David Epstein

And then he says, I think in fine Seussian form, it's like trying to make a strudel with no strudels, which I think is hilarious because it's like he was the same guy in his personal life as his books.

And then he just decides, throws his hands up and says, I'm just going to take the first two rhyming words on the list and make a book.

And the first two rhyming words are cat and hat.

And that kind of changed children's literature forever.

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.