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A director would fixate on some tiny detail in the background of a shot, like the shading on a penny that the audience may well never even notice.
And they'd have animators working on it and working on it.
That's author David Epstein.
He's describing a problem.
Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull told him about how to get people to obsess over details but still get all of their work done.
And so that's where they devised the Popsicle sticks, Velcroed to a board, with each stick representing the amount of work that one animator could do in one week.
And if they wanted to keep working on that penny...
They had to start taking popsicle sticks away from other characters.
And so making the constraint visible showed people the tradeoff they're making and had this instant effect of helping them clarify their priorities and knowing where they should put their energy.
This is Masters of Scale.
I'm Jeff Berman, your host.
I am thrilled to be here today.
He has a brilliant new book out called Inside the Box How Constraints Make Us Better.
David, welcome to Masters of Scale.
Thank you so much for having me.
I really like been so looking forward to this.
I was late to range.
I found it just a few months ago.
How to get your priorities straight.
I do.
I do.
Well, the good news is I'm early to inside the box.
So, you know, I'm making up for it here.
You know, when I was reading range, this is almost like embarrassingly self-referential, but I felt really seen.
Because it's not many people who do what I do now, who started their careers as a public defender in Washington DC and have had kind of this zigzagging career.
And I think, in a world where there's so much focus on building skills, and especially when you're a parent and like getting a kid into a sport or into an activity coding, whatever it is
The data backed layout that you do in range is a really powerful case for diversifying how we spend our time.
I appreciate that.
And it's interesting you mentioned coding, right?
Because a few years ago it said, all right, learn to code and you'll always be safe.
And now it's maybe the least safe feeling thing.
But to build on that, there was just a paper in Science, you know, one of the probably two most prestigious scientific journals in the world.
It aggregated about 30,000 careers of musicians, scientists, athletes.
What it found was basically the thesis of range that the indicators of elite youth performance were basically negatively associated with those of elite adult performance, that you can optimize for the short-term if you want to make the best kid.
But that often undermines long term development, whether it comes to learning an individual skill, picking a career and so forth.
And that's even more true in a world that's really rapidly changing, where people can't just count on next year looking like last year.
So, you know, there's been some more validation and the idea of feeling seen.
I mean, the same thing happened to me.
Right.
I was training to be a scientist before I was a writer.
And so I felt seen while I was doing the research.
So I'm just curious because there's and this really feeds into the conceit of, inside the box, how constraints make us better.
You have extraordinary range.
You could choose almost anything to write about.
How do you decide what your next book is?
How did you pick this as a subject?
Oh, yeah.
You're hitting almost what I would call a sore spot here a little bit, because one of the reasons I did this book is because I was terrible at putting constraints on myself and in my own work.
And so after Range, I was able to become independent as a writer.
And I said, gosh, books are so much work.
I'm not doing it again unless I find the perfect topic.
And I have such wide interest that I was like dabbling in all these different topics and never picking.
And then I came across this quote by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the researcher who coined the term flow to describe the feeling of immersion in an activity.
And he was talking about marriage, but I think you could apply what he was saying to anything.
He said you know, the great thing about being committed by your own choice to something is that you can stop wondering how to live and start spending your energy living instead of wondering what's always around the corner.
And I was like, man, that's what I'm doing with book topics right now.
I have a bunch of stuff I'm fascinated in, but I keep saying, well, what's around the corner?
And one of those things I was fascinated in was constraints.
And then reading that quote, it dawned on me that I needed this help myself.
I said, I'm writing a proposal on this tomorrow.
And of course, two weeks later, I'm 10 times as interested in it.
Right.
And so my problem is not having enough ideas to write about.
It's deciding what to actually execute on.
Was there a point along the way in researching and writing the book where you had a crisis of confidence that this was the right thing to be writing about?
Or did you?
No.
Yes.
Yes.
Oh, my gosh.
Adam Grant, the psychologist, tells me I was at some point.
I was talking to him about my ideas in the book.
And he said, you're a defensive pessimist.
I had not heard that before.
He said you think every one of your ideas like you get excited about it, then you're sure it's going to fail.
And then you work really hard to make it not fail.
I guess that's what a defensive pessimist is.
But no, I absolutely go through this phase where I think something's fascinating.
It's going to work.
I'm so fired up.
And then there's a phase where it's just What did I get myself into?
I can't believe I thought this was going to work.
I start taking my own books down from the shelf and looking at them being like.
I know this is possible because this thing is in my hands right here.
There's this famous contrived chart that shows the entrepreneur's journey, right?
And it ends up going up and to the right.
But in between, it's this incredible oscillation.
So I think every entrepreneur can relate to that.
Like, we're going to crush it.
We're going to win.
Like, we've got this.
And then an hour later, we're going to fail.
It's a disaster, etc.
I had been so bad with my previous books at putting useful boundaries in place that I wrote 150 the length of a book and then had to cut back to get a book.
This time around, partly at the suggestion of Tony Fadell, who's a character in the book and was the co-founder of Nest, I decided to make a one-page and one-page only outline of what I was trying to do, focus on what is the problem that I'm trying to address.
So you referenced Tony Fadell who, through incredible doggedness, ends up at a company called General Magic, which is perhaps the paradigmatic case study of having too much in the way of resources.
I'd love to understand how you came to understand the General Magic problem and how that then informed both your research and the conclusions you offer in the book.
So my first exposure to General Magic was seeing a documentary about the company and just thinking it was utterly fascinating.
And reaching out to the filmmakers and basically asking if they had other footage, because they had real time footage of this company.
That was the first so-called concept IPO in Silicon Valley history where Goldman Sachs took them public with an idea, not a product.
And they were basically making the iPhone, you know, 20 years too early.
And resources poured in, talent poured in, and they could do anything.
And so they did do anything, basically.
And every good idea they had.
Someone built it and the product just became completely incoherent and nobody knew what to do with it.
When I was interviewing lots of former employees of General Magic, the refrain was basically I just couldn't figure out what not to do.
Like they didn't know what not to do.
And to me it became, like you said, emblematic of all this other research where, in the abstract because Mark Peratt, the CEO said, his goal in raising all this money and getting all this talent so fast was total freedom, no limits.
And it just dovetailed with all this research about how, in the abstract And even in rational actor models of human decision making, more choice, more opportunity, more research, more talent, always better.
Can't be worse.
And then you look at the actual research of how our brains work, how people find satisfaction, how they make good decisions, how they focus their energy.
And it's not that at all.
Having too much makes us unsatisfied, leaves us adrift, doesn't you know?
We can't focus our energies.
And so I thought the company was kind of emblematic of this, this larger swath of research that wasn't just about businesses but also about personal decision making.
So I feel like it's never been easier to do too much than it is right now, whether you are an organization or an individual.
And so it really felt almost personal to me in that way.
There's so much in this book that is actionable, that is really high value.
And it's not just the kind of negative lessons of something like General Magic.
The Pixar stories really struck me here in particular to one, this idea of trying to engineer away from people getting too attached to to their ideas too early on um and so pixar engineered this really creative solution to that that i'd love to hear you talk about yeah i think you're talking about the three pitches rule that's exactly right and pixar the reason i wanted to contrast it with general magic is because it was evolving at the same time equally audacious vision make the world's first fully computer animated feature film And I think it's viewed as this place of unfettered imagination when, in fact, it is a place of very many fetters and rules and guardrails and all these things that channel those creative ideas.
And the three pitches rule.
They found that people would get attached to their first idea directors pitching stories even though it usually wasn't their best idea.
And there's actually science behind this.
It's called the creative cliff illusion.
We think that our best idea comes first or not at all, but actually that's not the case.
It's usually the convenient idea that comes first.
And so they forced people to pitch three ideas, and they often would end up not with their first idea.
So it's kind of a rule that would help save directors from getting attached too early.
And so I think Pixar really had a lot of insight into human psychology.
And so they set up all sorts of rules to to sort of save people from themselves.
The other thing that I thought was fascinating in the Pixar storytelling was the hyper fixation on small details, which is part of the beauty of Pixar movies but also can lead to a massive misallocation of resources.
And they engineered, I don't remember if it's called the Popsicle stick solution.
That's how I understood it. as a way to solve that.
I'd love for you to walk us through that as well.
Yeah, and this was when I was hanging out with Ed Catmull, who was the co-founder, telling me about it.
What he called it was the beautifully shaded penny problem, where a director would fixate on some tiny detail in the background of a shot like the shading on a penny that the audience may well never even notice.
And they'd have animators working on it and working on it.
Meanwhile, they were losing sight of things where they really needed to spend time and energy.
And so that's where they devised the solution.
You're referring to popsicle sticks Velcroed to a board, with each stick representing the amount of work that one animator could do in one week.
And if they wanted to keep working on that penny, They had to start taking popsicle sticks away from other characters.
And so making the constraint visible showed people the trade-off they're making and had this instant effect of helping them clarify their priorities and knowing where they should put their energy.
There was one part of the book that I took a photo of and sent.
It's an old quote of Bill Gurley's where I think I'll get this right.
He says more startups dive indigestion than starvation.
I just joined the board of a company in stealth mode and the founder was articulating some concerns about being pushed to do too many things too early.
I sent him a picture and I just said, like, keep doing what you're doing.
Like, say no.
I'm so excited you're sending pictures of this book around.
I love this.
Very validating.
I don't know how big your fanboy community is, but like, sign me up to be chair of it, David.
Because your books are actionable and they unlock.
And this really unlocked in a meaningful way.
But we are in this era where we can take on a lot more work because we can have agents doing it on our behalf or doing 70 80 90, 99 percent of it on our behalf.
Are we in a different moment now?
Like, should we be rethinking this indigestion and starvation equation in this moment?
Yeah, it's an interesting question.
So, first of all, I think there's infinite ability now to start a million things that we're not going to finish.
And I think...
A lot of people have been doing that.
Right.
The potential, obviously, of AI.
I mean, it's cut certain things that I do from 10 hours into one hour.
Right.
So I'm a fan.
But at the same time, I've spent over the last year, spent some time with one particular AI company that helps other companies implement AI.
And one of the things I've noticed in that experience you know, just sort of doing it for my own research and understanding purposes was that a lot of these companies are implementing in this sprawling fashion.
Basically,
And they know they need to do it.
They need to do it fast.
Everyone else is doing it.
And so they're implementing.
And it's leading to a lot of what researchers are starting to call work slop.
You know, just like tons of volume of stuff that is unclear, exactly if it's addressing the strategy or not.
And the companies that seemed to do it more successfully again from the ones that I was exposed to were first defining a problem really well,
And once that problem was defined, what tool matches this problem?
Or a few of the organizations would do what they called mapping the jobs to be done.
And what are the actual jobs that need to be done here, and which of these can that tool do, or which human can that free up to think more strategically?
So, on the one hand, I think we can do more than ever, and that we will certainly see smaller organizations able to do things that look, you know, in the past, like they would have had to be much bigger.
But I think, on the other hand, it's more important than ever to really define our problems well, so we understand how we want to implement these tools.
And also and this is a little different type of constraint, but in organizations, people are going to use these tools, whether they're officially allowed to or not, right?
Yep.
They're doing it.
And, in some cases, if they're using the public models, that could actually put an organization at some risk.
And so I think it's probably important for leaders to sort of create models, the guardrails, and then say please, experiment and let the flowers bloom, instead of just having this disjointed thing where everyone's doing it according to their own way.
So setting some of those constraints and say now experiment, because you're going to be able to find out where this produces some efficiencies, but creating that playing space for people.
Still ahead.
More with David Epstein about when constraints help and when they go just a little too far.
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I had constraints imposed on me when I was a public defender for sure.
I had a lot fewer constraints imposed on me when I worked at Myspace in Myspace's heyday or at the National Football League.
Is there a difference?
In leading teams, where the constraints are imposed from the outside, they're real, they're unavoidable, versus the ones that you create for your team.
Yes and no, because I think, in either case, constraints can do two of the great things they do, which is force you to clarify priorities or launch you into productive exploration, or both at the same time.
So, to give an example, one of the early readers of this book was a guy named Ed Hoffman, who was NASA's chief knowledge officer, sort of like a psychologist who's supposed to ensure there's institutional memory, basically created when NASA had some mistakes and a position that they had to have.
And Ed said oh, let me tell you about this mission called LCROSS, where Engineers ended up with half the time and half the money that they expected.
And so what did they do?
Well, they whined and complained a little.
And then they said, if we were going to get this done anyway, how would we do it?
And they couldn't build from scratch, so they had to borrow technology.
So they took imaging equipment from Army tanks and engine temperature sensors from NASCAR and built a probe that confirmed water on the moon.
And so it was really successful and they never would have thought that way otherwise.
Now, if it had been a quarter of the time and money instead of a half, would they have been able to do it?
I don't know where exactly that line is.
I mean, I think, if you get to a line and you're so constrained, whether by outside forces or by your own boss,
And you say, can I surprise myself here?
And if the answer is no, then it's gone too far, right?
But if there's still a chance to surprise yourself, I actually think that wherever the constraints come from, they can be really useful.
Emotionally, I think people want to feel a sense of agency.
And when the constraints are externally imposed, there can be a problem with people feeling like they don't have a sense of agency and this is something being done to them.
So my hope I don't know if this is realistic, but my hope would be that maybe the book can be sort of an emotional reframe for people who find themselves in that situation, because it can be a really powerful tool.
But it's hard. but it's what psychologists call a desirable difficulty.
A lot of things that are good for us and get the best out of us are not easy.
David, you're trained to be a scientist.
Most of us in business are not trained that way.
What can business leaders learn from scientists to be better at leading their teams and building their organizations?
Yeah, I think there's a certain kind of adaptability and ability to pivot that they can learn from scientists.
And in fact there's some research I go into in Inside the Box where different founders were trained in different types of market research, evaluating their value proposition.
And some of them were randomized to get trained in a scientific method version of this, where they make a hypothesis about what do they think is their value add.
And then they have to commit to a way to go test it.
And some decision rule, you know, they measure are they right or wrong.
And the companies that got that kind of training very often found out that some assumption they made about the value they were providing was wrong.
They had not read the market right.
They had not read their customers right.
And they often pivoted and were much more likely to succeed.
Whereas the ones that got kind of the standard training were much more likely to basically retrofit whatever they heard to their story and pivoted much more rarely.
So I think prospectively making a hypothesis about what you're trying to do that scientists need to be better about this too.
This is one of the reasons so much scientific work hasn't replicated because scientists haven't been as good about prospectively making their prediction and sticking to it.
Prospectively making a prediction even if this is something you're trying with your team predict what you think is going to happen before you start, And that will help you figure out when you see the actual result.
Do I need to update my model of the world or of the market or of my team?
Proactively commit to predictions.
And similarly, I mean, in range, I wrote about people who are good at forecasting.
And one of the most important habits of people who improved at forecasting was just recording their predictions in the first place, because otherwise we have this bias where we We say well, I basically got that right, or we sort of tweak the story.
So write it down and that will help you update your worldview and you'll become a better thinker in general.
We're in a moment in our country where we do feel so much more divided than united, notwithstanding all the data, all the evidence that we have so much more in common than not.
And you know, as I pull on what I see as one of the through lines between range and inside the box, you profile people who really are attacking problems that don't have obvious answers.
The vision of Pixar is a great example, right?
I mean, so far ahead of its time, and yet they got there.
It fills me with a lot of hope.
It's grounded optimism, which I feel like is in short supply right now.
If you were sitting with political leaders and talking, they were saying David look, we got to figure this out.
We got to be better.
We have to lead us out of this mess somehow.
What are the lessons from your research that you would be sharing with them?
Yeah, I mean, I think the first leap there is they would actually have to want to do that.
And I think political landscape in many ways has become an extension of influencer culture.
And bringing people together is not really... the way that influencer culture works.
Right.
It's often making people angry or giving them shortcut solutions that are not really true to talk about being in person.
And I'm here in D.C.
I know a fair number of people who used to be in Congress.
And one of the things that some of them have told me is that there used to be a time when you would spend more time in DC.
And then there was a rebellion to that, saying no no, you should, you know, to win your primaries, all these things.
Go spend your time, or win your elections.
Go spend your time in your district at home.
And so they spend very little time in D.C.
And that might make sense.
Say, oh, we want our politicians like where the rubber meets the road.
But in fact what it means is that they don't.
Their kids aren't in the same schools or they're not in the same baseball teams and they don't develop relationships with people across the aisle and they don't end up working together because they don't know each other.
And so I think that's actually a really bad thing.
Like we need them to be going on runs together and having lunch together and all of those things, as people with diametrically opposed views.
I mean when I wrote my first book and criticized Malcolm Gladwell quite a bit.
You know who, obviously you know probably the most famous nonfiction writer in the world at the time.
What specifically were you criticizing Gladwell about?
What what what was the substance of what you were saying he was wrong about?
Yeah, in my first book I was criticizing the research underlying the so-called 10000 hours rule and then his popularization of it.
The idea that the only route to exceptional performance is through 10000 hours so-called deliberate practice, highly technical, effortful practice.
And that brought us together for a debate.
It was specifically about sports development at this thing called the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference.
And there I said you know the data that actually track.
Yes, elite athletes spend more time in deliberate practice than lower level athletes.
But the studies that track them over the course of their development show that early on they spent less time in deliberate practice in that activity than peers who plateau at lower levels.
They have what scientists call a sampling period broad variety of activities where you learn general skills, now called physical literacy.
You learn about your own interests and abilities and delay specializing until later than peers who plateau at lower levels.
And so he acknowledged when we were coming off stage.
He said that does not fit with what I thought.
Why don't we run together?
We were in Boston when we're back in New York tomorrow, because we'd both been national level middle distance runners and we'll talk about on our own time.
And so we started running together every weekend and we came to call it the Roger versus Tiger problem, because Tiger Woods early specializer, Roger Federer early diversity and Which is how range opens.
That's where range starts.
Roger versus Tiger.
Yep.
That was right out of our debates.
And once we became good enough friends I said Malcolm, you know, you really could have just kind of crushed me in that initial debate.
I wasn't particularly well known, anything like that.
And he said, I have the luxury of learning from my critics.
And that always stuck with me.
And he really became a role model for me in that sense where it's not just someone yelling at you on the internet, but if it's an earnest critic you really can say what is there for me to learn here?
Like, if you write about science, especially something you write about is going to be wrong, whether it may be misinterpreted or, or more likely, some of the science, no matter how much vetting you do.
And I do a ton.
Something may not replicate or it might be altered in the future.
And so you have to be open to finding out that you need to update your your beliefs on something.
And so he set a great model for me and I've tried to live that way ever since.
One of these my wife has introduced our relationship is when.
We have something constructively critical to share and obviously want to frame it the right way and with kindness.
But the initial response is always thank you for telling me.
I love that.
No matter how hard it was to hear.
And I've tried to implement this not just with my friends but at work and what have you, because it
It reinforces this I'm open to the informed criticism, to the thoughtful criticism and it suppresses whatever defensiveness you might be leading with by forcing you to say okay, thank you for telling me.
Now I'm going to take a moment to reflect on that and put myself in a mindset of having a conversation.
So I think it works both for the person saying it and for the person receiving it and helps create an environment where where that's more welcome and more it's normalized and easier to do.
So I love I love that story.
And I want to I want to really reflect on how how we integrate more of that into our work lives.
Yeah, I love that.
Kind of what you just said reminds me a little bit of the engineer Wernher von Braun, who led the development of the Saturn V rocket that first put humans on the moon.
And he had these notes where his engineering team leads would pass around their questions every week on one sheet of paper and he'd write handwritten notes in the margin and recirculate them.
And sometimes he'd put congrats if someone found a big anomaly, because he wanted to be seen when he recirculated it, thanking people for bringing up problems basically, which I thought was pretty cool.
And even I mean we had talked about earlier you know how Adam Grant told me I'm a defensive pessimist.
And I have to say when he said that, a little bit it stung a little bit because I don't think I think of myself as quite optimistic person, general about the world and human capacity and all these things.
So it was a little bit like taken aback.
But then I realized he was right in terms of me thinking about my own projects and and that actually turned out to be really useful for me, even though it kind of stung a little bit at first because I think of myself as optimistic.
But yeah, I tried to use Malcolm as a model and say well, what can I learn from this?
Because what he's telling me is true And that always stuck with me, this idea that an earnest critic you can actually learn from.
But I think you actually have to respect them as a human being.
And if you're only social media posting to each other, that's not realistic.
And so I think I would actually try to force these people to spend time with one another so they actually care about one another if they disagree.
And then I think it becomes a lot harder to do this sort of flamethrowing that really inflames the public.
There's one chapter in Inside the Box that talks about the importance of social norms that are constraints on human behavior that make strangers more predictable to one another.
And that in economic history, these turned out to be incredibly important in allowing people to trust strangers so they could collaborate outside their kinship networks.
And that preceded a lot of the technological innovation that then led to shared prosperity.
And when those norms erode, people start trusting strangers less.
The proportion of people that answer in surveys they trust strangers.
Tightly related to per capita GDP on a national basis.
And when that goes down, you see less collaboration and less prosperity.
And I think we have some danger with that right now.
I just saw there was a Pew survey out that showed America is now the only country where a majority of adults it was a small majority, but a majority said that other people have bad morals.
That's a bad sign.
And so I think I would ask some of these politicians to try to rebuild some of those social norms and behaviors of public decorum.
Because they are role models, like it or not, and whatever their political beliefs are.
If that trust between strangers degrades, I don't care what your policies are.
You're jeopardizing shared prosperity.
I really appreciate that perspective and it takes me back just a little over 20 years ago, which feels like a lifetime ago, when I left Capitol Hill.
But I was working for a member of the Senate Democratic leadership.
My counterpart on our subcommittee was Jeff Sessions as chief counsel, and Ed Haddon was – you know, a good old boy from Alabama with a bunch of fancy degrees.
And Ed and I had lunch every month.
And we sat out in the open in the Senate cafeteria and we got criticized by you know, people on each of our sides for doing it.
But I got to know him as a human.
And, you know, Ed is an incredibly bright person.
He's deeply patriotic, really cares about our country.
We just happen to see the world really differently.
But there was no world in which I could look at Ed and say, this is a bad person.
I love this this point because it goes well beyond politics and frankly, it goes beyond business.
It goes to the world that we live in and that we want to live in.
And your Gladwell story is really helpful there.
And I hope I hope people take that to heart.
And there are there are books that I will speed read and kind of get the gist.
And you know, if you get one or two good, actionable insights out of them, you know it's been worth the few hours you spend with it.
And then there are books that you crib the ever living daylights out of.
And Inside the Box is one of those books.
So I can't recommend it highly enough.
I'm super grateful.
The book is Inside the Box, How Constraints Make Us Better.
I encourage everyone to pick it up, pick up Range and Sports Gene as well.
And David, hope to get to see you again soon.
That would be my pleasure.
Thanks so much, Jeff.
Thanks for being on Masters of Scale.
Masters of Scale is a Wait What original.
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