.700 Oh, yeah.

00:48:39.160 I mean, because I think I have maximizing tendencies for sure.

00:48:42.220 And so setting down these rules ahead of time of what's good enough for this decision has

00:48:47.520 been really helpful for me.

00:48:49.200 Even in fact, when I started a newsletter, I was reading Simon's work and it was very

00:48:53.060 much because I just had this very successful book and I felt a little paralyzed.

00:48:57.940 I'm like, if I do anything else, it has to be as good at this or better.

00:49:01.020 And so the newsletter was a case where I said, okay, if a book has to be a nine or 10, if

00:49:04.780 I get a newsletter post to six and a half, like maybe it'll fly past that on the first

00:49:08.240 draft maybe.

00:49:08.720 But if I'm confident that it's at six and a half, I'm sending it.

00:49:11.760 And that became a really important, satisficing exercise for me to kind of tamp down some

00:49:17.320 of my maximization.

00:49:18.320 But I, as maybe it sounds like silly or I don't know, just weird, but I proactively make

00:49:25.020 satisficing calls.

00:49:25.800 like if I'm trying to buy something, here are the three things I needed to do. That's the job I want

00:49:29.900 to hire it for. Once I see those three things, I'm done looking. I'm not reading every single

00:49:34.000 review. And that's been really helpful for me. When do you think maximizing is beneficial or

00:49:38.380 is it ever beneficial? It's a good question because Simon, you know, I mean, he did all

00:49:43.160 these things where, you know, he wore one kind of beret only and one color of socks. And he said,

00:49:46.800 you only need three pairs of clothes, one on your body, one in the, in the closet right to wear and

00:49:50.700 one in the wash. And he had the same breakfast every day, lived in the same house for 46 years.

00:49:54.480 And what he was saying was, look, this freed up my cognitive bandwidth to focus on the things that were really important, like his research. And so I think there are things where, you know, he famously said the best is the enemy of the good.

00:50:08.800 and I think it's almost always good to be a satisficer in terms of making progress

00:50:15.840 but I think there are also cases where once you have enough experience to know the kind of things

00:50:21.620 the ways that you want to spend your time that it can be okay to be more of a maximizer in trying to

00:50:28.120 craft your work life so that you're spending more of the time working on something that you think is

00:50:32.320 ideal, basically. And again, I think aiming for perfection is way too much, but being okay with

00:50:39.260 dithering more on that and saying, you know, how can I really work my way towards spending my time

00:50:44.420 working on things that I think are really important? And again, not that you have to

00:50:49.380 jump to that immediately, but over the course of a working career, not just necessarily saying,

00:50:53.940 this is kind of a good enough thing, but once you get to good enough thinking about, well,

00:50:57.320 could I go a little farther? So I think it's okay to do that. But again, I think it should be done

00:51:00.560 in steps as opposed to maximization right from the beginning. Well, David, this has been a great

00:51:05.240 conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work? DavidEpstein.com.

00:51:10.060 Got links to the book, free newsletter, all that kind of stuff. You're on Substack now, right?

00:51:15.400 I'm on Substack. Yep. And there's a link for that on my website for all that stuff. And there's some

00:51:19.040 free sort of tip sheets related to Inside the Box on the site also.

00:51:22.180 Well, fantastic. David Epstein, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.

00:51:24.740 Pleasure's mine.

00:51:26.500 My guest today was David Epstein. He's the author of the book Inside the Box. It's available on

00:51:29.980 amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can learn more information about his work at his

00:51:33.320 website, davidepstein.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash constraints. We find

00:51:38.220 links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of

00:51:49.780 the A1 podcast. If you haven't done so already, I'd appreciate it if you take one minute to give

00:51:53.380 a review on the podcast player that you use the list of the show. And if you've done that already,

00:51:56.680 thank you, please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member. You think we get

00:52:00.240 something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it's Brett

00:52:03.720 McKay. Remind you on listening on podcast, put what you've heard into action.

00:52:07.640 before you go here's another episode worth adding to the queue in episode number 821 we explore why

00:52:30.460 routines especially over rigid ones can actually make life harder not easier we talk discipline

00:52:35.760 without obsession, structure without rigidity, and where real growth comes from. You can find

00:52:40.180 it at aom.is slash routines. That's aom.is slash routines. Go check it out. Episode number 821.

The Art of Manliness - May 12, 2026

How Constraints Help You Focus, Create, and Finish

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