Why More Choices Make You Less Happy | David Epstein

Most of us believe more options equals better outcomes. Research says no. In much of life, the opposite is true, and the gap between what we believe and what the data shows is one of the more quietly consequential misconceptions shaping how we live right now.

David Epstein is the author of Range and the new book Inside the Box, both New York Times bestsellers. He spent years studying human performance and creativity, and this conversation picks up where Range left off. If Range was about why broad exploration matters early in life, Inside the Box is about what you actually do once you have all that range. The answer turns out to be counterintuitive: you box yourself in.

In this conversation, you’ll discover:

Why people with more options to watch are consistently more bored than people with fewer, and what that reveals about how your brain actually works  The difference between satisficing and maximizing, and why maximizers make worse decisions, feel more regret, and are less happy with their lives despite spending more time and energy on every choice  How Keith Jarrett recorded the best-selling solo jazz piano album of all time on a broken, out-of-tune instrument he almost refused to play, and what that says about where creative breakthroughs actually come from  The paired constraints process used by Monet, Dr. Seuss, and Isabel Allende, and how you can use the same structure to unstick your own creative projects  Why our attention switches tasks every 45 seconds on average now, down from every three minutes 25 years ago, and what it’s actually costing us in terms of stress, creativity, and the simple experience of loving our work

This is a conversation for anyone who has ever felt scattered across too many possibilities, half-committed to too many things, and quietly wondered if the constraint they’ve been avoiding might be exactly the thing they need.

You can find David at: Website | Instagram | Range Widely Substack | Episode Transcript

Next week, we’re sitting down with Donna Jackson Nakazawa to talk about why rumination feels so productive even when it’s actively working against you, and what the neuroscience actually says about how to loosen its grip. She has a framework for this that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since we recorded. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts, so you don’t miss it.

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photo credit: Nina Subin

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Episode Transcript:

Jonathan Fields: [00:00:00] So everything we think we know about living well says more freedom, more options, more room to maneuver. That’s the goal. But what if it was all wrong? What if limitation? What if constraint? What if the box turns out to be one of the most powerful tools available to doing your best work, and building a life that actually feels like yours? Not freedom. At least not all the time. In this conversation, you’ll discover why. Quote Maximizers. The people always searching for the best possible option are measurably less happy and making worse decisions than people who don’t. How the best-selling solo jazz album of all time was recorded on a broken instrument. The artist nearly refused to play and yet produced genius like never before. And the one daily practice that changes what it feels like to actually love your work. It is not rooted in more options or more freedom. Just the opposite. Our guide is New York Times best selling author David Epstein. So excited to share this conversation with you. I’m Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project. We’ll jump right in after this short break.

Jonathan Fields: [00:01:13] You have spent the better part of a decade or so, maybe longer at this point, studying what makes people tick, what makes them creative, what makes them capable, what makes them satisfied in no small part in their lives. Um, and in your previous book range, which we talked about a couple of years back, um, sort of like the overriding message there was, you told people not to focus too quickly to keep their options open, to explore possibilities. You need the freedom to explore choices in your new book, Inside the Box. It sounds like what you’re now saying is that was half the story. So what is the rest of the story here? What’s this sort of like the the second half of the bigger truth about freedom and choice that we need to understand.

David Epstein: [00:02:04] Yeah, that’s a great way to put it because, uh, in many ways, this new book is responsive to the most common question I was getting from people who liked range who would say, you know, I’m wildly curious. I have these diverse experiences, but I just can’t figure out what to do, you know, where to focus. And I absolutely put myself in that boat. Uh, there’s a reason why it has been 6 to 7 years between each of my books, because I do have quite a bit of trouble figuring out where to, to put my energy because I’m interested in so many different things. And so. Well, I think, um, a lot of the science and range is held up quite well. In fact, there was just a paper in the journal science looking at 3000 careers, uh, that found that the, um, factors associated with early peaking, basically with youth elite performance in science and music and sports were negatively associated, uh, with peak adult performance. So that you wanted this broader beginning where you get a range of skills and you try lots of different things at the same time. I think that gives the challenge of how do you figure out when to focus that? How do you figure out when to focus that energy, whether it’s into some creative project or, um, something that gives your life meaning? And so I think it’s especially true for people who have a lot of interests that we, because I include myself in this, have to find boundaries that, that focus some of that formidable toolkit basically, or else you can kind of end up sort of adrift. And that’s never been more true than in a world with, you know, seemingly endless options, right? I mean, this would have been laughable thing to discuss for most of human history, but now it’s incumbent upon each of us to kind of define what it is we should be doing in a way that’s historically unprecedented.

Jonathan Fields: [00:04:02] I’m going to ask you to state in the most concise possible way, um, and in the most potentially counterintuitive possible way, what the thesis of this new work is.

David Epstein: [00:04:15] The thesis of inside the box is that in the abstract, we always prefer more freedom, more options, more entertainment choices, uh, longer deadlines, fewer resource limitations. And yet in practice, that leads to often disastrous results. It undermines creativity. It undermines satisfaction. Whereas useful boundaries force people to clarify priorities and launch them into exploration they never would have taken on otherwise. So there’s this disconnect between freedom in the abstract and the reality of of boundaries actually creating breakthroughs for people.

Jonathan Fields: [00:04:53] So it’s like we walk around believing in our hearts that that the thing we want more than anything is optionality, is freedom. More items on the menu. That’s the good life. That’s what gives us the choice to go and do the things we want to do. And what you’re inviting us to say is that may not be true. In fact, it may be the exact opposite.

David Epstein: [00:05:13] And not only do we believe this, uh, this is encoded into models of humans in neoclassical economic theory, right? So this is how we are modeled by scholars as we will always be better off with more choices. How could you not? There are more things to compare and you can choose. Uh, you can, you can make a better decision, but it’s absolutely not the case. I mean, let’s take something really simple like entertainment options. It seems like how could anything but more be better, right? And yet, since the introduction of infinite scrolling, international surveys show that people have been getting progressively more bored as the options have increased. And so researchers that were trying to figure out the mechanism behind that would do things like give people in a study, they’d randomly assign some people to say, uh, get, have 20 videos that they could choose from, and other people would only get one video from that same set of 20, and they just had to watch that one. And the people with the one were less bored than the people with the 20. And the theory is that because our brains are comparison engines, that just the idea that there is something else that might be better than what you’re currently watching undermines the experience of the moment itself. And it leaves people much more basically regretting whatever choice they actually made in some way. And so that’s just one example of how the rational actor model of humans does not actually, uh, comport with our psychology.

Jonathan Fields: [00:06:47] Mhm. So if endless possibility, if endless choices is a big part of the problem, what’s the solution.

David Epstein: [00:06:55] To hem ourselves in? So in let’s say, if we’re going back to that video example, right, is before you get sucked in to wherever it is, the algorithmic winds are trying to direct you in the various things that you can choose from is deciding what you’re trying to do. Setting good enough rules. So the Nobel laureate Herbert Simon, uh, advocated something that he called satisficing, which was basically having good enough rules for decisions instead of the the opposite, which is called maximizing, which is trying to get the best of everything. And it turns out that psychological research shows that it’s almost always bad to be a maximizer. Maximizers are, uh, less happy with their decisions. They’re less happy with their lives, they’re more prone to regret, and they’re more likely to make decisions just in the interest of optionality. So to, to, to prefer reversible decisions, even though it prevents them from committing one way or another. Whereas Satisficers will say, here’s what I’m looking for. Here’s the thing that I want this tool that I’m getting on Amazon to do. And once that is met, they make the decision and then move on. And I think that’s a almost a critical approach to life in a time when it seems, you know, when we have more options than we can even reasonably consider.

Jonathan Fields: [00:08:22] So tease this out for me more, because I want to get really clear on the difference between satisficing and maximizing. I’ve heard the terms before, um, but paint the picture in a more sort of like tangible, real world way for me. Like, give me an example.

David Epstein: [00:08:39] Okay. So Maximizers will, um, in fact, some of the surveys that help determine if people are Maximizers will ask things like, you know, if you found some good program that you’re watching already, do you stop and watch it or, or will you keep searching to make sure that you’re seeing the best thing when you’re shopping for gifts for friends? Do you do you have a lot of trouble because you really need to find that perfect thing, you know, are they prone to regret? Like, are they ruminating over a lot of decisions that have already been made, things like that? Whereas Satisficers will be much more likely, first of all, to not necessarily take reversible decisions, right? So there’s some studies that offer people reversible decisions. And the maximizers will always take a reversible decision, even though it makes them less happy when satisficing.

Jonathan Fields: [00:09:22] So it’s like I bought this thing, but I can return it.

David Epstein: [00:09:25] Exactly. Yeah. And get something else. So and they, they tend to be less happy. Um, with that. And this, this goes in much more important areas than purchases. So in relationships, for example, there’s a trend now documented that the psychologist Scott Stanley refers to as sliding versus deciding where. In the interest of keeping your options open, someone will not mentally commit to a relationship. They’ll say, you know, I’m not sure if this is right. I’m keeping my options open, but they’ll really end up kind of sleepwalking into escalating commitment anyway, because that’s what happens when relationships get longer and when that ends up leading to moving in or to marriage, it’s much more likely to be an unhappy relationship and to end in divorce versus people who just decide, say, I’m either in or I’m out, and you make that commitment psychologically. Whereas sliding again is, is, is basically treating optionality as an end in your decision making, always making decisions in order to keep your options open. And, and while that can make some sense, I think, or especially early in people’s work lives, um, I think there’s, there’s evidence that some maximizing tendencies are actually on the rise around the world. The theory being that because it’s so easy for us to compare to all the other people we could be or things we could be doing. And so preserving optionality is becoming an end unto itself. So people are making decisions specifically to just keep their options open. And that and that never ends. And that turns out to be absolutely antithetical to, to, to getting meaning out of life and satisfaction.

Jonathan Fields: [00:11:05] So I want to make sure I understand this. So then in the relationship context, the maximizer is going to say, you know, okay, so I’m starting into this relationship, but I’m always scanning the horizon. I want to keep my options open because who knows, maybe somebody better is going to come along. So, um, I’m not going to ever really fully commit or potentially do the work to make this extraordinary. I’m just constantly putting in enough so that, um, but I’m always looking for like the more perfect option along the way. But what you’re saying is even in that situation, because just the natural progression of time leads most relationships to sort of like move along a timeline to like some sort of like indicia of commitment that you often end up, you know, like in that same place, but the relationship is qualitatively different and worse than somebody who would be satisficer who kind of says, here’s the person, I’m just all in. Like, I’m not, I’m not scanning for anyone else right now. Um, I’m just all in on this relationship. I’m going to like, give this person everything that I have. And, um, and rather than just constantly looking for like, is this the best possible person for me and always keeping their eye open for somebody potentially better? They’re just 100%, they’ve constrained themselves to this one relationship for this window of time. Is that right?

David Epstein: [00:12:33] Yeah. And if they’re out, they’re out. And that’s a fine decision to make too. Right. But the problem is when you’re in, but always kind of, you know, something’s not perfect here. Right. And nobody’s perfect. And so Maximizers will have this tendency to really fixate on the flaws of a job or another person or something like that. And so, you know, become fixated on this idea that perfect is out there somewhere, but perfect isn’t out there somewhere. That doesn’t mean you can’t get better. You shouldn’t improve. But, um, but there is no perfect. And so I think some of the kind of wise advice I think is Ellen Langer, who put it this way, that don’t make the right decision, make the decision and then make it right. And that’s not true for everything. But to recognize that, uh, you’re going to have to work to make the thing, right? Like you have good enough criteria. If those are met, then you have to, to do some of that work. Um, and, and I think it’s worthwhile. Like Mihai chicks and Mihai, the psychologist who coined the term flow, you know, to describe the feeling of immersion in an activity Said that one of the great things about committing to something, he was actually talking about marriage in this case, but he wrote about it for all sorts of things, is that you can stop spending energy wondering how to live and start spending that energy living. And I think that’s kind of applicable to, uh, many walks of life. And I think it’s okay to get in and out of things, but being always half in, I think, is a recipe for dissatisfaction.

Jonathan Fields: [00:14:05] And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. There is going to be somebody, maybe a lot of people joining us for this conversation and. Especially those who actually are living the life and the choices of being a maximizer right now. And there’s no doubt there’s a script that’s going to be running in that person’s head that says this whole satisficing thing that sounds a whole lot like settling, like giving up, like, you know, like, uh, never actually putting in the work or holding yourself open to something that would be a much better outcome, a much better relationship, a much better job, whatever it might be. Yeah. How do you respond to that?

David Epstein: [00:14:50] Yeah. I mean, I should have said, by the way, that Satisfice is a portmanteau of satisfy and suffice. Right. And I think we can take a lesson from the guy who coined it, Herbert Simon the who was trained as a political scientist, but he won the highest award in computer science as a founder of AI. The Turing Award, he won the highest award in psychology. He was a founder of cognitive psychology. And then, for good measure, he won the Nobel Prize in economics, and he called himself an incorrigible satisficer. So he would he wore one beret from the same store that he only owned one at a time. He ate the same breakfast every day. He lived in the same house for 46 years. He always wore the same kind of socks. Uh, he said, you only need three. He told his daughter, you only need three sets of clothes, one on your body, one in the wash and one in the closet ready to wear and you’d almost accuse him of having low standards of being unambitious if he hadn’t won the highest possible awards in three different disciplines. And what his theory was, was that he was preserving cognitive bandwidth for for the things that mattered as he as his work showed, you can’t actually realistically maximize anyway. So we we have finite brains. We have a very imperfect ability to predict the repercussions of our choices. And so we can’t really maximize, we can try to and it can make us miserable, but we can’t actually do it. And so Simon’s point was that anywhere we can, we should take the opportunity to eagerly satisfice. And maybe that wasn’t in his work, right? He pushed himself in, in his work, but he found all these other places in life to very proactively satisfice so that he could he could save his energy and his concern for at least places where they were more, uh, more productive, potentially.

Jonathan Fields: [00:16:36] Yeah. I love that. Um, and you’re so right, right. Like, but for the fact that you look at this person’s life and then you look at the stunning accomplishments that go along with it, you know, if you just looked at some of the fundamental choices, you might say one thing. So the distinction then and tell me if I’m getting this right. It isn’t so much between high standards and low standards. It’s between standards you can actually satisfy and the unachievable standard of, quote, best imaginable. And yes, and the reverse. The research then says that maximizers the people who are kind of always looking for the absolute best thing out there, the perfect solution, the perfect option, are actually less happy and less satisfied, not more. Is that right?

David Epstein: [00:17:23] That’s right. And in many cases, there’s there’s no evidence they make better decisions either. And one of the problems is that they don’t count the cost of search. So maximizers spend a lot more time and anxiety searching on any given decision. And they don’t count that as a cost. But it’s a huge cost, and they’re much more likely to fall prey to what’s called fredkin’s paradox. The idea that we spend the most time on the least important decisions because we’re having trouble telling the options apart, which means either that they aren’t that different and it doesn’t matter that much, or we can’t tell anyway. And so there’s no use spending more time. But because it’s difficult to differentiate, that’s where we’re liable to spend a lot of time. And so Maximizers will get sucked into spending a huge amount of time and energy on decisions that, you know, they could probably just as well flip a coin, basically.

Jonathan Fields: [00:18:16] Yeah. I mean, that’s so interesting, right? Because if you factor that in, who knows what the percentage of your available bandwidth to do anything is consumed by just the process of scanning the horizon and looking for a better option. Um, I remember, uh, I can’t remember where I saw this stat, but somebody I remember seeing somewhere like that, the typical person, um, spends something in the order of an hour a day not watching TV, but looking for something to watch.

David Epstein: [00:18:45] There you go. So that that’s a, that’s a, that’s like a classic. When the maximizer Satisficer studies first started, it was for radio. It was like, if you have something on the radio, you know, how long do you spend looking. And it’s again, it’s those search costs.

Jonathan Fields: [00:19:00] So what’s the move here, I guess is my question. If you if you’re joining us and you’re kind of nodding along and you’re like, huh, I sound an awful lot like I’ve been a maximizer, and maybe I’m not even convinced in the argument right now, but you’re open to sort of like testing this and seeing like, will this make me happier? Will this actually make me more productive or produce better, cooler, more interesting impact or outcome in whatever area of my life I’m measuring? What’s kind of the opening move here for somebody who wants to to test this.

David Epstein: [00:19:32] I’ll tell you for me, let me give you something that I do because I have maximizing tendencies. And again, one reason that it’s taken me a long time between books is one, I’m mildly curious and have trouble figuring out what to do, but also because I keep wondering, like, is there a more perfect topic that I should dive into?

Jonathan Fields: [00:19:48] Um, I know that pain is like, like I do, I do that with businesses. I have literally the only thing that I hoard is, is domains. And I’m constantly like, which one should I run with? Which one should I do something with?

David Epstein: [00:20:02] Yeah. I mean, so, so and again, nobody, nobody’s a maximizer in all things. So maybe we both have some of these tendencies in, in different areas. Um, and so some of the things I’ll do is I decide if I’m going to purchase something, for example, or watch something, I will decide on some criteria ahead of time. Because if I start getting sucked into every review and every recommendation, you know, people are interested in that, get interested in this, then I’ll fall into that trap you described, where I spend most of my time searching, and I actually have a what I think of as a satisficing practice in my life where, uh, let’s say a book has to be a 9 or 10 effort level for me. And, you know, my perceived quality level, my newsletter, this isn’t going to make anybody want to read it. But if I get a post to a six and a half, I send it. Every time I do it, I say there’s here these other things that I would like to put in there. But if I’m if I think it’s a six and a half, I send it because it’s a satisficing practice for me to realize that I can do some of these things and I don’t have to search through, like all of my notes and ideas and try to incorporate them all the time.

David Epstein: [00:21:09] So I think having some things where you proactively satisfice so that the search is not taking up needless space, um, is really important and trying to set good enough criteria for, for lots of decisions and then just make a decision and move on. And I think it can also be useful to reframe how you think of regret, because one of the costs of maximizing is that maximizers are more prone to regret about anything a purchase, a life decision. And maybe there’s nothing we can do about that sometimes. But, you know, as my my friend and colleague Dan Pink has written, there’s regret. You can say no regrets when you don’t like a decision. That means you’re not learning anything. You’re just pushing it away. You can ruminate and wallow and get depressed and or you can say, what is this feeling teaching me for next time? And I think that’s a really productive way to temper some of the negative emotions that come from a lot of the maximizing tendencies. You may not be able to avoid some of that regret, but can you say, what is this feeling teaching me that I can carry into next time? So that’s, that’s been useful for me.

Jonathan Fields: [00:22:17] Yeah, I love that. Let’s talk a little bit more about this notion of constraints. Um, you actually talk about something that, um, you, you call the green eggs and ham effect. Um, take me into this.

David Epstein: [00:22:30] Yeah. So that is named for a famous bet, which a publisher named Bennett Cerf bet Theodor Geisel, aka Doctor Seuss, that he couldn’t write a book using only 50 words. And that gave birth to green eggs and ham. Because, uh, Doctor Seuss couldn’t be expansive with vocabulary. He had to experiment with rhythm instead. And that’s how he developed this, this rollicking rhythm. In fact, even before that bet, what led to that bet was that he was asked to create a children’s book using about 200 words from a vocabulary list. And he looks at the list and he starts complaining because there’s almost no adjectives. And then he makes this this very sabzian comment. He tells his wife, it’s like trying to make a strudel without any strudels, and then he just throws up his hands and decides he’s going to take the first two rhyming words on the list and make a book out of it. And the first two rhyming words are cat and hat, and the rest is literary history. And again, that’s what forced him to develop this rollicking rhythm that completely changed children’s literature, which was like very literal and boring at the time. And so a psychologist who was named Katrina Tromp, who was reviewing all this research on creativity, uh, noted that hemming people in is the fastest way to make them more creative.

David Epstein: [00:23:53] And so she named this the green eggs and ham, uh, model of creativity. And the reason this works is because as the cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham says, 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 left up to its own devices or just an open field of possibilities, you will go down what cognitive psychologists call the path of least resistance. You will reach for a solution that is convenient, not because it’s good, just because it’s convenient or because it’s familiar. You’ve seen it before. And so the best way to get someone to be creative is to block whatever that familiar solution is. And in fact, in studies that often makes people who even self-identify as uncreative, if the, the thing that they’re used to, if they’re restricted from it, they will suddenly become much more creative. Uh, but it’s not intuitive, right? There was a group of psychologists did, did a survey, an international survey on known creativity myths. And the top one was that people are most creative when they are most free. So this is another case where our intuition about what we would do if only there were no limits is completely at odds with what happens in practice.

Jonathan Fields: [00:25:11] I mean, it really is counterintuitive. You know, the notion that the more you constrain yourself, the greater access you have to bigger, better, more interesting insights, creativity, ideas, solutions. It’s like telling somebody to go, you know, like paint the most beautiful rainbow they’ve ever painted. And your color palette is black, black and black.

David Epstein: [00:25:33] Yeah. There, although there are, I mean, to use one of the, if I can use that segue as an example. I mean, there’s a psychologist I write about named Patricia Stokes who studied artistic innovation. And what she found the theme of artistic innovation historically is what she called the paired constraints process, paired because it involves two steps. The first preclude constraint where you. You block that familiar thing or the status quo and the promote constraints. You say, here’s this restricted means that I’m going to use instead. So to your point about color palette, Monet famously blocked light and dark shades and black. He wouldn’t use any black.

Jonathan Fields: [00:26:15] Right?

David Epstein: [00:26:16] So much so that when at his funeral, when they put a black shroud over his coffin, one of his friends freaked out and started yelling no black for Monet and went and got a floral tablecloth to put over his coffin. But Monet said, I won’t use light and dark shades. I won’t mix paint with black. I won’t use black at all. And in its place I’ll force myself to use only pure colors. No shades, only pure color. In close proximity to see if he could portray any impression of light that a viewer could experience. And that’s what gave rise to Impressionism. So it was very much saying, I’m going to restrict my palette, which is is what led to the birth of Impressionism. And that’s kind of the the story of artistic innovation more generally.

Jonathan Fields: [00:26:55] Yeah. You tell a story in the book, which I’d heard before, and that was it’s the story of a legendary improvisational jazz pianist, Keith Jarrett’s, um, his this iconic recording of him playing in 1975, the colon concert in Cologne, Germany. Um, and I had first been turned on to that by a friend who’s a jazz aficionado probably 20 years ago. And I listened to this piece and I was 66 minutes transported utterly somewhere else. Right. This is become one of the most it’s sold like, I don’t know, 4 or 5 million copies. One of the biggest selling, um, jazz pieces, especially on piano in history. The back story, though, is wild. And it’s so representative of exactly what you’re talking about.

David Epstein: [00:27:43] Yeah. So this, this began when, uh, this recording in Cologne, Germany, where a teenage girl who became a concert promoter, um, this was going to be her big concert. She got Keith Jarrett to come. She sold out the opera house in Cologne. And Jarrett, who was famously, um, uh, prickly, you know, would, would cancel a concert if he heard the, the shutter of a camera showed up at the venue. He hit a few keys on the piano and said, concert’s off. So this is before. Hours before the concert was going to start. And this woman, her name is Vera Brandis. What are you talking about? It turns out it’s the wrong piano. It’s not tuned. It has worn felt hammers. It has fewer keys than the piano that Jarrett requested. And so he says, no. No chance. She tries to get another piano. She can’t do it. Eventually she. She begs him to to stay. He’s driving off in a car with her brother and she begs him to stay. And I don’t know if it’s because she was a teenager and he saw her distress or whatever, but he decides. He says, you know, only I’ll do it only for you just this once. And so he comes back and they try to get the piano in shape as best they can, but there’s only so much you can do in a few hours. And so the piano forces him to do these unusual things where he stays away from the upper register because it sounds tinny because of those felt hammers.

David Epstein: [00:29:13] There are parts of the lower register that aren’t great, so he stays in the middle a lot. The piano is not large enough to fill the space, really, so he starts hitting his foot against the pedal without pushing it down to add this percussive element. And because he’s sticking in certain parts of the the piano, he’ll often play these repetitive rhythms with his left hand, sometimes ten minutes at a time. He’ll be repeating a rhythm while he’s improvising with his right hand, and it turns into this ethereal improvisation that is unlike anything anyone has done before. Jarrett goes off, doesn’t think about it again, and then it’s way too long to get played on radio. It’s an hour’s over an hour, but people start playing in the background in record stores, and everyone who hears it starts asking what it is, and it starts selling and selling and selling, and becomes the best selling solo jazz piano album of all time. And as Jarrett later said, this this imperfect character of a piano often forces me into a creative place that I could not have found otherwise. And he said that about multiple performances in his career. But again, that turns out to be the rule, not the exception in creative breakthrough. That something blocks the familiar path, either intentionally or in this case, by accident.

Jonathan Fields: [00:30:27] Yeah, I mean, I love that story. Um, and it really is, you know, for, for that person who’s kind of wandering around thinking, I’ll just be a better photographer if I can upgrade to this camera or to like, like, get, like, have this equipment or this and that. Um, it really puts the onus back on us and saying like, actually, well, this is like, um, Jack white, um, white stripes, you know, like it’s like, how do I strip this down to like the smallest amount of optionality, the fewest instruments, like the least effect and electrification and still make something extraordinary. And like that forces, it’s this forcing function for a level of creativity that. But for the fact that we’re so limited, it’s almost like we wouldn’t have access to. Does that land.

David Epstein: [00:31:15] Absolutely. And Jack white actually has also talked about using instruments with imperfections on purpose for this reason, because it forces you off that path of least resistance. So absolutely. But it’s still it’s still often hard to believe, I think. Yeah, it just doesn’t feel right again, that’s why it showed up as the most popular creativity myth in this, in this research. Um, so I think it’s, that’s, that’s difficult.

Jonathan Fields: [00:31:44] And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. Give you another great example, the wonderful writer Isabel Allende. Um, and so she creates this writing routine. She has a crazy busy life, very complicated. People are coming at her for all different things all the time. But she has to write. So she decides, okay, there’s, there’s this, There’s this series of things that must happen in the same way, at the same time. For me to actually be able to write at a level that I want to write.

David Epstein: [00:32:13] Yeah, yeah. I mean, and people are coming at her because she’s one of the greatest living writers. Um, you know, she, she published her first book about age 40 and since then has written a best seller about every 18 months for the last 44 years. Um, 80 million copies sold in all. And she has constructed her life, sort of. I think of it how when you see a basketball player doing their routine before they shoot a free throw and they do the same thing every time. And the reason is that because it gets them in the performance headspace and they come to associate this thing with the space they need to be in for performance. That’s kind of what she’s done with her life, where every January 8th, she starts a new book. If she’s finished with the with the previous one. And everyone knows that her life turned outward, as she calls it, ends right then. So if they need something, they have to get it from her before then. And she enters this this place of silence and structure. She cleans out everything from the previous work. She lights a candle to start every work day and blows it out to finish it. And. And the work lives in this space for her. And she needs this quiet and this solitude. And so she really has all this ritual. Like she puts a Pablo Neruda book under her computer in case it will like inspiration by osmosis as a thing.

David Epstein: [00:33:27] So she sets up this incredible discipline, right? Because she doesn’t have to do anything. She’s an independent writer. She could work on any schedule, but she finds that she really needs this structure, both to bring meaning to her life and to get her in the space where she can do this work repeatedly. And the reason I wanted to profile her, other than that, I’m a writer working on my craft. And of course, I was going to, you know, try to shadow one of the best living writers. Is that because some of her books have magical realism in them, when she’s profiled, it’s always as if she’s just this mystical medium who sits back and the characters speak through her. And it couldn’t be further from the truth. When she starts on January 8th, she often spends a week or two writing nothing that she’s going to keep, just like getting warmed up and to get into that space. And so her real story is really one of discipline and structure and ritual. And by the way, I don’t know if this would be interesting, but she just sent me a really interesting email about the trouble she’s having being a little structure free at the moment. I asked her if I could share it. I’m happy to read it if you’d like to to hear it.

Jonathan Fields: [00:34:29] Yeah, please.

David Epstein: [00:34:29] The reason this came up is because I sent her, um, you know, I asked her would she like an advance copy of Inside the Box because she’s in it. And I think I asked her in February and she said, you know, yeah, send it. But as you know, I just it’s January 8th was recently. So I started another book. So I can’t read it. I said, perfect, you know, that’s how she should respond. But then she responds a few weeks ago saying, you know, I’m really enjoying the book. And, and.

Jonathan Fields: [00:34:57] And by the way, just for those, this is early June now when we’re recording this. So this is like three months later at this point. Yes.

David Epstein: [00:35:04] And I said, well, why are you reading it? You’re supposed to be working. And. And she sends me this email that says, here’s a secret. I started a novel on January 8th and gave myself a deadline to finish a first manuscript by the end of March. The reason for the short deadline is not important. I didn’t want to share that for whatever reason. Uh, my agent, my brother read it and liked it a lot. It still needs polishing, but it’s May 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. And the Inquisition. Or a story set in 1810 in Ireland about a girl slash 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 at 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. Then an hour later, she sends another email. Just one line. Do you have any idea for me? Not the ink or the Irish. Which.

Jonathan Fields: [00:36:18] Oh my God, I love that.

David Epstein: [00:36:20] So it’s for whatever reason, she decided to finish this book super early and she’s having a problem with it, which is the same thing that since Inside the Box came out, I’ve been hearing from a number of people who are recently retired saying, you know, they’re struggling, right? Because I think they probably took for granted the structure that work gave to their lives. Or one guy yesterday was saying, I always said, you know, when I retire, I’m going to go clean up this room. And I said, actually, it turns out I just didn’t want to do that. So I’m not doing it in retirement either. Um, and so she’s now looking for this like really defined task again, to bring that structure and ritual to her life.

Jonathan Fields: [00:36:59] Yeah, I mean, it makes so much sense. I think probably so many of us have felt that. And it sounds like you’re also you’re overlaying structure and constraint in this sort of like where a certain amount of structure, even a certain amount of ritual can be also constraint can take the form of structure or ritual. Does that land?

David Epstein: [00:37:19] Yeah, absolutely. And I think that’s especially important when there’s so many things vying for our attention, because some of it for Isabel, is about structuring her attention so that it isn’t structured for her, right? Like she, she does something also kind of similar to what, um, Ernest Hemingway used to do, where Hemingway would stop, where he knew what was coming next in the story. And he stopped purposely because then it gave him a known important thing to start with the next day. I think that’s really smart because there’s something called the the mere urgency effect in psychology, which is this finding that people will opt for tasks that feel urgent, even if they’re not important? So unless you’re specifying the important things, I do this at the end of every workday. Now the last thing I do is what’s the important thing I’m going to start with tomorrow, because that protects you from just getting opening your day to feeds. Algorithmic feeds or your inbox. Um, and so I view those as, as constraints on our attention, boundaries on our attention. Uh, that if we’re not structuring our attention in this day and age, it’s being structured for you and probably not to your greatest benefit.

Jonathan Fields: [00:38:30] No doubt. Um, I remember reading that about Hemingway. It was in an interview in The Paris Review.

David Epstein: [00:38:38] That’s right. 1958. Good memory. Yeah. Good for you.

Jonathan Fields: [00:38:40] And this was very early in my writing journey. And I was like, this is genius. And I started doing that. And I was actually working, I think on my first book when I, when I first came upon that interview. It changed everything. Like I would, I would stop almost mid-sentence knowing what the next one was going to be or like wanting to actually write it. And I would close it up. And then when I, when I, I almost rushed back to my computer the next day because I was excited to sit down because I already had momentum before I even started. And I wouldn’t stop the next day until I could hit a similar point. I wouldn’t stop on a convenient ending where like, it just felt like, okay, yeah. Um, and I’ve done that literally, um, every single time I’ve written a substantial piece since then and it works brilliantly. I’m actually, and I believe you’re doing this right now. Also, I’ve been sort of like very quietly and publicly writing, working on a novel, um, seeing if I can actually write fiction. I have no idea. Like I.

David Epstein: [00:39:37] Am indeed. Yeah.

Jonathan Fields: [00:39:38] And, and, but I thought about doing this literally for decades and I’m like, life keeps getting in the way, blah, blah, blah. I keep making excuses, attention all over the place. I said, the only way I will ever do this is if I build constraints and I would sit down, I said, okay. On January 1st, I’m going to my favorite coffee shop. It’s open at seven in the morning. I’m going to sit down. I’m going to get the same drink so I don’t have to think about it. I’m going to set up at a table and until 9 a.m. in the morning, I’m going to write or think about writing. I don’t have to actually write a word, but I can’t do anything but that. Um, so I set those simple constraints and lo and behold, like it just started pouring out. And during that process, I would always end at that same exact place you were, you were just sharing that Hemingway described. Because I wanted to know, I wanted to be excited knowing that the next time I sit down, I know where I’m beginning. I’m not. I don’t have to sit there and spend the first half of it figuring it out. Astonishingly powerful.

David Epstein: [00:40:36] That’s right. It’s crazy how well this works. It’s like changed my mornings. Um, because it’s again, the decision making is a cost, right? Otherwise you open your day either wondering what it is you should be doing or doing something passive. That’s easy to do, which is often scrolling, right? And that’s, you know, that’s not the important thing. You know, that’s not where you want to start. But it’s such an easy thing. And again, your brain’s wired for convenience, not for doing your most important work. Um, and it’s just, it’s wild how much some of that kind of structure you’re talking about that seems so simple can really, you know, Rick Rubin talks about this too, about how these these disciplinary boundaries, they liberate people to, to create. And, you know, we have this image of the creators as just like pushed around by all the winds, but really they’re often very structured in their, in their work life. And I sort of feel like we all know we should do this, you know, we all know we should mono task on the important thing in the morning. It’s like, and yet it’s, it’s one of the hardest things to put into practice. Or we just, we just don’t put enough attention to doing it. So it’s, it’s simple, but maybe not easy.

Jonathan Fields: [00:41:44] Yeah. So I guess the invitation here then would be, if you’re joining us and there is something that you’ve wanted to make or create or build and you’re struggling, um, with that to maybe invite yourself to think about like, what is one single simple constraint that you can put in place that might help you take the first step? Does that land with you?

David Epstein: [00:42:07] Yes. And time is an easy one, right? Everyone’s familiar with deadlines, of course. And, and what the research shows is that deadlines, you know, like you were talking about having this time where this specific time where you’re doing that thing, deadlines can actually enhance or diminish creativity. It kind of depends if you use them to mono task or to multitask, if you if you feel like everything’s urgent, all of a sudden you start multitasking. That destroys creativity. If you say, this time is just for, you know, when I’m just going to do this one thing or this one kind of thinking, then it creativity blossoms. So if someone has a project they’re having trouble getting started, I would designate, you know, an hour, half hour, something just to start that practice with Monotasking where that is the one thing that you’re doing and you just start chipping away over time.

Jonathan Fields: [00:42:56] Mhm. Yeah, I love that. Um, I know it worked for me and maybe I’m going to piggyback on that and say, so the rule that I use for, for myself, I actually stole from Seinfeld. Um, and I heard him in an interview talking about this is the way he writes jokes. Like he sits down, there’s a designated window of time. He doesn’t have to write a word, but he can’t do anything but that he can gaze off into space. And I find I found it incredibly forgiving because I didn’t have a productivity expectation going into it also. So I wonder if you even say, I’m going to set aside 15 minutes every day at this time, like on my lunch break or before I go to work. And, and it’s just, you know, like, I don’t actually have to produce something, but I can’t do anything but that or think about it or ponder it. I found that incredibly freeing in a weird way.

David Epstein: [00:43:45] Actually, no, I think that’s a great way to put it right, because otherwise you might, especially starting out, have that sort of anxiety of, of producing things that would be productive based on some metric. But as a writer, you know, and I know most of the time is spent thinking the once the thinking is clear, the writing happens quickly. I mean, for this book, I didn’t start writing, uh, for a year, but I was doing a ton of thinking. And in fact, that’s what allowed me to create a very specific structure that then when I moved into the execution of the writing, it was the fastest I’ve ever done because I had this clear structure. But from a metric standpoint, if somebody were holding me to a daily word count, I would have been in in big trouble. I was holding myself. I was being very disciplined about time, the things I was doing. But it wasn’t it wasn’t at that point producing a word count.

Jonathan Fields: [00:44:40] Yeah. I think that that self-forgiveness going in, um, can be just incredibly freeing for me. It actually made me more productive than I’ve ever been working on a book. Um. That’s great. I want to shift a little bit and it’s not really a shift, actually. You brought up a number of times this idea of attention. Um, there’s a line in your book you’ve mentioned, um, Herbert Simon before in a conversation. I think the line was a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, um, or something like that. Um, which he said back in the 70s, it feels as true, if not more today than it did then. Um, why.

David Epstein: [00:45:19] Why does it feel more true? Because it is more true. I mean, he was seeing the explosion of computers and looking into the future and seeing that this, this wealth of information would create a scarcity of the thing that information consumes and that is attention. And by every measure, our attention is more fractured than it had been. So I read about a lot about the work of a psychologist named Gloria Mark, who’s.

Jonathan Fields: [00:45:47] Been a guest on the podcast, actually.

David Epstein: [00:45:49] She’s great. I love her work. Yeah. Um, and she’s been studying people at work for the last 25 years. And when she started, for example, she would see that people switched tasks about every three minutes on average. And then by 2012, it was every 75 seconds. And then by 2022, it was every 45 seconds. Last I checked with her, it had plateaued at 45 seconds. So maybe we’re stuck there. Maybe not. We don’t really know yet, but that’s terrible. Not just for productivity, because in her work, she finds that the more switches people make during the day, the lower is their productivity. At the end of the day, uh, even if they don’t realize it and the higher their stress is, right? She started measuring heart rate variability. Now there’s some work that’s not hers, but looking at impacts on immune function of too much toggling between tasks, too much multitasking. So it’s bad for you in all sorts of ways. And I think the scariest thing from her work was her research on self interruption. So if you’re interrupted by notifications or other people or whatever all day long, and then you say, well, now I’m putting the phone away and I’m now I need to focus. You will self interrupt with intrusive thoughts at the rate to which you’ve become accustomed, as if we have some internal distraction barometer that wants to keep a certain cadence. And so you’ll wonder what you should be checking or what you didn’t answer and all those things. And so some of her advice is to batch your work, right? Work in these blocks of these monotasking blocks where you’re doing one thing at a time, and to have a pad next to yourself, where when those thoughts pop into your head, you write them down called cognitive outsourcing, and try to retrain your attention by using these working blocks where you’re not toggling throughout the day. Otherwise you you’ll really you’ll train yourself to be able to have difficulty focusing. And I think that’s what a lot of us have done.

Jonathan Fields: [00:47:39] Yeah. I mean, it is really wild. You know, if I understand what you’re saying, then you’re it’s it’s not just about discipline or willpower. We, we have actually taught ourselves to be distracted and that, that learning runs so deep that even when external distractions, which we may not have much or if any control over when they disappear, will, will recreate them internally ourselves to keep up with sort of like a similar rate of distraction.

David Epstein: [00:48:09] Yes, exactly, exactly. Well said. And, and I don’t blame us in many ways. I mean, there are right armies of psychologists behind all of these apps and algorithms that are trying to, uh, co-opt your attention. And, uh, even if it’s not apps and things like that, it’s often maybe just, uh, you know, a boss who doesn’t think about this stuff that much or like in, in Gloria’s work. She also found that when she was. When a large organization allowed her to cut off email for a week, um, which is wild that she was able to get them to do that. Very impressive. Um, some of the bosses or managers stopped delegating without thinking. Right. So sometimes with email, something would come to their plate and they would just forward it to somebody else. And then it would without really thinking about how much was on that person’s plate. And so then that person ends up having to balance a whole bunch of things. And when, when they turned off email, she would find that even if even if they were on the same hallway, that mindless designating would would decrease. Someone could have just like walked a few doors down, but they don’t do it. So I think, I think the, the barrier there is that you stop and think about what you’re doing before you just send it off, essentially. And so I think some of this is, you know, hopefully the responsibility of, of people who manage people to be a little bit more thoughtful about how they pass off work.

Jonathan Fields: [00:49:41] Yeah, I mean, I can see that as somebody who leads or manages others, but also just on an individual level, you know, my mantra for years has been fewer things better. I don’t live that mantra nearly as often as I hold it, dear. Um, but what I wanted to tease out here is what I, what I see is that when I can commit to that, not only is the work better and more productive and more creative and I do I come closer to closing the gap between taste and expectation. But on a human level, like on a personal flourishing level, I’m happier, I’m calmer. I’m, I’m more like, I’m 100% positive. I’m more pleasant to be around. Yeah. It’s not just about productivity or creativity. This is about just like how we feel moving through the day, right?

David Epstein: [00:50:30] Absolutely. In fact, I mean, that’s the, that’s the area of the research that affected me the most. You know, productivity is important. Everybody wants to be more productive. But the research that that looks at things that correspond to well-being, you know, primarily stress, again, looking at even physiological measures. And it made me think of this experience where I had a few years ago, where I had to get a few stitches in my head, you know, minor injury, no big deal. But for a few days, I was supposed to not really try to turn my head, separated my shoulders if I could help it not get my blood pressure up, you know? So no exercising for a few days. Try not to get too worked up about anything. Um, and so it wasn’t some pain, you know, I had to sleep sitting up and all this. And after a few days, I found myself so happy that I started journaling about what is going on here. And I realized that I could only do one thing at a time if I was brushing my teeth. I was only brushing my teeth.

David Epstein: [00:51:25] Because when you can’t whip your head around, you’re just going to do one thing at a time. If I was writing, I was just writing. And so I started trying to build that into my life. I literally remember saying, because this was in a time where I was kind of fragmented and very busy. And I remember saying, oh yeah, I love my work when I’m allowed to focus on it at a reasonable pace. I had to sort of be reminded of that. And I still have to remind myself of that a lot. Now, if I start getting more fragmented to, to try to get back to working in these sustained blocks where I remember that actually, I love this work. It’s very hard, but I love it because when I’m pulled in a million directions and my attention switching, I actually don’t love it then. So it’s, it’s that big a deal for me. It’s the difference between loving what I do and not loving what I do. If I’m able to, to focus on it in a sustained way.

Jonathan Fields: [00:52:17] Yeah. I mean, that makes so much sense to me. Um, I’m, as you’re describing that my, my mind started sort of like thinking about how all of these different things we’ve been talking about come together. You know, earlier in our conversation, we were talking about this idea of satisficing versus maximizing. So if we take the example of like a relationship, if we basically say, okay, so here’s the person in front of me. I have said yes to this person. I’m not scanning the horizon. I’m not constantly like, this is my person. And, and so that is a constraint, right? But this is a constraint which allows me to actually just devote myself as fully as possible to this one person. If I then go to this idea of environmental or behavioral or like built constraints and I say, you know, we are going to create, um, certain, a certain container that nobody else can enter where we just, we spend time together, we talk, we do things in a very particular way on a repeated ritualistic basis. There’s another constraint that will very likely also deepen the relationship. Then if we go to what we’re just talking about here, an attentional constraint, and we say within that container, we’re going to leave our devices outside of it. We’re going to remove all electronics from that place. Maybe we’re going to go for a walk in nature and leave the device. Whatever it is, we’re going to actually proactively remove distractions from attention during that window, allowing you again, to just deepen into that. Like, imagine the effect, imagine that relationship versus like all the opposite choices.

David Epstein: [00:53:48] The life you were just describing. I’m like getting tingles. It sounds wonderful. Right? And, and, and, and the thing that is just that sort of works me up about it too, is, is I think when you describe it, it’s like the feeling if I were listening to this, I mean, I am listening to this, but if I weren’t engaged in the conversation, I think my feeling would probably be like, that’s so obvious. We know these things, right? But but they’re so hard to do because again, brain is made for path of least resistance. And so that’s doing whatever. And we’re made to be distractible. So it’s doing whatever comes easily and letting other people who are very interested in owning your attention. Own it. And so I think it’s really an issue of, of maybe it, maybe it feels kind of silly to have to set up these explicit boundaries. Like, does Isabel Allende really have to start on January 8th? And I think the answer is kind of yes, that it may feel silly. You know, we know that children need this, right? We know they thrive with these boundaries. But as adults, we should be able to just figure this out organically or intuitively. And I think it’s just not not really the case.

Jonathan Fields: [00:54:57] Yeah. So agree. You know, it strikes me as we’ve been talking is that, um, there’s kind of like this thread running through all of it through the creativity research, the attention research, the we didn’t even talk about it much, but the idea of collaboration and just contentment, you know, like what actually makes us happy and satisfied and fulfilled in life. It’s all kind of the same thread. The thing that we think is holding us back. And tell me if you agree with this, is frequently the thing that would set us free. The constraint, Um the limit, the, the box as you describe it. It’s not the enemy, it’s the condition.

David Epstein: [00:55:35] Yeah, I agree, I mean, I think there are, I certainly don’t intend to say that there are not bad constraints. Yeah. Right. The word is practically synonymous with something that’s frustrating. The problem with that is I think that it causes us often to overlook how useful constraints can be. Our most powerful tools for focusing our energy for unsticking a project for for finding satisfaction in life. And so, you know, one of the things I was hoping with this book is that it would be an emotional reframe for, for people in how they think about limits and boundaries. Mhm.

Jonathan Fields: [00:56:16] Love that feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well. So in this container of Good Life Project., if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up.

David Epstein: [00:56:24] Can I steal from philosophers that I was reading while I was finishing this book, or. Okay. Because I loved the definition of a philosopher named Susan Wolf. That was meaning comes from because. Well, let me specify that first. I think my, uh, regnant value is engagement, not happiness. We often think about happiness two, two of the, the my favorite things I’ve ever done are book writing. And when I was a competitive 800 meter runner in college and then after college, and if someone asked me in the middle of those things if I’m enjoying myself, in many cases, I would say it’s torture, but it’s so engaging and I find it so engaging. And so I think having something that engages you is key to a good life. And to and to use Susan Wolff, this philosophers framing, she says subjective attraction. So you liking the finding interest in the thing to something objectively attractive? Now, objectively attractive is a a loaded thing. But she would argue that, you know, some of objective attractiveness can come from these values that we know are shared across cultures, you know, loyalty, hard work, uh, open mindedness, curiosity. So, so your attraction to something that engages you, that also has one of those objectively important values embedded in it. Is that too complicated?

Jonathan Fields: [00:57:55] Yeah.

David Epstein: [00:57:56] Okay.

Jonathan Fields: [00:57:57] Your answer is your answer. That’s all good. Thank you. So let’s talk about some of the big takeaways from this conversation. One thing that I’m really sitting with is something that David said near the end, that the word constraint is practically synonymous with frustration. And that’s a problem because it causes us to overlook how useful constraints actually are. That framing has been with me since we stopped recording. Three other things that I want you to carry out of this one. First, the satisficing standard. Not low standards, good enough standards for the right things so you can stop spending energy wondering how to live and start spending it, actually living it. That phrase from Csikszentmihalyi. David deployed it like a quiet mic drop. Second, the path of least resistance. The brain is not built to think. It’s built to actually prevent you from having to think whenever possible. Which means if you leave your attention unstructured, someone or something will structure for you. And third, the Hemingway stop. Consider ending each work session knowing exactly what you’re starting with next time, not at a convenient stopping point, at a point where you’re kind of slightly sorry to leave. I’ve been doing this for years with my writing, and it has been a game-changer. And hey, before you leave next week, we’re sitting down with Donna Jackson Nakazawa to talk about why rumination feels so productive, even when it’s actively working against you, and what the neuroscience actually says about how to loosen its grip. She has this framework for this that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since we recorded, so be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss it. And do me a quick favor, share this episode with just one person who needs to hear it. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsey Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help by Troy Young. Kris Carter crafted our theme music. And if you haven’t already. Follow us wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss a conversation. Until next time, I’m Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.

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