David Epstein

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.

It's like you end up lifting the same weights the same number of times every day, which means you may not get worse, but you're also not going to get better.

I have that problem in spades.

I mean, I have a very... A psychologist I was interviewing once told me that I have a... What he called a flat associative hierarchy, which means that I see lots of disparate ideas as kind of connected.

It's easy for me to connect them.

And that can be nice because I maybe find things that aren't obvious to other people.

But it also means that I can be incredibly prone to doing what you're describing, which is going down these rabbit holes of things that I think are interesting.

And they're really...

Not that well connected in a way that will make sense to other people.

And so I really need structure to kind of prevent myself from writing books that are just all over the place.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's, I actually don't think it's healthy for, as Jonathan Haidt told me in one of the interviews in the book, it's not healthy for anyone to have everything everywhere all the time.

Um, and a lot of us, even if we're not rich are kind of in a situation like that in, in the digital world now.

Um, and so I think when it comes to businesses, there are a bunch of, you know, there are examples in the book where people are just sloppy, like when they, when they have too much, right.

It leads to sloppiness.

It leads to not feeling like you need to define these boundaries.

And I think one of the things, um,

This gets at one of the things that I hope, maybe the mindset shift that I hope the book engenders, which is from seeing limits as only bad to seeing them as opportunities to clarify priorities and launch productive exploration.