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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you.
Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, and performers, even the occasional rocket scientist, war correspondent, or arms dealer.
And hey, if you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, and I always appreciate it when you do that, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of some of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and negotiation, psychology and geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime and cults, and more.
That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today on the show, everybody loves the story of the genius who wakes up from a dream and changes the world.
Dmitri Mendeleev supposedly dreams the periodic table into existence, bolts upright in bed, and suddenly chemistry has a seating chart. Beautiful story. Also apparently mostly bullshit. The real story is less magical and a lot more useful...
Medelov was boxed in by a textbook deadline, he had to cram the known elements into a limited space under pressure with imperfect information, and that constraint helped him see the pattern everyone else had missed. So today we're asking a question that sounds like something your boss says right before ruining your weekend. What if constraints actually make us better?
Not all constraints, obviously. Some constraints are just bureaucracy with a necktie. Some are budget cuts wearing a fake TED Talk mustache. But the right constraints, limits, deadlines, rules, friction, forced choices, those can sharpen thinking, expose nonsense, and turn chaos into creativity.
My guest today, David Epstein, author of Range and the Sports Gene, which many of you have probably read, and his new book is Inside the Box, How Constraints Make Us Better.
We'll discuss why too much freedom can make us stupid, how a company full of Apple legends built the iPhone before the iPhone and still somehow face-planted, what Pixar understands about creative discipline, why writing down your prediction before the results come in makes it harder to lie to yourself, and how a terrible piano helped create one of the most legendary jazz recordings of all time.
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Chapter 2: How do constraints enhance creativity and decision-making?
What's going on for lunch? I do hope that you call your tax drawer the Epstein files. I think that would be a funny household.
Just lean right into it. Why not? The saving grace is that it's like the Jewish Smith. So there's a lot of us. That's true.
I would love to hear about Inside the Box, the sort of constraints ideas, because I feel like I've spent my whole life with everyone telling me, you know, remove the constraints. You know, your book title, Inside the Box, the idea here, I assume, is everybody's telling you to think outside the box. I don't know. Maybe there's a box for a reason.
That's kind of where you're going with this, right?
That's right. The cliche outside the box, telling people to free themselves from all of the bounds or restrictions that usually you're talking about creativity, that are restricting their creativity.
And there's a mountain of psychological research that shows that actually giving people this totally open space and saying, think differently, is the quickest way to get them to do something completely uncreative because...
The cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham says, you may think your brain's made for thinking, but it's actually made for preventing you from having to think whenever possible because thinking is energetically costly. And so if you're just given an open field of possibility, you'll just do the convenient thing or the familiar thing or what neuroscientists call the path of least resistance.
So actually the best way to get someone to have outside the box ideas, like new creative original ideas, is to really narrowly confine them in a way that blocks the solutions that are most familiar to them.
I just did a show about this yesterday about how AI is taking advantage of our brains shortcuts, right? So the whole we only construct reality in our brain, your eyes aren't really seeing what your brain thinks they're seeing. It's constructing this and all the cognitive bias that goes along with it.
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Chapter 3: What does the periodic table story reveal about creativity?
You're not actually like learning anything. And that's what's showing up in some of these studies. So I think we have to be structured in how we decide to use AI unless we want to outsource our entire brains to it, at which point, what is the purpose of you?
Yeah, well, that's the uncomfortable truth. Somebody had pitched me something today. They were just on a bunch of shows and this is like their media pitch. And it was essentially, will your job be around in two years, which is the speed of adoption, they're assuming.
And the test was, can somebody who sits with a manual or three for two weeks with nothing else to do learn how to do your job at a sort of functional level? They don't have to be great at it, but can they do it? Will it take a manual or two? And will it take a week or two? And if the answer is yes, you're totally screwed. So you have to figure out something else to do.
That's right. And I do think, though, there's hope for some of this stuff. If you look at the history of technological innovation, an example I always like is when ATMs were introduced in the U.S. in the early 1970s. And I went back and read news coverage there, and it's apocalyptic. There's going to be no more banks, right, or something.
The tellers, I think there were about 300,000 at the time.
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Chapter 4: Why do too many options lead to dissatisfaction?
They're all going out of business. And instead, what happened over the next 40 years, at least, maybe they will eventually, but as there were more ATMs, there were more bank tellers because they made branches cheaper to operate. And so banks opened more branches, fewer tellers per branch.
But more interestingly is that it fundamentally changed the job from one of someone who's doing repetitive cash transactions to someone who's a marketing professional slash customer service representative, financial advisor, like this much broader mix. What sometimes people call soft skills, what I like to call durable skills because they never go out of fashion.
And actually, the Financial Times just did this analysis showing that since the mid to late 1980s, the returns to these social and collaborative skills have been outpacing the returns to technical skills at an accelerating rate, which I think is probably the opposite of a lot of people's intuition of what happens with technological disruption.
Yes, this jives with my experience, right? Because I go to a bank around here and 50% of the time I get a teller that English is their second language, they count the money and that's it, and they're new, they've been there for a week. It's coin flip if they're there next month, right? Then there's another sort of middle-aged lady who's a bank teller.
And I go up and when I get her, I can ask her all sorts of questions about how the accounts operate and what's the cheapest way for me to wire money over here. And she'll be like, actually, you should use this. And well, in this case, I would give you a cashier's check and I can waive the fee for that. It's usually four bucks.
But I would do that because otherwise it's going to delay the payment by this and they're going to wait till it clears because it's over this amount. And then that's going to delay your transaction. I'm like, wow, you actually know a lot about About these things, try asking an ATM those questions and see what happens.
Yeah. Of course, now, you know, say asking a chatbot those questions, but they still go wrong in all kinds of ways. I was recently talking with Jack GPT and it brought up some obscure stat about the number of pen pals that Charles Darwin had. And I happen to know that stat because it's something I've written about in the past.
But I'm like, there must be a handful of people in the world that know this. And then it started saying how this was researched and attributing it to this one researcher. And I was looking and I'm saying, that's wrong. So I asked, what's your source? And it turns out it was me. Somebody had taken some of my writing, put it on Goodreads.
And the AI took nearby paragraphs and kind of mashed them into something new. And so there are all these really convincing ways that they still go wrong. And so I think human judgment in connecting to strategy is still really important.
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Chapter 5: How does Pixar use constraints to improve creativity?
We feel, oh, if only I had more freedom, my imagination would fill the gaps. It's not how our brains work. So our intuition is just wrong about how to get our best ideas.
What is the actual box that Mendeleev was trapped inside, was putting himself inside, perhaps, is a better word.
There are a number of layers of constraints that he had. So there was first the space constraints of the textbook where he just did not have enough space to keep going. Because what he did was, again, he did the path of least resistance. Oh, what's the best way for me to describe all the elements? I'll just go one at a time, basically. And so you do the thing that's convenient and easy.
One of the really important things that constraints can do is launch us into productive experimentation that we would not have taken on otherwise. Necessity is the mother of invention. And so when he was forced away from that thing that came to him easily... I have to start experimenting with these other mechanisms.
And he also had a customer problem, which was it had to be a logical organization for beginners. So he had to save the space. He needed a logical organization for beginners. He had a deadline, right? We know deadlines can be either really bad or really good for creative problem solving. And it depends... if it leads you to start multitasking or to hyper-focus and monotask.
And if it's the latter, which is what happened to him, then you really can have some of your best ideas if it forces you into this monotasking, like Duke Ellington said, I don't need time, I need a deadline.
So he had all these constraints that pushed him into this almost hyper-focused experimentation where he was going through all these different possibilities very quickly that he had never explored before.
You know those people in college that it's the night before a giant thing is due and it's 8 p.m. and you walk in and you're like, man, I'm so jealous. Are you done with your paper? And they're like, no, man, I haven't started yet. And they're rolling a joint and watching, I don't know, Super Troopers or something like that on the TV. And you go, what?
Around 1030, when you're putting your mask on or whatever, you're going to bed. They're like, all right. And you hear their knuckles crack and the light turns on and they stay up until six o'clock in the morning. And somehow they put this thing out. And these aren't guys that like failed out of school, right? These are guys that went to law school with me afterwards. Is that what they're doing?
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Chapter 6: What lessons can we learn from the NIH's pre-registration requirement?
I think sometimes having that this is the allotted time and I know what I should be doing during this time. you're not having to make all these little decisions about competing priorities. It's like having this system of smaller goals where it takes away that what is the priority. Because obviously, these people you're talking about would get to a point where, oh, the priority is now very clear.
And for them, it was leaving it to the last minute. But I think everyone can use that in work. They figure out a way of how can I box myself in enough so that the priority for what I should be doing right now is very clear. I'd say the two pillars of what useful constraints can do for you is forcing you to clarify priorities and launching you into productive exploration.
It sounds to me that they were using this time pressure to clarify exactly what they should be doing.
Most people hear constraints and they think bureaucracy, lack of money or resources, lack of time, some idiot manager ruining everything. So what kind of constraints, you mentioned, you touched on this earlier, but what kind of constraints are we defending and what kinds of constraints are we not defending?
Yeah, the word constraints, obviously, is practically synonymous with something that's frustrating. Restraint and constraint have the same root word, right? That's right. And I think when it comes to, when you mentioned managers and bosses, in many cases, it's not only the constraint itself, whatever it is, but it's that the people...
upon whom it's being foisted don't feel like they have any agency in it. And so that, I think, is a leadership issue. Actually, in the book, I ended up interviewing a lot of people who used to work with Steve Jobs. I wasn't writing about Steve Jobs, but because I wrote about some companies that had a lot of people who worked with him, I ended up talking to dozens of people who'd worked with him.
And one of the things that they told me was the biggest difference between his first time at Apple, where he then got forced out And when he came back in the late 90s, as he gets forced out of Apple, he goes to Next Computers where he says, we're going to have a, the hard drive casing is going to be a perfect magnesium cube. He really was micromanaging and dictating everything.
And when he came back the second time, he was much more of a constraint setter. So he comes in and Apple's a mess. They're in danger of going out of business. They're making a ton of computer models. They were making printers and servers and this tablet thing called the Newton.
And he comes in and draws a two by two grid on a whiteboard and puts desktop and portable on one axis and consumer and pro on the other. That's it. Cancels everything else and lays out some of the customer need. What problem do these things have to solve? And then lets people go within that. At first, of course, because so much stuff got canceled, people were upset.
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Chapter 7: How can we apply the 'bad piano' concept to our work?
Now back to David Epstein. You write in the book about, you call it the dizziness of freedom that modern life gives us. We just have so many more options than any humans before us. What does this do to our brains? Because it leads to confusion where we think, I need more freedom, but we actually need more boundaries or better boundaries.
Yeah, that phrase, dizziness of freedom, comes from Soren Kierkegaard, the philosopher. And that idea, to emphasize your point, that there could be too much freedom and choice would have been laughable for most of human history. And it's still laughable for a lot of people in various parts of the world.
But increasingly, since about the 19th century, you started to see in a lot of eminent thinkers and philosophers and things like that would start taking up this issue for the first time in history of we have too many options. Less of our life is structured by rulers and religions and all those sorts of things.
And so people started having to face choices about everything, who to love, what to do, what to be, etc. And that's when you started to see mass anxiety, basically, popping up in society because there's the weight of all of these potential options. And we see it now with...
Social media, for example, where things like socially prescribed perfectionism, that behavior, are on the rise because people have so many things to compare themselves to. So it's like this endless possibility of choices, of what you could be doing and what you should be doing. And it tracks with this steep rise in anxiety. And so our brains are really not built –
for this kind of endless comparison and optionality. In the past, you'd compare yourself to the people you could physically see wherever you lived.
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, the whole, this is like Dunbar's number, right? And your tribe is 150 people. But even then, your whole village, Saxony might have been like 75 people or somewhere around there. So yeah, you're comparing yourself to the other four people in your generation that you grow up near.
That's right. You would think that having an endless number of entertainment options can't be bad, right? You'll get to something better. And yet, since the introduction of infinite scrolling, people have been getting progressively more bored. And in these studies to follow up on that, if you give people 20 videos they can watch, for example,
they will be more bored than if you just give them one from that same set of 20 and say, you just have to watch this one. And the theory is that it's this endless ability to think about what else you could be doing, your other possible choices that undermines the experience of the moment itself.
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Chapter 8: What practical steps can we take to implement effective constraints?
You're less likely to end up happy with your decision.
Man, so interesting. There's so many roads we can go down here, but I want to make it practical. So for somebody listening who feels overwhelmed. which is a lot of folks, what is one of the first constraint audits they should run? Is it, I have too many projects. How do we sort of do this? And I would like you to be specific if possible.
Like if somebody's got tabs open, three half-started side hustles in a book and a notes app full of ideas, what is the first box that you would want to see them put themselves in?
Two things to start with. The first one, make all your current commitments visible. And this can be post-its on a wall. Visualizing it is really better. And what people will typically see when they do this, or teams, that I describe a lab that does this in the book with their innovation team.
They will usually see, okay, first of all, there's a lot of medium priorities competing with high priorities. And there's more stuff here than I could get done even in a best case scenario. And so put those up and force yourself to say, if I had to cut something out in the next 90 days, what would it be? And then make a funnel with the stuff that's high priority. Physical funnel.
Put the Post-its in the physical funnel. Nothing else can go in the top until something else comes out the bottom. It's a rule called stop starting, start finishing. And you will actually get more stuff done. This works really reliably. And once you've got that funnel... change your to-do list, right? People's to-do list, we have a hardwired bias always to add. This is called additive bias.
Tell me about it. Our associated bias called subtraction neglect bias. We overlook solutions that involve taking away. So we always add and end up with too much stuff to do. And so with your to-do list, put one thing that if you got this thing accomplished tomorrow, it would be a good productive day.
You can have other bonus things that once you get that thing done, but usually what happens is people have a to-do list and they don't get to everything called the planning fallacy. We're really bad at estimating. We always think that things will take less time than they actually will. What happens is you think you're going to get more done. You don't get it done.
You carry stuff over to the next day's to-do list. And that happens repeatedly until the list gets so long that you just rip it up and throw it out because you don't even want to look at it anymore. Maybe I'm just describing me.
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