571 - How to Escape Creative Paralysis According to Studies, Science and Real Life Stories with David Epstein

Creative Pep Talk

In this episode of Creative Pep Talk, host explores creative paralysis with bestselling author David Epstein, discussing insights from his new book 'Inside the Box: How

Key takeaways

Thinking outside the box is often counterproductive because our brains naturally default to the path of least resistance.
Constraints reduce cognitive load and force creative breakthroughs by eliminating easy, habitual solutions.

Main topics

Creative paralysis and analysis paralysis
The power of constraints in fostering innovation

Notable quotes

"I don't need time, what I need is a deadline." – Duke Ellington

"Give me the freedom of a tight brief." – Advertising industry saying

Conclusion

Embracing constraints—like defined problems, tight deadlines, and structured routines—is not limiting but liberating for

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Do you feel like you're creatively flailing out in the waters of infinite possibility and just feel like you can't grab onto anything and you're overthinking things and you're stuck in analysis paralysis and you just don't know what to do? This episode is for you. I am so pumped about this episode. It is with David Epstein, who wrote the new book, Inside the Box, How Constraints Make Us Better. This conversation, I just finished this conversation and I am on fire. I am loving this book. It is chock full of some of the best creative insight that I've ever heard. Honestly, it's one of the best books on creativity I've ever read. And David Epstein is just a phenomenal writer. He wrote the book Range, which was a New York Times number one bestseller. Speaker 1 (0:53) This new book is just made for me and made for you. And this conversation was, I was just so giddy. You will hear. I tried to, you know, rate it a little bit. I was not trying to scare him, but I was just so pumped. And we went all over the place exploring theories from this book. There's so much creative wisdom in this episode and in this book. I can't wait to get to it. At the end, we get to a creative call to adventure. I'm not going to come back for that. We just talk about it in the episode and I get David to help us take action on these ideas with something called the, we're calling it the shrink the problem space. Literally, that's your CTA. That'll be at the end of this episode and it will help you form a hypothesis. Speaker 1 (1:41) to fuel your creative experiments in your own work that will help you get better results and find some stuff that can turn into bigger things in your creative journey. So stick around for that. But for now, let's get started with this fantastic chat with David Epstein. Speaker 1 (2:08) Sometimes you just need a creative pep talk. Speaker 1 (2:19) I have absolutely been loving your book. Like it is, it is so good. It's so many things that I've had experiences with as an illustrator and an author. It really maps to my experience, but I haven't heard a lot of people talk about it. It's called Inside the Box, but I thought just to take some advice from your book, we could throw some rope to the listeners and maybe could you start by just saying like, Speaker 1 (2:47) Is there merit to thinking outside the box? Why is that so popular in terms of an idea before we jump to this upside down approach? Yeah. So depending on what someone means when they say it, I think there is merit to the idea of thinking differently for sure. Because I think when people tell someone to think outside the box, what they're usually saying is come up with something different than what we've done before. Right. You know, whether that's drawing or coming up with a business plan. Speaker 1 (3:15) So I do something different and I don't want it to be a thing that I've heard before, basically. Very true. I think the problem with that to bridge into inside the box is that 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. And so if you're given this sort of open field of possibilities, you will go down what. Speaker 1 (3:42) scientists call the path of least resistance, meaning exactly the thing that's already familiar. So if you're given total freedom, that will be the hardest situation where you do this directive of thinking outside the box. And in fact, the best way to come up with something different is to block the most convenient solutions, to hem yourself in and take certain things away. And that is what actually forces you off of that path of least resistance. So I have no problem with the idea of saying, look, we have to come up with something different here. Speaker 1 (4:11) But if the mechanism implies like take all of the boundaries away and that's how you're going to get there, that's where I think it implies something that's mistaken. I completely agree. And also this is like a common conversation in illustration and design world where you get a client that's a great client, great intentions, and they think they're giving you this amazing gift when they say, do whatever you want and there's no deadline. And that ends up becoming a huge problem. Yeah, I mean, I learned when I was reporting inside the box that there's this saying in the advertising industry where they say, give me the freedom of a tight brief, right? They want the person to bring them this really defined problem. And that kind of liberates them to say, okay, within that, what can I explore? What can I do? Speaker 1 (4:57) Like defining that box really well is what gives people's brains something that they can grab onto again, so that you avoid that path of least resistance where you basically just do the convenient thing. Because again, your brain is wired for convenience, not for thinking hard. So it's going to go for the easy thing if you can do anything. And the easy thing isn't what gets you to something creative. So I think there's that aspect and also the no deadline part. I mean, yeah, look, when I start a book and, and like, I remember with this book, my Speaker 1 (5:25) My agent, I had a two year, like 23 months from the time that I signed the contract. And my agent told me, you know, as you know, like book deadlines are flexible. And I was like, don't, don't tell me that. I'm treating this day as rigid. And not only that day, 23 months later, but having to make my much shorter deadlines for myself for getting specific things done. Because when the deadline is too long, I think, or amorphous. Speaker 1 (5:52) it makes it really hard to understand how to plan. As Duke Ellington used to say, I don't need time, what I need is a deadline. Because he basically couldn't work unless it was, you're going to be on stage in Carnegie Hall on this day, and then you would become hyper-focused. And so I'm actually a fan of deadlines within deadlines, where you're getting closer to it actually giving you actionable information. What do I need to do this week to get to that place where you need to be in two years? Speaker 1 (6:20) So there's this thing called the mere urgency effect, that this finding in psychology that people will prioritize things that feel urgent over things that are important. And so that means you may have an important project that's not due for weeks or months or even years. And because it's so far away, you'll tend to put off doing tasks that would work toward that for things like answering emails because they feel urgent and you can do it really, really quickly. And so I think. When you have this sort of amorphous deadline, it makes it that much more likely that you're going to fall prey to that mere urgency effect where things that feel urgent will supplant things that are actually important. That's super important for me because, like I already mentioned, it always comes up because it's just a huge part of my life. But being ADHD, I have these two. Speaker 1 (7:10) ways of getting things done. I either am just deeply interested in it and I have that kind of motivation or it's urgent and there's nothing in between. Important but not interesting basically does nothing for me if it's not urgent. So that's a really good way to frame it and creating those deadlines. I do think you're right, not necessarily arbitrary, but if they're working towards something rigid, you can even create extra deadlines. I think this really highlights what Speaker 1 (7:38) drives me insane. So I make picture books and I've made other books too. And I'm kind of working on a book proposal right now. And I, it just drives me nuts. And I couldn't, there are a bunch of reasons why that was, but I think you nailed it. Like the reason this drives me nuts is that there isn't a deadline for the proposal. There's not a, like, nobody's making me do this there. And so I'll just put it off indefinitely. And I have for years, really. Do you have any like, Speaker 1 (8:04) tips on how to deal with a scenario where you don't have that external force like mandating a deadline? Yeah, I mean, there are a few things that I try and one is sort of more smaller and tactical. So tell me if this resonates or not. But what I come to call the Hemingway principles, you know, Hemingway would stop sometimes in the middle of a sentence, his writing day, where he knew what was coming next. And then because that meant the next day, he knew exactly where to start when he returned to something. Speaker 1 (8:33) Again, I think in this day and age, that can prevent you from sort of the two ways that your creative work can go sideways, which is like starting in a feed or starting in your inbox because it's easy. Again, your brain wants to do easy stuff. And so if I don't have a definite deadline, I'll try to at least do that and say, okay, for the last act of each workday, here's where I'm starting tomorrow on this thing that's important to me. And then I'll say, you know, and I'll go for an hour or something. So I may not, I mean, this is what I did with this book proposal where. Speaker 1 (9:03) I didn't, you know, nobody was on me to turn in the book proposal by a certain date, but I knew if I did that hour, sometimes two hours where I started with it, stopping at a spot where I kind of knew what was coming next and started with the next day, that pretty soon that thing was going to be done because I was going to be making progress on it every day. So I didn't give myself a firm deadline, but I did force myself to start with it every day. Yeah, that resonates a ton. And I think it kind of leans up or touches this other thing that I am trying to get comfortable with and encourage creative people to embrace. If you go into like creative research, when they define the process, one of the big pieces that I always find in creative researchers process, but I rarely see it in artists or creatives process because it's so hard is the incubation phase. Speaker 1 (9:54) I think it's hard because it's hard to leave something undone. It's especially hard when you're, when you feel like, oh, I figured it out. I know what I need to do. You want to execute it so that you can, like my wife and I are both artists and we have this like shorthand of we're in the middle of something and that's why we're distracted. Like we had to leave that thing and take the kids to the camp or whatever. And now we're, we're discombobulated and out of it because. we're leaving this open thing. But I think you're right. If you stop before you get to the frustration, if you stop in the point where you're still excited about it, I at least have a much easier time leaving, but then also coming back. Yeah, no, I think that. Speaker 1 (10:39) I completely agree. Part of the reason I wanted to start this chat talking about thinking outside the box, which is something everyone's familiar with and probably a lot of us have accepted as true, is because something that's kind of funny. Early in my career, I actually did a talk. for a local group, a small little situation that was about thinking inside the box. And it wasn't researched like your book and it wasn't super well communicated like your book. It was just based on some of my experience with Constraint. And the funny thing is your book helped me understand what I think I got wrong because I did that talk and I felt like the response afterwards was just kind of like, I think it's think outside the box. Like I think you're Speaker 1 (11:25) got it wrong. And so I think what the problem was is I didn't give them what you call rope in the book. Could you explain that? Because I think this is like a huge concept that a lot of creative people don't think about when we're thinking about making different stuff or new stuff. Yeah. And I stole, I stole that word. that characterization from the novelist Virginia Woolf. Yeah. So she was very dedicated to being a great writer and she was a great writer in the terms of tactics and sentences and things like that. But she was kind of upset with her own work because it felt so conventional, as did most of the novels of the day, where she was in this world that was changing at a pace that had never occurred before, like science and technology exploding, World War I changing the entire world order, gender relations completely changing, all these things. Speaker 1 (12:16) And literature had not kept up with that. It was still this sort of very tidy Victorian, tidy stories, lots of emphasis placed on like physically describing everything and very little on the interiority of characters' lives. I just want to point out real quick, because I think it's interesting, not to veer us completely off path, but it just reminded me of the moment that we're in right now where I think a lot of older media, like TV and movies have... Speaker 1 (12:45) had a hard time feeling as real as stuff you see on the internet. It's been really hard for them to like bridge that chasm. And I think there's a lot of good reasons, but I totally, it feels similar to that moment in a way. Wait, that's interesting. Tell me before we go back, tell me more. Yeah, I just think in terms of like what's funny, I think there's some things that are starting to catch up, but I feel like we had a good period of time, like from probably like 2010 to... 2020 or even 2000 to 2020, that the funniest things were on the internet. The way people were actually talking was on the internet, but the scripts and the TV and all that hadn't really caught up or figured out how to capture that. One example that feels like a good example of it catching up is the Netflix show, I Think You Should Leave, which feels like memes. And so much of that show has turned into memes. Speaker 1 (13:42) And it just feels like it's kind of getting there where what's funny to everyday people is starting to show up on Saturday Night Live. I think Saturday Night Live is a good example of they always have these peaks and falls and valleys and all that. But I feel like for a while, it just felt really behind the curve in terms of modern humor. wasn't able to keep up to the pace of the internet. And so it's just a good example. And I'm curious, I want to start thinking about who were the people that started to break that in a similar way that Wolf did? Because that's an interesting kind of question. I mean, that's really interesting the way you put that, because that sounds very much like what she was grappling with. Yeah. In the early 20th century, this, like the medium that she was working in just lagging behind. Speaker 1 (14:32) the real experience of people. Not that it wasn't good and the stories weren't good, but it just had not kept up. And it feels like there's this disconnect. Sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off. No, no, no, no, please. The other thought I had was my buddy, you ever see the Kid President YouTube videos? Yeah, yeah. Okay, so he's the writer behind that and the creator behind that. His name's Brad Montague. He's been on the show a bunch of times. I think his work is a really good example. Like his, that stuff was hitting in this major way, billions of views, like this crazy thing. And then he's since moved into picture books. And when you read his picture books, they have a lot of that flavor and a lot of that