David Epstein

You should first attack the thing that you're thinking about attacking instead of all this other stuff around it.

And I think it...

One of the reasons I think some of the optimization culture is insidious is because it preys on really good instincts in people, like self-improvement, wanting to be better.

But it's like in so many cases, I think it's just distracting from the main thing.

Yeah.

And yeah, and that's just like frustrating for good impulses to be, I think, sort of preyed upon in that way, basically.

Yeah, I mean, places have tried, you know, like Google did this whole thing where they tried not to have managers.

And then what they found is, you know, people are going to Larry Page with their expense reports and stuff, and it just wasn't going to work.

But in the case of General Magic, people weren't coordinated, right?

They weren't stopping and getting their lessons together.

They were often working on things that were not the most important thing they needed to be doing.

They were missing things.

They would start new projects all the time.

And it was in deep... I mean, one of the reasons...

I wanted to contrast it to Pixar in the book, where Pixar, equally large vision, developing at the exact same time as General Magic, basically.

So it was like these parallel visions, basically, and one worked and one didn't.

And I spent a bunch of time with Ed Catmull, who was co-founder of Pixar, and he described to me something he called the beautifully shaded penny problem at Pixar, which was...

Artists or directors would get obsessed over the shading on a penny in the background of a scene that the audience would never notice.

And the way they solved this problem, here comes the real high-tech fix, was with Popsicle sticks on a board.

And each Popsicle stick represented the amount of work that one animator could get done in a week.