In this episode, David Epstein explores why doing more can leave us overwhelmed, and how the right constraints can help us focus and make meaningful progress. Drawing on his book, Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better, David shares why unlimited freedom can be surprisingly paralyzing and why adding another self-improvement habit isn’t always the answer. He and Eric discuss how to protect your attention, stop endlessly preparing, and make room for what matters before your to-do list is finished.
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Key Takeaways:
- Why limits can spark creativity by pushing us beyond our most familiar ideas
- How simple routines and clear boundaries reduce the burden of constantly deciding what to do next
- Why making progress often requires removing a commitment before adding something new
- How frequent task switching fragments attention and increases stress—even when we feel busy
- Why identifying the real bottleneck can accomplish more than optimizing everything else
- How to “consolidate your caring” by choosing commitments that reflect your values and fit your finite capacity
David Epstein is the author of the number one New York Times bestseller Range and the New York Times bestseller The Sports Gene. He has master’s degrees in environmental science and journalism and has worked as a senior writer for Sports Illustrated and as an investigative reporter for ProPublica.
Connect with David Epstein: Website | Instagram | LinkedIn | YouTube
If you enjoyed this conversation with David Epstein, check out these other episodes:
From Overwhelm to Empowerment: Harnessing Tiny Shifts for Emotional Resilience with Elisha Goldstein
Are You Playing a Game You Actually Want to Win? | Seth Godin
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Episode Transcript:
David Epstein 00:00:00 The modern fire hose of information and influence are dumb. It can be so overwhelming it can kind of hijack that really good impulse to be a self improver by just overwhelming you with stuff and making you feel bad even when you are improving.
Chris Forbes 00:00:21 Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts. We have quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf.
Eric Zimmer 00:01:05 When I was writing my book, I kept thinking I needed more. More quotes, more research.
Eric Zimmer 00:01:10 More stories than a friend who’s a writer told me. Spend what’s in your pocket. Nothing new comes in. I had to use what I already had, and that’s a constraint. And it’s the reason the book got finished. David Epstein’s new book, Inside the Box, is about why limits like that make us better at almost everything. He also has a phrase I’ve been thinking about since we talked consolidate your caring. There are more things you could care about than you can possibly help on, and choosing a few of them is really important. I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi David, welcome to the show.
David Epstein 00:01:48 Thank you very much for having me. Glad to be here.
Eric Zimmer 00:01:50 I’m excited to discuss with you your latest book, which is called Inside the Box How Constraints Make Us Better. But before we get into that, we’ll start like we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed, hatred, and fear. And the grandchild stops. They think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.
David Epstein 00:02:38 I think it is simple and brilliant and true. And I think in this day and age, for me and probably everyone else, part of that, wolf, is also social comparison envy. I would say even what we’re ubiquitously calling maxing now, like trying to get the ultimate optimization of everything. And I think when you feed that and, and it’s very easy to feed because there are algorithms that want to feed it for you if you’re not proactively deciding to feed the other wolf. And so when I think of that parable, what immediately comes to mind? The boundless ability to compare what I’m doing and who I am to the rest of the world at any given moment in time, and that that will never be satiated and will only grow if I feed it. So I think it’s very relevant to, to to modern life.
Eric Zimmer 00:03:35 Yeah. I love that idea of never be satiated. That’s the really interesting thing about some of it is you can never get enough. Someone said on the show and I don’t remember who because I wish I did know, but you can never get enough of something that almost works. So like as an author, you get feedback on the book. You see how well it’s selling. And yet it could always, from a certain perspective, always be better, always be more, not match up to the other successes that are out there. And it’s all just a relative game that I think ultimately is unwinnable if you’re playing it.
David Epstein 00:04:14 Absolutely. And I think that includes, to some degree, even playing it with yourself. Right. Like, I had a note my previous book before this ring was more successful than I could have imagined. And for a little while, that paralyzed me about writing another book, because you just can even feel that comparison with yourself and what you’ve done in the past. And so I think that’s a question to go back to the wolves. Are you feeding that aspect that I need to sell more copies, or are you feeding that aspect of, oh, this is work that I find really engaging and I’m in it for that. Yeah. So I think even there it can depend it can be very easy when you have a six, maybe, especially if it’s a little unexpected to sort of shift your your values metrics to something that you weren’t even considering in the past and away from the things you proactively chose as meaningful to you. So in order to sort of get out of that paralysis, I had to kind of remind myself that it’s the work that I find incredibly engaging in. A lot of the outcome is actually out of my control anyway. I read a psychology study where if you say that things are dependent on luck, people like you less, but it’s the truth. Like, it’s it’s an underrated fact.
Eric Zimmer 00:05:19 It is an incredibly underrated factor. I mean, there is just so many things that can go right or wrong at any given time that you just have no control over, I remember. I mean, this is just a silly example, but the week that I had planned, I was going to pitch all of the regional NPR stations on my book. I had a plan all worked out. I had already had a little bit of success there, and it was the week we sent the pitches. That was the week that the war started. I mean, no one was going to look at my pitch and pay any attention to it. Not the slightest bit. There was nothing I could have done to make that campaign any better except do it another time later. And it’s just like things are like that over and over again. It’s. Have you ever read the the book Fluke by Brian Klass? I think that’s his name. If you want to get into a deep brain bending read on this subject, I highly recommend it because he’s talking about things like the fluke of like which city got bombed in Japan. I mean, things that make you you just go like, oh my God. Like it’s all chaos.
David Epstein 00:06:24 It’s like, it reminds me of my first book when I was at Sports Illustrated was about genetics and athleticism. And I remember one of my colleagues who’d written books, and he was like, at the time, vampire novels were super popular. Like they were floating publishing, basically. And he said, you know, if a book about the genetics of vampires comes out in the same day, you’re screwed. And that’s what it is. And like, you’re right, you’re right to that fluke. I’ll definitely check that out. And you reminded me of another book by writer. I love Michael Matheson, and he also works in finance. and he wrote this book called The Success Equation. And what a lot of it actually is about is trying to determine whether luck or skill was responsible for an outcome. And he looks in various fields at the rate of regression to the mean. And, you know, the faster people at the top regressed to the mean, the more likely it is that luck was involved in some of their rise.
David Epstein 00:07:14 And so this is like why Sports Illustrated the cover curve. So it was like someone gets worse as soon as they’re on the cover. Like, no, it’s actually just captured them at this brief moment where they just did their greatest thing. And it’s unlikely to happen again. But Michael shows like some of these. I think he cites a study where come in the famous book Good to great like most of them regress to the mean shortly after that. So it wasn’t just, oh, they figured it all out and it’s going to be success forever, right? It doesn’t detract that they did something great, but it just means there was a lot of luck involved also.
Eric Zimmer 00:07:45 Yeah. And it also highlights I’ve thought about that good to great thing because I mean some of those companies don’t even exist. I don’t think anymore. You do see that? Like what got you here won’t get you there. Also, you know, things that work don’t suddenly stop working. And you’re like, oh, I know I need, like a new approach.
Eric Zimmer 00:08:01 So let’s go into the book. I found the book really a great exploration in this idea of constraints. And I’ve understood the idea of constraints in the artistic process, because a band that I used to love, and I don’t think they were in the book, but is The White Stripes, that is a band that embraced constraint, you know, three colors, two instruments. You know, he used old guitars so that he had to fight the guitar more. Right. And that band was so constraint driven. This is just my personal feeling that anything he’s done after has not had the same magic that happened when it was shoehorned into that form.
David Epstein 00:08:43 Yeah. And I mean, that is so on the nose for what psychology of creativity research shows psychologists did an international survey of known creativity myths. So these are things that we know from research are not true like definitively shown. And the second most popular myth globally about creativity was that people are most creative when they are most free. So we know this isn’t true for a few reasons, and mainly because, as the cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham has written, you may think your brain’s made for thinking, but it’s actually made for preventing you from having to think whenever possible, because thinking is energetically costly, right? And your brain is wired for convenience.
David Epstein 00:09:23 So if you have this sort of open field of options, you will reach for the convenient answers, which are things that you’ve done before mainly, or that just popped to mind quickly, and things that pop to mind quickly are not going to be creatively unique. And so the best creative prompt is actually blocking what what psychologists call the path of least resistance. Whatever it is you would first reach for, you block that. And that’s when people start looking for something new. And that’s what those kinds of constraints do. It’s even referred to in psychology as the Green Eggs and Ham model of creativity, because Doctor Seuss famously wrote the book Green Eggs and Ham on a bet that he couldn’t write a children’s book using only 50 words, and it frustrated him like crazy. But it forced his to develop his rollicking rhythm because he couldn’t be expansive with vocabulary. And I think that’s very much what you’re talking about, where when you can be expansive with kind of the conventional stuff that actually makes it extremely hard to do something unique and creative.
Eric Zimmer 00:10:21 Yeah, it’s been interesting. I borrowed an old classical guitar from a friend recently, and there’s something about it. It’s an old guitar. It’s painted green with flowers on it. But there’s something about that guitar that all of a sudden music has just been pouring out of me. And I think it’s partially because it is not a great instrument in some sense. It has its limitations, but something about those limitations seem to be for some reason right now, I’m sure it’s not only the guitar, but it’s been part of a creative boom for me. I want to take this in a slightly different direction for a minute, away from creativity and talk about people’s kind of day to day lives. Because I like the myth of people used to think that what I wanted was to be free, to do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, and that did not go well for me. I ended up as a homeless heroin addict, and in recovery, there was a phrase I heard that I still used today with myself working with clients, which is that structure liberates. And so let’s talk about like in your own, like day to day life. How does this idea of putting constraints in place or structures in place help you live a better life?
David Epstein 00:11:36 Yeah, and I don’t think I had as dramatic a story as as you did at the same time. And this will sound like it’s coming from an incredibly privileged place, and I recognize that. But, you know, a few years ago, I went to a writer’s retreat, a small group like a dozen writers, and we had to answer in one word what we were each optimizing for that year. And I said, autonomy, right? Because I’d written this book that took off suddenly. I could be independent. I could spend every minute in a way of my own choosing, etc. so I went and did that. Fast forward two years later, and I learned that there is such a thing as too much autonomy. Again, I know this sounds like I mean, but this is how excessive freedom always sounds. It always sounds great in the abstract.
David Epstein 00:12:20 Yeah, a lot of these studies show, you know, there was a time when I started saying, gosh, I wish none of my books had ever taken off, because then I would have stayed in an office with colleagues, with a structure where I don’t have to make every little decision all day, because I had individualized my schedule so much that I was never really syncing with other people. And the Soviet Union tried this in the 20s, where they individualized people’s work schedules, and it was a social calamity Because people weren’t syncing up anymore. And I did that to myself. And I think a lot of us are doing that to ourselves. And it really sucked a lot of the meaning out of my life. Like, first of all, I was spending a ton of time deciding what it is I should actually be doing at any given moment because I didn’t have it plotted out. But then I was just spending like a ton of time alone, and it made me really unhappy. And so I had to sort of rethink this thing that seemed like my ultimate career goal that I had worked toward.
David Epstein 00:13:14 You know, I started structuring my workday with specific start and stop. The last thing I do for every workday I take from Ernest Hemingway, he would stop his writing in the middle of a sentence where I put down the important thing I’m going to start with the next day, so I know exactly where I’m going to start. So I don’t like fall into my fees or into email and all that stuff. I light a candle, electric candle. I still listen to Isabel Allende to start my work. I turned it off to stop it. I joined a nonprofit board at an early child education center for low income families in my community. I started going to these dance classes. I joined a dinner and discussion club like things where people were counting on me to be in a certain place at a certain time, because I started to realize that the best way to make friends as an adult is to show up at the same place at the same time every week, and then it’ll happen.
Eric Zimmer 00:13:57 Boy, there’s so many good things in there.I want to hit that last piece, though, what you just said there, because we talk a lot about loneliness. It’s a big thing we talk about in the social culture, but what do you do about it? And I think what you just said is a very simple, great answer. Show up in the same place each week, you know, for a period of time, because friendships just take they take time to develop like that, right?
David Epstein 00:14:18 That’s right. I mean, I applied stuff to my own work on a more granular level to these constraints, because I don’t know if you want to hear about that too. But one of the reasons I got interested in this topic was because I had been so bad at putting in place helpful boundaries in my writing projects in the past, and so this was something I wasn’t writing this book because this is something I excelled at. I was writing it because it’s something I was terrible at and wanted to learn more about.
Eric Zimmer 00:14:41 I want to go back to the broad problem that you described. I was giving a keynote last week, and I actually told this story about the same thing. I was like, when I started my coaching business, my one on one work, I was surprised by something. And the thing I was surprised by was how many of my clients were retired people. I was like, that is odd. I didn’t see that coming, but it’s exactly what you’re describing. They knew how to function in a very structured environment of work, and they had figured that out relatively well, most of them. But when all the rules changed, they found it somewhat paralyzing. Because when you can do anything, any time, you often do nothing.
David Epstein 00:15:28 Totally. Okay. Two things here. One, when I was at Sports Illustrated, I spent a lot of time with athletes. I’d been a national level athlete myself. And these guys, most, most pro athletes at the very top level, are not retiring on their own schedule. Okay. But for the ones who do, it was always can’t wait to spend more time fishing, golfing, all that stuff. And then like nine months later and they would love that for a few months.
Eric Zimmer 00:15:50 Yeah.
David Epstein 00:15:51 And then nine months later, they’re like despondent, looking to get back into coaching or someone has structured so much for them. You know, they’ve had to show up and execute, but they’ve been living with so much structure. I mean, it’s the same as sometimes people you see getting out of the military where you don’t even realize how helpful some of this structure has been until you lose it. And what you were saying just reminded me of something. And maybe you want me to read this to you. So inside the box, I. I spent a bunch of time with Isabel Allende, who I think one of the greatest living writers, and she sent me an email that relates to this that she said I could share if I ever had the chance. Can I can I look to my email and read these to you? Yeah. Hold on. This might just take me a second to find here. So her her writing life, she started writing, you know, publishing books around age 40, then wrote a bestseller about every 18 months for the next 43 years.
David Epstein 00:16:37 She really built all these rituals into her life. Every book started on January 8th. You know, she built the structure because she needed it. And so I told her because she’s in the. I’ll send you an advance copy. I probably said that in like February or something. And she writes back and says, yeah, send it. But as you know, I can’t read it because January 8th just passed and my life turned outward, as she calls it, is closed. Great. Perfect response, I expected it, and then she sends me a message, maybe like two months later or something saying, oh, I’m reading the book. I’m really liking it. And I’m like, what? You’re supposed to be working. And she sends me this email, which again, she said I could share if I ever had reason to. She says, I started a novel on January 8th and gave myself a deadline to finish her first manuscript by the end of March. The reason is not important. Okay, so she doesn’t want to tell me why she gave this absurdly short deadline.
David Epstein 00:17:27 Whatever.
Eric Zimmer 00:17:28 It’s pretty short.
David Epstein 00:17:29 My agent and my brother. And she’d never done that before. My agent and my brother read it and liked it a lot. It still needs polishing, but it’s meh. And I find myself without work until next January 8th. I’m going crazy. I’m getting rid of my clothes, replacing the furniture, walking in circles, reading compulsively, etc. your book has been an inspiration. I need to give myself a task with boundaries. For example, write a novel set in Lima in the year 1610 about a cowardly Spanish soldier in Inca made an Inquisition, or a story set in 1810, in Ireland, about a girl witch expelled from her village who seeks revenge. You get the idea. I can’t start writing until January 8th, but I can start researching and planning. I have total freedom to do whatever I want, and in my age, 84, I have no obligation to keep writing this. Freedom is lethal. Help! Exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point. Love your pen pal.
David Epstein 00:18:14 Then, like, an hour later, she sends another email. That’s just one line. It says, do you have an idea for me? Inca maid or the Irish witch?
Eric Zimmer 00:18:21 Like that’s great. Hey, it’s amazing that she will not start a book that is not on January 8th. Like, and when we say start a book, we don’t mean that the book itself is set on January 8th. We mean she sits down to start working on January 8th, which is her constraint, her ritual that worked for her for all these years.
David Epstein 00:19:08 Yes, yes. Very much. And she has these other rituals and structures that I came to see as kind of like, well, one the January 8th pattern. And she started this long before she was successful and could do whatever she wanted. I think her second novel, she was writing in a closet so she could have a little space because it was also important her to have her own space. And I came to view it sort of as like an NBA player who, before they shoot a free, you know, bounces the ball twice, claps their hand and touches their cheek. It’s like all these things that became part of her, not only signaling to other people that my life is changing starting on this date. So if you need something from me, you better get it by January 7th. But things that cued her into her performance mindset basically and got her ready for that journey she had to take.
Eric Zimmer 00:19:54 Yeah, in my own little way. When I was writing my book, I had those sort of things. You know, this is how I kick off a writing session. You know, I set a timer, I put on headphones, I block all the notifications, I put on a certain playlist. For a while, I had this little toy top that I would give a spin to, you know, to sort of start things. And all of that is just exactly kind of what you’re talking about. It primes the, the brain for this is what we’re doing.
David Epstein 00:20:19 Yeah. Yeah. Completely. They might seem a little silly, but again, for anyone who’s been around elite sports, they don’t seem silly at all. And so, you know, they’re revered. They’re essential. They’re encouraged if someone doesn’t have them. And so even if it feels a little silly at first. I think it’s really applicable no matter what we’re doing. Like, we know this works, that if you can set cues to get you into a certain mindset. It doesn’t work on day one, but it does start to work if you keep up with it.
Eric Zimmer 00:20:51 So NBA free throws comes to mind. Are there a lot of these in other sports, maybe like a tennis player before they serve, or a baseball player before they go to the bat, or a pitcher before they throw.
David Epstein 00:21:03 All of the above track athletes at the starting line? Same with swimmers. Yes, hitters before they’re going up to bat. I mean, it was Rafael Nadal who has that whole thing about stacking a certain number of water bottles and turning them to face a certain direction. Yeah, they are all over the place. I’m trying to think if I can think of any sports that don’t have them, you know, sometimes they’ll also involve things like some kind of mantra.
David Epstein 00:21:25 Maybe it’s even written on somebody’s arm that they look at repeatedly as they’re they’re warming up and all. Yeah. It’s ubiquitous.
Eric Zimmer 00:21:33 Yeah. For a second there, you start to talk about some other habits that you use with writing around constraints or in your life. Can we go into some of those?
David Epstein 00:21:42 Yes. Let me talk about the writing. So it’s been 6 to 7 years between my books. I’ve written three books. And that’s been the case from 1 to 2 and then 2 to 3. And part of the reason for that is because I’ve been terrible at putting boundaries around my own projects, and because I have this expansive curiosity, which can be an asset, but it can also be a liability because I’ll end up going down all these rabbit holes. I won’t really know the container for the book because I picked these amorphous types. You know how broad or specialized to be when constraints are useful, which makes it even more important to have some lines around what you’re doing. Say, where does this project start and stop? Who am I writing this for? You know what? What problem I attempting to solve for them or take on for them?
Eric Zimmer 00:22:24 Can you tell me for the latest book how you ultimately ended up answering those questions? Yeah. You know what problem you’re solving, who you’re writing for.
David Epstein 00:22:34 Yeah, so part of the impetus for the new book came out of the most common reader questions I would get from range. My previous book, which is about the benefits of generalists in a fast changing world. And a lot of people who liked it would say, look, I’m really curious. You know, I have all these experiences, but I really have trouble figuring out like, what to do, what to focus on. And I counted myself exactly among those people. And so some of it was those readers who were curious, you know, who were willing to experiment but really had trouble figuring out how to channel their skills and their interests into a project and into achievement. And one of the first people I interviewed for Inside the Box was Tony Fadell, who had been like the lead designer of the iPod, and I was talking to him before I even knew I was writing a book.
David Epstein 00:23:23 We were just connected by a mutual friend, and he co-founded the smart thermostat company nest, and he had his team work inside a literal box, where he made them prototype the packaging before the product because he said, look, if it doesn’t fit on this packaging, then is not a priority. This is our most important space to communicate to the consumer, and he encouraged me to write a press release for the book before I started writing the book. Before I was even contract.
Eric Zimmer 00:23:46 Interesting.
David Epstein 00:23:47 And I found that exercise to be so useful. He said, write the fake blurbs that you hope people will say, or reviews or whatever. And it really gave me the sense of who I’m hoping to reach, which were, again, these readers of range, who had diverse experience, were curious, but really had trouble focusing all that power into a specific project. People who wanted to be creative. People who said if only I had more freedom, and who needed an emotional reframe for limits, right? Some of the people I identified were people who were dealing with constraints at work that are maybe handed down to them and their not their choice.
David Epstein 00:24:26 And how could I give them an emotional reframe to help them realize these can actually be their best tools and don’t have to be seen just as a punishment? And so the phrase that I came up with, I think at the start of the press release was it’s never been easier to do too much. So for people who are feeling overwhelmed from all the stream of information from AI, allowing them to start a million things that they’re never going to finish and maybe shouldn’t be starting, they get paralyzed shopping on Amazon because there’s a million competitions, or being on a dating app because you’re always wondering what else there could be. So it started to make me think about the actual problems that I hoped people reading it would think about when they read it, and I had never done anything like that before. It made me think about this, this adage, I don’t know if this was Ellen Langer, but that people don’t want a quarter inch drill. They want a quarter inch hole in the wall. But I think with my previous two books, like even though they did well, I was very much like trying to shoehorn in all the stuff I thought was interesting.
David Epstein 00:25:23 And that’s the quarter inch drill. It’s like, how cool of a drill can I make? Instead of what is the thing I really want them thinking about here? What is the problem that this might make them think about in a new way, Not how much cool stuff can I pack in. And that eventually led me to do this exercise where I took what I call my master thought list. It’s like ideas. I have quotes, stats, paper citations, etc. and it got up to 100,000 words, which is significantly longer than the book itself.
Eric Zimmer 00:25:50 I was about to ask how big it is. So yeah, yeah, it’s.
David Epstein 00:25:53 Right back here. So.
Eric Zimmer 00:25:54 Oh, so it’s a physical thing.
David Epstein 00:25:57 Well, I mean, I have it on my computer, but yeah, this gets to the exercise so you can see there’s all these like flags, different color coded like crazy stuff. And I printed it out. And then I went to a hermitage in the back of a Franciscan monastery for two days, where no internet didn’t open my mouth.
David Epstein 00:26:12 Read it one page at a time, because you can’t keep 100,000 words of notes in your brain. And then I said, when I’m done, the things that are super interesting to me will still be there as soon as I finish the other stuff, you know, interesting, but can’t get to everything. And then I force myself to on one page and one page only. Here it is. If you can see there’s to outline the book on a single page. You can see I wrote as small as humanly possible.
Eric Zimmer 00:26:36 There’s a lot of words on that page, but a lot of words, one page and arrows.
David Epstein 00:26:40 And that forced me to ruthlessly prioritize what I thought would go in. And it led to this new structure for the book where I did these thematic sections with linked chapters. So it also led me to kind of experiment in a new way. And it took time, and it was a little painful, and I didn’t start writing until later in the process than I had for the previous two books. But because I had the sandbox worked out, my execution was one then much more pleasurable where I could really focus on the writing. And two, I finished early. Like my first book, I needed an extra year. I had to go back to the publisher. The second one I turned in at 5 p.m. on the day in the contract, and this one I was just sitting on because even though I started later in the writing part, the execution was so much more rapid because I had an idea of what the container was. And it was weird after like decade, you know, in two bestsellers to have a totally new process. But I would never not do it this way again.
Eric Zimmer 00:27:33 It’s really fascinating. I had a friend when I was working on my book who said something to me that was so helpful because I had something similar to you. I had all these ideas and I actually had a structure, but I had so many ideas and I kept thinking, like, I probably need more, like I need info on this.
Eric Zimmer 00:27:49 I need more quotes, more anecdotes, more. And he said to me, spend what is in your pocket. And that was so valuable because then I was like, okay, it’s a constraint, right? The constraint was nothing new comes. I mean, it’s not that if a new idea or a new thing just landed on my plate, that I couldn’t include it. But we are not going out and seeking more. Yeah, we are spending what’s already in this container. We’re arranging it and putting it down. And I mean, I finished my book a little bit early also, and I think that was the reason was because I had I had a big constraint that I put on myself.
David Epstein 00:28:28 I love that, I love that phrase. And, you know, I even think, like you said, it’s new stuff can come in. But I even think at a certain point just trying to start writing it is the only way you figure out where the holes are, too.
Eric Zimmer 00:28:39 Exactly. Yeah.
David Epstein 00:28:40 Because when you’re going super deep into research for too long, like, obviously you need a base, you’re still going to have holes, but you don’t know where they are. And so the best way to figure out what they are is actually to start writing with what you’ve got. It feels like this principle and design that’s called design freeze where especially with like design programs now and software, you know, whether you’re designing a vehicle or building whatever, you can so easily add new features and constantly be changing. So Design Freeze is the practice where the project team says, we’re stopping, everyone is stopping on this date, and then we’re going to see where we are, and we’re going to test it, because that’s the only way we’re going to really learn, not from more and more and more and more design. So it prevents you from getting feature itis, as they say, where you’re just like always, always heading features. There was an interesting not long ago front page article in the Wall Street Journal about this, basically about how the US used to be the world leading shipbuilders and now we’re complete laggards.
David Epstein 00:29:37 And it talked about a main reason being that we never stop adding specifications. It’s like, oh, here’s another cool thing. Let’s add. And so you never actually stop and say, all right, let’s go with what we’ve got and test it. Because you can always add and add and add. So that’s like the version you and I are battling the writing version of that, that ship building problem.
Eric Zimmer 00:29:57 And I think there’s a version of this in our lives of what do we devote our limited time and energy to, because it’s the same situation when it comes to deciding what I’m going to do, because there’s always more and we’re always encouraged to do more. I mean, a lot of people listening to this show and my audience, it’s self-improvement people, right? And there’s literally no end to the number of ways you’re told you could improve yourself any given day. I mean, they’re countless And you can’t keep stacking them, or you make no progress and you feel bad because you’re not doing everything. So one of the things I’ll ask somebody like, I want to start doing X and I’m like, okay, but what are we going to stop doing then? Like, there’s got to be something that’s got to come out now.
It may come out easy. You may go, look, I’m spending three hours a day scrolling social media. I’m going to take that to two and grab an hour. Maybe easy, maybe really hard to find, depending. But time doesn’t just suddenly show up. You don’t suddenly have more of it.
David Epstein 00:31:00 Yeah. And I think that’s a great question. You ask, what are you taking away? Because I’m self-improvement focused. I want to do all this stuff. I totally have that tendency. But I think some kind of the the modern firehose of information and influencer dumb. It can be so overwhelming. It can kind of hijack that really good impulse to be a self improver by just overwhelming you with stuff and making you feel bad even when you are improving. Yeah. And I think it caters to this really hardwired human bias called additive bias, where we are hardwired to add to solve problems and not to take away. So the cousin of additive biases was called subtraction, neglect, bias where we tend to overlook solutions that involve taking away the theory for why this is is that in our evolutionary context, having too much of stuff wasn’t really a problem.
David Epstein 00:31:50 That’s a very modern problem, and having too little was the problem. So you just did not get oriented toward the idea of taking things away. That’s the theory. Doesn’t matter if it’s right or wrong, because the empirical finding is that people have this. And so I actually do quarterly now, something that I stole from a lab that I was writing about. And inside the box where every quarter I put on post-it notes on my wall, all of my current commitments and say, if I had to cut one in the next 90 days, what would it be? And then I’d do that. And all of these things are up there because there are things that I want to do. There are no easy cuts. But when you recognize your finite bandwidth, your mortality, your finite energy. You’re not going to get all that. You can’t get all this stuff done doesn’t mean you have to say never, but at least you have the funnel. Nothing new going in the funnel can go in unless something comes out the bottom, and you’ll actually get more done that way.
David Epstein 00:32:44 You know, I think the impulse a lot of people have is add, add, add, and then there’s something important to them, whether it’s a project, a new habit, something family related. Say, I’m really going to get to this thing once I clear the decks. Like the decks will never be clear. The decks will never be clear. You have to make room for the important stuff now by subtracting things that you would like to do, but you have to make those hard choices.
Eric Zimmer 00:33:06 Yeah, absolutely. That is so, so spot on. I want to pivot a little bit and talk about attention. If you go back to William James, right. I mean, William James essentially said my life is what I pay attention to, right? That is what makes up my experience of being in life, what I pay attention to. And you talk about some researchers. I think Gloria marks about what’s kind of happening with our attention. And it’s a cliché to say that our attention is fracturing, but there are some nuances in what you put in there that I’d like to pull out. So give us the overview for a second.
David Epstein 00:33:40 Okay. Yeah. So Gloria Marx has been studying people at work for about 25 years. And when she started, what she saw was that people were task switching about every three minutes at work. And then by 2012, it was like every 75 seconds. And then by 2022 was every 45 seconds. I think it’s been there for a few years now. And what she found is that this is not only bad for your productivity. So as she describes it, the brain is like a whiteboard where when you task switch, you erase, but there’s that residue still there that interferes with the next thing. And the more switches you make, the more that builds up and takes part of your cognitive bandwidth that you’re not going to replenish until you rest and sleep. And so the number of task switches negatively predicts your productivity during a day. But I found a more urgent finding was that it’s really highly correlated to your stress at the end of the day. So she would measure people’s heart rate variability, skin temperature, all this kind of stuff.
David Epstein 00:34:38 And task switching boosts your stress. You may not feel that way. There’s even some evidence now that it affects your immune function. And so it’s not good for you in any way. And so I think we have to try to find ways to what she calls batching work or blocking work. You know, where I think she found in one of her studies and this is some years old now. So it’s probably more that people in an office were checking email about 77 times a day on average. So it’s not 77 emails, 77 different checks.
Eric Zimmer 00:35:10 I believe it.
David Epstein 00:35:12 I bet that’s low for now because again, this was a few years ago. And if you count all these other messaging, like if you count your LinkedIn inbox and your Instagram messages and your slack or whatever. Yeah, yeah. And so what she would say is, okay, maybe you have to answer all the emails that you looked at in those 77 checks, but can you convert that into one or 3 or 5 blocks during the day when you’re just doing email and then you’re not doing email? Because anything you can do to lessen that 77 switches is going to be a benefit for your ability to focus, preserving your cognitive bandwidth and for your stress level.
Eric Zimmer 00:35:53 Yeah. That is certainly my experience, and I’m fortunate I have a role in which I can dictate to a certain degree, what I’m going to do with my time. And what I’ve realized is, at the end of the day of a hard day of intellectual work, I’m tired. No matter what I do. Like I noticed that. But when I have been focused on just a couple of things that I went deep into, I’m tired, but I’m more satisfied. I’m not any less tired than I am when I’m flitting around all the time. But when I’m flitting around all the time, I feel agitated and like nothing happened. It’s an unsatisfied feeling, at least from my experience, is not that one gives me more energy than the other. At the end of the day, it’s that one just has a feeling of satisfaction to the other. And email is definitely my digital tick. Like I turn off all notifications. My phone rarely bothers me, but email is definitely my tick and I’ve resorted to I have to limit it. I have to make it harder for me to check email because so much of it too. I think we do. And this gets to the next thing that you wrote in the book that I want to talk about is it happens automatically. I’m not consciously choosing to go to my email, I’m just doing it. And that was the other thing that you brought out that I found intuitively correct and glad to hear is that once, even if we start limiting the outer interruptions. We are used to a certain cadence of interruption and we will do it to ourselves. And that is really sobering.
David Epstein 00:37:30 Yeah, I found that a little frightening, right? So that if you’re interrupted by distractions and tasks which all day and then you say, well, today I really have to focus. Not going to happen because you’ll self interrupt with intrusive thoughts at the rate to which you become accustomed. That was another finding of Doctor Mark’s work. And I mean that means you need to start training your attention if you want to have it.
David Epstein 00:37:50 You can’t just on the last day say, now I’m going to focus. You won’t be able to. You’ll be thinking about what you should be checking, like your brain will go through those checks or what did I not respond to, etc. and so I think ways to start that, or even with small blocks of work. Can you do 15 minutes without task switching and putting a pad next to yourself, what’s called cognitive outsourcing? When those intrusive thoughts pop in, write them down so you’re not trying to hold them in in working memory. But I think it really shows. Like you said, a lot of this becomes automatic, right. And where you’re checking your inbox because you didn’t decide what else you should be doing. Like, what other important thing you should be doing? And there’s something called the mere urgency effect, where people will tend to prioritize things that feel urgent, like responding to a message over things that they know are more important, but that may have a little longer or more amorphous deadline. And so you can just fall into these checks even if they aren’t high value things to be doing. So unfortunately, there’s a lot on us to to structure our attention. But I think it’s it’s more important than ever.
Eric Zimmer 00:39:10 Eight years ago, I was completely overwhelmed. My life was full with good things, a challenging career, two teenage boys, a growing podcast, and a mother who needed care. But I had a persistent feeling of I can’t keep doing this, but I valued everything I was doing and I wasn’t willing to let any of them go. And the advice to do less only made me more overwhelmed. That’s when I stumbled into something I now call this still point method, a way of using small moments throughout my day to change not how much I had to do, but how I felt while I was doing it. And so I wanted to build something I wish I’d had eight years ago. So you don’t have to stumble towards an answer that something is now here and it’s called overwhelm is optional tools for when you can’t do less.
Eric Zimmer 00:39:58 It’s an email course that fits into moments you already have. Taking less than ten minutes total a day. It isn’t about doing less, it’s about relating differently to what you do. I think it’s the most useful tool we’ve ever built. The launch price is $29 if life is too full, but you still need relief from overwhelm. Check out overwhelm is optional. Go to oneyoufeed.net/overwhelm. That’s oneyoufeel.net/overwhelm.
I love what you just said there that it’s on us because I hear from people a lot. Like my job won’t allow me to have any blocks of time. And if you’re a customer service representative, that is probably true, right? Your job is to respond. And I’m not saying that there isn’t enormous pressure, but what I’ve realized is that self-interruption that even when we can, we don’t. Yeah, right. Even when we can potentially carve out 30 minutes or an hour, that could be our time. We often don’t or we spend it, you know, checking email. Again, like I said, if I’m not careful, that’s my digital tick. And it goes back to for me, it goes back to structure and constraint where I’m like, okay, I have a block of time from 1030 to noon. Deciding ahead of time. Like what goes in there? Yeah. What fits in there? Because if I try and decide and do at the same time, like, okay, I just got off my interview with David. I’ve got an hour and a half. What am I going to do? That rarely goes well for me.
David Epstein 00:41:35 Totally. You want to be doing it ahead of time and again. That’s that’s one of the reasons why I end my workday with the the Hemmingway principle of the last thing I do is where am I going to start tomorrow? If I can leave something in it mid-sentence, like Hemingway did, I will. Because then it’s obvious where you want to start on this important thing, and it prevents me from drifting into feeds, drifting into my inbox initially. And it doesn’t have to be writing whatever that important work is for you, where you can get a little bit of that, you know, pay yourself first. Like you can get a little bit of that in the morning. And I think you’re totally right that if you don’t, if you don’t specify what that is ahead of time, you’re very likely in the moment to pick that important thing. Doctor Mark also talked about what she called using your your little mind. So she liked the anecdote of Maya Angelou, who would because she wanted to focus so much. She would go to like this motel and have them take even the art off the walls so she wouldn’t be distracted. But then she would also break for crossword puzzles, or Allende would break for beating. And that’s okay. Like she actually says, you should take breaks. If you think of your attention like a bucket, you want to take breaks before it overflows. Then you’ll need less time to recover. And so little breaks for relatively mindless stuff are fine. I’m not sure that I would call email mindless stuff, but.
Eric Zimmer 00:42:50 Yeah, I mean exactly. I have started after interviewing someone. I don’t know if you know who it is, Manoush Zomodori, she’s an NPR to overcome the bad effects of sitting because sitting is, as we know, not good for us. And even if you exercise, you know, once in the morning, sitting all day is still not good. They came up with a rough prescription. Who knows how accurate it is, right? It’s probably it’s a number which was five minutes of movement every 30 minutes, and I’ve started just trying to do that as a general thing to do. And sometimes that’s a little bit too quick for me. And obviously you and I are having an hour interview, so I’m not going to get up in the middle of it. But what I found is that that kind of break an up and walk around my building a couple times, break is very different than the check my email and, you know, New York Times website kind of break.
David Epstein 00:43:44 Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think it is that you want to be shifting your thinking mode, right? Reducing the strain on those resources you’ve been using all day for reading, for writing, in our case, in a lot of people’s cases. And you remind me of there’s something scientist called the default mode network, which is like a group of regions in the brain that activate when you are become less task oriented. So this is why sometimes people will find they have ideas in the shower, or while they’re on a run, or while they’re on a walk or something like that, because connections start being made. So I think it can be useful for productivity to do that, not just by restoring your attention, but also because you break from being super task oriented and these connections can be made. But I think it’s also just evidence that you get into this different mode and you kind of switch into drawing on different resources, and that can be replenishing. Yep.
Eric Zimmer 00:44:36 Let’s talk about problem solving. You’ve got a line in the book that really intrigued me.And you say, in a manner of speaking, shrinking a challenge is the hallmark of masterful problem solvers. So talk to me about constraints in solving problems.
David Epstein 00:44:55 Yeah. And that comes from the work of Herbert Simon, who was probably the biggest influence on this book, who was trained as a political scientist. But he won the Turing Award, the highest award computer science, for doing one of the first AI demonstrations. He was one of the founders of cognitive psychology. And then he won a Nobel Prize in economics.
Eric Zimmer 00:45:11 That’s crazy.
David Epstein 00:45:12 It is very crazy. And all of his, all of his work revolved around human, how human solve problems. And one of the main things he found in a nutshell was that more adept problem solvers do what he calls cutting down the problem space. So if the problem space is a metaphorical space where you have to navigate from beginning to end and you don’t know exactly how to do it. And what he saw was that more novice problem solvers would kind of try things a little chaotically, like they try and answer the pop to mind, and if it didn’t work, they’d try another one and they weren’t really following a progression.
David Epstein 00:45:50 So they may even end up trying the same thing twice, because they kind of weren’t keeping track where the more expert problem solvers would think a little more, and they wouldn’t even try to get it right on the first try. What they would do is what is something I can do here that will make the problem smaller, like, well, give me information about how to shrink the possible solutions. So like a simple, facile example. You know, if you’ve ever played 20 questions, you know, with your kids or something. What you’re trying to do is you’re not trying to solve it on the first guess or the second guess. You’re trying to ask questions that will chop down the possibilities as much as possible. And that’s basically what good problem solvers would do. They’re saying, I’m not even trying to solve this right away. I’m trying to come up with something to try that will eliminate a huge portion of the possible solutions. And that turns out to be like a hallmark, whether it’s math, physics, programming, whatever.
David Epstein 00:46:47 A hallmark of the better problem solvers is they take that approach at the beginning.
Eric Zimmer 00:46:51 This is a completely different example and and sort of adjacent, but a similar principle I was just thinking about, as you were saying, that was playing learning a piece on guitar. As soon as I knew how to make like a few chords, I just started writing music. I never really learned to play anything. And partially that was a patience issue, But part of the problem also was that I did not understand a very simple principle, which was you can’t try and play the whole song, you just try and play the first four notes. My problem would be I couldn’t go very far into the problem, so I would conclude it was unsolvable for me and I give up instead of going, I’ve shrunk the problem. Space to bar one. Okay, that I can solve. Again, slightly different example, but but is the same idea of totally. I was trying to solve all of it and I couldn’t. And so I would conclude I can’t.
David Epstein 00:47:49 Absolutely, absolutely the same idea. Basically, you were taking on something that was intractable because it was so big when it was in fact tractable, but you had to shrink it to a much smaller problem, at least at the beginning. Yeah.
Eric Zimmer 00:48:05 You also brought in talking about constraints, the theory of constraints, and the, the book The Goal, which somebody gave me very early in my career to read, which is a novel about a factory. But the core idea sitting in the middle of it is that you solve, well, actually, I’m going to back up a second. Why don’t you tell us what the core idea is of that?
David Epstein 00:48:28 The core idea of the goal is what came to be known as the theory of constraints is the idea that every system is limited by a single bottleneck, or the single slowest or least efficient step, and so that the best way to improve results for an overall system is not like optimizing every step separately, but identifying what really is the limiting factor, where is work piling up and targeting that limiting factor.
David Epstein 00:48:59 Because no matter how well all the other steps are working, it doesn’t matter because the overall system will work at the rate of the slowest step.
Eric Zimmer 00:49:08 Yeah. And I had an insight into my own work and business when when I read that, I was like, I am the bottleneck. That’s right. I am the bottleneck for most things. And so it doesn’t do. It doesn’t serve me to speed up the rest of it. Right? It really is of no value to optimize or speed up these other things if it’s all going to pile up behind me. It raises a different question of how do I get myself out of that role? But when I think like that, it changes what I think about the help that I need, right? The help that I need is at a different level. The help I need may be in a different place than I think it is. If I recognize where the true bottleneck is, which is me. And I’ve said that I’m the bottleneck, but I never thought about it in the way I did just a couple of days ago when I read your book, where I was like, oh, I’m trying to optimize other things, and those aren’t of any value if I don’t figure this thing out?
David Epstein 00:50:12 Absolutely. I mean, once I was learning about the Theory of Constraints, I started seeing it everywhere. So a lot of the examples, you know, in research are from industry for obvious reasons. So, you know, one that I reported on was a factory that made custom gearboxes for industry. Right. Everyone is is custom made and they were missing their goals. And so they did this theory of constraints audit. They found the work was piling up in the tiny 15 person design office. Because to our previous discussion of attention, the designers were ravaged by multitasking. They were switching projects they were working on more than 50 times a day led to errors, frustration, quitting. And so they implemented a rule they called stop starting and start finishing where you couldn’t start a new design until you’re finished with the one in progress. And a few months later, they were getting three times as many designs out the door. And because that was the limiting step of the system, it changed the time that the entire company could get a gearbox out the door from a year to two months, so they had spent all this time optimizing all these other steps trucking, logistics, how many pieces of certain parts they could produce in a certain time.
David Epstein 00:51:21 And it did not matter because work would just pile up. The designers weren’t done, so it didn’t matter. None of that other stuff. And I think it’s really applicable to individuals too. It’s like what in my improvement. We often have a tendency to continue to optimize things that are already working well, and that’s okay. Like, I don’t mean that you shouldn’t lean into your superpowers, but sometimes it’s easy to go and optimize like individual nodes and ignore what really is the limiting factor here, and where that limiting factor is, whether that’s your attention or someone you’re working with who you know needs help to move something along at the rate they need to. It’s a really high leverage strategy to to look at what is the limiting step.
Eric Zimmer 00:52:10 Yeah. A similar idea is in personal development or all that is to think of things that are like keystone habits. Right. What what is the one thing if I started doing is going to more likely unlock other things. And so for me, my keystone habit is exercise. That is the one that if I do that one, all the rest of it has a better chance of working. And when I don’t do that one, what it does is it just it basically takes my energy and my mood plummet to the point that becomes the constraint for the entire rest of my life. You know, but by keeping that on point, I can at least keep other things moving through. And the thing about the Theory of Constraints is, as soon as you solve one bottleneck, you identify what the next one exactly is, right? It’s not like it’s you fix one thing and the world is solved. Although in this design case. Right. They they did make incredible improvement. And then probably what they’re doing now is going, well now, what’s the next? Is it shipping logistics? Is it manufacturing? Is it sales?
David Epstein 00:53:14 It’s a process of continuous improvement. Yeah, yeah. And to your point about exercise. I mean, one of the cool things about that is the idea behind the Theory of Constraints even more broadly. And I think this is basically what you were saying is what is the way you can impact a whole system, right? It’s hard to to do everything in the system at once, but you can actually find these leverage points where you’re essentially working on the system level by targeting one specific thing. And that can be really powerful because often, whether it’s an individual or especially in an organization, the reality is much more that people are optimizing the individual nodes, and that doesn’t necessarily make the whole system better, or at least not as much better as it could be.
Eric Zimmer 00:53:56 So we touched earlier at one point on this idea of there’s so many things that we can do in life, we’re overwhelmed by the choices, and there was a tool you had in the book that I really liked, that I thought you could talk to us a little bit about as a way of perhaps shrinking that field or putting some constraints in. It was called narrative values.
David Epstein 00:54:19 Yeah. Narrative values are the concept from some modern philosophers that is about looking at your life story and looking for themes in that narrative that bring out your values. You know, for me, that’s things like curiosity, open mindedness, diligence, and so forth. One that I wanted to add to my story was forgiveness. And so I think it’s the idea is that there’s so much stuff you could possibly care about. Every time you look at the news, there are more things you should be caring about than you possibly really can if you want to be sane and healthy. And so I think it’s about in this chaotic world of having a sort of Northstar that helps you see opportunities to to use your values and to stick to them, to consolidate your caring to things that are really meaningful to you and have shown up in your story.
Eric Zimmer 00:55:08 I love that phrase you just used there. Consolidate your caring. That is a really good one. I thought maybe we could end with having you just read a paragraph from the book that I thought was a beautiful way to tie all of this up.
David Epstein 00:55:21 Sure. And this is at the end of a section about narrative values. You have finite capacity. Forging narrative values is about consolidating your caring in a world that rains down upon you in infinite number of urgent things about which to care. It is about establishing personal policies, conceptual boundaries that make life manageable, coherent, and meaningful. This is who I am and this is what I can do.
Eric Zimmer 00:55:47 Beautiful. Thank you. David. You and I are going to continue in the post-show conversation where we are going to add a minimum, discuss how to know whether to trust scientific studies or not. And from there we may get into Bach and Keith Jarrett and other musical things. So, listeners, if you’d like access to post-show conversations, ad-free episodes, and if you want to support the show, which is an important, hopefully important thing to you, then you can go to oneyoufeed.net/join. David, thank you so much. It’s been a real pleasure.
David Epstein 00:56:23 Total pleasure to be here.
Eric Zimmer 00:56:24 Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Share it from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity. But we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the One You Feed community.
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