53: Getting Smarter, Faster & Better

Charles is the reporter for The New York Times, an author of two books on habits and productivity, The Power of Habit, Why we do what we do in life and Business and Smarter, Faster, Better, The Secrets of being Productive in Life and Business. Hey, Charles, thanks for being here. Thanks for having me on so really interesting books. One Smarter, Faster, Better and who doesn't want to be more productive? That's that's the hope, right is that everything everyone at least

sees something useful in it. I mean, my gosh, it is a great, substantial book, but from a marketing perspective, like who doesn't want to be smarter, faster and or better? And who doesn't want to know a secret who doesn't want to be more productive in life and who isn't in the business world in some capacity so well. And I think what's interesting is that is that one of the things that I found when I was reporting the book is that there is sometimes this tension between being

smarter or being faster, being better. Right in other words, in today's life, there's so much stuff going on, there's so many tasks to be done, there's so many emails, there's so many phone calls to be returned, that you can be busy all of the time and never get

anything important done. And the most productive people what they tend to recognize is that sometimes there's a times when you have to be smarter, and sometimes there's times that you have to be faster, and sometimes there's times that you have to be better, but usually not all three at the same time. And the way that you distinguish between them is that you take the time, you push yourself, You create habits that push you to think a little bit more deeply of what you really ought to be doing.

Oh yeah, I do really like that, So there doesn't have to be this antagonism between them whatsoever. That's how do you define smarter by the way, So I think that smarter, much like productivity, is kind of in the eye of the beholder, right Like I think that most of us know when we feel like we're being really productive, or we know when we feel like we're being particularly smart.

And I think one of the things that's important to recognize is that productivity and smartness and intelligence that they mean different things for different people. Right So, productivity on a Wednesday morning might mean that you drive your kid off at school as early as you can, and you get to your desk and you like power plow through a bunch of emails and you're on top of everything.

But a productive Friday morning might be one where you can walk your kid to school and talk to them about their week and find out what's going on in their life, and you don't feel stressed and overwhelmed. And I think the point here is that when we try and jam things into these one size fits all definitions, we're not paying attention to people's inborn instincts to figure out what productivity or what smartness or what better is

for them. And it's important to have time in your life when you can ask those questions and figure out what is productively Like, what's the most important thing to me right now? What does being productive really mean? Absolutely? Yeah, it sounds like you're best in your optimal when they operate as a system and you're kind of firing in all cylinders. That's exactly right. I like that. So let's cover some of these things you've learned, these insights you're

going from talking with lots of different people. Let's start with the something I think everyone is generally interested in, how to increase their motivation. You talk about a concept used in the psychological literature called internal locus of control. Could you explain a little bit what that is and maybe how that relates to Marines? Absolutely, and I'm sure

you've probably studied internal locus. So internal locus of control is this ability to believe that we have can control over our destiny, the choices that we make have impacts on what happens in our life. And what's really interesting is that as researchers have looked at how people generate self motivation, that why some people are so much better at motivating and sort of you know, getting things done

quickly with that with less like stress and effort. What they found is that the people who seem easiest to seem in a position to sort of trigger their self motivation. And we know this also from neurological studies. Are folks who have this ability to perceive choices to convince themselves that they're making decisions and that those decisions will have a real material impact on what happens next. And you mentioned the Marines. One of my favorite examples of this

is in the Marines and then Smarter, Faster, Better. We kind of explain this concept by talking about how the Marines transformed basic training. So it used to be we're all accustomed to thinking of Marines going to basic training and sort of being trained in obedience and discipline. And that's still true. Right when you're a Marine recruit, you

still get yelled at plenty by a drill instructor. But about fifteen years ago, the head of the Marines, a guy named General Charles Krulek, he started changing how basic training worked in order to teach recruits, these young eighteen and nineteen year olds to develop more of an internal

locus of control. And how the Marines talk about that is they talk about it as a bias towards action that they wanted to teach marines to have a bias towards action, to take the initiative to charge up that hill, even if you're your commanders and around to tell you what to do. And what they did is they redesigned basic training to force all these recruits to make choice

after choice after choice. So it's not uncommon in your first week or two at basic training that you go into the mess hall and you have a big meal and all of your colleagues do to and then and then you know, most of the mess all will empty out except for your unit, and your drill instructor will tell you, okay, now go clean the mess hall. And someone will turn to the drill instructure and they'll say, okay, so like where are the brooms And he says that's

you know, figure it out, that's up to you. And they say, well, should we like throw away the leftover hamburgers? Should we put them in the fridge, And he says, figure it out, that's up to you. And what they're doing is they're trying to train all these marines to make choice after choice after choice, so that making a

choice becomes instinctual. Because one of the things that we know is that when people can look at chores and turn them into choices, when they can see some type of agency that they can assert, it makes it much easier for them to self motivate and get things done. I love that. I you know, you see that external locus of control is very high and people who are depressed absolutely, yeah, absolutely very So it's that's super key.

So what from a you know, it's interesting you implicate the striatum in this because that's not always talked about in terms of motivation, but it does seem to be a major projection point for dopamine, and we know that dopamine is essential for whether or not, you know, you want to decide whether something's worth an effort, you know,

is it worth the effort? If I put this in so you can kind of see an interesting linkage there between having an internal locus control and being more voted motivated more of the extent to what you feel like if you intentionally put in that effort, that you are

actually the one who's causing the result. And a lot of that research comes from Mauricio Delgado at Rutgers, who's done some really really interesting and very clever and graceful studies trying to figure out which parts of our neurology become most active when we feel like we can make

a choice. And what he found is that the straatum seems to become more active even if our choice has no impact, even if we know that our choice has no impact, or that the task that we're doing is a meaningless task, simply feeling like we can make a

decision that has a reward sensation inherent in it. And the way he explained this to me, which I thought was really insightful, was he said, you know when you're driving down the freeway and you're like stuck in like a traffic jam on the freeway, and you see this exit right, and you know that if you take that exit, it's going to take just as long to get home. Right, you might as well just stay in the traffic jam.

But there's some part of your brain that's saying, like, turn the wheel, turn the wheel, go take the exit. You just want to take control, You want to make a choice. That's exactly what I think he's saying is that we have this almost inborn instinct to motivate around a choice, to seek out something that makes us feel

in control. And you know, from an evolutionary perspective, You can see why that would be really useful, right that people who have an internal locus of control, who try and assert themselves probably evolutionarily are going to be more successful than their peers. But it's also a way for us to kind of learn how to trick ourselves into self motivating when we're having trouble doing so. Absolutely, and if you look at other animals, they don't even have

that agency at all. So yeah, maybe it's like what

it means to feel human in a sense. Yeah, yeah, I think it is great, And so I want to now turn teams because you know, there's this this is phrase called safe spaces that they use an academic institution, And it occurs to me that what you talk about in terms of psychological safety is actually the reverse of safe spaces in that, you know, a lot of students today are want to kind of be in a space where they can't be challenged, you know, where like they

want to make sure that what they say is protected and in a way that no one, you know, like is going to interfere that. But it looks like this psychological safety is a much better way of letting people feel like free to express their opinions. Could you tell

me a little bit about that. I think that's really I hadn't thought about that, but you're that's a really it's a really clever juxtaposition, particularly right now with the University of Chicago saying that their campus won't have safe spaces and how the university is responding and saying safe spaces are important. So you're exactly right. So what we know about psychological safety comes largely from studies of team dynamics, and in the book the way that we I talk

about this is on Google. That Google. There is an excerpt of this in the Times magazine that Google spent about four years and tens of millions of dollars trying to figure out how to build the perfect team. And initially their thought was the perfect team is one where you mix exactly the right kinds of people. So maybe everyone on the team is friends so they all get along really well, or maybe maybe they're people who all like the same type of leadership structure, or maybe it's

a mixture of introverts and extroverts. And Google, because it's a data driven company, they basically looked at all their good teams and their bad teams, and they tested all these hypotheses and they put none of them seem to be true. That basically who was on a team seemed to not have much correlation with whether that team was effective. The thing that did matter a great deal was how the people on the team interacted, basically the group norms,

the culture that emerged among those teammates. And in particular, they found that there were these two behaviors that, more than anything else, seemed to have a huge impact on making a group come together there and work well. The first was this equality and conversational turntaking. So basically, in an average meeting, does everyone kind of pipe up and speak up to equal degree. Now that doesn't mean that

everyone talks the same number of minutes. You know, maybe there's some meetings when some people are a little bit more long winded than others, But say, over you know, a month, is everyone basically speaking in rough legal proportion. And then the second behavioral norm the second characteristic was that, in addition to letting everyone kind of talk up, does everyone show each other that they're listening? Do they engage

in ostentatious listening behaviors? Which means are they like picking up on each other's nonverbal cues when someone looks upset, or they saying, Hey, Susie, why do you look so upset? Are they repeating what people just said? They said? You know, hey Jim, what I hear you saying is such and such.

If you have these two behaviors, this listening and this talking, what you get is psychological safety, which Amy Edmondson and Anita Wooley have written a lot about it, particularly Amy Edmundson at Harvard Business School, and psychological safety is kind of this environment where, exactly as you put it, everyone feels safe to speak their mind, everyone feels like they're

being listened to. But at the same time, you also feel like you can take risks, like if I bring up idea and it's kind of a crazy idea, no one's going to hold it against me. If I ask a question that maybe is like not a smart question, that smart question, or maybe it's an offensive question that other people will understand it's coming from a good place.

And I think I think you're exactly right that what safe spaces really aspire to is they aspire to psychological safety, right, because what we really want on university campuses or anywhere else for that matter, is a place where I can be myself, where I can turn to someone and I can say, Hey, tell me what it's like to be you. I can ask a dumb question, right, and I feel safe enough to ask it and they feel safe enough

to answer it. Yeah. So where I kind of got this idea is from Second City in Chicago, the improv group we did, so we had some conversations with Kelly Leonard and Ann lebera from that group, and you know, and just noticed that the kind of safe spaces they talk about in academy are almost the exactly opposite of what they try to nurture within the improv group. You know, what you're saying shouldn't offend others, but you should still be safe to have a different opinion and to take

those risks. So it does seem like that culture of comedy and improv is more along lines of what we should be promoting and even in academia. Well, and it's interesting because one of the things that's true I think of improv comedy, and that's also true of good teams, is that there's often a little bit of tension in that group, not necessarily tension among the group members but tension in regards to the ambitions or the aspirations of

the group. Right, an improv comedy group is saying, by definition, we want to be really funny and look really really smart. But instead of preparing, we're going to come into this thing without even knowing what we're talking about. Right. And the best teams, and I think everyone's had this experience, the best teams are ones that say, like, look like, we want to do something together that's like even more amazing than anything that we could all do on our own.

And it's that tension. It's being comfortable with that tension, embracing that tension and saying, look are reach expeeds our gasp or our graspic seeds are reach right now, it's being okay with that It's not only at the core of like why groups sometimes do really well, but also

at the core of like productivity. Right that, like the first step in productivity is oftentimes being able to elucidate some ambition, some something you think is wonderful that's not in the world yet that you want to bring into the world. Absolutely, I think that was very well put, and that's, you know, the whole idea of stingling creativity is in academia for me is the first thing near and dear to my heart. So I love that you brought that up. So let's just move all along the lines.

I still want people to buy your book, but let's cover some of these key points you talk about. You also talk about focus, and I was wondering how you relate that to, uh, you know, some of these plane crashes. Yeah, so it's so that's actually my favorite chapter in the book. It's it's the story of air Flight France flight four four seven, which which most people might remember sort of tragically crashed into the ocean without there being anything obvious

lay wrong with the airplane. And then this other amazing story of Quantus flight thirty two, which is actually one of the worst mid air mechanical disasters in history. Basically one of the wings of the plane, the engine just like tore through the wing and basically knocked out every single electrical and hydraulic system and everything else, and that plane landed completely safely. There wasn't one injury on board.

And when researchers have looked at those two flights and tried to figure out, you know, what made the difference what they figured out is that basically the differences a problem of attention that on air Finance flight four four seven, the one that crashed, the pilots didn't know how to manage their attention very well, and so so as a result,

they became completely overwhelmed. There was this one small incident where where one of a tube that helps measure airspeed became iced over and the plane lost airspeed information for just a couple of minutes, and that set off this whole cascade of panic in the cockpit that caused the pilots to inadvertently crashed plane into the sea. And it's because they didn't really know where to put their attention. As academics would put it or scientists would put it,

they weren't building mental models. They weren't telling themselves stories about what was occurring to help their brain figure out which alarms to focus on and which ones to ignore.

Whereas in Quantus flight thirty two, the pilots, in the midst of a very genuine emergency, something that normally should have crashed almost any plane, they were in the habit of telling themselves stories constantly, in fact vocalizing the stories to each other, saying Hey, you know, I saw this alarm go off, and I thought that this was happening, and so I looked at this panel and it's not happening.

And they basically spent the entire time telling each other's stories about what was occurring, and as a result, they were able as a group to figure out where to put their attention and which details they could safely ignore because otherwise they would have been overwhelmed. Yeah, that's great.

The more that you're under stress, what is the research show the more you're understressed, the more you're you get laser like focused on something, or the more it diffuses, which well, so the risk and you're understresses that you fall into what's known as a cognitive tunnel, which is that that you tend to react to the most obvious stimuli possible. So in some cases that might mean that you focus in on one thing and you don't pay

attention to all the other important details. Or it might mean that if there's stimulus after stimulus after stimulus, that your attention is jumping from alarm to alarm to alarm. And we've all experienced this before when you're driving down again, a driving example, when you're driving down the street and you know you're going to speed limit and you see a cop car suddenly out of the corner of your eyes, and you like hit the brake even though you don't

have to. That's a momentary cognitive tunnel. What your brain has done is it has said, I'm so overwhelmed by all the stimuli here that this one piece of stimuli I'm going to focus on at the police car to the exclusion of everything else. And that's really dangerous, right. I mean, if you're in a car, it's not that big a deal, but if you're in a cockpit, it

can be a really big deal. Or think about what happens when we walk into our office every morning, right, We walk in and your phone is buzzing in your pocket, and you've got one hundred emails to deal with, and there's someone knocking on the door asking if you can come to this emergency meeting, and there's three other people

asking you questions. For many of us, every workday is kind of like the cockpit of an airplane with all these alarms going off, and the people who are best at dealing with that, the people who are best at figuring out where to focus and maintaining their priorities. What research has shown is there people who tend to tell themselves stories about how they expect their day to unfold. So there are people who visualize their day with like

just half a degree more specificity than everyone else. So if they have a meeting at ten o'clock, instead of saying like, oh, I have a meeting at ten o'clock and it's going to last to eleven, they take a couple of minutes in the morning and they think, I have a meeting at ten o'clock, and it's probably going to start with Jim bringing up his dumb idea because he always brings up that dumb idea, and then Susan's going to disagree with him, because Susan always disagrees with Jim,

And then I can bring up my idea, and I'm going to look like a genius by comparison, and that act of telling yourself a story, of building a mental model of how you expect your day to unfold, that seems to be correlated with much much better focus and much better prioritization, because you're able to figure out almost automatically what you should pay attention to and what you can safely ignore that's such useful information. It's it's kind of like you want to do cognitive tunneling, but you

want to cognitively tunnel the most relevant information. Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah, so we can like distinguish between like unhelpful cognitive tunneling and like productive cognitive tuttling. But anyway, let's talk about goal setting because, uh, you know, a lot of your readers and a lot of the listeners of this podcast constantly fail in their goals. It's kind of like to be human is too is to have

setbacks in your goals. What are some kinds of goals you could set to kind of minimize that you're going to not be able to reach them. Well, so I guess at the out that I would sort of say that we should have some goals that we're failing in, right, Like if every goal that we set we accomplish perfectly, then yeah, a be boring, but it probably means b not being particularly ambitious, right, We're not trying to stretch ourselves.

But see, it would mean that we're not really thinking very hard about our goals, right, because just because you write something on a piece of paper is like on a to do list three days later, that might be not the right thing to be chasing anymore, right Like prioritization should be an ongoing process. And so when researchers have looked at this, one of the things that they focused on is they focused on to do list, how

people write to do lists. There's one set of studies that I really love about to do list where a guy went in He's gut his last name is Pitchell. He's a researcher at Carlton. He went and he looked at how people wrote to do list and he found that most people used to do list as an external memory aid. So what they'll do is they'll come up with like a list of things that they want to get done, and they'll just drop them down on a piece of paper so they don't have to remember all

of them. And about fifteen percent of them would actually write at the top of that to do list a task that they had already completed, because it feels so good when you like sit down at your desk to like cross something off right away, right like pick up the milk. I did it last night, that one off. And what's interesting is that he said that the problem with that is that that's using a to do list for mood repair. It's using it to do list to make yourself feel good instead of using a to do

list as a prioritization device. And so the right way to write a to do list, the way that seems most correlated with success is at the top of your to do list, write your most important goal, write your stretch goal, right like, what's the most important thing you want to get done this week or this month or today, and then under that come up with a plan. And there's ways to come up with plans, really simple plans.

There's a method called smart goals where you just say sort of specifically what you want to do and how you're going to measure it and is it achievable and realistic and what's the timeline. But as a result, every time you look at your to do list, if you have that most important goal at the top of your page, it's going to force you to ask yourself, is what I'm doing right now? Does it align with my top priorities?

Right If I just spent the last forty five minutes answering emails, and at the top of my to do list, it says, write that memo you've been putting off for three weeks. What I probably ought to do is close my computer and write that memo. And by the way, I spent like forty five seconds coming up with a smart plan on how to write that memo, so I

know where to start. To do lists are most effective when they remind us of our most important goals, when they cause us to think about our priorities rather than just trying to get the next thing on the list done. But you have to write your to do list the right way to use it as a prioritization device. Well, what if like like for me, one of the biggest things on my to do list is to actually forget

what my priorities are. So I feel like I'm screwed. Well, but I think that there's a way to do that, right, I mean, I think that you know what your priorities are. I don't know. I'm about to add I find everything interesting. Yeah, but okay, so let me ask you, so, what's your biggest goal for this week? Like, what's the number one thing you wanted to get done this week? Wrap up some of these reports we're running up of on our

imagination retreats. Okay, yeah, okay, so that's that seems pretty And so what what did you spend today doing besides this podcast? Well, yeah, I was reviewing one of these reports that we did with futurists. Okay, so it sounds sounds like your behavior and your stretch cool or in alignment. It's true, it's true, but you know, then there are just constantly things coming up during the day that distract you from it. So you know, I'll get an email

with someone with it. Oh, Scott used to read this article, and I'm like, okay, and then I'm like and then it's like, if you like this article, you also like these articles. And then I'm like, oh, that's interesting, and then well yeah, so that's so. So it sounds like what you're saying is that like you have a challenge not knowing what your goals are. You have a challenge

remaining focused on the goals. That's goods And I think I think to that point, like that's where mental models become so powerful, which is that like you, so when I take the subway, I live in Brooklyn, I work in Manhattan, and so one of the things I do on the subway every morning is like I used to, you know, like check my email or read on my kindle or whatever it was. Now, I just put everything away and for like seven minutes, I actually said a

time around my watch. For seven minutes, I literally just try and envision visualize my day hour by hour, right so, and so by the time I get off the subway doesn't make very long to do this. I'm like, you know, by eleven o'clock, I intend to have this memo written.

And from ten to eleven, like what I expect to do is just and like, because I've just visualized it a little bit, it's so much easier at ten o'clock to like close my turn off my email program, close the door to my office because I kind of expect that that's what I planned on doing. And I think that's how mental models work, is that mental models they

create what seems normal for us. And as a result, you don't get distracted by all those emails because you said, like, look in my head, I told myself the story from ten to eleven, I'm working on the memo, and so it doesn't feel weird to turn off my email, and so I won't get distracted. Now, that really is super helpful information. Thanks for letting me be a bit of a smartness. I like being a smart a sometimes, but

that is that is very useful. So let's talk about what's about decision making because that seems like a good segue. When we try to make our decisions, there are various ways we can do them. And I don't think a lot of people are aware of Baijian statistics, right, but you are, so this is what That was another one of my favorite chapters, just because like the concept of like Bayesian psychology is so is so interesting? Ye base rates and all that. Where did you learn about that?

First of all? Well, so I how did I learn about it? So that chapter is about poker players, right, It's about Annie Duke and sort of the he's a professional poker player and how she won the Tournament of Champions sort of hand by hand. And I can't remember exactly what brought me to Baysian Baysian psychology when I finally found these researchers. Some paper they wrote must have been like must have come across my screen, and I

just thought it was really interesting. And Annie talks a lot about Bayesian statistics because Basian statistics, So for people

who haven't heard of basing statistics. Basian statistics is or basian maths is this way of figuring out how to predict the future when you have limited knowledge, right, And what it basically says is you should try and take advantage of what you already know, and then figure out how much what you already know matches kind of the situation you're trying to forecast, and then as you're making guesses, look at how successful or how much you fail in

your guesses. Right. So, like one of the famous examples, of course, is you know breast cancer detection rates. That we're much better at accurately forecasting whether someone has breast cancer if we take into consideration how many times we've been right or wrong in the past instead of simply just looking at pure statistics. And the way that this matters in our life is that what this says is that oftentimes all of us have this instinct that we

can either pay attention to or we can ignore. But our instinct is like a big basing machine in our head. Our instinct oftentimes can recognize patterns, and it can see things that maybe we're not even totally conscious of. And if we allow our instincts to help guide us, then we oftentimes make much better decisions. We do a better job of sort of predicting what's going to happen and making a decision as a result, because in many ways

making a choice about trying to predict the future. But the caveat there is that our instinct isn't perfect, right, many of us have good instincts, we have like not so good instincts. Sometimes our instinct is weaker than we think it is. And so how do we train our instinct to be as accurate as possible? Well, what researchers have found is that the best way to do that is to simply expose ourselves to as many different kinds

of experiences as possible. Right, The more data I have, the more I expand my base rate relevant data not too yeah relevant right, relevant data, the more that I'm able to make a good guess about what's going to happen. But the trick is that many of us tend to oversample certain times kinds of experiences in particular success right. And a great example of this, I think is when

we're asking people about getting married. That if a friend comes up and they say, hey, I got engaged last month, it's our instinct to be like, oh, tell me all about it, like, you know, how did you meet her? When did you realize that you were in love? How did you pop the question? We ask all these questions about getting married, and that expands our data set about marriage experiences, so that maybe we're better off in a situation when we're trying to figure out whether we should

propose or not. But when someone comes up and they tell us that they're getting divorced, we never do that, right, We never ask, oh, you know, like tell me like when did you decide to get divorced, and like how did you how did you bring up divorce? How did you pop the question divorce? And as a result, we don't have a very good data set in our heads

a set of experiences about divorce. We tend to overbias towards success and away from failure, and that can hurt our instincts because we think that we have a pretty good data set. We think our instincts are pretty good, but it turns out that it's being bias by being oversampled overexposed to one type of kind of situation. I think that's right, and that's really can help us make better decisions, But can I get in a way of making innovative decisions. I'm trying to like reconcile chapter six

with the chapter seven. So in my I study creativity and I also study expertise. But I find sometimes too much expertise makes you inflexible and not allowing you to actually see something fresh that would lead to creativity. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, so I think that

can happen. But I think that I think that there's a counter a counterbalance to that, which is that in chapter seven about creativity, it focuses a lot on Disney and Pixar, who believe that, like, it's fine to have experts, right, we should have as many experts as we can, but we don't ask people to rely on their expertise to be creative. Rather than what we do is we set up a process. And that process can take someone who's

an expert, it can take someone who's a novice. It can take someone who's you know, quote unquote really creative, like an artist. It can take someone who doesn't think of themselves as being creative, and as long as they commit to the process, a creative product will emerge. Right, and the process is going to do things like ask us to look at this problem from other vantage points, to say, your expertise might be an advantage, it might also be a weakness. So let's think about how do

we counteract the weakness of expertise the process. The nice thing about process is it's kind of agnostic, right. It doesn't say this process can only be used by an expert or by a novice. It says, regardless of who you are, we want you to think a little bit and act a little bit like an expert, and think and act a little bit like a novice, and hopefully in doing so we get a diversity of perspectives. Oh totally. And the key there's the adaptability to switch between those

ways of thinking depending on the situation. Absolutely, you talk about intense time pressures in your innovation chapter. Could you tell me a little bit how that interacts with coming up with new ideas? Yeah? Well so, I mean, I imagine your research has looked at this, and there seems to be a healthy string of research that shows that time pressures can oftentimes push people to be more creative

because it removes it removes a couple of things. First of all, it removes the ability to seek perfectionism, Second of all, it oftentimes forces people to be much more pragmatic and to rely on what they already know rather than coming up with something completely completely new. And all of those are really can be really powerful. Now, but I guess my insect is always I sort of shy away from time like that those studies though, because it seems like it seems like it's arguing that we should

create like false time pressure to become creative. But that's not actually, I think what the cities are saying constraints is good for creativity. Yeah, the constraints. But why are constraints good for creativity? Right? They're oftentimes good because they they force because they remove false barriers. Right, they force us to be comfortable with that constraint, to forgive ourselves our mediocrity along the way. That's an interesting way of

thinking about it. But the expertise literature always thought of it is not and it narrows the problem space. So you know, we can have the paradox of choice. We can get so overwhelmed when the problem space you can have too many operators. I'm dropping, like you know, Herbsimon expertise language, but yeah, you know, you have operators that allow you to mean Zen's analysis reduce the discrepancy between

your goal state and your end state. And it seems like when you have some constraints, you narrow that all the operators that you need to choose, but it still gives you freedom to be creative and how you overcome the barriers. So I think that, I mean, I think

you could make that argument. Like the way I think about it is Chuck Close, right, because by that same token, if someone is an expert, we should create more and more and more and more false constraints for them, right, But we know that there's a point of diminishing returns. And we also know that, by the way, if someone has all the time in the world, they still oftentimes will automatically isolating sort of where they want to focus, and in doing so we'll get to the right answer

relatively quickly. I would make an argument that it's less mechanical than this kind of decision tree, right, where if we can cut off some of the branches the experts will get faster, we'll get to the right answer faster.

And it's more like Chuck Close, which is that Chuck Close made this decision in part because he was disabled to paint these portraits by painting all these little boxes, and that what that allowed him to do is it allowed him to really intensely focus on each box, and so can what we consider a constraint wasn't actually a constraint.

It was actually a freeing mechanism. That's saying, rather than have to think about the whole picture, I'm now going to allow you to think about that picture square inch by square inch. Hm. I like that. That's one of the things that I'm going to chew over the next couple of days. I'm not going to respond to right away right now, but I think it's really interesting. Yeah, I like that. So let's uh, your book has certainly

given me a lot of stuff to think about. And you know, the fun thing for me, honestly, Charles, is like seeing how the big pic like, what's the big picture like when you take all these different aspects and you like look as a global puzzle, you know, does it all fit nicely together? Which aspects could potentially contradict each other? You know these sorts of things. So well, so here's how I think about it. And I'd be curious, since I wrote it, I'm maybe too close to it.

So curious of if you agree or disagreer you saw something else? Which is that? Is it? Throughout history, like the killer app for productivity and success has always been thinking more deeply, right, Like, like the people who seem to succeed are the ones who seem to be able to push themselves to just think a little bit more deeply about like what do I really want to get done? What's going to move the needle? How do I stay focused on that? How instead of just being busy do

I become productive? That's Cayle Newport's deep work exactly exactly and so and so for me, Like, what all the chapters in this book bring together is this idea that we don't accidentally sort of trip over thoughtfulness, That we need to create habits that act allow us to think more. And that when I say something like that, most people think, okay, that means that like I need to like take long walks in the woods, right and like let my mind wander.

But for many people that's not actually how they engage in thoughtful behavior. That's not how they have contemplative routines.

That for many people, a contemplative routine is, for instance, being in the habit of like arguing with your friends because it forces you to think more deeply about the choices, or maybe writing long emails to your parents, or describing your entire day to your wife, or maybe taking a long walk in the woods, or experimenting with a bunch of different routines and figuring out which ones actually push you to think. Right, right, Because at the end of

the day, our growth goals aren't to create habits. Our growth goals is to automatize the things that are taking us away from our growth. Yeah, that's exactly right. So I don't have to think about brushing my teeth, or I don't have to think about exercising that Instead, I exercise and during that time, I'm in some habit I'm in.

I know how to push myself to think more deeply about the choices that I'm making, because my instinct, frankly, is going to be to like let my mind wander and just daydream, or to listen to a podcast, or if I'm standing in line, to check my iPhone or

whatever it is. Each of the chapters in the book is about, like, here's a way of pushing yourself to think more deeply for this one kind of specific goal, right, if you want to self motivate, if you want to be more creative, and here are the tools that are available to you to say, like, how do you make this more part of your life? So the common thread running your prior book on habits and this book, I mean that you see a similarity between both of them, right,

a little bit. I actually see them as being opposite for the reasoning you just elucid that habits are about like habits are about not having to think about the dumb things in life, just having them happen automatically. And productivity is about using that new mental free space to think about the things that really matter and training yourself to think about them in productive ways. Totally. I was just going to say, tame, Yeah, tame your habits so

that you can be most productive. Yeah, yeah, I think that's exactly right. I like it. Thank you so much for chatting with me today, Charles is really thanks for having me on. Thanks for listening to the Psychology Podcast with doctor Scott Barry Kauffman. I hope you found this episode just as thought for booking and interesting as I did. If you'd like to read the show notes for this episode or hear past episodes. You can visit the Psychology Podcast dot com