Why More Choices Make You Less Happy | David Epstein
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How does David Epstein redefine freedom vs. constraint?
So everything we think we know about living well says more freedom, more options, more room to maneuver. That's the goal. But what if it was all wrong? What if limitation, what if constraint, what if the box turns out to be one of the most powerful tools available to doing your best work and building a life that actually feels like yours, not freedom? at least not all the time. In this conversation, you'll discover why, quote, maximizers, the people always searching for the best possible option, are measurably less happy and making worse decisions than people who don't. How the best-selling solo jazz album of all time was recorded on a broken instrument the artist nearly refused to play and yet produced genius like never before.
And the one daily practice that changes what it feels like to actually love your work, it is not rooted in more options or more freedom, just the opposite. Our guide is New York Times bestselling author David Epstein. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. We'll jump right in after this short break.
Good Life Project
You have spent the better part of a decade or so, maybe longer at this point, studying what makes people tick, what makes them creative, what makes them capable, what makes them satisfied in no small part in their lives. And in your previous book, Range, which we talked about a couple of years back, sort of like the overriding message there was you told people not to focus too quickly, to keep their options open, to explore possibilities. You need the freedom to explore choices. In your new book, Inside the Box, it sounds like what you're now saying is that was half the story. So what is the rest of the story here? What's the second half of the bigger truth about freedom and choice that we need to understand?
Yeah, that's a great way to put it because in many ways, this new book is responsive to the most common question I was getting from people who liked range, who would say, you know, I'm widely curious. I have these diverse experiences, but I can't figure out what to do, you know, where to focus. And I absolutely put myself in that boat. there's a reason why it has been six to seven years between each of my books because I do have quite a bit of trouble figuring out where to put my energy because I'm interested in so many different things. And so, well, I think a lot of the science and range is held up quite well. In fact, there was just a paper in the journal Science looking at 30,000 careers that found that the –
And factors associated with early peaking, basically, with youth elite performance in science and music and sports were negatively associated with peak adult performance so that you wanted this broader beginning where you get a range of skills and you try lots of different things. At the same time, I think that gives the challenge of how do you figure out when to focus that energy, whether it's into some creative project or something that gives your life meaning. And so I think it's especially true for people who have a lot of interests that – we, because I include myself in this, have to find boundaries that focus some of that formidable toolkit, basically, or else you can kind of end up sort of adrift.
And that's never been more true than in a world with seemingly endless options, right? I mean, this would have been a laughable thing to discuss for most of human history. But now it's incumbent upon each of us to kind of define what it is we should be doing in a way that's historically unprecedented.
I'm going to ask you to state in the most concise possible way, and in the most potentially counterintuitive possible way, what the thesis of this new work is.
The thesis of Inside the Box is that in the abstract, we always prefer more freedom, more options, more entertainment choices, longer deadlines, fewer resource limitations. And yet in practice, that leads to often disastrous results. It undermines creativity. It undermines satisfaction.
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