David Epstein

Like Duke Ellington said, I don't need time.

What I need is a deadline.

Yeah, I should say, in the past, I have not been as good as I should be in giving people stuff.

Adam Grant, psychologist, has actually given me some very healthy criticism on that.

He's like, you got to show your work to more people while you're doing it.

And so this time around...

I showed it more than I ever had in the past, which included my editor.

In the past, I didn't even show it to my editor while I was working on it.

I just showed up with a book.

This time, I showed her stuff while I was going.

I showed my agent, who's a great reader.

I showed my wife tons of stuff.

So...

That's not a ton of people, but I went from zero to several people this time, showing them in the middle.

And I think that was really helpful.

And also talking my ideas off my editor a lot earlier to see if I could articulate them reasonably.

So that was more the process this time around, where before I would show the manuscript.

In this case, sometimes I was showing sections or chapters, much smaller pieces.

That's interesting.

I mean, that's like... I sort of made a mistake like that in this case with this book, just with the title and subtitle, where for the first time I asked for input in the past, it was just...