David Epstein

It gets to this idea that cognitive psychologists have really fleshed out now that, you know, as the cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham has put it, you may think your brain is made for thinking, but it's actually made to prevent you from having to think whenever possible because thinking is energetically costly.

And so if you're not forced, you'll just go down what cognitive psychologists call the path of least resistance, meaning you'll just reach for ideas that you've already used or that you've seen what's familiar, what's easy.

And so unless, in many cases, unless the normal thing is actually blocked, it becomes incredibly hard and sometimes impossible to be creative.

Absolutely.

I mean, to your point, we were talking before we started recording about my process a little bit for the book this time around.

And this was the first time I ever created an architectural plan for how I was going to order the information before I started writing the book.

A hefty portion of this book is me-search.

I was terrible at putting constraints in place and wanted to get better at it.

That's often the case for a lot of the things I'm researching is I'm bad at it and want to get better.

And so I wrote way over length in my previous two books and it just incredibly inefficient.

So this time I made this one page outline.

I forced myself to outline the whole book on one page.

As you can see, I ended up writing very, very small, my own attempt, my brain's attempt to defeat my own system.

But if it's not on this page, it's not in the book.

So this is the first time I wrote the length of a book to get a book.

And the book is tighter than my others, about 20% shorter.

But it also blocked the kind of...

Some of the methods that I was used to because I had never laid out a plan ahead of time where I wanted the beginning and the end of the book to kind of come full circle in a way that the other ones didn't.

And so I think that was really helpful because especially and it's exactly what you're saying, like we've gotten competent at this thing.

which is great, but competency can also be a trap from getting better.