Applying Constraints to Personal Life

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All vets are in network. Go to fetchpet dot com slash save right now to get your free quote. That's fetchpet dot com slash save is freedom The simplest definition is something like the absence of limits Freedom means more options, fewer obligations, no walls, no constraints. It's the ability to keep every door open for as long as possible And on some level, that makes sense Nobody wants to feel trapped Nobody wants to be restrained by arbitrary boundaries or somebody else's idea of how life should go. But there's another side to this too many choices can also become a burden T much openness can make it harder to commit. harder to create even harder to know what you want in the first place. So how do we tell the difference between the limits that oppress us and the limits that free us I'm Sean Alllly, and this is the grreay area. Today's guest is David Epstein, a journalist and the author of Range, and now, inside the box, how constraints Make Us Better Epstein's argument is that we have badly misunderstood the relationship between freedom and structure We tend to think constraints are what hold us back, but in work, in art, in relationships, in life generally, the right constraints are often what make meaningful freedom possible. It's a provocative, somewhat counterintuitive argument. So I brought David on the show to walk me through it. He Steam, Wlcome to the show. Thank you for having me. This is a very interesting book that I think pushes against some pretty basic Intuitions that we all have Um, So let's just start with you. summing up the thesis. What is this thing about The thesis is that we overvalue complete freedom and that useful limits in our work and in our lives can actually liberate us to be the most creative and satisfied versions of ourselves. And then it's especially important now because Um I think quite frankly, it's never been easier to do too much starts with a myth of scientific discovery with which I was not familiar. It's the myth of the Russian chemist Mendelleev who Dreamt up, we are told periodic table. Why start with that story? What is it telling us or not telling us about how creativity and discovery actually? I started with it in part because I had learned the famous dream story, which was that Mendlev was trying to put in order all the elements, the chemical building blocks of the universe And after three tireless days of work fell asleep and know drifted off into the most impactful nap in human history where he sees all the elements arrange themselves in this order. And so then I was Yeah. K kind of flabbergasted when I learned the real story, which is that actually, Mendelleev had a publishing contract to write a two volume introochemistry textbook and He'd only gotten an eight the then sixty three known elements into volume one So you had to get the other fifty five into volume two And he realized he couldn't keep going one element at a time So we had to do it in a logical way also for beginners. And so he started thinking about elements in terms of families that he recognized this pattern, the periodic pattern, which is that as you move along the table, chemical and physical properties repeat. periodically at certain intervals And so it struck me as just the exact opposite of the celebrated myth, this freedom of your dreaming brain, you know loose from the bounds of reality versus really these very tight constraints that forced him into productive experimentation. And I thought that the gap between the myth and the reality was symbolic of something important, the fact that we overvalue complete freedom and undervalue the power of useful constraints, both to to help us clarify priorities and launch into productive exploration that we would never think of otherwise. So what is the best way, what is a simpler more way to think about the relationship between freedom and creativity In a recent international survey by psychologists of known creativity myths, these are things we know from research are not true. The most popular one was that people are most creative when they were most free And we know this isn't true And to I like to use the words of the cognive scientist Daniel Willingham who said, you know You may think that your brain is made for thinking, but your brain is actually made for preventing you from having to think whenever possible because thinking is energetically costly And so whenever possible, you will default to convenient solutions, easy solutions, ones you've done before, ones that just readily come to mind And so in fact, Given complete freedom, it's basically impossible to be really creative Because your brain just goes down what cognitive scientists call the path of least resistance easy familiar thing that's convenient And so really the greatest creative prompt you can possibly have is when you're faced with a problem or a challenge or just a task Do the thing that comes to mind and then basically cross that out and say I'm not allowed to do that You force yourself off the path of least resistance, and that's the most reliable way to become creative I had this mythology in my head, I think a lot of us do. about you know, genius and freedom and creativity and it's very hard to shake. You know, it's a trope. in the history of science, but it's also how we think about artist Yeah performers, you know that in order to be truly original, truly great You have to be totally free Totally untethered Yeah and out of that weird, you know, chaotic sauce comes the creative Magic or whatever,? I'm not a super creative person, so I don't know anything about that. But that's what I hear Um Do you see any truth in that story or do you think it's mostly just a pretty story, but this misleads us about what actually going on I think it's true that great creators are often uninhibited in some of the ways that other people are inhibited. in fact We know from there's like a mountain of research on creativity that shows that Great creators Um just are willing to experiment more. so they will tend to have more bad ideas But more ideas overall, and so more good ideas. like you can see this in patent research, right? People with impactful patents have tons of totally useless ones But then they're more likely to get hits But I think there are two things that are mistakes kind of in the normal portrayal that you described One of which is that the people are totally original in the first place where in fact, you know we will see one creator who explodes When someone delves into it, it's really they're usually building on a lineage And maybe not everyone got famous in that lineage. So to people that are consuming their content, it looks like they came out of nowhere. But in fact It's usually, like this famous art historian George Kubler noted that it's basically always a lineage And you only see one person who caught on for some reason or another, but they're really just building sort of on their ancestors And the other thing I'd say is that Patricia Stokes is a psychologist who's done really interesting work on this, where she looked at the history of artistic innovation and what were the common themes and what she came up with was what she said the common theme in artistic innovation is what she called paired constraints And what she meant by that was that an artistic innovator We' first kind of work in the status quo And then they know what they have to block to do something different. So they'll use a preclude constraint where they block that and then a promote constraint where they' saying and here's something I have to use in its place So to give a simple example, like Claude Monet you know, knew how to do the status quo ar at the time and then he said, you know what?' I'm going to to portray impressions of light Painters usually used light and dark shades and mix things with black. and he said, I'm not going to do that at all No black and no light and dark shades blocking that And in its place, I'm going to use only pure color in close proximity, like a mosaic of color, and I'm going to try to portray any impression of light that someone can see just using that. So he was actually blocking one thing and forcing himself to use another thing He blocked bllack so thoroughly that At his funeral, when there wass a black shroud over his coffin, one of his friends started yelling, No black from Met. and went and grabbed a floral tablecloth to put over his coffin But so it's really this much more systematic process of saying, I'm blocking that stat I'm restricting myself from the status quo thing. and I'm forcing myself to use something else in its place. And that's what she found was the theme of artistic innovation in history. So it's pretty different portrayal than this kind of being struck by a lightning of inspiration that just comes out of nowhere. Do you draw meaningful distinction between constraints on the one hand and Imediments. on the other I think it goes without saying that there's such a thing as too much constraint, right? Right. The word itself is practically synonymous with something that's frustrating. And I think if you're given, you know, if someone tells you what to do and how to do it, and this is clear in all sorts of studies about problem solving, that if if you say Could I surpr could I still surprise myself And if the answer is no then you're too constrained, right? Because the usefulness of constraints is it causes you to think in different ways and to explore productively That said think just because something's an impediment. that it's necessarily bad. Like I'm kind of hoping The mind set shift the emotional reframe, if you will. that this book engenders would be to seeing limits as opportunities to clarify priorities. and experiment in new ways. So to give an example, this isn't in the book, but one of the first readers was a guy named Ed Hoffman, who was NASA's first chief K knowledge officer. It's like a sort of sort of like a had psychologist who's in charge of making sure that there's institutional memory. at NASA and He said, Ohh, I have to tell you about this mission called Elcross where team ends up with half the time and the budget that they expected. So what do they do? Well, you know, they complain, right? And then they say If we were going to get this done anyway, how would we do it And so it forced them to instead of building from scratch to borrow equipment to borrow technology. so they took imaging equipment from arrmy tanks. and engine temperature sensors from NASCAR and built a probe that confirmed water on the Moon And so did they want that situation? No. could it Could it have been even more constrained and made it impossible? Yes. But what it actually did was cause them to think in ways that they never would have otherwise. kind of shift this to more like the more personal existential level and talk about freedom, the simplest. Definitely the most common definition of freedom we have is the absence of limits And that is certainly a kind of freed But it seems like you don't think that is the most useful kind of freedom. So I wonder How you would to find the ideal of freedom. I think the fetishization of total freedom is completely a historical for the things that have made the freest countries in the world, right They are completely based upon agreed upon rules that did not exist. So there's one of the thinkers that made a big impression on me While I was reporting inside the box was a guy named Douglas North Wh won a Nobel Prize in economics Um for his work onn constraints, essentially, on social norms And political and economic structures constrained human behavior such that strangers became more predictable to one another And that led to trust across boundaries because for much of human history people only collaborated or did business with their kinship network or with the people in their neighborhood, essentially And it was these social norms and boundaries that allowed people to start trusting strangers. And I have to say, I think there are some pretty ominous signs in our society right now where What North would predict is these as these shared social norms that constrain human behavior and make it more predictable u breakdown. or as some of the public rules are more obviously don't apply to everyone What you start to see is a decline in trust. And trust, by the way, is very tightly related to per capita GDP. If you look at the portion of people Um In a country that say most strangers are trustworthy, it maps very tightly with Papta GDP. And I just saw a peew survey that found that the majority of adults a small majority, but a majority of adults say that other people have bad morals So this is like exactly what Douglas North would have predicted where there's a breakdown of these shared social norms and constraints on the way that people behave and strangers start trusting each other less And stranger trust is the foundation of shared prosperity And so the idea that we should all just do whatever we want It's certainly not the foundation of shared prosperity in society. You know, there's a very old conservative insight that I used to balk at. when I was younger that maximum freedom is its own kind of bondage I need to order I y get the more I've come to believe that that's true It seems like you've landed there too Yeah, and I mean You said something that's in passing, but that's profound, which is people actually do overvalue freedom in the abstract. There's all sorts of evidence in this in different instces specific cases of this. in research like, you know, most people say If they got cancer, they would want to be choose their treatment basically. But then of people who actually get cancer, it's almost nobody that actually wants to be faced with that choice. So that's just kind of one niche example. But there are all these examples where people say that they want all this freedom. But then when it comes down to it It's actually a burden in many ways, and they don't necessarily want that freedom And aside from that, on a personal basis, once I became a writer and I said, I want to, you know, the dream is that you become totally independent and you spend all of your time doing things, you know spending every minute of your day only in a manner of your choosing. In fact, when my last book Um Once that was done, I went I left my job the last time I had a normal journalism job was at Pro Publica. And then when I left that, I've just been on my own ever since And I was at a writer's retreat where we were asked to Everyone had to say, what are you optimizing for this year? And I said, autonomy fast forward a few years, and I learned there' such a thing as too much autonomy I had individualized my schedule so much At first of all, I wasn't really syncing with other people Right? Because syncking with other people is kind of inconvenient. So I was doing everything that was convenient for me And it was like, I had to make every decision about everything that was going be to all these competing. I was just having decision fatigue about everything And it was just not good for wellbe. and then I ended up reading a lot of research. It's like Humans thrive in a dense network of reciprocal obligation. Like you want obligations to other people and you want them to have obligations to you And you want to be synchronizing with people in real life. So I ended up joining a Nonprofit board in my community and going to dance meetups and joining a dinner and discussion club. and all these things are inconvenient. I have to be at a certain place at a certain time, physically But it adds meaning back into your life and structure back into your life And so I think the I certainly thought that this thing that I really, really wanted And then I got there and it turned out It's actually not so great. No, I mean, it's something I used to hear a lot when I was in the military. peopleeople would, you know, drill sergeant types would tell you If you want freedom, discipline is the way You live a very disciplined life and counterintuitively that actually frees you up. Again, I balked I've come to believe that there's real deep truth in that But I think and I suspect you would agree Part of the the desire for freedom, which is understandable Is people just want choices Yeah want to have choices options in life, as many choices as we can get. And like its it is a hallmark of modernity that we are overwhelmed of choices. We have never had more choices in terms of what to do with our time What to pay attention to Yeah But that, I think, has not made us happier. I think it has created more paralysis and and more anxiety. What is that about for you, right? Why does the superabundance of choices actually have the opposite effect on us and create anxiety Yeah, it seems like it should only be good, more choices, right? And according to right, you know, classical economic thinking It has to be good ? You have more options, which gives you a better chance of making reaching an optimal decision, essentially But it turns out that's not at all the way humans actually work. We can't make optimal decisions. We have finite bandwidth to consider all the different options And so when choice sets reach a certain level of complexity people start making worse decisions and they're less happy. or they just get paralyzed by it. So know when four hundred one K options surpass a certain level of complexity with lots of choices, people are more likely to just not even participate at all. Like they just they just like back out of it And and in some ways, this is it's almost sort of hilariously dire like since the introduction of infinite scrolling People have been getting international surveys, so people particularly young people have been getting more bored And so in follow up studies to that peopleeople will be given say a set of twenty videos they can watch and they can scroll through and pick. and they'll be more bored And then the people who were given one video from that same set and said you have to watch this one. It's like just the possibility. that there is some other thing that you could be doing spoils the experience of the moment itself And since we have so many choices now, I mean, this Oxford professor calculated that the consumer choices available to us in modern society There are a hundred million fold more than pre industrial societies, which dwarfs the increase in wealth And there's some research now showing that as those consumer choices go up, people start to view all of their purchase decisions as like extensions of their identity. So every decision is freighted with all this weight It seems like this can't be bad to have more decisions and certainly you can have too few But again, it's a case where in the abstract it seems great, but the reality looks different. One of the many unexpected benefits of being a dad to a young kid is getting to observe human behavior in such an intimate way. in, you know, the reason why my wife and I basically Just shut down YouTube access, right? is that you could see how watching all these hyper edited frenetic videos, the ability to start stop, shif from video to video was not just it was not just destroying his attention Um It was making regular life or anything that didn't mimic that frenetic pace of YouTube, intolerably boring the attention issue is a really serious one. where People's attention spans are being trained in way at this point in our history, if you're not structuring your attention, it is being structured for you and not in a good way. Support for the gray area comes from Mint Mobile When you hear a deal that's too good to be true, you usually wonder, what's the catch But sometimes the catch is that there is no catch. 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Additional taxes, fees, and restrictions apply, S MintMobile for details Support for the grreay area comes from Mint Mobile When you hear a deal that's too good to be true, you usually wonder what's the catch But sometimes the catch is that there is no catch Like MitMobile offering preremium wireless for just fifteen dollars a month. That's it. No catch, justust a good deal, plain and simple. Catches be gone. MitMobile took what's wrong with wireless and made it right with preremium wireless for fifteen bucks a month. You can even bring your current phone and your number. It's incredibly easy to get started. You can sign up online and get three months of premium wireless service for just fifteen bucks a month To get your new wireless plan for just fifteen bucks a month, go to mintMobile d. com slash gray area. That's mint moobile. com slash gray area. Cut your wireless bill to fifteen bucks a month at mintMobile d. com slash gray area That's it, there's no catch. forty five dollars upfront payment required equivalent to fifteen dollars a month. New customers on first three month plan only speed slower above forty gigabytes on unlimited plan. Additional taxes, fees, and restrictions apply, See MintMobile for details Support for the show comes from Task Rabbit. For a lot of people, summer means more projects. So if you find yourself with a growing to do list, Task Rabbit can help you keep from falling behind Task Rabbit connects you with skilled taskers in your area for moving, furniture assembly, home repairs, yard work, mounting, and more. You can search for a tasker based on cost, skill set, availability, and past client reviews so you know exactly who's showing up and can have confidence that they know what they are doing. And if it's short notice, no worries because taskers are often available to help the same day. Taskers have assembled over three point four million pieces of furniture, completed seven hundred thousand home repairs, and handled one point five million moves and counting So our laundry room was a complete objective. Daster and we had to get a couple of giant cabinets and what can I say? Your boy just did not want to break out the toolbox and spend an entire afternoon putting all that stuff together. So we had a handyman come and do it and it was fantastic When life happens, your to do list grows. Get ahead of it now and get fifteen dollars off your first task at taskrabbit d. com or on the Task raabbit app using prromo code Greay Area. Taskers book up fast, especially for same day tasks, so book trusted Home Help today. That's fifteen dollars off your first task using promo code Gay Area with TaskRabbit app or taskraabbit. com character in the book, Herbert Simon You say, actually he's the thinker who most influenced the book. And I think a lot of people may not be familiar with him at all, but he had this idea of satisfying Yeah And it feels really connected to what we're talking about now in terms of, okay, this is the world we live in how do we orient ourself to a world that's giving us too many choices that is actually making our lives more anxious and more difficult? So talk about his idea there and how it connects to Yeah the broader thesis of the book. Herbert Simon, who I think is Yeah one of the most brilliant minds that I know of, period Um, He was trained as a political scientist But he won the highest award in computer science because he was o created the first AI demonstration. He won the highest award in psychology. He was a fnder cognive psychology, meaning not like therapy, but how our brains solve problems and make decisions and then he won the Nobel Prize in economics for a good measure And one of one of his u Well, one of his grad students once asked, how do you master all these fields? And he said, No, it's just one thing I'm just studying. how humans make decisions And one of his important ideas was called satisfificing, which is a portmanteau of satisfy and suffice and What Simon was showing is that Humans do not behave like the rational actor model of classical economic theory, where we evaluate all the different options and pick the best one. We have finite bandwidth, so we have to use shortcuts, essentially, to make decisions And we often use good enough shortcuts or we satisfy instead of maximizing or maybe what we'd optimizing. And Simon said, we should be doing this really proactively. You know, we have to do it anyway. We can't make the optimal decisions because we can't evalueate everything and we can't predict the future But we waste a ton of cognitive bandwidth doing it And so he called himself an incorrrigeible satisfizer. So he wanted to set good enough rules for just about everything. He wore the same kind of socks. He always owned one beeret. He said, you only need three pairs of clothes. O on your body, one in the closet ready to wear u one in the wasash He ate the same Bakfast. Grapefu Oatmeal, black coffee. You live in the same house forty six years, etcera And he said by simplifying all these things to good enough He saved energy and cognitive bandwidth for the things that he really wanted focus on, and Simon felt this was increasingly important in a world of information overload. is as he said Um, in an information rich world There is a dearth of something else, and thats something else the thing that information consumes. and information consumes attention So with a wealth of information, there's a scarcity of attention. So one was about saving cognitive bandwidth, but also he famously said The best is enemy of the good And so if you can set these good enough decision rules, I mean, I really took this to heart because I have what would be called maximizing tendencies. So the opposite of satisfying, maximizing, trying to get the best. you know? You may like the show you're watching on Netflix, but is there could there be something else better so you're still switching and surfing Or I guess dating apps would be a very obvious one, right? It's of infinite ability to swipe So and it's almost always bad to be a maximizer, by the way. In psychological research, maximizers are less happy with their decisions They are more prone to regret, they'reess happy with their lives They're much more likely to go for reversible decisions, which ends up both making them unhappy and preventing them from kind of committing one way or the other Um And so for someone like me, I think it's important to set rules for whether it's like buuying something online or whatever it is of Here are the few things I need this to do for me to get to good enough and then Stick with that and make the decision. Well, I love the what is it that Fredkin's paradox. Yeah, right? This idea that the more similar Your options are, the less choosing between them matters, but the harder. Right Choosing between them. So you spend the most time and energy on the least important decisions. spend the most time. right on Netflix, like what the hell am I going to stream? It's all the same Yeah thing, you know, But you know, I'm curious what you think about this because I think a byproduct of all the choices It's just a fear of closure. I think we all have that deep seated fear of closure. It's like when you commit to anything, there's this worry that you're you're missing out on some other thing or some other experience or you're killing off some potentialial alternative version of yourself. And if you're prone to overthinking, which I think we all increasingly are having all these choices It does not feel like freedom. It just feels like more shit to fret over, which it is That was very eloquently put. Hn't thought of it in that language that you just put it in, but I like that that you're killing off a futurel, right? because you're choosing a path and you're not choosing the other paths. And I think the fact is you're doing that anyway. and so it's important to face up to it and realize that's what you are doing and that's okay.. Is this what you're talking about with that distinction in the book between sliding and deciding. because the people who slide are less happier in life Why is that Yeah, and again, this is this is from research specifically on relationships and what sliding means And this is apparently a phenomenon that has been increasing among young people It means kind of in an effort to keep your options open you kind of sleepwalk into escalating commitment, you know, moving in together, etceta. you go through all these steps, never having decided because you kind of want to keep your options open, but things escalate anyway. instead of saying like, I'm committed to this person, like this is where we're going and couples that slide into escalating commitment, you know, if they get married they're likely to be divorced, or they're less happy. And so again, it's this illusion of keeping your options open while they are being closed down. You know, those you think you're preserving those other versions of yourself, but you're actually having to kill them off And so putting off the decision and having the feeling that you haven't committed Um It just leads to worse outcomes versus making a decision one way or the other or're again, we're trying to preserve that sensation of freedom, but refusing to actually choose makes the whole thing feel all the more fragile You know, so you're never really grounded. And I think some of this This is me totally philosophical speculation I think some of this has to do with maybe illusions about mortality and finitude in general would't there's same more there's this part of our brain that thinks You know, if I just got the right system in all these things, I could do everything. I could do it all Right? The write productivity hacks But you can't. You're the bottleneck. And so what you need to do is recognize my time and my life are limited and prioritize ruthlessly or that, you know that it's just hard to grapple with how short our lives are in some ways and how few chances we get at certain things. And so I think it's almost this comforting illusion to feel like you're not killing off those alternate versions of yourself, but you are. you are anyway. And so it's that much more important to deliberately make these kind of decisions. So think I think it partly just has to do with the way. and again, this is my philosophical speculation These illusions that we think we could get everything done if only we if only we got it all right and that we aren't actually Uhuh making decisions that are permanent in a sense Spport for the Greay arerea comes from Fetch Pet Insurance. Pets add so much to our lives, really too much to say in words. We've got a cat and a dog here at house Iilling, and they are the best. 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It is that Humans have these psychological emotional vulnerabilities weaknesses. ologies, right? just like habits that undermine us And it seems like All the technology we live with and under now is designed to exploit all of those things And All of this stimuli, which is designed to pull you away from yourself and the things that may actually makeake your life rich and fulfilling. But what do you think Right I mean, there's obviously there's huge amount of money to be made by other people structuring your attention which is a reason why this is happening. but it's also just the convenience of it Um, and I think it's even even worse now. So again, it's never been easier to do too much. And I think AI also just really exacerbates that where you have this enormous ability to start a million things that you have no intention of finishing. I say, I don't know if you've seen this new research on work slop where it's causing people to produce these incredible volumes of things that are like mediocre and building up. And so it's just like everything is more more, more more and more more streams of information U, you know, more videos, more products that we can all put out and fragments attention in ways that are really unhealthy. mean You know, I get into the research by psychologist Gloria Mark, who studies people's attention at work and twenty five years ago, it was about three minutes between task switches when people were working And even then, the paper she published based on that work, titled Cstant C constant multitasking craziness. That was a quote from one of the subjects in the research And then by twenty twelve, it was seventy five seconds and by twenty twenty two it was forty five seconds, every forty five seconds switching. Um And it because multitasking isn't really possible Um actually makes people worse at everything and stressed out Really Yeahah, I think it's just incumbent upon us unfortunately have to structure own attention and it does require a lot of effort. But the good thing is it's doable and not all of the Things you have to do are that hard and you can make a difference pretty quickly. The downside is so much of the world is kind of conspiring against you Well, how do you think about the role of of ritual any kind of ritual in modern life, do you see that as a way to Discipline our attention in ways that actually protect it preserve what matters. Certainly. I mean, I think to make making, I think I think ritual can help make doing the important things easier, right? If something becomes Um becomes habitual Um And because I think I think the when we're talking about this attention economy It's like there's so many things ready to flood into any empty space you leave. So if you have ritual, one it gives us a sense of Like humans were built for seasonality in their work and maybe this isn't fully seasonality, but having some sense of switching into different modes. And I think that's what ritualten often does for people think because all of these other forms of entertainment or information or whatever they are are ready to flood into any moment we have where we haven't decided what we're doing But having a ritual that sets you up for this is what I'm doing now or this is what I'm not doing now. or this is the mindset I'm in right now can be really important so that you're not just doing the equivalent of mindlessly scrolling all the time, right? Like you see this all the time when people don't have some other particular thing decided to do then they start beaming all the stuff into their face that's waiting for them. So I think ritual can be really important that way Any good examples of rituals that come to mind or maybe even rituals that you've adopted Yeah, I mean, my favorite was s obviously Use this book as an excuse to spend time with one of my favorite writers, and one of the best Livving writers in the world is Isabllellende H started writing books just before she turned forty. And since then, she's now eighty three eighty three. She has written a bestseller about every eighteen months for the last forty three years All right, eighty million copies sold now. She's the most. translated female Spanishanguage author, ever Um, And I spent some time with her. And she started writing her first book On january eighth of nineteen eighty one House of the spirits, that was a huge hit And from then on, she started every subsequent book on january eighth, if she had finished her previous book, if she was done with the book she was working on every january eighth, she started a new book and it turned to this whole kind of cleansing ritual We're in the lead up. Everyone knew that they had to get to her before january eighth, and she would tie up all of her things and she would clear out her old research materials and you know, go through these various rituals, put a Pablo Naruta book under her computer just in case inspiration by osmosis is a thing And then on january eighth, she would retreat kind of into this silence where she said her life turned outward. go away, you know, no more talks, none of those other things And would take her a few a little time, you know, sometimes a few weeks to get into this headspace of doing her work And then even within the day there was a ritual. L she'd light a candle to start the workday and blow it out to end the workday and close the door. I adopted that, by the way, but I use electric candles. much paper around Um that sense of ritual It just gave her a time where she always knew like she would build up to it. and it was almost like her body and her mind would get ready for it to get into this mode and it gave her life a discipline and a ritual. And even after You know, she thought she was going to retire from writing after her daughter in her twenties passed away from a rare disease. I think I'm done And that was the one time she had a little publishing drought. But then as january eighth was coming up again, she started feeling nervous and could she try again? and she did You know, and that was decades ago. So this sense of ritual really gave a structure to her life that turned into a discipline It's kind of Yeah Qite incredible. There's an awesome example in the book. Um, are really a story about Dr. Seus that I just I just had to bring out because I'd never heard this story before But it's such a good illustration of your argument And so the story is basically, I guess an editor at random house, B Theodore Geislo is that H's name, the doror Swothi out He was This editor bet him that he couldn't write a children's book using only fifty words Yeah And he was struggling, I guess, before that to write the thing. And the result of that bed, was green eggs and hat That's right, which is incredible. talk about a lesson in that form. may actually matter more than inspiration. Yeah. And I mean it forced him to experiment with rhythm because he couldn't be expansive with vocabulary and Even before that, though He was given a vocabulary list for kids. A the time when he was working Before him, children's literature was Bore It was super literal and pretty boring most of it And so even before Green Eggs and Ham, he was given his vocabulist for kids and asked to use about two hundred words from it only and no more and And he looks at the list and starts complaining to his wife because there are very few adjectives And he says, it's like trying to make a strudel without any struds which I love because it makes it feel like he's kind of the same person in his personal life as in his work And then he ultimately gets frustrated and just says, I'm just going to take the first two rhyming words on the list and make a book The first two rounding words in the list Cat and hat. and the rest is history. But again, it forced him to rely on this like rollicking rhythm because he was restricted in his vocabulary How different is your life after writing this book. Have you gotten much more intentional about imposing limits and structure in your own life hundred percent and there are a few different categories. If I may go into them and you can tell me to stop if it's too much, but I mean, one of the reasons I wrote this book is because I was bad at putting useful limits in my own life. and it started with my work where with both of my previous two books I wrote one hundred and fifty percent the length a book and then had to cut it back to the length of a book And that's very much because I didn't define the boundaries of what I was doing very well and I mean, my first book I had to cut into trip to Arctic Sweden. You know, once I became a dad, don't want to be taking trips to Arctic Sweden that you're gonna then have to cut from your work, right And that just meant I was doing so much more work So this time around actually didn't start Um I sort of did the Pixar way where you stay small really long. I didn't start writing for a year just researching and interviewing. And then at the end of that year, I forced myself to make on one page and one page only. a structural outline of the book I took a hundred thousand word but I call my master thought list read it literally printed out and read it and then said, all right, with what's in my head now, I'm making it on one page and one page only. And it forced me to prioritize ruthlessly. And so this this book is twenty percent shorter than my other two. I think it's much more efficient. I was much more efficient with my time And I turned it in early, which I didn't even know was a thing in books becausecause I really defined what I was doing a lot more carefully So so that was one way I did it, but also with You know, I used to think my competitive advantage would be allowing my work projects to swallow every moment of my life And but again, one, I actually don't even think that's right. It's like you need programmed recovery. But also again, becoming a parent, I just didn't want to do that. And so I have rituals where I end my workday again, flipping off the candle, closing the door so that my workday is contained And in my personal life I mean, I mentioned this before, but reeling back some of that autonomy that was not healthy for me. So I picked things to do where I had to have my feet in a specific place at a specific time and live there not be as the MIT professor Sherry Turkele says, forever elsewhere, which is the case when you're living in the virtual world. So again Joined a nonprofit board in my community, started going to these dance meetups, joined a dinner and discussion club where I had to be physically in certain places at certain times and had certain obligations Um, and then I just started I guess a few other things I did is I started setting satisfying rules for myself because I know my tendencies So to say Here are the things I'm trying to get done with this decision. Once those are met, no more looking, no more reading every review or whatever it is Just take it and don't look back And so that was was quite useful for me. fromr sorry, I mean, it Again, I was researching stuff that I wanted to be better at. so there were a lot of changes I made in my life. I mean, I structure my attention totally different. and priorities. like I use post it notes to make all my current commitments visible and put them on a wall And I said, all right, I can see that I could never get all these things done. So if I have to cut something out in the next month, what would it be? And I force myself to do that constantly, sububtraction audit Fr an a attention standpoint. Y Glory Marks research found that we checked People in offices check email on average seventy seven times a day. Maybe you have to answer that email That That's not seventy seven emails. That's seventy seven different checks, different times checking That toggling is terrible. And I realized I was doing, I was toggling with the email. and so now I batch it One or two or three batches a day where I'm only doing email, and then when I'm not doing it, I'm not doing it at all put my phone outside the room if I don't need it. becausecause if it's even visible Y' you'll think about checking . What she found is that we become accustomed to a certain level of interruption, a cadence.