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In 2023, a 16-year-old Lamine Yamal made his debut for Barcelona after a childhood playing pickup soccer on the concrete in Rocafonda. Today, he's widely being regarded as the next Lionel Messi.
Ironically, 20 years earlier, a 16-year-old Lionel Messi made his debut for the same club after a childhood playing futsal on the streets of Argentina. Same club, same age, same path to stardom? A photo from 2007 makes this bizarre parallel even stranger.
So, what makes these two players so great? It's not just talent, it's how they trained. In fact, there's one specific idea that forced them to be better. An idea that it's applicable to soccer players, but also to anyone who's looking to get better at what they do, even you.
By the way, I'm David Epstein, the three-time New York Times bestselling author of The Sports Gene, Range, and my new book Inside the Box.
So, let's go back to Lamine. Yamal joined Barcelona's youth academy at just 7 years old. The training was all small-sided games, four on four, five on five. It was never 11 on 11 until his late teens. This was the same pipeline that produced Messi, Xavi, and Iniesta.
Those small-sided games, they leverage something called the constraints-led approach of skill learning in sports. Where instead of telling someone how to do something, the coach or the trainer is like an environment architect, that's the term they use, who sets up boundaries that force players to experiment and develop creativity. When you're playing in small sides and small spaces, there's research that shows that players more actively explore the different strategies they could use than if they were on a much larger field with more players.
It's easy to write Yamal off as just a one-off prodigy, a freak. But the same answer shows up in nearly every name on the Mount Rushmore of soccer. And once you see it, you'll see it in your own work, too.
The vast majority of the world's best soccer players grew up training in a particular way. They grew up playing futsal. In his book, The Talent Code, author Daniel Coyle called it Brazil's secret weapon. He described futsal as soccer if it were played inside a phone booth and dosed with amphetamines. The ball's half the size and weighs twice as much, so it stays on the ground and doesn't even really bounce much.
Kids play five on five or six on six in basketball court-size stretches of concrete or wood floors or grass or sand. It's lots of short, quick passes. The rhythm and the speed of the game, it's almost more like hockey than it's really like soccer. And players touch the ball six times as much per minute as they do in normal soccer. So, they're making decisions much more actively, and nobody can just be downfield watching.
As Coyle writes again in The Talent Code, the great Juninho said he never kicked a full-size ball on grass until he was 14. And until he was 12, Robinho spent half his training time playing futsal.
The key is the constraint. Futsal compresses soccer's essential skills, decision-making, and ball control into a tiny box. As Messi said, "It really helped me become who I am today." Or as Ronaldo put it, "All we played was futsal."
Soccer legend after legend credits futsal for the development. Iniesta, Xavi, Ronaldinho, Neymar, even Pelé. Notice what futsal actually is. Tight space, fewer players, a heavier ball, there's no long ball escape. Every one of those is a deliberate constraint designed to take away the easy answer and force a young brain to invent a new one.
In the constraints-led approach, coaches or trainers are called the environment architect, and they create these spaces, often these small spaces, that force the learner to experiment in new ways because the easy path is blocked. When adults want to get better at something, our instinct is to add more time, more tools, more freedom. Soccer suggests the opposite.
Picasso put it this way, "Forcing yourself to use restricted means is the sort of restraint that liberates invention." So, how do you put yourself in your own phone booth?
Blumhouse, the Hollywood hit factory, intentionally gives directors tiny budgets that forces them to experiment and get creative. So, they can't use lots of locations, they can't have tons of speaking roles, so they have to experiment with story. Kind of like the way that a futsal player has to experiment in a space of limited size. And this recipe has led to films like Get Out, Whiplash, Paranormal Activity. Films that sometimes produce a thousand X or more return on their budgets, not to mention being critically acclaimed. Some of the greatest film directors make their works out of these constrained budgets, just like some of the greatest soccer players develop their creativity inside of a box.
If you're looking to spark a creative breakthrough, you too need a box. In fact, you can use something that psychologist Patricia Stokes called the paired constraints framework. It's called paired because it involves two steps. The first is preclude, blocking something that you rely upon. The second is called a promote, you put something in its place that you have to try.
What you want to start with is a constraint that blocks the easiest path, because if you have total freedom, your brain will just go down what cognitive scientists call the path of least resistance. You'll just do the easier convenient thing or something that you've done before. So, first you have to block that.
Let me give you a historical example of the paired constraints framework in action. Claude Monet, one of the greatest artists in history. In his day, painters portrayed light using dark and light shades of color. They would mix paints with black to portray different impressions of light. Monet said, "I'm going to block that entirely. I'm not going to use light and dark shades. No black at all." He banned black so thoroughly that at his funeral, when they draped a black shroud over his coffin, one of his friends freaked out and started yelling, "No black for Monet." and went and found a floral tablecloth to drape over the coffin. So, he put pure colors next to one another, almost like a mosaic. And that's what allowed him to show any impression of light that a viewer could see in nature. And that was the birth of Impressionism.
So, if you're feeling creatively stuck, what you need is to try some constraints. Here five that you might be able to try this week.
First, shrink the problem space. If you have to write something, try a 200-word version of it first before you move on to something longer. A friend of mine, who's a great writer, says that before he writes an article, he'll force himself to write the tweet about the article so he can figure out the core of what he wants to say.
Second, cut out your default tool. Maybe no laptop or no ChatGPT or in this next client meeting, I'm not allowed to recommend the thing I usually recommend. What would I do instead?
Third, shrink the clock. Give yourself 25 minutes to do whatever it is, not all afternoon. As Duke Ellington said, "I don't need time. What I need is a deadline."
Fourth, reduce the number of people. Brainstorm alone first. There's actually a huge body of research showing that brainstorming basically doesn't work for generating creative ideas because people start to gravitate around a consensus. Or sometimes they all just gravitate to a single person's opinion. There's one funny term called HIPPO that means highest paid person's opinion. That once the highest paid person in the room speaks, everyone else will gravitate to their opinion. So, the research shows that something called brain writing is actually a better way to generate creative ideas, where people all separately write down their ideas first and then they come together and evaluate them together.
Fifth, pick one small thing to subtract this week. Humans have a bias called additive bias to always add more of things. More tools, more people, more dashboards, more obligations. That doesn't leave room for your creativity to fill some of the gaps. So, this week put all of your current obligations on posted notes and put them on a wall. And then say, "If I had to cut one of these out in the next 30 days, what would it be?"
If you like this video, you'll probably love my story about how Southwest Airlines turned their business around when they only had 140 bucks left and had to sell one of their planes and couldn't service all the routes anymore. It's a fascinating story of innovation under constraints and I cut it for my new book Inside the Box. That was probably a mistake because it's fascinating. But, now I'm offering it for free. You can download it at the PDF in the description. Take a look. It's fascinating. I probably should have left it in.
Thanks so much for watching. I'll see you in the next one.