685: David Epstein - The Freedom Trap, Narrative Values, General Magic, The Nobel Prize Winner Who Simplified Everything, Wearing the Same Thing Everyday, and Why Constraints Are the Secret to Your Best Work

bestselling author of To Sell as Human, Drive, Win, The Power of Regret, and many others. Just asked him what he thought. Asked him if he'd write a blurb, an endorsement for the book, maybe one that I would put on the cover. And this is what he sent back to me. Dan Pink says the price of becoming refuses to sell you a shortcut. Instead, Ryan shows how small daily deposits, a hundred shots, five hundred words.

a single tough conversation compound into something that looks like an overnight success to anyone who wasn't paying attention. This Is a clear-eyed, powerful book. I'm super grateful for people like Dan Pink to have read it and shared his thoughts. I would love it. If you would go to learningleader.com and pre-order the book right now, or just go straight to Amazon and pre-order the price of becoming. Thank you so much.

and maybe completely rethink it and then change it and it's being updated as we speak. So that's one of the most kind and generous things that a person could do. And I didn't ask you for that. I just asked you for a blurb and yet you went above and beyond. So I just wanted to publicly say thank you for that. That was super, super kind of you to do.

me or how it's going to be perceived if I have an error in my book. And so I I I think that is really cool. It actually inspires me to want to be more like that. So I think it's worth it from a leadership perspective to point that out to say, Fifty other people have it right now. Nobody else has mentioned that, including ones who are proofreading it. So it's really cool.

And your dedication says for A. I noticed there's actually a restraint in the dedication. It's like an act of constraint. It flows with the book. Is that on purpose?

And it's mega viral, right? It's everywhere. It still is to this day. It kind of created freedom for you to do whatever you want, which is cool. It's what we all think and it's what we all want.

And that allowed me to do this thing that every writer that I have known for years wanted to do, which is go on your own and do your own thing. Have control of every topic you write about and the length you write to and, you know, not being edited, all that stuff. So I was at this writer's retreat and and there was a question we all had to answer, which was what are you optimizing for this year? And that's when I said autonomy. And I I set about

just individualizing my whole life. I didn't write about anything that anybody else assigned me, only me. I made my schedule totally individualized. what I thought I wanted and, you know, fast forward a year or so later. I learned there's such a thing as too much autonomy. I really missed the structure of a a specific work day, of sometimes having other other people asking you to do things or solve certain problems so it's clear what you should be doing.

the deadlines, the sometimes the annoyances of scheduling with other people, right? Where I had individualized my schedule so much that I was I was never inconveniencing myself, but it meant that I wasn't really connecting with other people in the way that I was used to. And so this total freedom that I thought I wanted.

ended up feeling terrible, basically. And I've I've been reeling it backwards. So When I was in this phase, so one of the things when I had this total freedom where I said, gosh, books are so consuming, it's so hard, it takes up so much of my life and energy that I'm not rewriting another one unless I find the perfect topic. So I start dipping my toes into all these topics and and I like a f finding several things fascinating, but none's perfect.

And so y like picture me, I'm basically like on a dating app, but I'm going for book topics. I'm just like swiping and swiping. I couldn't pick anything. Like I kept thinking, is there something a little better? And then I read this quote by Mihai Chicks and Mihai, the psychologist who coined the term flow for the feeling of immersion in an activity.

And he's talking about marriage, but you could sub it for any other word, it wouldn't matter. And basically he says the great thing about being committed by your own choice is that you can stop wondering how to live and start living. Like it frees up this energy to actually do the thing. And I was like, man, this is what I'm doing with my topic.

I'm just like wondering what's around the corner. That day I said, I'm really interested in constraints. I need some myself. I'm writing a book proposal on this. And of course, two weeks later I was ten times more interested in it because I decided to dive into it.

And so that was the start of this process of me reeling back some of this excessive autonomy where, you know, I joined a board of a nonprofit in my community. I started going to dance meetups so I could have embodied experience with strangers, all these things that kind of started adding structure back to my life. E even in my workday, I borrowed from a character in the book.

one of the greatest living writers, she lights a candle to start her work day and blows it out to finish the workday and closes the door. And since I work at home, I would never shut down my work day. So I stole that from her. I I use an electric candle though, because I have too much paper in my office, but

You know, and that now that I mention it, I like my neighbor Cal Newport, the author of Deep Work and Slow Productivity, he'll at the end of his work day he does like a compute he's a computer science professor. He'll say, System shutting down. You know, and it seems silly, but when you have all that freedom, you actually need something to

close the work day so that just like an athlete in training, you can recover and be ready for the next hard bout the next day and and, you know, to be there for your family and all those kinds of things.

We think we want this thing of a wide open day and no meetings. Oh, this is going to be great. And then before you know it, it's two o'clock. It's like, what did I even do?

And so when things are too open, all you'll do is what's convenient. Basically your brain will be lazy. Yeah. Because that's that's what it wants to do. And so if your time is unstructured, your tasks are unstructured, what people typically end up doing

is doing things that are easy. There's actually a finding in psychology called the mere urgency effect where if things are too open, people will start doing things that seem like they they're kind of urgent, like they have a deadline, even if they're unimportant. So when you're too unstructured, you'll start doing a bunch of stuff.

but with no relation to its importance, just to have like checked off doing something. And so I think the typical pattern is when people not that you shouldn't have slack time in your work at some points, right? Because that's

that's a whole different topic. But when it's too free flowing, people end up doing huge volumes of low value stuff. And then it's only when they really see the deadline or some pressing need for those bigger things where they now it's time to like really focus on that basically. And so you wanna be more proactively structured if you don't wanna end up falling prey to all these cognitive biases where you'll busy yourself with relatively low value work if you don't structure your time.

And you can do all your email. You know, I'm not saying you don't need a lot of time for email. The way that people are usually doing that is they're toggling all the time between email and something else. And when you do that, one, it lowers your productivity.

And now we know it like from physiological markers, it massively increases your stress. And there's some evidence that it might affect your immune function even. So you don't want to be doing that toggling all the time. And so if you can batch. and separate that email into maybe two blocks during the day, you know, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Maybe that's not realistic for everybody, but maybe you can even start with a half hour of doing it

and then a half hour of doing something else where you're not toggling. So that's an important thing for me is batching. And when I was writing the book, this isn't right for everybody, but I wasn't looking at my email until my important work for the day was done. I used to start in my inbox.

After reading her research, I never start in my inbox because of something called the Zagarnik effect where an unfinished task leaves like an open loop in your brain basically, where it's taking up some of your working memory. And your inbox, right, is a never-ending, like Zagarnik effect engine. And so I wouldn't open my email until really the end of the workday. Now, I'm working independently. That might not work for everybody, but I think most people can start the day

with at least a little bit of what their important work is before they go into that that inbox and captures their attention. So that's part of the way I structure it. And then I would I end the work day like when my son comes in from school. I I used to work like all through the night and all this stuff and I actually don't think it made me better. I now think of it much more like a nap. I mean, I was a competitive eight hundred meter runner.

And you know that you have to program rest just as assiduously as you have to program training. And I now realize that's true for writing too. And so this book. My previous two books I turned in at five PM on the day in the contract.

This one I finished early and I just sat on it for a few weeks. I'm like, does anybody turn in books? I don't even know what to do. And then I sent it in. But I think focusing and then resting, along with some other constraints that I implemented in my process, actually made me way more efficient.

Because he came into a team that was a teardown and didn't have much to work with. And so they really built a lot of their systems around constraints. And he'll talk about in his own work, he has to schedule time just for thinking every day.

And he he said that sounds silly. That should be the thing you just fit in between stuff. But if you don't schedule it, it does not happen. And GMs, for anyone who knows pro sports GMs, they are absolute workaholics. Like they could be working every second of the day. And so for someone like that to say, I schedule in just thinking time. And I think he has two blocks a day, if I recall, where he schedules just thinking time. These don't have to be super long.

But sometime where you slow down, what's the priority work to do here? What's the thing I can focus on? And and you just get a little bit of thinking time. So Scheduling that in as if it's as important as those meetings, because it is. We just don't usually schedule it. Overall, the extent to which you can monotask through the course of the day.

It seems inefficient, right? You feel like you have to monotask. But again, Gloria Mark's work shows that if you can break these things up into blocks of monotasking instead of multitasking, you actually will end up. with more done overall, but it makes people feel bad because they have to delay certain things at least a few hours.

As we were talking, well, two things. First, I brought this paper that I wanted to ask him about called On the Psychology of Prediction, and he said it was his favorite paper that he'd ever written, so I had him sign it. Um now I have that framed, but I was confused at the time where I was reading a lot of expertise research.

Some of which showed that people got better with like very narrowly focused practice and specialization. And some that showed that not only did they not get better, they got more confident, but not better, which is a really bad combination. And he said, Oh, and I was telling him which papers I was reading. And he said, Oh, oh, yeah, no, I know the answer to that. It depends on the characteristics of the domain. You need to go read this research on kind versus wicked learning environments.

And in the kind environments where work is more repetitive and feedback is quick and accurate and work next year will look like work last year, that's where this really narrowly focused training excels. But in the wicked learning environments where Things are always changing. Feedback could be delayed or inaccurate. Work next year might not look like work last year.

That's where you act often see narrowly focused practice making people more confident but not better. And that ended up becoming the frame for a lot of range, basically, that people with this broader toolbox were better equipped. for adapting in a fast changing work world. And so we talked about that and it ended up becoming very important for the book.

But then we just got into talking about books and writing and of course I'm like praising thinking fast and slow, you know, like it uh it's a m the book's amazing if you take out the chapter on priming. There's none of that work replicated. But He said, Never again. Never again. Like really?

And he was saying it was horrible. He said it was the worst few years of his life because it was so isolating. Like he was used to working with a partner or multiple partner and colleagues. And he felt so isolated. So he said he'd never write a book again. Or if he did, he would write it with somebody else. And that's in fact what he did.

And I get what he's saying. It is lonely. Yeah, to be honest, going forward, I mean, I think for the next few years I'm gonna make sure I'm doing work that involves other people.

was that I was terrible at putting constraints around my own work. For my first two books, So it was a me search, right? It was a lot of me search in this book, not just research. And I was terrible at putting constraints around my first book. So I wrote 150% the length of a book to get my first two books and then had to cut back.

I cut a trip to Arctic Sweden for my first book. Had I planned better ahead of time, I would have realized that it wasn't going to work out right. And having a kid and other responsibilities, I'm just like, I can't do that. I can't be Taking trips to Arctic Sweden that don't count for the book, you know? And so this time around, I had a different process where because I don't I don't write for the first year of a book project. No writing, just research.

And after doing that this time around, I made on one page and one page only, like an architectural outline of how the book would look. So I'd never done that before. Actually, this is it right here. As you can see. I wrote as small as possible to try to like defeat my own system, I think.

constraining myself and making sure I had a clear like anyone making a product. What's the problem I'm trying to solve here with this thing that I'm doing? And it the fact that we overvalue freedom and undervalue useful constraints and and I wanted to make that clear.

the next book after writing a mega viral book. I mean, Morgan's done it a couple of times. James is is still waiting or working on it. Have have you talked to those guys about that?

His answer was delightful, but not that useful to me, because it was basically no. I think he I think what he literally said was Oh no, I don't have any of your Jewish neuroticism. I have a Jamaican's joie de vive and a British stiff upper lip or something like that. Because he's he's part British, part Jamaican, his his parents. So he said something like that. So he just said no, he doesn't have that. Which was cool. Which was cool. But

the next one probably will not sell as much. And in his case, the next two have not sold as much. They're still amazing books, but they just haven't sold as much. They haven't caught fire like that. It just seems like Almost divorcing yourself of the results. You're proud of the work. The book is awesome. I mean, it's really, really good. You know this. You worked like crazy on it, the research, the storytelling. At this point,

you're gonna work really, really hard to seed the market and sell a lot of'em, but then it's out of your control after that, you know? It's almost like you have to be okay with whatever happens.

You know, if a book about genetics and of vampires comes out the same day, you're screwed and there's nothing you can do about it. And he was right. You know, a lot's out of your control. And to Morgan's point, I think the one thing I will say with Inside the Box was When I transitioned out of science into writing, for a while I was saying this is something I'm doing for a specific purpose. I had specific topics I wanted to write about. Then I'll get back to this other stuff.

But somewhere along the road that changed and I very strongly identify as a writer now, as like a craftsman. and look at other people's craft. And I've taken, you know, fiction writing courses just to learn about craft and things like that. And so with this book, this structural experiment where I made the architecture ahead of time and drew the introductory story back every three chapters to highlight a new layer of constraints that led to

a world changing breakthrough. That was a new structural experiment for me. And I found it so engaging. I think it worked, but that will be for other people to judge. But I found it so engaging because I I like to start a book project that in order to finish it, I don't presently have the skills that I will need to have to bring it to fruition.

I want it to force me'cause I can't learn as ferociously when I'm not writing a book. There's just like something about that constraint that forces me to learn in a way with like a velocity that I just can't otherwise. And I'm naturally kind of shy and it forces me to just talk to everybody in the world that might know anything about what I'm talking about.

And so I found this the writing experiment so engaging that there was so much along the way where I was like, this is a really worthwhile thing to be doing. I'm really glad I'm doing this experiment. I think I'm getting better at my craft. So to some degree that made me feel if it doesn't work as well commercially, this was a worthwhile thing to do anyway. And so I think that's been really helpful.

It is such an amazing learning. I even wrote that, I think, in my my next book. I said, This book's for me. This is for me, first and foremost, because I wanted to learn more about the power of compounding. I want to learn more about excellence. I want to learn more. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, I'm gonna try to sell like crazy just like you are. And then a after that though, it's still a win. It's a big win because I learned so much in the process. I think that applies though, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this idea of why leaders should regularly put themselves in the position of being a teacher because it's such a great tool to learn.

So I was looking for the antidote myself. And so the book has improved my life, for sure. In terms of teaching, there's actually a quote in Inside the Box from Seneca, the famous Stoic philosopher, Dokendo Discumus. in Latin, which means by teaching we learn. So that's an a quote from an ancient philosopher, but it's now been backed up by modern science, which has found that if people think they're going to have to teach certain material,

they organize it more coherently in their own mind. Like they start pulling out main ideas and attaching different ideas together and in what's called a brain semantic network, how you connect ideas together. And it seems like you should always do this when you're trying to

assimilate information. But the fact is, like many good constraints, if you're not being forced to teach it, you just don't do it. It's very difficult to do that. Teaching it is even better, but in these studies, just making someone think they're going to have to teach it.

makes them learn it in this much more coherent way where they can use the knowledge, they remember the knowledge better. So it's like forcing someone to consume information through that frame of I'm going to have to teach this just activates a different network in the brain.

that makes you learn in a a much more durable and flexible way. So the teaching is for the teacher often. So I think it's something that we should all do really frequently. I don't know if you find this, but when I'm working on my book ideas, talking them off of people. is one of the most important things I do in the process. That teaches me where I don't know what I'm talking about, where I have holes, you know, how to make the argument, what ideas are connected, all those sorts of things.

Are you kidding me? You don't have time to get better. You don't have time to help other people. You don't have time to get really, really clear on what you believe, what you think. You're out of your mind. Of course you have time for that. That's like the most important thing to do. So it's definitely something I push on people, but

They don't always love to hear that because it takes time, it takes effort to organize those thoughts, to get really clear. But I think it's super valuable and important for us to do on a regular basis.

our brains will prevent us from thinking hard if we ever have to. I think that's why you need things like constraints or you need the the directive to you're going to teach this. It it would be wonderful if we could just Flip it on and say, I'm going to learn this really well now. But it just doesn't work that way. So I think we need to embrace these desirable difficulties. And they're called desirable difficulties. For a reason, because they're difficult, but desirable in in the long term.

So this is a part v you know, in the last part of the last chapter where I'm talking about things like how constraints can help make a life more coherent.'Cause we know it's really important for well being to have a coherent life story. These two philosophers you mentioned write about meaning, how to find meaning in life. And Susan Wolf said, Well, meaning comes from

subjective attraction to something that is objectively attractive, meaning that you are personally drawn to something that has objective value. But then the question is like what is objective value? And Todd May says it comes from narrative values. And those are the qualities that are prized across all cultures. These could be things like loyalty, heroism, hospitality, caring, love.

That helps you feel agency. It helps you feel more coherent. And so for me, I went and looked back in my life and some of the ones I identified were curiosity and open-mindedness and diligence and resilience. Now that I've started telling my story in that way, it shows up everywhere. I'm like, of course I did this because that's my value.

But going forward, I realized I also wanted some things in my story that I didn't have. So I identified forgiveness in particular, because that has not been a strong suit for me. I don't know why. I have no

Trauma in my life that I can point to why I've been like bad at grudges, like why I've held grudges for things. I don't know why. But As I write in the book, when I was at Sports Illustrated, I wrote about this guy named Ben Helfgott, who was the only living Olympian to have survived a concentration camp, two time British weightlifting champ.

You know, almost everybody in his family, an extended family, was killed in the Holocaust. He became the head basically of this group called the Boys, these kids who were orphaned in Poland and brought to England and kind of re-socialized.

And he just preached forgiveness all the time. Like he would tell these guys, You have to go back to Poland or Germany or wherever and rebuild bridges. The people today aren't responsible. Like we have to rebuild. And when I would see what he was doing These like petty grudges that I'm holding. are nothing compared to what this guy has forgiven and I want to be like that.

Because you're just you're poisoning yourself, right? When you hold these grudges, like feeding yourself your own poison. And so I decided that I wanted forgiveness to become one of my narrative values. So I had these ones that already come easily to me. that give me a coherent life story. And then I chose one out of all the things

that I see that I wish would be better in the world, that I'd like to work on. You can't do them all. And so I wanted to pick this one value to sort of add to my my holster of of themes in my story going forward.

You know, your backgrounds in studying athletes and greatness. There are stories of Tom Brady, Michael Jordan, others where they They definitely held grudges and they've got a huge chip on their shore. And sometimes they even make it up in Michael Jordan's case, which I'm sure you've seen all about, right?

Yeah. And I have I have friends that I work with that are leaders where they openly ask questions like what's the chip on your shoulder or what grudge do you hold? Who are you striving to prove wrong? And they kind of like it because maybe it'll it'll be a motivating factor and that'll help their company.

And so I go back and forth on this because I, David, I am very motivated to prove my supporters right. Yeah. I feel very lucky to have great support, great loving parents, brothers, my wife, my family, amazing, you know, friends. And I just so badly want to say, you were right for believing in me. And let me go out and prove that right. Way more than the people who have not believed in me or said mean things.

You know what I mean? And so I don't know. I go back and forth. What do you think when it comes to like motivation and excellence and winning and and doing big things when it comes to chips on your shoulder versus proving people right?

Because otherwise I think it just you're like harming yourself over the long term. So I think it can be separate. Like I think you can still want to prove people wrong. I mean I I want that all the time to to prove people wrong. Do you have a lot

I'm not mad at those people. I don't care. I wish they'd be a little more creative with their jokes. Like I wanna laugh, but it is sort of like I'm gonna show you. But I I don't actually have any animosity for them and you know, toward them. It's just like you wanna prove them wrong.

But he won the highest award in computer science, the the Turing Award for because he did the first AI demonstration ever. He won the highest award in psychology. He's one of the founders of cognitive psychology. So meaning not like therapy, but like how our brains solve problems. And for good measure he won the Nobel Prize in economics.

One of his quotes serves as the epigraph of the book. It is a myth widely believed but not less mythical for that, that people are most creative when they are most free. And so much of his work is about constraints, both in how important they are for people in problem solving, like to cut down problems, what do you call the problem space to make problems manageable? And also just personally. So he coined this term satisficing.

In his most famous work, that's a combination of satisfy and suffice. And it means basically having good enough decision rules. And he contrasted that. Well, what has been contrasted to by people who followed up on his work is is maximizing. Maximizing, maybe we would call it optimizing now in optimizer culture. And it turns out from a mountain of psychological research that it is almost always bad to be a maximizer, someone who is trying to get the perfect choice in every decision.

Maximizers are less happy with their decisions, they're less happy with their lives, they're more prone to regret. There's not much evidence they actually make better decisions most of the time. Whereas satisficers will tend to have, whether they do it explicitly or not, good enough rules. And once good enough is exceeded, you may go to outstanding. But once good enough succeeded, you can accept it and move on.

And I think this is an incredibly important tool for life today, where we have so much choice, right? Consumer choice has multiplied by a hundred million fold compared to before the industrial revolution. Wealth has only multiplied four hundredfold, so it's a massive increase in choice.

There are evidence from surveys now that these maximizing tendencies are on the rise, probably because you can do so much comparison online of what you could be doing or what you could be buying or who you could be. that it's leading people to have more maximizing tendencies and those are really, really bad for well being.

So Simon was a proactive satisficer. He said, you need three sets of clothing, one on your back, one in the wash, and next one ready to wear. And he just simplified all the decisions in his life so that he could save cognitive bandwidth for the really important ones. And reading about his life, you'd almost think, Hey, here's a guy who has low expectations. Like he would he would be terrible in optimizing influencer culture.

because he was always settling for good enough. He famously said the perfect is the enemy of the good. So you might say this guy just has low expectations. If he hadn't won the highest possible awards in economic computer science and psychology. And so his thinking just about how important constraints are both for human problem solving and for well-being, are kind of pervade the book. He he really introduced him at length in the last chapter, but his work is sprinkled through throughout.

I read about it initially and thought that's what I'm trying to do that I never want to decide what I'm wearing ever. And I don't. I don't decide. I may spend zero time. I never want to decide what I'm eating. I eat breakfast at or usually around like twelve o'clock. And it's the same eggs, fruit, and uh protein and oatmeal like every day. And to me, like it's I love it. I think it's great. Do you subscribe to this? What do you do?

And I think with so much choice, there's one study I cite in the book that shows that as consumer choices exploded, people are more likely to see all of their purchase decisions as expressions of their identity. It's like freighted with even more weight and stress and all this stuff. Like don't do that to yourself. Where you can simplify, where you can get good enough. And this is I should say'cause I think I've had maximizing tendencies. So one of the things that was really important for me

Again, after range. This thread keeps coming back of what do you do after you have a book that went awell, but it's an interesting thread where Again, I didn't have a normal journalism job anymore. And so I'm like, what do I do? Do I only write books now? That means everything has to be this huge project. So that's when I started a newsletter. And the newsletter was basically a satisficing exercise for me. I was already new a lot of Simon's work.

So if a book has to be a nine or ten, I said if a newsletter post once it hits six and a half I'm sending it. Maybe it goes to eight, you know? But if I feel I've gotten to six and a half, I send it'cause there's always more stuff I wanna add or more tweaking I wanna do. So that became a r I'm not really selling people on my newsletter here very well, am I? But um but

That became a really useful satisfacing exercise for me because I was kind of getting stuck in a little bit of perfectionism syndrome. And so I think everybody should have those. And now I do, I start doing like beginner dance classes and stuff. I

often choose to be a beginner at something to make sure that I'm having some satisfacing in my life. And I think we all should. Because it doesn't it d we gotta get over the idea that good enough means you have low standards. It actually means that you're saving your bandwidth for the most important things. And and there's something I write about inside the box called Fredkin's paradox, which is this finding that

we spend the most energy on the least important decisions because we agonize when the options are really similar. So either we're agonizing because they're similar, we can't tell the difference. But that either means they're so similar the difference doesn't matter much, or we we can't tell the difference, and so agonizing more isn't gonna make a big deal anyway. And so you don't wanna be falling prey to Fredkin's paradox. You have satisfacing limits, good enough decision rules.

But otherwise I think paddling untrue. Like I said, w otherwise you and I would be in trouble just based on our fashion choice alone.

In general magic is a little bit different than that because it's kind of a startup. They're trying to do something new that hadn't been done. They're way ahead of their time. What can we learn as leaders from the story about general magic?

They build this huge consortium of international businesses, all this stuff. And they did have the right vision. Like if you go back and look at what they were doing. and read their documents, they saw what was coming for the next generation. But it turned into a massive failure because they had so much talent, they had so many resources, they could do anything. And so they did do anything.

Everything got bigger and bigger. So they're basically making this personal communicator. And it's like every cool idea that an engineer has, they do it. Does it fit in? I don't know, but it's cool. So they do it. They never identified a clear customer. They called their customer Joe Sixpack.

After a few years of missed deadlines, they realized nobody knew the guy who was there. So they didn't have a clear problem to solve. When I was interviewing a lot of the people who worked there, they kept saying we couldn't decide what not to do. because there were no boundaries. I think a really telling interview was with a an engineer there named Steve Perlman who was making a calendar function for this personal communicator.

And he writes it to go from nineteen oh four to twenty ninety six and checks it in and thinks he's done. And then one of his uh someone else comes to him and says, Steve. Someone might write apps for historical stuff or way into the future. You gotta make this calendar bigger. So he writes it to go from year one. And then he thinks he's done again. And then someone else comes to him and says, Why are you starting with an arbitrary religious context?

You should go back to the beginning of astronomical time. So he opens it up again and writes the calendar function going from the beginning of the universe. And as he said, if he'd left it at 1904 to 2096, it would have been four lines of code.

But this was how everything operated at General Magic. They could do it. So they did do it. And when the device came out, it didn't solve a clear customer problem. So nobody was sure it was for them. It had a two hundred page manual. It had so many features that it was Battery life was terrible, the user experience was choppy. They sold 3,000 units in the first six months, mostly to people who they knew. And meanwhile, People inside of General Magic who bit off much smaller chunks.

had success. So one low-level service engineer started a website called Auction Web that was facilitating auctions online. And he went to his bosses and said, look at this. This is doing one of the things we want. Would you want it? And they said no, you know, too small for them. He left and changed the name to eBay. So that was Piero Midiar. He was a low level service tech there. Another third party app developer.

created an app called graffiti where with strokes of a stylus would be turned into writing and he said when it was clear general magic was gonna fail, he took his app and said, I'm gonna solve a clear customer problem. Busy professionals want their contacts and calendar on the go to sync with their computer. And so he did just calendar, contacts and a memo pad. And that was the palm pilot. In the same era, by doing way less, by doing something, not everything.

And so general magic became this kind of cautionary tale. in the book where they could not draw boundaries. They had no constraints and it was a disaster. But people inside, I still think the company was a success in a different way, where people inside the company learned such important lessons about constraints. that they then took out of there and they made Android and the iPod and the Apple Watch.

uh and led Google Maps and founded LinkedIn, co founded LinkedIn and eBay, obviously, and Nest. So Tony Fidel, who's an important character in the book, It was his first job out of college. So he was like deeply traumatized'cause these were his heroes. When I first interviewed him, by the way, Bill Gurley, the prominent venture capitalist, when I told him I was thinking about constraints.

He said, We have a saying and venture, more startups dive into gestion than starvation. And he said, You gotta talk to my friend Tony if you're interested in constraints. So I called Tony Fidel, who is known as the Pod Father, because he was a lead designer of the the iPod. He's a very energetic guy. He's almost yelling at me. He's like, if you don't have constraints, make up constraints.

And he told me that when he co founded Nest, a smart thermostat company, he made his team work inside a literal box. We made them prototype the box before they had the product. Because that was how it was going to look to the end user. And if it didn't fit on that box, it was not a priority for them. So as he's he told me, with these ultra constraint-based things, it makes you think really hard.

It slows you down, he said, but it forces that thinking. That's kind of the mindset shift that I hope this book engenders is from seeing limits purely as obstacles to seeing them as opportunities to clarify priorities and launch into productive exploration.

A ten K say PR. I think that would be fun. So s I'm know I'm supposed to say something about my book and There's certainly things that I would celebrate. Like would I love to have another number one New York Times bestseller? Absolutely, I would. But if I were popping champagne, I think it would be more likely to be about family stuff, probably.

better humans, better people than they are as writers. Man, it just makes you feel good about the world. I root so hard for you. Not that you need it, but I root so hard for you because you're just a great dude and I'm uh super appreciative for you, man.

and courage. And then he added on forgiveness as an aspirational value. Pick whatever is true to you and let those values make decisions for you before you ever face The decision. So good. And then design a constraint you don't have. Create a deadline, a word limit, a candle you light at the start of the workday and blow out when you're done. Whatever it is. Do not wait for structure to be imposed on you. Build it for yourself. Then think about general magic. Do something not.

everything. The General Magic engineers could build anything. So they built everything. Jeff Hawkins took one small piece and made the Palm Pilot. Another Created eBay. The list of things you could do is so long. It's infinite, but you should create some constraints. It's weird. It feels counterintuitive, but the constraints actually make you better. Once again I would say thank you so much for continuing to spread the message and telling a friend or two, hey

You should listen to this episode of the Learning Leader Show with David Epstein. I think he'll help you become a more effective leader because you continue to do that. And you also go to Spotify, Apple Podcasts, subscribe to the show, rate it, hopefully five stars write a thoughtful review. Do by doing all of that, you are continually giving me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so, so much. Talking to soon.