Why Too Much Freedom Is the Enemy of Success | Plain English

Freedom is good. It's hard to think of a less controversial set of three words. In politics, freedom is the rare virtue that enjoys bipartisan support. Democrats and Republicans agree.

In the realm of career advice, we urge young people to chase their dreams and do what you love. This gospel covers everything from commencement speeches to self-help publishing. In a 2001 international survey of people's assumptions about creativity, 70% agreed with the idea that "one is most creative when with total freedom in one's actions."

We have a historically unprecedented number of options regarding what to do, who to be, how to spend our time. The Oxford professor Eric Beinhocker once tried to calculate how many things a person could buy in today's economy compared to the pre-industrial world. We're talking SKUs here, stock keeping units, distinct purchasable items. How many different boxes of cereal, button-down shirts, cars, movies, books. He calculated that compared to pre-industrial worlds, we have 10 million times more choices. We are more free than our ancestors in practically every way. Our lives less constrained by religion and ancient bigotries. The modern world, democratic capitalism itself, thrives at giving people more freedom, more choices, more autonomy, more agency. Surely one of the dumbest things you could possibly do is to argue that this search for freedom is overrated.

So, that's what we're going to do today. Sort of. Our guest is a most unusual person to make this argument. Several years ago, my friend David Epstein wrote a book called Range. And it became one of those best-selling non-fiction books of the last few years that you see in all sorts of people's libraries and bookshelves. Range is about the case for being a generalist in a world that's designed for specialists. But his new book, Inside the Box, takes on the opposite side of the equation. In a world that celebrates absolute freedom, David encourages us to see the virtues of constraint.

If you ask people what they want from life, they'll describe examples of agency and autonomy. Give me a job with more money, a life with more flexibility, a contract with more optionality. But what people tend to enjoy most about their lives are the relationships and achievements that require responsibilities, limitations, rules, constraints. The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once wrote that anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. It is the sickness that comes from the person who spends so much time keeping their options open that they forget that becoming a real person requires making decisions. We live in an age of anxiety. So, perhaps this is the best time to remind ourselves of the ancient wisdom that ironically it is our limitations that set us free.

I'm Derek Thompson. This is Plain English.

>> [music] [music] >> David Epstein, hello.

Hi, thanks for having me. So, I want to go back to 2019. Your book Range comes out. It's a super massive bestseller. Take me back to May 2019. Remind us what was Range about? And in the aftermath of a book like that, how do you find your next project?

Yeah, it was about the benefits of having broad experiences and a broad toolbox in an increasingly specialized world and made the argument that that's increasingly important as the world changes really rapidly and people need to be adaptable. And as you alluded, it found a wider audience than I myself expected. And so, it was also so much work and I and I and I felt like I needed to live up to it again after that that I decided I was only going to write another book if I could find the perfect topic, right? And so, over the course of about the next 2 years or so, I started dabbling in a whole bunch of different topics cuz I never have a problem finding enough things to be interested in, right? That's not like for you. I think our problem is what do you execute on, not like how many things are you interested in. And I found a lot of things that were interesting, but I could not find anything that was perfect, you know?

Um and then I was reading uh some work by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist who's most known for coining the term flow to describe the feeling of immersion in an activity. And he has this quote where he's talking about marriage, but I think it can be applied to anything where he basically says the great thing about being committed, if you commit by your choice, >> [snorts] >> is that all that you you free up all this energy for living instead of wondering how to live. So, you can get busy living instead of wondering what's around the corner.

I actually have the Csikszentmihalyi quote right here in front of me. >> yeah. Yeah, please. Yeah, yeah. By making up one's mind to invest psychic energy in a marriage, regardless of any problems, obstacles, or more attractive options that may come along later, one is freed of the constant pressure of trying to maximize emotional returns. Having made the commitment and having made it willingly instead of being compelled by tradition, a person no longer needs to worry whether she has made the right choice or whether the grass might be greener somewhere else. As a result, a great deal of energy gets freed up for living instead of being spent on wondering about how to live. And later in that passage, he says "limitations are liberating."

Yeah, and this hit me in the face like uh kick with a golf shoe, you know? And I said, "Oh my gosh, this is what I'm doing with topics. Like I'm finding really fascinating stuff, but I'm swiping right." Is that I I've never been on a dating app. >> left is No, it's you were swiping left cuz you were rejecting. Swiping right >> Is is it accepting? I I wasn't totally rejecting. I was I was like keeping them in the hopper, but then like, "But what else is there?" I would say keeping a lot of things open at once. I'll I'll accept the right. That's fine. So, and as soon as I read that quote, I said, "One of the topics I was interested in was useful constraints." I said, "I'm writing I'm I'm writing a proposal on that tomorrow." And naturally by 2 weeks later of research, I was 10 times as fascinated and and that was the beginning of this book.

So, I want to put these two projects next to each other, Range and your new book Inside the Box. So, Range essentially argues that like we need to reject the pressure to specialize and be a generalist. >> Yeah. In Inside the Box, you're arguing that we need to reject the allure of freedom and design constraints on our lives. Like does this amount to you changing your mind? Is it hypocrisy or is there like a is there a subtle nuance here in which it can simultaneously be true that the world is pushing us to both specialize and want too much freedom?

Yeah, I think it's and I don't even think it's that subtle. I mean, to me it was a natural next question and and became more natural as lots of readers asked me versions of the same question, which was, "Okay, I actually have these broad experiences. I have wide-ranging curiosity. I have tons of ideas, but I don't know what to do." And so, it felt like this natural next question of, "Okay, at some point you have to focus that into doing something, into achievement, into satisfaction, all those things." And I count myself among those people that was struggling with this. You know, I was trained to be a scientist in my first life, then I became a writer. I had this very broad background, but I did have a challenge drawing boundaries around my projects. In fact, with my first two books, I wrote 150% the length of a book and had to cut back to get a book. I I cut a trip to Arctic Sweden for my first book that had I drawn better boundaries around the project, I would have seen wasn't going to work. Then I became a parent and was like, "I can't be writing a book and a half to get a book." I realized, you know, there's a hefty dose of me search in this book that I stunk at putting useful boundaries around my work and and wanted to get better at that. So, I really changed my writing process a lot, but that's a whole other thing.

There are several themes from this book that I think are worth a deep dive. And the first that I want to discuss is this idea that individuals and organizations with ultimate freedom and few constraints often struggle and fail. Yeah. And the canonical example from your book is this company called General Magic. >> Yeah. What was General Magic?

>> Yeah, most important company nobody's ever heard of. It's exactly right. >> Most important because of the people who came out of it. So, this was a company it was a first so-called concept IPO where their vision, talent was so alluring, Goldman Sachs took them public with an idea, not with a product in the mid-90s. So, starting in the late '80s really, this company was essentially building the iPhone before the internet. And it was founded by two of the original designers of the Apple Macintosh and then a third Apple employee whose job was seeing the future of technology. And by the way, if you were I got to give you his PhD dissertation, this guy Mark Porat. 1976 at Stanford, he coins the term information economy on the first page. Reading this thing is eerie as hell. Like he saw the next half century of technological change, not just the promise, but problems with misinformation, inequality, all this kind of stuff. So, he's the visionary CEO. In 1989, he's sketching a thin glass rectangle with no protruding buttons and a touch screen that has rectangular apps on it. And so, their vision is obviously correct. Money absolutely pours in. International partners pour in. So many international partners, their meetings have to start with an anti-trust lawyer listing all the things they're not allowed to talk about. And in building these personal communicators, they get to work, there's a huge amounts of innovation, but they have so much talent and so many resources, they can do anything. And so they do do anything. Every good idea they have, someone starts doing it, right? They don't They don't define a clear user. They call their user Joe Sixpack, so they don't really know and they realize nobody's really met the guy after missing a few years of deadlines. And so the project grows and grows and grows and the CEO, Marc Porat, says, "Why raise to create heaven for engineers, where they were unlimited, limited only by the things they could imagine. What more could anyone ask for?" And I think the obvious answer became less freedom. I interviewed dozens of former employees there and the refrain was, "We just couldn't figure out what not to do." So, I think there was one emblematic interview with this uh engineer named Steve Perlman. So, the thing comes out as a total disaster. Like, the the stock price doubles on the first day, 2 years later the company's basically worthless. And because it when the communicator comes out, it's like it has 200-page manual, nobody really It's so many features like nobody really understands how to use it. So, Perlman's supposed to create the calendar function for this thing. And he writes it from 1904 to 2096 and checks it in, done. When you say calendar function, like why is the calendar function going back to 1904 here? Uh it's just cuz there may be old apps that people use or because they they were readying themselves for the world of apps, that people might build things that have historical stock prices or historical news or whatever. And so he checks it in and he's done, right? And then one of the leaders comes to him and says, "Steve, people might write historical apps that go way back. You got to make it bigger." So, he opens it back up, makes it go from year one, thinks he's done. Then another team comes him and says, "Why are you tying it into this arbitrary religious context of year one? Make it go back to the beginning of astronomical time." So, he opens it up and writes the calendar function to go from the Big Bang to the future. It would have been four lines of code if he left it 1904 to 2096, instead it drags on for months. And this is how everything worked at General Magic because they could do anything, so they did.

There's a line by Bill Gurley, the venture capitalist, that says more startups die of indigestion than starvation. That seems appropriate. Yeah, actually multiple people claim to me that they coined that line in my interviews. Yeah, that's right, of the same quotation. Yeah, and and this idea that, you know, it's really counterintuitive, the idea that that they die of too much not too little. Um but it's but it's often the case because it doesn't force you to I mean, I think the things that that useful constraints can often do is force you to clarify your priorities and launch productive experimentation. And with so many resources, places like General Magic don't have to do that. They're not forced to prioritize ruthlessly.

When I was talking about changing my own writing process, my book projects are usually about 2 years. I mean, I'm interested in the idea before that, but the formal process, 2 years. This time around, I didn't start writing for a year, not a word. At the end of a year just researching, I made an I took a 100,000-word note sheet, much longer than the book, and made it into a one-page outline with the structural architecture of the book, which forced me to prioritize ruthlessly. And if it's not on that page, it's not in the book. So, there's all these other things I think are interesting, right? But that forced me to really prioritize and and places like General Magic never have to ruthlessly prioritize.

One of the really cool about the General Magic story is that the expats who come out of General Magic >> That's why it's an important company. >> Yeah, they go on to build I mean, it's almost like everything. It's like it's like Stanford. It's like the people who graduated from General Magic went on to found other >> Every person listening to this uses something made by a General Magic alum the iPhone, the iPad, the iPhone, Nest, >> Android, LinkedIn, eBay. Can you tell me how they applied the lessons they learned from the implosion of General Magic? Because it did implode.

Yeah, it it exploded. It was a disaster, ruined the various people's lives and stuff like that. Um but some of these, especially younger employees, were kind of, you know, I don't want to say traumatized cuz it's not like trauma in the real psychological term, but it left a scar for them. And they took that to the next places they went and all became kind of constraint-obsessed to various degrees. The guy who was the most constraint-obsessed was this guy, Tony Fadell, who when I first called him and said, I was Bill Gurley had introduced us and and I said, you know, I want to talk about constraints. He goes, "If you don't have constraints, make up constraints." He's like almost yelling at me. He's a very enthusiastic guy in general. But he went on to design the iPod. He was the lead designer of the iPod. And he pitched Steve Jobs a Styrofoam model in March of 2001 and got the green light and said, "We're shipping by Christmas." And just a few weeks to make a first prototype, clear customer problem, right? Growing music collections in the MP3 age, no way to carry them on the go. And it's a and it forced them to because he set these really tight deadlines for when they would stop, learn lessons and then do a next version, sometimes called design freeze, where you're forced to stop. It forced them to start borrowing technology instead of building from scratch like they did at General Magic. So, the scroll wheel that was the iconic feature of the iPod came from a team member who brought in a Danish cordless phone that had a wheel on it and they had to repurpose stuff. But his The apotheosis, I think, of his fervor for constraints was Nest, where he forced the team to work inside a literal box. Like, he made them prototype the packaging box before the product because it forced them to say, "What are the What are the priorities that are so important we communicate them on the box to the end user." Uh and so the you know, his whole career became like centered around constraint-driven innovation. He wasn't the only one. I mean, interesting one in government, um which you might appreciate because of all of your writing about government, was Megan Smith, who was another young engineer there, went on to become She She like led some stuff dealing with Google Maps and all these other things. And then she went on to become the first female chief technology officer of the United States under President Obama. And she told me people had these huge ideas of things they want to do. They'd be like, "Let's remake education." And she was like, "I've seen what happens when you say we're going to remake everything. It doesn't It doesn't work." So, so she developed this philosophy she called scout and scale, where she's like, "All these people are doing these little prototypes in their communities and some of them might be working. So, what we need to do is go find those people that have already learned these lessons in a small way and then just help their good solutions scale." So, there's in all these different ways, they all came out um with these with these lessons about putting a bounding box around projects.

One of my frustrations talking to you and for people watching us or listening to us, this is not the first or 10th time that David and I have hung out, is that every question I have for you always like opens up like 10 to 15 different tabs in like the browser of my own head cuz I'm like there's like all these different things I want to like follow up on. One of them is as you were offering the last uh story on how Tony Fadell went from the disaster of General Magic, uh too much freedom, uh to Nest, which is hyper-constrained by the design process of it first design the box in order to design the exterior of the product in order to design the interior of the product. One way that I think about that with my own work is um it's often instructive, I think, if you're stuck in an essay wondering what it is you want to say, write the tweet. If you can't write the tweet, if you can't express not just the headline, if you can't express in 200 to 300 words why you are excited to share this idea with the world, you don't have an idea. You haven't done the work. You need to talk to more people. You need to read more books. You need to read more papers. If you can't write the tweet, you haven't written the essay or you're not ready to.

That's >> And like I feel like it's it's similar because the tweet is the packaging. The tweet's not the essay. The tweet is the box in which the essay is travels through the world, right? Meets its ultimate customer. But in a way I was like, oh, that that explains why this weird habit that I've developed works. Because in a weird way, if you reverse-engineer from the box, that can provide enough focus to ask the question, "What is it that I'm trying to make here in the world?"

That's That's That's pretty brilliant. That's very Fadell-esque of you. And in fact, he told me that one of the reasons I did the one-page outline was his He said his uh most important advice he gives entrepreneurs who he mentors now is to write the press release before they start the project. One page press release only, right? Which I think is a very similar thing. And as he said, whether it's the Nest box or or the press release, uh because that, you know, it forces you to try Why are you doing this thing? Like you said, "What problem am I solving?" And he said it does slow you down. Like, it it it kind of sucks, right? I didn't enjoy taking 100,000 words and condensing into a one-page outline. I don't know how you feel about doing those tweets, but it's probably hard. But that's the point, right? I think as he his words were something like with these ultra-constraint-based things, it slows you down, but it forces that thinking. So, when I hear you say that, I'm immediately like, "Oh, I don't want to do that." But it would absolutely be great for me to do, but it's it's It's a little painful, but that's why it's helpful. And then you're liberated within that to do your thing.

Yeah. This idea that when we fail to constrain ourselves, our focus often suffers, uh also clicks into a wonderful idea from the book by the focus and attention researcher Gloria Mark, who introduced a concept I I I had not heard of before I read your work called self-interruption. What is self-interruption?

Ooh, yeah, this was the scariest research in the book. So, what Gloria Mark She She's been uh following people at work for about a quarter century and finding that we're switching tasks. You know, it was about 3 minutes every 3 minutes you'd switch a task when she started, now it's about every 45 seconds. And what she found is that with all these constant interruptions like that, whether it's phone notification, other people, whatever, and then often people will say, "Okay, not today or this week I have to focus. I'm putting that stuff away." But even if you do that, you will start self-interrupting with intrusive thoughts about stuff you should check, things you should respond to at the cadence to which you've become accustomed. >> Mhm. As if we have some internal distraction barometer that's like "No, I've become used to this. I'm going to interrupt you with your own thoughts even if you you put the phone away." And so, you actually have to train your attention if you want to be able to focus by having you know, one of the things she recommends is is having blocks of focus. So, she found that people in offices check email 77 different times a day on average, right? That's not 77 emails. That's 77 times checking. Maybe you have to answer all that email, but if you can put it into one or two or three blocks where you're just doing email and then your other blocks you're not doing that and try to structure all your work like that. I mean, part of her point is that if you're not structuring your attention now it is being structured for you. So, you either have a choice to structure it and and train yourself to be able to have blocks of focus um or or it's going to be done to you.

One reason why this approach is so counterintuitive is that I think our creativity myths and our mythologies of genius and invention tend to associate the moment of discovery and the moment of invention >> Yeah. with a kind of mindless freedom. Yes. >> Like go take a shower. Yeah. >> Go have a bath. And not that those things can't act >> I'm not telling people not to shower, that's for sure. >> [laughter] >> They they they should do so. But it's interesting me cuz your book is organized in many ways around one big story that you're trying to myth-bust. Yeah. And that is the story of Dmitri Mendeleev. Yeah. Tell me what most people understand to be the story of Dmitri Mendeleev and the periodic table. Tell me the story that most people know and then we'll tell the story that you discovered is real.

>> Yeah. Yeah, if they know it. I mean, so I'll tell you the one that I learned in college chemistry, which is the the status quo story. Um is that he's the Siberian Siberian genius. In the winter of 1869, he's trying to put all the elements, you know, the chemical building blocks of the universe in order. He senses there's some order, but he can't find it and he he's he's maniacally focused on and he he stays up for 3 days no sleep and finally he can't stay awake any longer and he drifts off into the most impactful nap in human history. And he dreams of the elements sort of swirling around and they snap together in columns and the columns snap together in a grid. And as you move across that grid the chemical and physical properties repeat periodically, which is why it's called the periodic table. And and by the way, it's it's and he wakes up and writes it down, finished product. And it's not just a poster that hangs in high school classrooms. It showed us where to find new elements. >> Mhm. The gaps in the table and that motivated the search for the underlying cause of this pattern, which was atoms. So, it it was a huge uh breakthrough, not just a poster. And that's the story that I learned in college chemistry. The Royal Society, you know, one of the biggest scientific societies in the in the world celebrated the anniversary. Matthew Walker in Why We Sleep called it the the epitome, the paradox example of the the power of our our our sleeping brains to our dreaming brains to to freed from the bounds of reality. And there's all these funny uses like Casper used it in mattress marketing and all this stuff like that. Um that's the story. If people know the story, that's the one they've heard.

>> And what's the truth? Uh none of that. Um so, Mendeleev actually had a publishing contract to do a two-volume intro to chemistry textbook. He had a book deadline. He had a book deadline. And and even more importantly, it So, in the first volume he'd gotten eight of the then 63 known elements in. Uh so, he had to get the other 55 into volume two. And he realized and it had to make So, he had a customer problem, too. It had to make sense to intro students. And he realized he couldn't keep going one element at a time. So, he started experimenting with groups and saying, "Maybe I can find sort of representative families that I can describe at once instead of individual elements." He was absolutely not looking for a law of nature. He was looking for an organizational scheme for his textbook. And it was in doing that he started to think in families and found the periodic pattern. So, it was very much the constraints of a textbook contract, which is like the the polar opposite end of coolness from discovering something in a dream. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Casper's not going to advertise that, I think.

So, the gap between the myth and the reality of Mendeleev, I think, for me draws a bridge between the two big principles I want to discuss with you. Principle number one, that we overrate the degree to which freedom makes us creative and freedom allows us to flourish. And number two the fact that it is wise limitations and wise constraints that often unleash our creativity and allow for flourishing. To get us started on part two this idea that throughout history the greatest musicians and writers and thinkers have been empowered by constraints >> [snorts] >> tell me about Keith Jarrett.

Keith Jarrett we're talking mid-1970s in the story I tell. He's he's a uh jazz piano phenom, right? He's becoming world famous. He's touring the world and one of his concert stops is in Cologne, Germany uh for a concert promoted by a a teenager who has uh rented out an opera house and all these things. And he shows up ready to play, test the piano at the opera house and says "Concert's off." And Vera Brandes was the name of the teenager who was promoting to freaks out like, "What are you talking about?" And it turns out the the wrong piano had been brought. In fact it was wrong it was untuned. It had like uh worn felt hammers, so the upper register was tinny. It was too small. It had fewer keys than the piano that he had requested. And so, he says, "Nope." He's he's leaving. And she basically begs him to do it. And you know, she's a she's a teenager and he he gives in and says "Just this just for you this once." And so, he ends up playing and the piano forces him to work in all these different ways. He he doesn't want to use the tinny area, so he kind of stays to the middle registers. He finds one area that sounds okay enough with his left hand. So, he just keeps repeating things there, sometimes for 10 minutes at a time while he's improvising with his right hand. The piano's not big enough to get sound to uh the back of the opera house. So, he adds a percussion by stepping on the pedal without pushing it down. All these innovative elements and then he, you know he kind of walks away and is like, "Whatever." and goes off to his next uh next gig. And he'd almost told once the piano he he had a recording crew there. He was with his his manager. And they were starting to tell the recording crew like just this one's not going to be useful. And they're like, "Whatever, they're already here. Let them stay here." It gets turned into an album about an hour-long impro- improvisation. Way too long to play on the radio. But people start playing it in record stores and everyone who walks in starts asking, "What is that? Give me that." And it builds and builds and builds and becomes the best-selling solo piano album of all time. And as Jarrett would say in he he he sort of came to have a dimmer view of it later on because it got associated with this sort of atmospheric jazz that he didn't like. But his album that he did say was his best was another piano that had these imperfections. And he said, "It forces you to work in these ways that you just can't envision ahead of time." So uh it it forced him to create something amazing that I think you and I actually both legitimately also love this album.

I listened to it today while writing these questions. I listened to it reading your book and it is on my deep work playlist. I mean, the there are It's incredible music to work to. >> tracks on the Cologne album by Keith Jarrett that are among just my favorite pieces of 20th century music bar none. I mean, it's just and you can hear one thing that I think is it was interesting, you know, reading your your your reporting on this it's just repetitive enough. And in my first book Hit Makers, I talked a lot about how we what we want from music is this idea that it is we we want hooks that don't announce themselves as hooks. So, they can't be too repetitive. But if they're just repetitive enough, they get stuck in our ear. And it's it's just an amazing piece of work. You call this idea this concept that Keith Jarrett stumbled on with Vera, the teenager. You call it the Green Eggs and Ham theory of creativity. Yeah. Why?

Yeah, that's actually a a a phrase I took from the psychologist Katherine Trump and it's after the book Green Eggs and Ham, which Theodor Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss wrote on a bet that he couldn't write a book using only 50 words. And that forced him to experiment with rhythm in all these new ways. He obviously did it. But actually even before that, the first bet was uh he was given a vocab list for kids and asked to use about 200 words to to write a book. And first he starts complaining to his wife cuz there's almost no adjectives. He says it's like trying to make a strudel with no strudels, which I love. And then he just says throws up his hands and says, "You know what? I'm just going to take the first two rhyming words on the list and make a book." And the first two rhyming words, cat and hat, right? And the rest is history. And it's the idea that having these constraints forces you off what cognitive psychologists call the path of least resistance. When you're hemmed in, when the typical convenient solution is blocked. So, like the cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham, I love how he puts this. He says uh "You may think your brain's made for thinking, but it's made for preventing you from having to think whenever possible because thinking is energetically costly. And so, you'll go for the low-friction easy solution, the path of least resistance, unless that is forcibly blocked and then you're forced to do totally new things." So, it's actually almost kind of impossible to be creative when you have too much freedom because your brain is wired for convenience, not for not for innovation.

What kind of limits and constraints do you think are most helpful? Because obviously there are some kinds of limits and constraints that aren't helpful. I mean, one can and and you say this in the book. I'm not exposing any any anything that you didn't observe already, but like like poverty is obviously a constraint. >> Yeah, constraint. Yeah. And no one would argue that like the best thing we should do for America's children is to make their parents poorer because that's going to introduce an economic constraint that will turn their children into Keith Jarrett. No one's saying that. You're not saying that. But what is a useful way to think about the kind of constraints that hurt and the kind of constraints that help?

Yeah. And And to that point, in fact, late in the book I talk about constraints that have led to shared prosperity, right? Cuz that's what we want. And obviously you you've written about that um eloquently. And I think the whole idea that there could be such a thing as too much freedom would have been laughable for most of human history, right? This is sort of a more a more recent problem. And I think if we're thinking about, say, our own life and work. So again, I think the the the two key principles of a useful constraint is that uh it forced you to clarify priorities or to launch into productive exploration, typically. Now, if someone's telling you how to do something so specifically that you say, "Could I surprise myself?" And the answer is no, then you're you're way too constrained. But in terms of clarifying priorities, let's say there's a genomics lab that I write about in the book that um was a leader in the world and was losing its lead because the work was getting so messy. And they decide to to make all of their current commitments visible on a wall, posted notes on a wall, and immediately realize we've got way too much going on. Because they only ever add. They never take things away. And I think modern life is insidious at adding things to our plate in work and in life. And we we are hardwired to overlook taking stuff away. It's called subtraction neglect bias. Like we over we we easily add things and don't take them away. So I think a form of doing that for everyone of uh making all your current commitments visible and then making a funnel that's like nothing else is coming in the top of this funnel until something else comes out the bottom uh can be incredibly useful. So that's something where you're not, you're not impoverishing somebody. You're not even telling them not to do things they want to do, but clarify your priorities. Because I think so much, you know, I think it's it's never been easier to do too much and compared to now. And I think a lot of the optimization and productivity hacks and all these kinds of things um that people want are illusions where they are not being forced to grapple with the fact they have limited time and attention and should be prioritizing ruthlessly. And so we're giving into all these illusions where we're uh taking on way more than we can do. So So that's what some I don't know if I went too far off track there.

>> not off track at all. In a way I want to go deeper. I mean, it sounds to me like you're saying that limitations are good when they fight one of two different enemies, distraction and delay, right? By fighting distraction, we force prioritization. And by fighting delay, you're saying, "No, do the thing now." And this is one reason why I think deadlines are so important. There's so many characters throughout this book, just strewn throughout the book of these incredible achievements that we would want to think of as breakthroughs in the shower, but in fact they're all about deadlines. Tell me about Frank Lloyd Wright. And then just keep going on on this principle, please, about the idea that what constraints do, the kind of constraints that are useful aren't constraints like poverty, but rather constraints that promote and require us to focus.

So Frank Lloyd Wright. Yeah. And And to set the little bit of the research background for Frank Lloyd Wright, deadlines because I think this is a great example where you're asking me to differentiate between the good and bad constraints. Deadlines can be either good or bad. Deadlines boost people's creative problem-solving and creativity and and productivity when it leads them to monotask. And they say, "I have to do this thing now." When it leads them to multitask, which is sometimes also does, people say, "I have all these deadlines. I have to do a million different things." Then all those good things go down. So it really depends how you use it. But in the case of Frank Lloyd Wright, so Falling Water, probably the most famous work of architecture in the United States, um he had months to work on this, thinking about it, but hadn't done anything. And the client then calls and says, "Hey, I'm a few hours away. I I want to stop by and see the drawings." And Frank Lloyd Wright, you know, according to one of his apprentices, marches uh across the room, sits down, and goes to work, and they he's wearing out pencils so fast they have multiple people like getting them ready to sharpen. And in a few hours he does the plan for Falling Water. Period. Done. And that's the plan that stuck. So it led him to monotask maniacally. And there are all these examples of people like that. Like another that's near him in the book is Duke Ellington, who was the most chronic of procrastinators, right? Left compositions unwritten, watches unworn, partners unwed. Like everything he put off. So as he like to say, "I don't need time. What I need is a deadline." He got he he he wrote almost 2,000 original compositions. I mean, I think he was one of America's eminent creative geniuses. Like the stuff in the '30s he's most famous for, to me, doesn't hold a candle to stuff in the '60s that's total creative reinvention. But he could not work unless there was a deadline pressing him. And then when it when there was, he worked with an intensity that like surprised everyone around him. But again, these were creators who saw the deadline as cause to monotask. And if people use it that way, it's incredibly powerful.

How has this changed your work? Like how has it changed your creative life?

Yeah. So So first of all, there's there's the process aspect of my work where with my first two books I wrote 150% the length of a book. This is the first time I wrote one book to get one book. And I turned it in early because I had this I took longer time to start, but I gave myself a much more defined box once I started working. And that really liberated me to then enjoy the writing and play with the sentences and things like that because I wasn't thinking about the architecture while I was doing that. So I would never not work this way again if I ever write another book. But it also changed the things I do within my work day in a few ways. One, I end my work day now. I used to say, "Oh, one of my competitive advantages is that I'm going to let my work day go on forever and I can just do more work than other people." You know, and one, I realized just like when I was an athlete, that's stupid because recovery is really important if you want to be good again later. But also having a kid and, you know, not wanting the work day to drag on forever. So I stole something from Isabel Allende, the you know, one of the greatest living writers who I profile in the book, where she lights a candle to start her work day and blows it out at the end every day to be like and closes the door. Done. Um I use electric candles because like too much paper. I don't want to burn down my office. But having a real end of my work day and a period of recovery, so that I'm cycling. And then during the day I really do batch my work now. So you know, not everybody can not check email as much as I do during some periods, but I definitely don't start with it because in looking at Gloria Mark's work I learned about the Zeigarnik effect, which is an unfinished task leaves this residue on your brain that in fear interferes with the other stuff you're going to do. And the inbox is always an unfinished task. So I make sure to do some of my important work before I open that. And then I try to make monotasking blocks for whatever I'm doing out throughout the day so that I'm minimizing my number of toggles. Another, I'll give you one more that's like really mechanical for me cuz there are also some personal things that that I took from this book that were not about my work. I'm with the personal stuff, too. So let's finish work and then go personal.

>> mechanically, um one of the probably the greatest creative prompt you can have is saying to somebody like, "How would you solve this problem?" And then say, "Oh, and you can't do it that way." Whether it's like a client meeting or a painter. And say, "Whatever the thing they start doing." Then say, "No, no, sorry. That one's gone." Preclude constraint, right? >> [snorts] >> And I I married that with something I learned while I was reporting on Pixar that they use called the three pitches rule, where they would have directors force them to pitch three story ideas cuz they found that they would get fall in love with their first idea and it usually wasn't their best. So they had to pitch three. So for me, my leads for every chapter in the book, I wrote the lead that came to mind. Then I crossed that out and forced myself to write two other leads. Painful, right? Cuz you get attached to the thing you put down. But I'd say two-thirds of the chapters I probably used not the first one, the second or third one. Cuz the first one is just the convenient thing that comes to mind. It's not the best. So that's a way I changed my work. In in my life, so I moved to the life >> Oh, yeah. I actually want to go to life because let me let me let me set up life. Um I'm very interested in in happiness. Uh I I write a lot about happiness. I podcast a lot about happiness. Um happiness is on my mind right now cuz I just wrote this long piece about how according to basically every single social survey we have available to us, American happiness just fell off a cliff in the 2020s. And um if you look at which groups have the highest level of self-reported happiness, it's often married people with kids. >> Yeah. And on the one hand, you could say, "That's not surprising because married people with kids tend to be economically advantaged." I think there's something to that, so I don't want to rule that out. But it's interesting in the concept or in the context, I should say, of our conversation because married people with kids have the most constraints, the most responsibilities. I mean, I have two children now, 2 and 1/2 and about 4 or 5 months old. I cannot work after 5:30. It like Yeah. I can't because I'm taking care of my children until they're in their beds until you know, 8:30. By the time they're in their beds by 8:30, I'm exhausted. Like my brain is complete mush by 8:45. So I can't physically work past 5:00 p.m. anymore. And I can't work on the weekends, either. But in a weird way, that constraint promotes such extraordinary focus. And there's one more piece that I found is like sort of counterintuitively helpful. If I structure my day around my workouts, if I say I, no matter what, I have to go to the gym for 35 minutes, and I go, forcing myself to organize the day around this thing that has nothing to do with productivity, makes me more productive, I think, because I lose time. So, now it's like it's not just that I have to be home at 5:30. It's not just that I have to go to the gym. All these things are limiting my time. If I want to get any writing done, it has to be done between like 9:45 and 11:15. Let's go, right? Yeah, the time where you're laser-focused, monotasking on that writing. >> unbelievably clear to me that I can't [ __ ] around the same way I could when I was 25 years old. When, to your point, it was like, if I don't finish this writing now, I'll go home and I'll write it at 9:00 p.m. Yep. I'll wake up at 2:00 a.m. and write it. Who cares? I'll wake up at 5:00 a.m. and write it. Who like But, that kind

of freedom, that ability to do anything whenever, always allows you to place your product, your focus in the future, rather than right here, right now. And so, it ends up working against you.

So, I I I now want to hear, now that I've given you my little sermon, I want to know about how writing this book has changed your life, changed your organization of time, or your conception of family life, or what's important to you.

Yeah, I mean, I think some of the things will not surprise you, right? And to go to your point, by the way, of people who are married with children, you know, being happier. I mean, it goes back to like Durkheim in the late 19th century. He's one of the founders of sociology, where when governments first started doing it, keeping statistics on suicide, and he looked at, well, and at the time it was thought it was just a private psychological problem. And he looked and said, "Oh, no, no, it's a social problem because it goes in waves. And if the economic fortunes of a country turn way down, suicide goes up. But if they go up too fast, and it unmoors people from all these things they're used to, suicide goes up also." And people without, basically, people without the less dense their network of reciprocal obligation was, the more likely they were to be depressed and take their own life.

And then, Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone found basically the same thing, where he famously said, "Joining one club cuts your risk of dying next year in half." And that's a rule of thumb, and but it's kind of been backed up by subsequent research, that having a network of obligations that impinge on your freedom, you have to be somewhere at certain times, right? But they make life more meaningful.

And I had thought, when I became a writer, as I started getting more traction in the industry, autonomy became my goal. I actually went to a writers' retreat once, and they we had to answer what we were all optimizing for that year, and I said autonomy. Fast forward a few years, and I realized there is such a thing as too much autonomy. When we came in here, I was just like, "I love coming into an office." Before we started recording. Um, and that's a very privileged thing to say, right? But I realized I was unhappy, and I had to start reeling that back. So, I joined a nonprofit board in my community. I started going to dance meetups to have some embodied experience with strangers. Um, I joined a regular dinner and discussion club, and all these things that impinge on my scheduling freedom, where I have to be places where other people are counting on me to be there at certain times that are annoying, but I'm so much happier doing that, having those connections and having those obligations and being a dad and all these things. So, some of it was rebuilding my network of obligations that, even though annoying, are really important.

Cuz I think I ended up in kind of, do you remember when Mark Zuckerberg first described the metaverse? And he was like, "It's going to be great. We're all going to live in a universe totally tailored just to us." And I'm like, "Wait, that's actually horrible. That's like what I was doing in real life. Like, you don't sync with anybody else's schedule, it's terrible." But I also, I think I started becoming more of a satisficer in my life after doing some of this research, where satisficing is a term coined by Herbert Simon. This guy who's a lot of his thinking is in the book. He was a trained political scientist, but he won the highest awards in computer science, psychology, and the Nobel Prize in economics. And what he showed was that humans don't conform to the rational actor model in economics, where we can evaluate endless options and make the best decision. We have to pick good enough solutions and satisfice. And he said we should do that proactively. You should have good enough rules. So, he wore one type of beret, one kind of socks, said you need three pairs of clothing, one on your back, one in the closet, one in the wash, same breakfast, same house for 46 years, etc. You'd almost think he's like a low-ambition guy, if he hadn't won the highest awards in three different scientific disciplines.

And so, I really took that to heart, because I think I have the opposite tendency, what's called maximizing tendencies, to try to evaluate everything and take the best option. And it's almost always a bad thing to be. Maximizers are, maybe we call optimizers now, less happy with their decisions, less happy with their lives, more prone to regret. So, I'm now very proactive about making decision rules. What would be good enough for this decision, this product I'm buying, this project I'm doing. My newsletter, I started as a very proactive satisficing experiment, where I say, "If a book has to be a nine or 10, if I hit six and a half on a newsletter post, it's going out." So, I'm much more cognizant about setting good enough rules for all these things and then moving on and not reading all the other reviews or whatever it is for my decisions.

I want to end with a character that you and I have talked a lot about, um, as you were writing this book, my favorite philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard. A Danish gentleman from the early to mid. You telling me when I first mentioned I was writing about constraints, you mentioned Kierkegaard. Well, one of the ideas that I love most in his history of existentialism, maybe philosophy, is Kierkegaard's theory of infinitude and finititude, where he says, you know, you can be lost in both. People have been lost in finititude for centuries. That is to say, if you're a Catholic potato farmer, whose dad is a Catholic potato farmer, whose dad is a Catholic potato farmer, you have no ability to make choices that truly author your individual authenticity. You can't become a true individual, because you're locked in the grooves of life. And he said, "The opposite, though, is the problem of modernity. We're not lost in finititude, we're lost in infinitude. We are told we can be anything. We are told that we should seek absolute freedom, maximize our happiness in all these different things at once."

And in the most famous line that he wrote is that anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. Right? Standing at the edge of a cliff and looking down and fearing that you're going to fall, that's fear. But not knowing if you should jump, or if you should step back, or if you should climb down, and being obsessed with thinking through all the different things you can do at the edge of that cliff, that is the dizziness of freedom. That is anxiety. And the reason I think that this project is such a good match for our times is that I I just think Kierkegaard was right. I think that we we are told to maximize happiness in so many different aspects of our lives, and it's a process of insanity making, I think, for a lot of people. And so, I thought from the second that I heard about this project that the idea of a book singing the gospel of constraint would be incredibly useful. And this book really is incredibly useful. So, David, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Very eloquently put.