You Don't Need More Freedom. You Need Better Constraints | David Epstein - EP 818

Passion Struck with John R. Miles

In this episode of Passion Struck, host John R. Miles interviews New York Times bestselling author David Epstein about his new book, 'Inside

Key takeaways

• Constraints often lead to greater creativity and productivity than unlimited freedom.
• Many major breakthroughs begin with small, constrained problems rather than grand visions.

Main topics

• The power of constraints in driving creativity
• Why too many options can prevent action

Notable quotes

"What if the thing holding you back isn't a lack of opportunity, but too much freedom?"

Conclusion

True progress often begins not with boundless freedom, but with embracing

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) What if the thing holding you back isn't a lack of opportunity, but too much freedom? We tend to believe that more options give us more freedom. More possibilities, more paths to explore, more chances to get it right. But when I sat down with New York Times bestselling author David Epstein, he challenged that idea. He explained why some of the most important breakthroughs don't happen because we have unlimited freedom. They happen because we have constraints. Take Speaker 2 (0:32) a listen. I actually think the gap between the Mendeley of myth and reality is symbolic of something important, which is that we overvalue the complete freedom of something like the dreaming brain and undervalue the power of constraints to channel us into productive experimentation. I think most breakthroughs do with a much smaller problem that opened into something that changed the world. Hey, it's your friend, John, Speaker 3 (0:58) and Speaker 2 (0:59) welcome to Speaker 3 (0:59) PassionStruck. I'm so glad you're here. Whether you're a longtime listener, or someone who just discovered the show, thank you for pressing play today. Maybe you've built the life you were supposed to want, but you've quietly wondered why it still doesn't feel like enough. If that's you, you're in the right place. Every week, I sit down with the world's top scientists, researchers, and thinkers to uncover what it actually takes to build an intentional life that matters. Thanks for joining me. Let's get into it. Speaker 3 (1:37) Welcome back to Passion Struck. I am so glad you're here. This is episode 818, and today we're continuing our series, The Adaptive Human, How We Thrive in a Changing World. Over the past few episodes, we've been exploring some big questions about what it means to shape our lives in a world that's constantly changing. Angela Duckworth challenged us to look at the situations shaping our behavior. Pulitzer Prize winning author Jared Diamond asked when individual leaders can actually change outcomes. And in our last episode earlier this week, Marty Seligman explored something even more fundamental. Do we believe that our actions can actually make a difference? But once we decide to act, another question emerges. Where do we begin? Because most of us have been taught to think that more freedom is always better. More options, more possibilities, more paths to explore. But what if too many possibilities can sometimes keep us from moving forward? That's what makes today's conversation with David Epstein so fascinating. David is the New York Times bestselling author of Range and the Sports Gene, and his work has challenged some of our most deeply held assumptions about expertise, success, and how people adapt. to an increasingly complex world. His new book, Inside the Box, takes that conversation in a surprising direction. It's about why constraints can sometimes help us see possibilities we would otherwise miss, why breakthroughs often begin with smaller problems than we expect, and why adaptation isn't always about having more freedom. Sometimes it's learning how to work productively with the reality that's already in front of us. In this conversation, David and I explore why the story we've been told about some of history's greatest breakthroughs isn't always true, how constraints can channel us into productive experimentation, why broad experience still matters, and what happens when we're constantly searching for the next horizon instead of learning how to engage with where we are. But here's what stayed with me long after we finished recording. David reminded me that we often imagine transformation as something dramatic. A new beginning. A bold leap. A completely different future. But many of the most meaningful changes in life don't begin that way. They begin with something much smaller. A problem right in front of us. A constraint we didn't choose. A question we can't ignore. And sometimes that small opening becomes the doorway to something much larger. I think that's an idea. all of us need to hear. So let's dive in. Here's my conversation with David Epstein. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life that matters. Now, let that journey begin. Speaker 3 (4:49) I am so honored and ecstatic today to have David Epstein on Passion Struck. David, so great to see you. Thank you for having me. Glad to be here. David, I loved your book, Range, as did millions of others. Thank Speaker 2 (5:04) you. Speaker 3 (5:04) And in it, you argued that broad experiences prepare us for an unpredictable world. Your new book, Inside the Box, feels like the next chapter of that conversation. Is this really a book about... How we move from possibility to progress. Speaker 2 (5:21) That is a great way to put it. And I'm glad you saw it that way, because that's exactly how I was thinking about it. In fact, Inside the Box was in some ways responsive to the most common reader questions I would get after Range, which were along the lines of, okay, I've got these broad experiences. I'm curious about so many things, but I have trouble channeling that energy into something, into a project, deciding what to actually do. and I counted myself in that boat, absolutely. There's a reason that there have been so many years between my books, which is that I would really have trouble drawing boundaries around a project and diving in. So I was partly motivated by, as they say, me-search, motivated by things I wanted to get better at, but absolutely, that moving from building the tool set and the adaptability to how do you focus and channel that into achievement and fulfillment. I Speaker 3 (6:14) have to ask you this question. I was interviewing Angela Duckworth a couple weeks ago. Angela's a personal friend. And I asked her, because it's been a number of years since Grit came out, how do you approach a book when you've set the bar so high with the first one that you wrote? And she said it was really difficult, that she questioned herself for a very long time. about what she should explore in this new book. And it became a much harder book to write as a result of that. Did you find anything similar for you? Speaker 2 (6:53) Yeah, Angela and I actually talked about that. Well, we were both in the process some. And yes, and I think part of my strategy for... overcoming that. And by the way, when I used to be running buddies with Malcolm Gladwell, I once asked him this question where I said, are you ever concerned about competing with your past self? And he said, oh no, I don't have any of your Jewish anxiety. I have a, what did he say? He said, I have a, because he's part British and part Jamaican. He said, I have a Brit stiff upper lip and a Jamaican joie de vivre. So he just was like, that's not an issue for me. But for me and Angela, obviously it is. And I think after my first book, which was a surprise bestseller, I was a little paralyzed. after that. And what ultimately I think helped was one, just getting, but also just trying to do something a little different. So after the sports gene, which was my first bestseller, there was a lot of pressure to do the sports gene too. And I didn't even know what that meant and to do it fast, right? This made me realize how bands can break out and then have a terrible sophomore album because it's like somehow people think they just figured out how to do what they do 10 times faster. So I think what was helpful for me was to go in another direction, basically. So my first book was very grounded in physical science, and then Range was in the social sciences. And so it really felt like something different to me. And there was enough of a tweak that I didn't feel like I was just competing with exactly what I'd done before. And then with Inside the Box, I think what really helped me get over that mental hump was an experiment where I said, look, I need to be more efficient in my writing projects. So I forced myself to outline the book on one page and one page only from 100,000 word note sheet. I actually have this. I took 100,000 words down to this one page outline. You can see I wrote as small as humanly possible, but it's like bubbles and arrows all over the place. But it forced me to ruthlessly prioritize and it forced me to come up with this structure where I have a repetitive story that keeps coming up in the text and I have linked chapters. And that structural experiment. I found so engaging that it took away some of the anxiety of, can I do the same thing again, but better? And got me so focused on just this engaging experiment where I was trying something new with my writing. And I just lost that self-consciousness while I was engaged in the experiment. Speaker 3 (9:13) And I love that whole explanation and especially your one page. As I was writing my upcoming book, I was fortunate enough to get an hour long. ish mentoring session from Dan Heath, because I was really struggling. I was banging my head against the wall about how to approach the book. And he gave me the same advice that you just went through. He said, you want to keep coming back to the central hypothesis that you're making in the book. And you want to keep asking questions. Speaker 3 (9:46) that allow you to do the me search that allows you to keep coming back to the answer of that for the audience. And it was really a profound way to approach the book because some people may say it's repetitive when they read it, but I was trying to really come at it from every different angle that I could possibly think of to answer it for the reader. And as I was reading your book, it seemed like you were trying to do the same thing through your me search as well. Speaker 2 (10:16) Absolutely. And by the way, my publisher told me never to use that word me search. So I'm glad you're okay with it. They said, it'll make it sound like the book is just for you and not for other people. And I'm like, well, I think I'm going to have to hope that other people struggle with the same things that I do. But coming back to it, the main idea from different angles, I think is really powerful. One is a way for us writers, we writers to structure a book, but also because of the way the human brain works, right? We know that what makes ideas sticky is when you embed them in what's called your semantic network, which is like if you picture a spider web of ideas in your head, the more connections there are between one idea, the more threads that are attached to it, the stickier it is because when one idea vibrates a thread, it's attached to more other things that then get activated. And so I think when you have a central idea and you come at it from all these different angles, You're basically building the semantic network that makes the idea memorable and makes it adaptable to all these different contexts. So I have to say, this is maybe a tangent here. I'm a digressive person, if you haven't noticed already. When I first started playing with large language models, like ChatGPT, when it first came out, I'm like, this is incredible. I'm opening up my old college physics textbook. I'm like, I'm going to relearn all this stuff. And I got the feeling of learning in this fast back and forth. But then I realized I really wasn't retaining well. And this is now what's showing up in some of this early research on how AI affects cognition, which is it's like too fast that you move through things. And so it's not sticky. What you really want is to dwell and approach the same idea from these multiple different angles. And so you can get the feeling of learning. But if something is too fast and the idea is flying by, it's not actually going to be both sticky and embedded in a sort of flexible network in your brain. Speaker 3 (12:08) It's so interesting what you just said, and I'm going to take my own side path here that I wasn't expecting to, but I interviewed Marty Slugman a couple of weeks ago. And David, you're going to love this. He is spending five to eight hours a day loading thousands and thousands of research papers across millennia into Claude. And he told me that. In the past six months, he has made more progress on his thinking than he did in the past six decades. And it's proving some of his theories correct and others incorrect. And it just was amazing to me to talk to the father of positive psychology and Speaker 2 (12:49) hear Speaker 3 (12:50) him using these language models to validate or invalidate his own research and how much letting go of the ego that has to be in order to do it. Speaker 2 (12:59) That's fascinating. That kind of mirrors the best use I've had for AI in some ways, which is creating an operation where I'll upload a scientific paper I'm interested in and then made a system where I'll get a map of all the other papers that cite it with a bubble showing how cited those papers are and attempting to sort into confirming or refuting. So I'm not doing it on my own research like Marty is, but taking these papers. that I'm interested in or that I've relied on and trying to put them into this huge network and see how do they really hold up in the larger body of research. Speaker 3 (13:37) Yeah, it is interesting sometimes the responses that you get back, isn't it? For sure. Because some I find they just want to flatter you, but sometimes you get these really 180 degree different outputs that you ever thought you were going to get. And those are the ones I really enjoy the most because it makes me want to double down on what they're saying to prove it either right or wrong. Speaker 2 (14:02) Totally. It's very interesting to have a tool that still is often wrong. and yet is very useful. So I think it's really helpful if people are being a little bit of an anthropologist about it and really going in there and messing around because you do start to get a sense of where it goes right and wrong. Like I had a recent experience where I was talking to an LLM and it brought up a fact that is pretty obscure about the number of pen pals that Charles Darwin had. And he had a huge... number of pen pals, because mainly what he was doing was synthesizing other people's research. And I'm like, wow, I know that fact, but not many people would know that. And then it cited, and then it got into the research on this, and it cited a particular famous researcher named Howard Gardner. And I said, he is a creativity researcher, and that's a right fact about Darwin, but he didn't do that work. So it conflated these things. And I said, what's your source for that? And the source was me. Somebody had posted an excerpt from something in range. on Goodreads, and it had conflated things that were in nearby paragraphs and kind of smushed them together in a way that was plausible, but not right. And every time I see that sort of thing,