Why constraints fuel innovation

DAVID EPSTEIN: A director would fixate on some tiny detail in the background of a shot, like the shading on a penny that the audience may well never even notice, and they’d have animators working on it and working on it.

JEFF BERMAN: That’s author David Epstein. He’s describing a problem Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull told him about: how to get people to obsess over details but still get all of their work done.

EPSTEIN: That’s where they devised the popsicle sticks Velcroed to a board, with each stick representing the amount of work that one animator could do in one week. If they wanted to keep working on that penny, they had to start taking popsicle sticks away from other characters. Making the constraint visible showed people the trade-off they were making and had this instant effect of helping them clarify their priorities and know where they should put their energy.

BERMAN: This is Masters of Scale.

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I’m Jeff Berman, your host. I am thrilled to be here today with bestselling author David Epstein. His books, The Sports Gene and Range, are truly essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how to become the best version of themselves. He has a brilliant new book out called Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better. 

David, welcome to Masters of Scale.

EPSTEIN: Thank you so much for having me.

BERMAN: I’ve really been looking forward to this. I was late to Range. I found it just a few months ago.

EPSTEIN: You got to get your priorities straight.

BERMAN: I do. Well, the good news is I’m early to Inside the Box.

EPSTEIN: All right. Doing better.

BERMAN: So I’m making up for it here. When I was reading Range, this is almost embarrassingly self-referential, but I felt really seen because there are not many people who do what I do now who started their careers as a public defender in Washington, D.C., and have had this kind of zigzagging career. In a world where there’s so much focus on building skills, especially when you’re a parent and getting a kid into a sport or into an activity, coding, whatever it is, the data-backed case you make in Range is a really powerful argument for diversifying how we spend our time.

EPSTEIN: I appreciate that. It’s interesting you mentioned coding, right? Because a few years ago, if you said, “All right, learn to code and you’ll always be safe,” now it maybe feels like the least safe thing. But to build on that, there was just a paper in Science, probably one of the two most prestigious scientific journals in the world. It aggregated about 30,000 careers of musicians, scientists, and athletes. What it found was basically the thesis of Range: that the indicators of elite youth performance were negatively associated with those of elite adult performance. You can optimize for the short term if you want to make the best kid, but that often undermines long-term development, whether it comes to learning an individual skill, picking a career, and so forth. And that’s even more true in a world that’s rapidly changing, where people can’t just count on next year looking like last year. So there’s been some more validation. And that idea of feeling seen, the same thing happened to me. I was training to be a scientist before I was a writer, so I felt seen while I was doing the research.

Copy LinkWhy David Epstein wrote Inside the Box

BERMAN: I’m curious, because this really feeds into the conceit of Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better. You have extraordinary range. You could choose almost anything to write about. How do you decide what your next book is? How did you pick this as a subject?

EPSTEIN: You’re hitting what I would call a sore spot here a little bit, because one of the reasons I did this book is that I was terrible at putting constraints on myself and on my own work. After Range, I was able to become independent as a writer, and I said, “Gosh, books are so much work. I’m not doing it again unless I find the perfect topic.” And I have such wide interests that I was dabbling in all these different topics and never picking.

Then I came across this quote by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the researcher who coined the term flow to describe the feeling of immersion in an activity. He was talking about marriage, but I think you could apply what he was saying to anything. He said, “The great thing about being committed by your own choice to something is that you can stop wondering how to live and start spending your energy living instead of wondering what’s always around the corner.” And I was like, “Man, that’s what I’m doing with book topics right now. I have a bunch of stuff I’m fascinated by, but I keep saying, ‘Well, what’s around the corner?'”

One of those things I was fascinated by was constraints. And then, reading that quote, it dawned on me that I needed this help myself. I said, “I’m writing a proposal on this tomorrow.” And of course, two weeks later, I’m 10 times as interested in it. My problem is not having enough ideas to write about. It’s deciding what to actually execute on.

BERMAN: Was there a point along the way in researching and writing the book where you had a crisis of confidence that this was the right thing to be writing about?

EPSTEIN: Oh my gosh. Adam Grant, the psychologist, tells me that at some point I was talking to him about my ideas in the book and he said, “You’re a defensive pessimist.” I had not heard that before. He said, “With every one of your ideas, you get excited about it, then you’re sure it’s going to fail, and then you work really hard to make it not fail.” I guess that’s what a defensive pessimist is. But no, I absolutely go through this phase where I think something’s fascinating, it’s going to work, I’m so fired up. And then there’s a phase where it’s just, what did I get myself into? I can’t believe I thought this was going to work. I start taking my own books down from the shelf and looking at them like, “I know this is possible because this thing is in my hands right here.”

BERMAN: There’s this famous chart that shows the entrepreneur’s journey, and it ends up going up and to the right, but in between it’s this incredible oscillation. I think every entrepreneur can relate to that: We’re going to crush it, we’re going to win, we’ve got this. And then an hour later it’s like, we’re going to fail, it’s a disaster, et cetera.

EPSTEIN: Yeah. I had been so bad with my previous books at putting useful boundaries in place that I wrote 150 percent of a book and then had to cut it back to get a book. This time around, partly at the suggestion of Tony Fadell, who’s a character in the book and was the co-founder of Nest, I decided to make a one-page, and one-page-only, outline of what I was trying to do and focus on what is the problem that I’m trying to address.

Copy LinkHow too much freedom can sink a brilliant company

BERMAN: You referenced Tony Fadell, who through incredible doggedness ends up at a company called General Magic, which is perhaps the paradigmatic case study of having too much in the way of resources. I’d love to understand how you came to understand the General Magic problem and how that informed both your research and the conclusions you offer in the book.

EPSTEIN: My first exposure to General Magic was seeing a documentary about the company and thinking it was utterly fascinating. I reached out to the filmmakers and basically asked if they had other footage, because they had real-time footage of this company that was the first so-called concept IPO in Silicon Valley history, where Goldman Sachs took them public with an idea, not a product. They were basically making the iPhone 20 years too early, and resources poured in, talent poured in, and they could do anything. So they did do anything, basically. Every good idea they had, someone built it, and the product became completely incoherent and nobody knew what to do with it. When I was interviewing lots of former employees of General Magic, the refrain was basically, “I just couldn’t figure out what not to do.” They didn’t know what not to do.

To me, it became, like you said, emblematic of all this other research where, in the abstract, and even in rational-actor models of human decision-making, more choice, more opportunity, more resources, more talent: always better, can’t be worse. Then you look at the actual research on how our brains work, how people find satisfaction, how they make good decisions, how they focus their energy, and it’s not that at all. Having too much makes us unsatisfied, leaves us adrift, and keeps us from focusing our energies. So I thought the company was emblematic of this larger swath of research that wasn’t just about businesses, but also about personal decision-making. I feel like it’s never been easier to do too much than it is right now, whether you are an organization or an individual. So it really felt almost personal to me in that way.

Copy LinkWhat Pixar teaches about channeling creativity with rules

BERMAN: There’s so much in this book that is actionable, that is really high-value, and it’s not just the kind of negative lessons of something like General Magic. The Pixar stories really struck me, in particular this idea of trying to engineer away from people getting too attached to their ideas too early on. Pixar engineered this really creative solution to that, and I’d love to hear you talk about it.

EPSTEIN: I think you’re talking about the three-pitches rule.

BERMAN: That’s exactly right.

EPSTEIN: Pixar, the reason I wanted to contrast it with General Magic, was because it was evolving at the same time, with an equally audacious vision: make the world’s first fully computer-animated feature film. I think it’s viewed as this place of unfettered imagination, when in fact it is a place of many fetters and rules and guardrails and all these things that channel those creative ideas. With the three-pitches rule, they found that people would get attached to their first idea, directors pitching stories, even though it usually wasn’t their best idea. And there’s actually science behind this. It’s called the creative cliff illusion. We think that our best idea comes first or not at all, but actually that’s not the case. It’s usually the convenient idea that comes first.

So they forced people to pitch three ideas, and they often ended up not with their first idea. It was a rule that helped save directors from getting attached too early. I think Pixar really had a lot of insight into human psychology, and so they set up all sorts of rules to save people from themselves.

BERMAN: The other thing that I thought was fascinating in the Pixar storytelling was the hyperfixation on small details, which is part of the beauty of Pixar movies but also can lead to a massive misallocation of resources. They engineered, I don’t remember if it’s called the popsicle stick solution, but that’s how I understood it, as a way to solve that. I’d love for you to walk us through that as well.

EPSTEIN: Yeah. This was when I was hanging out with Ed Catmull, the co-founder, and he was telling me about it. What he called it was the beautifully shaded penny problem, where a director would fixate on some tiny detail in the background of a shot, like the shading on a penny that the audience may well never even notice, and they’d have animators working on it and working on it. Meanwhile, they were losing sight of the places where they really needed to spend time and energy. That’s where they devised the solution you’re referring to: popsicle sticks Velcroed to a board, with each stick representing the amount of work that one animator could do in one week. If they wanted to keep working on that penny, they had to start taking popsicle sticks away from other characters. Making the constraint visible showed people the trade-off they were making and had this instant effect of helping them clarify their priorities and know where they should put their energy.

BERMAN: There was one part of the book that I took a photo of and sent around. It’s an old quote of Bill Gurley’s where, I think I’ll get this right, he says, “More start-ups die of indigestion than starvation.” I just joined the board of a company in stealth mode, and the founder was articulating some concerns about being pushed to do too many things too early. I sent him a picture and I just said, “Keep doing what you’re doing. Say no.”

EPSTEIN: I’m so excited you’re sending pictures of this book around. I love this. Very validating.

Copy LinkWhy AI makes guardrails even more important

BERMAN: I don’t know how big your fanboy community is, but sign me up to be chair of it, David, because your books are actionable. This one really unlocked something in a meaningful way. But we are in this AI era where we can take on a lot more work because we can have agents doing it on our behalf, or doing 70, 80, 90, 99 percent of it on our behalf. Are we in a different moment now? Should we be rethinking this indigestion-and-starvation equation in this moment?

EPSTEIN: Yeah, it’s an interesting question. First of all, I think there’s an infinite ability now to start a million things that we’re not going to finish, and I think a lot of people have been doing that. The potential of AI is obvious. It’s cut certain things that I do from 10 hours to one hour, so I’m a fan. But at the same time, over the last year I’ve spent some time with one particular AI company that helps other companies implement AI. One of the things I’ve noticed in that experience, just doing it for my own research and understanding purposes, is that a lot of these companies are implementing it in this sprawling fashion. They know they need to do it, they need to do it fast, everyone else is doing it. So they’re implementing, and it’s leading to a lot of what researchers are starting to call work slop: just tons of volume of stuff that is unclear in terms of whether it’s addressing strategy or not.

The companies that seemed to do it more successfully, at least from the ones I was exposed to, were first defining a problem really well. Once that problem was defined well, then they asked, what tool matches this problem? A few of the organizations would do what they called mapping the jobs to be done: What are the actual jobs that need to be done here, and which of these can that tool do, or which human can that free up to think more strategically? So on the one hand, I think we can do more than ever, and we will certainly see smaller organizations able to do things that in the past would have required them to be much bigger. But on the other hand, I think it’s more important than ever to define our problems really well so we understand how we want to implement these tools.

Also, and this is a little different type of constraint, in organizations people are going to use these tools whether they’re officially allowed to or not, right?

BERMAN: Yep. No question.

EPSTEIN: They’re doing it. And in some cases, if they’re using the public models, that could actually put an organization at some risk. So I think it’s probably important for leaders to create the guardrails and then say, “Please experiment and let the flowers bloom,” instead of just having this disjointed thing where everyone’s doing it in their own way. Set some of those constraints and say, “Now experiment,” because you’re going to be able to find out where this produces some efficiencies, while also creating that playing space for people.

BERMAN: Still ahead, more with David Epstein about when constraints help and when they go just a little too far.

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Copy LinkWhen constraints unlock better problem-solving

Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find this conversation and more on our YouTube channel, and be sure to check out the link in our show notes to subscribe to our newsletter. I had constraints imposed on me when I was a public defender, for sure. I had a lot fewer constraints imposed on me when I worked at MySpace in MySpace’s heyday or at the National Football League. Is there a difference in leading teams where the constraints are imposed from the outside, they’re real, they’re unavoidable, versus the ones that you create for your team?

EPSTEIN: Yes and no, because I think in either case, constraints can do two of the great things they do, which is force you to clarify priorities or launch you into productive exploration, or both at the same time. To give an example, one of the early readers of this book was a guy named Ed Hoffman, who was NASA’s chief knowledge officer, sort of like a psychologist who’s supposed to ensure there’s institutional memory. It was a position created after NASA had some mistakes and decided it needed one. Ed said, “Let me tell you about this mission called LCROSS, where engineers ended up with half the time and half the money that they expected.” What did they do? They whined and complained a little, and then they said, “If we were going to get this done anyway, how would we do it?”

They couldn’t build from scratch, so they had to borrow technology. They took imaging equipment from Army tanks and engine temperature sensors from NASCAR and built a probe that confirmed water on the moon. It was really successful, and they never would have thought that way otherwise. Now, if it had been a quarter of the time and money instead of half, would they have been able to do it? I don’t know where exactly that line is. I think if you get to a line where you’re so constrained, whether by outside forces or by your own boss, and you say, “Can I surprise myself here?” and the answer is no, then it’s gone too far. But if there’s still a chance to surprise yourself, I actually think that wherever the constraints come from, they can be really useful. Emotionally, people want to feel a sense of agency, and when the constraints are externally imposed, there can be a problem with people feeling like they don’t have a sense of agency and that this is something being done to them.

So my hope, and I don’t know if this is realistic, is that maybe the book can be an emotional reframe for people who find themselves in that situation, because it can be a really powerful tool. It’s hard, but it’s what psychologists call a desirable difficulty. A lot of the things that are good for us and get the best out of us are not easy.

Copy LinkUsing scientific thinking to test assumptions and pivot faster

BERMAN: David, you’re trained to be a scientist. Most of us in business are not trained that way. What can business leaders learn from scientists to be better at leading their teams and building their organizations?

EPSTEIN: I think there’s a certain kind of adaptability and an ability to pivot that they can learn from scientists. In fact, there’s some research I go into in Inside the Box where different founders were trained in different types of market research evaluating their value proposition. Some of them were randomized to get trained in a scientific-method version of this, where they make a hypothesis about what they think their value-add is, then they have to commit to a way to test it and some decision rule to measure whether they are right or wrong. The companies that got that kind of training very often found out that some assumption they made about the value they were providing was wrong. They had not read the market right, they had not read their customers right, and they often pivoted and were much more likely to succeed. The ones that got the standard training were much more likely to basically retrofit whatever they heard to their story and pivot much more rarely.

So I think prospectively making a hypothesis about what you’re trying to do matters. Scientists need to be better about this too. This is one of the reasons so much scientific work hasn’t replicated, because scientists haven’t been as good about prospectively making their prediction and sticking to it. Prospectively make a prediction, even if this is something you’re trying with your team. Predict what you think is going to happen before you start, and that will help you figure out, when you see the actual result, do I need to update my model of the world or of the market or of my team? Proactively commit to predictions.

Similarly, in Range I wrote about people who are good at forecasting, and one of the most important habits of people who improved at forecasting was just recording their predictions in the first place, because otherwise we have this bias where we say, “Well, I basically got that right,” or we tweak the story. So write it down. That will help you update your worldview, and you’ll become a better thinker in general.

Copy LinkWhat leaders can learn about disagreement & working across divides

BERMAN: We’re in a moment in our country where we do feel so much more divided than united, notwithstanding all the data and all the evidence that we have so much more in common than not. As I pull on what I see as one of the through lines between Range and Inside the Box, you profile people who really are attacking problems that don’t have obvious answers. The vision of Pixar is a great example, right? It was so far ahead of its time, and yet they got there. It fills me with a lot of hope. It’s grounded optimism, which I feel like is in short supply right now. If you were sitting with political leaders and they were saying, “David, look, we got to figure this out. We got to be better. We have to lead us out of this mess somehow,” what are the lessons from your research that you would share with them?

EPSTEIN: I think the first leap there is that they would actually have to want to do that. I think the political landscape in many ways has become an extension of influencer culture, and bringing people together is not really the way influencer culture works. It’s often about making people angry or giving them shortcut solutions that are not really true. Since we’re talking about being in person, and I’m here in D.C., I know a fair number of people who used to be in Congress. One of the things some of them have told me is that there used to be a time when you would spend more time in D.C. Then there was a rebellion against that saying, “No, no, to win your primaries, to win your elections, go spend your time in your district at home.” So they spend very little time in D.C. That might seem to make sense. You might say, “We want our politicians where the rubber meets the road.”

But in fact, what it means is that their kids aren’t in the same schools, they’re not on the same baseball teams, and they don’t develop relationships with people across the aisle. They don’t end up working together because they don’t know each other. I think that’s actually a really bad thing. We need them to be going on runs together and having lunch together and doing all of those things as people with diametrically opposed views. When I wrote my first book, I criticized Malcolm Gladwell quite a bit, who’s obviously probably the most famous nonfiction writer in the world at the time.

BERMAN: What specifically were you criticizing Gladwell about? What was the substance of what you were saying he was wrong about?

EPSTEIN: In my first book, I was criticizing the research underlying the so-called 10,000-hours rule and then his popularization of it: the idea that the only route to exceptional performance is through 10,000 hours of so-called deliberate practice, highly technical, effortful practice. That brought us together for a debate, specifically about sports development, at this thing called the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. There I said the data that actually track elite athletes show that, yes, elite athletes spend more time in deliberate practice than lower-level athletes, but the studies that track them over the course of their development show that early on they spent less time in deliberate practice in that activity than peers who plateau at lower levels. They have what scientists call a sampling period, a broad variety of activities where you learn general skills, now called physical literacy. You learn about your own interests and abilities and delay specializing until later than peers who plateau at lower levels.

He acknowledged that when we were coming offstage. He said, “That does not fit with what I thought. Why don’t we run together when we’re back in New York tomorrow?” We were in Boston, and we’d both been national-level middle-distance runners. “And we’ll talk about it on our own time.” So we started running together every weekend, and we came to call it the Roger-versus-Tiger problem, because Tiger Woods was an early specializer and Roger Federer represented early diversity.

BERMAN: Which is how Range opens. That’s where Range starts.

EPSTEIN: That’s right. Roger versus Tiger. That was right out of our debates. Once we became good enough friends, I said, “Malcolm, you really could have just crushed me in that initial debate. I wasn’t particularly well known, anything like that.” And he said, “I have the luxury of learning from my critics.” That always stuck with me, and he really became a role model for me in that sense. It’s not just someone yelling at you on the internet, but if it’s an earnest critic, you really can say, “What is there for me to learn here?” If you write about science especially, something you write about is going to be wrong, whether maybe you misinterpret it or, more likely, some of the science, no matter how much vetting you do, and I do a ton, may not replicate or may be altered in the future. So you have to be open to finding out that you need to update your beliefs on something. He set a great model for me, and I’ve tried to live that way ever since.

BERMAN: One thing my wife has introduced to our relationship is that when we have something constructively critical to share, and obviously we want to frame it the right way with kindness, the initial response is always, “Thank you for telling me.”

EPSTEIN: I love that.

BERMAN: No matter how hard it was to hear. I’ve tried to implement this not just with my friends, but at work and elsewhere, because it reinforces that I’m open to informed criticism, to thoughtful criticism, and it suppresses whatever defensiveness you might be leading with by forcing you to say, “Okay, thank you for telling me. Now I’m going to take a moment to reflect on that and put myself in a mindset of having a conversation.” I think it works both for the person saying it and for the person receiving it and helps create an environment where that’s more welcome, normalized, and easier to do. So I love that story, and I want to reflect on how we integrate more of that into our work lives.

EPSTEIN: I love that. What you just said reminds me a little bit of the engineer Wernher von Braun, who led the development of the Saturn V rocket that first put humans on the moon. He had these notes where his engineering team leads would pass around their questions every week on one sheet of paper, and he’d write handwritten notes in the margin and recirculate them. Sometimes he’d put congratulations if someone found a big anomaly, because he wanted to be seen, when he recirculated it, thanking people for bringing up problems. I thought that was pretty cool.

We had talked earlier about how Adam Grant told me I’m a defensive pessimist. I have to say, when he said that, it stung a little bit because I think of myself as quite an optimistic person in general, about the world and human capacity and all these things. So I was a little taken aback. But then I realized he was right in terms of how I think about my own projects, and that actually turned out to be really useful for me, even though it stung a little bit at first. I tried to use Malcolm as a model and say, “What can I learn from this?” because what he’s telling me is true. That always stuck with me, this idea that an earnest critic is someone you can actually learn from. But I think you have to respect them as a human being. If you’re only posting at each other on social media, that’s not realistic. So I would actually try to force these people to spend time with one another so they care about one another even if they disagree. Then I think it becomes a lot harder to do this sort of flame-throwing that really inflames the public.

There’s one chapter in Inside the Box that talks about the importance of social norms that are constraints on human behavior, making strangers more predictable to one another. In economic history, these turned out to be incredibly important in allowing people to trust strangers so they could collaborate outside their kinship networks, and that preceded a lot of the technological innovation that then led to shared prosperity. When those norms erode, people start trusting strangers less. The proportion of people who answer in surveys that they trust strangers is tightly related to per capita GDP on a national basis. When that goes down, you see less collaboration and less prosperity. I think we have some danger with that right now.

I just saw a Pew survey that showed America is now the only country where a majority of adults, it was a small majority, but a majority, said that other people have bad morals. That’s a bad sign. So I think I would ask some of these politicians to try to rebuild some of those social norms and behaviors of public decorum, because they are role models, like it or not. Whatever their political beliefs are, if that trust between strangers degrades, I don’t care what your policies are, you’re jeopardizing shared prosperity.

Copy LinkBuilding real relationships to make criticism useful

BERMAN: I really appreciate that perspective. It takes me back a little over 20 years, which feels like a lifetime ago, when I left Capitol Hill. I was working for a member of the Senate Democratic leadership. My counterpart on our subcommittee was Jeff Sessions’ chief counsel, Ed Haddon, a good old boy from Alabama with a bunch of fancy degrees. Ed and I had lunch every month, and we sat out in the open in the Senate cafeteria, and we got criticized by people on each of our sides for doing it.

But I got to know him as a human, and Ed is an incredibly bright person. He’s deeply patriotic and really cares about our country. We just happen to see the world really differently, but there was no world in which I could look at Ed and say, “This is a bad person.” I love this point because it goes well beyond politics, and frankly it goes beyond business. It goes to the world that we live in and that we want to live in. Your Gladwell story is really helpful there, and I hope people take that to heart.

There are books that I will speed-read and kind of get the gist of, and if you get one or two good actionable insights out of them, it’s been worth the few hours you spend with them. Then there are books that you crib the ever-living daylights out of, and Inside the Box is one of those books. So I can’t recommend it highly enough. I’m super grateful. The book is Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better. I encourage everyone to pick it up, and pick up Range and The Sports Gene as well. David, I hope to get to see you again soon.

EPSTEIN: That would be my pleasure. Thanks so much, Jeff.

BERMAN: Thanks for being on Masters of Scale.