David Epstein

The work boundaries are much more clear.

And again, one of the reasons I picked Pixar in the book is because Ben Flubier identified Pixar as like the apotheosis of good planning.

where they would keep, he actually calls it Pixar planning.

A director could stay for years with a small team in story development, refining the core of a story, cutting away characters, right?

Like they cut away the character for Schadenfreude in the first Inside Out because they didn't, they felt like it was getting too many characters, getting too complicated.

And that might seem inefficient to stay in a small team for years while you're refining the story, but the costs only explode once you move into production and bring in this much bigger team.

And so it actually, in the long run, turns out to be much more efficient.

And so that kind of think slow, act fast, where they've spent all that time defining the boundaries allows them to work fast once they get into it.

And

I found that to be very true for me, where I didn't write a single word of my book for a year.

Yeah.

I just planned the architecture and did the research, and then it allowed me to write more quickly than I ever had once I moved into execution.

Yeah, I think whatever it is they're doing, let's say if it's a work project or some kind of behavior change that you're trying to engender, is...

I think we've talked about optimization a little bit and the motivation is you see something cool, I'm going to do this tomorrow.

I think it would actually make more sense to sit down and say, what is the goal that this is serving?

what are the blocks between me and doing this thing?

Where am I going to draw the line for now?

Like implement in a small way.

What's the first small experiment, a low stakes experiment that I can run instead of moving straight into big implementation?

And so just spend a little time figuring out what are the blocks?