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Chapter 1: What is the main argument about freedom and creativity?
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A couple of quotes to start with today. The first one comes from the composer Leonard Bernstein who said, To achieve great things, two things are needed. A plan and not quite enough time. And here's the second quote from a man named Herbert Simon who said, It is a myth... widely believed but not less mythical for that, the people are most creative when they are most free.
Herbert Simon was no dummy. He was a Nobel laureate in economics and a pioneer of cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence. And the man was definitely onto something there. His quote is the basis for a book by US journalist and author David Epstein. David is the author of the bestselling book, Range, Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialised World.
And now David's written something that's something like a partner to that book on why and how people do not thrive creatively in conditions of total freedom. In fact, it may be that just the opposite is true. We live today with vastly more freedom and freedom of choice than our ancestors ever did. And the market's always there, offering us more and more and more options.
But it turns out there's plenty of research to tell us all that choice is actually making us more anxious, more overwhelmed and less creative. Not more creative, less creative. And it's narrowing your options that can truly set you free. David Epstein's provocative book is called Inside the Box, How Constraints Make Us Better. Hello, David.
Hi, thank you for having me.
You start your book with this personal story that was about your boyhood obsession with sports. How obsessed were you as a kid with American sports like gridiron football and baseball and the like?
Oh, so much so that I would wake up to watch the same half-hour sports news program, the literal same one, played twice in a row identically just so that I could attempt to, you know, know everything that was going on. So I'd literally wake up and lay down on the couch to watch the same thing played twice in a row just to get all the sports news.
And what kind of sport were you playing yourself?
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Chapter 2: How did David Epstein's personal experiences shape his views?
And so that's the story that I learned and that, you know, the Royal Society of Scientists has celebrated. Matthew Walker in his mega bestselling book, Why We Sleep, calls it the ultimate proof of the power of our free dreaming brains. A famous mattress company here in the US has used it in their marketing. So that's the story. Right. That's the myth.
What really happened? What's the real story behind his discovery of the periodic table?
Yeah, so Mendeleev had a book contract to write a two-volume intro to chemistry textbook. And he had only gotten eight of the then 63 known elements into volume one. And so he had to get the other 55 into volume two. He had that. He also had a customer problem. He was teaching beginners, so it had to make sense. And so he was not looking for a law of nature.
He was looking for a way to organize the remaining volume of his textbook. And so he realized he didn't have enough space or time left to keep going one element at a time. So he started looking for families that he could describe together with similar properties. And in doing that, he started experimenting with different arrangements.
Again, the constraint led him into this productive exploration. And that's where he realized that there were these groups that were analogous to one another. And he organized a periodic table. And he was so sure, once he stumbled on it, He was so sure that it was a law of nature that he actually left gaps and said this is where we're going to find new elements and that was proven true.
As you're telling me this, David, it's made me think that, you know, there's that famous story of Isaac Newton who was intuited the laws of gravity according to the myth by looking an apple fall from a tree outside of his window. But as you say that, the real reason why he was able to find all this stuff and the nature of light and so on
was because of the plague, the plague that came to Cambridge. I mean, he couldn't go into uni and had to stay in his home on the farm for months at a time. That thought just occurred to me, another constraint there rather than this sudden kind of dreamlike moment of watching the apple fall from the tree. So he wasn't thinking outside the box at all, Dmitry Mendeleev here.
Absolutely not. I mean, there were layers and layers of constraints that he was working under. He had this deadline, he had this space constraint, and he had essentially this customer problem, which was that whatever scheme he picked, it had to be sensible to beginners.
So it was like layer after layer of constraint that forced him to think in a way that essentially nobody had in history before that.
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Chapter 3: What role do constraints play in enhancing creativity?
I'm just wondering how you think this works with something like improv comedy, like improvisational comedy. Like there's a thing in Australia, I don't know if you've had it in the US, theatre sports, where it's entirely improvisational. But there's rules. There's actually really strong rules. So someone will say, create this based on this, this and this.
How does your thinking run with things like improvisational comedy?
Oh, yeah, there's actually a creativity researcher named Keith Sawyer who writes extensively about improv. And one of his main points is that if you want it to work well, you actually want to give your partner constraints in the form of being as specific as possible.
He'll say, you know, instead of saying, oh, look, there's a gun to your improv partner, you say, oh, look, there's the X-3000 destroyer ray gun. And the more specifics you can give them, the more that gives them to grab onto because we actually don't do that well with completely open choice. You need to be channeled down a direction. And that shows up...
not only in his research on improv, but in research on artistic and mechanical inventions where people will do better if you say you have to use these 20 pieces from a set of 100 and you have to make a piece of furniture versus if you say you can use all 100 and make whatever you want.
This is called the green eggs and ham effect. Now that's a Dr. Seuss reference, isn't it?
Yes, yes. And so it's a reference to the fact that Dr. Seuss wrote green eggs and ham on a bet that he couldn't write a children's book using only 50 words, which of course he did. And that forced him to experiment with his rollicking rhythm because he couldn't be expansive with words. For Dr. Seuss, children's literature was incredibly literal and very boring for the most part.
And he was asked, he was given a vocabulary list for kids and asked if he could write a book using only about 200 words from the list. And he looks at the list and he gets exasperated because there's very few adjectives. So he makes this fine Seussian comment to his wife. He says, it's like trying to make a strudel without any strudels. And then he throws up his hands and says, you know what?
I'm just going to take the first two rhyming words on the list and write a book. And the first two rhyming words were cat and... and hat. And the rest is literary history. But that's what forced him to develop this rollicking rhythm because he couldn't really be creative with the words themselves. So he had to focus on rhythm.
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