David Epstein on Constraints, Attention, and Narrative Values

David Epstein

He was one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century, but most people don't know his name. He was trained as a political scientist but won the Turing Award for co-creating the first AI demonstration. He won the highest award in psychology and was one of the founders of cognitive psychology, and for good measure he won the Nobel in economics. When a graduate student once asked him to explain his mastery of these multiple fields, he said, "All I'm really doing is exploring human decision-making."

One of his most important findings was called bounded rationality — the fact that humans do not adhere to the rational actor model of classical economics, where we evaluate all options and choose the best one. We have finite bandwidth, mixed motivations, and instead we use mental shortcuts. Satisfice is a word Simon coined — a combination of "satisfy" and "suffice" — meaning we take a good-enough path to make things comprehensible.

He argued we should do this proactively in our personal lives. Simon wore the same brand of socks every day, the same beret, had the same breakfast, and told his daughter that one only needed three pairs of clothes: one on one's body, one in the wash, one in the closet ready to wear. He was deliberately setting good-enough rules so he wasn't wasting energy agonising over every decision, and so he wasn't falling prey to Fredkin's paradox — where we spend the most time on the least important decisions because the options are so similar that more deliberation probably doesn't help. Simon researched both the importance of putting constraints around problems to drive creativity and this personal aspect of setting up boundaries so you don't drive yourself crazy.

David Epstein

A maximiser — the opposite of a satisficer — is someone trying to optimise all their decisions, to evaluate as many options as possible and get the very best. It turns out that's almost always a bad thing to be. Maximisers are less happy with their decisions, less happy with their lives, much more prone to regret, and much more likely to prefer reversible solutions — even though reversible solutions make them less happy and often prevent them from committing.

There's evidence that maximising tendencies are on the rise. The theory is that it's now so easy to endlessly compare yourself to other possible decisions you could have made — because of the internet — that people never stop agonising over a decision even once it's made. One of the sadly funny findings in the research was that since infinite scrolling appeared, people have been getting progressively more bored based on international surveys. Just the idea that there is some other thing you could be watching or reading helps spoil the experience of the moment you're actually in.

David Epstein

In 8th grade I was playing quarterback in a schoolyard football game in gym class. Because I had a good throwing arm, instead of kicking off you would throw as far as you could. My arm snapped in two on the follow-through — a freak injury, no contact, nothing. I've only seen this happen one other time with an athlete, and that guy had to have his arm amputated. So what exactly happened will never be known.

The repercussion was that I was out of sport. I lived for sport — that was the sun around which my days orbited. With my arm strapped to my body, I couldn't keep up with French class tests where you had to fill in blanks while listening to a recording. So instead I started trying to memorise the words as they went by, then slowly go back and write them down with my left hand. I started using mnemonics — memory tools attaching each word to some sports statistic or thought. And I started doing better than I had ever done before.

Years later I would read one of the most famous studies ever done on memory, which took a Carnegie Mellon undergraduate from memorising seven digits in a row to 80 digits, using sports-related mnemonic devices. That constraint also led me — because I couldn't play contact sports for a year — to take up cross-country and track just to stay in shape. I ended up becoming a division-one runner and a university record holder. I never would have tested those sports if not for the injury.

David Epstein

Yes. In my first two books I wrote 150% of the length I was allotted and then had to cut it back. Once I became a parent I couldn't afford that kind of waste. This time, inspired by an entrepreneur I was interviewing, I made a structural outline for the book on one page, and one page only. If it's not on that page, it is not in the book.

If there's a mindset shift I hope this book engenders, it's to go from seeing limits as just bad to seeing them as opportunities to clarify priorities and launch productive exploration. That one-page outline did both of those things for me. It forced me to ruthlessly prioritise and to experiment with structures that could fit the pieces together. I did that before I started writing, and this is the first time I wrote the length of a book to get a book instead of way over length. I turned it in early — which is a thing I wasn't sure was even allowed.

David Epstein

Simon was starting to see the future, though I don't know if he would have seen all the way to where we are now. When psychologist Gloria Mark began monitoring people at work about 25 years ago — sitting behind them with a stopwatch — people switched the task they were working on about every three minutes. Ten years later it was more like a minute and a half. By 2022 it was 45 seconds, where it seems to have plateaued.

Multitasking is not really possible. You have to stop doing one thing and then activate a different set of rules in your brain to pick up the next thing. Think of your brain like a whiteboard: when you switch tasks you erase it, but there's a residue — what psychologists call attentional residue — that carries over and occupies some of your resources for the next task. The amount of toggling someone does predicts their end-of-day productivity negatively, and is a positive predictor of stress measured by physiological markers such as heart rate variability.

Mark found that people in offices check email about 77 distinct times a day on average. If you can batch that down to one, two, or five blocks, you're going to be more productive and less stressed. For me, I try to batch types of work so that I'm monotasking over the course of the day in different blocks. The scariest finding in the book is that if you've become accustomed to a cadence of interruption, your brain will maintain that rhythm even when the distractors disappear — you'll self-interrupt with intrusive thoughts at the same cadence. You have to actively retrain your attention. It doesn't take long: there is measurable improvement in a few days. Put a pad next to you and write down intrusive thoughts — what I call cognitive outsourcing — to take them out of working memory.

David Epstein

As a writer, I used this as an excuse to shadow one of the great living writers. Isabel did not start writing until she was almost 40 — she's now sold 80 million books. She began because she was in exile from Chile after a coup overthrew a relative, and when she learned her grandfather back home was passing away she started writing him a letter recounting all the stories he had told her. That letter became a novel. She started it on January 8th, and from then on she started every new book on January 8th.

Her life has this incredible structure: in the lead-up to that date, people know that if you want to talk to Isabel, it has to be before then. She goes through rituals of cleaning out her workspace, creating silence. She lights a candle to start her workday and blows it out to end it. She would work in a clothes closet if she needed to — whatever space she designated was the space. She usually spends several weeks at the opening knowing she won't keep anything — it's all thrown out, just the warm-up of getting into the mode she needs to be in. This has produced a bestselling book roughly every 18 months for 40 straight years.

When you read profiles of her they often portray her as some kind of magical medium, because some of her books have magical realism. The reality of her daily life could not be further from that. The real secret was silence and structure — exactly the things we know we should create for ourselves and almost never actually do.

David Epstein

The theory of constraints originated with an Israeli physicist named Eliyahu Goldratt, who was studying how atoms behave in crystals when a friend asked him to look at his chicken-coop building business. The friend had added workers and production hadn't improved. Goldratt found that work was always piling up at a certain spot: it didn't matter that earlier stages were going faster, because it all backed up at the bottleneck. He moved one worker from a fast step to the slowest one and tripled overall output. That became the core insight: the output of a system is limited by its single least efficient step.

He later wrote a novel called The Goal about a plant manager who has to save his factory and can't understand why new machines haven't improved overall output. It spawned a whole school of management thinking. The fixes it engenders often seem obvious in retrospect but nobody thinks about them in advance. One case study I researched involved a company making custom gearboxes — every one totally customised. A theory-of-constraints audit found the bottleneck was a small 15-person design office where staff were switching between projects about 55 times a day. They implemented one rule: "stop starting and start finishing" — you're not allowed to begin a new design until you've finished the current one. Within months they tripled the number of designs coming out the door and cut the time from order to delivery from a year to two months.

Goldratt wrote the foreword to the 1,200-page theory-of-constraints handbook and said: "Can I summarise all of theory of constraints in one sentence? I think I can do it in one word. Focus. The bottleneck shows you where to focus."

David Epstein

Sheila Taormina. She was a swimmer at the University of Georgia in 1992 who tried to make the Olympic team in the 200-metre freestyle, failed, didn't come particularly close, and decided to retire. For her last class she took Management 577, learned about the theory of constraints, and decided her class project would be applying it to her own training to unretire and drop three seconds in the event.

She's only 5'2" — very small for an elite swimmer — with an extraordinary aerobic engine. And that's what her coaches had her working on: swimming volume. She was developing the thing she was already good at and ignoring what was actually limiting her. She concluded her bottleneck was strength and power. She changed coaches, found one willing to focus entirely on that, and four years later made the Olympic team — swimming exactly three seconds faster — and won a gold medal as part of the relay team.

Then she retired and took up triathlon, now approaching training with the same lens: find the limiting factor. She won the US national championships, competed in the Olympics in triathlon, then again in the next Olympics. Retired again, learned fencing and show jumping, went to a fourth Olympics in modern pentathlon. She is the only woman ever to have competed in three different sports across four Summer Olympics — and it all started from retiring in 1992 and then taking a management class.

I had my own version of this. As a walk-on 800-metre runner in college, nobody cared what I was doing so I had time to experiment. I realised my bottleneck was recovery — I simply couldn't bounce back from hard workouts at the same rate as my peers. By the time Wednesday's workout arrived I wasn't recovered from Monday. I scheduled class over one workout a week so I had an excuse not to show up, cut my mileage from 80 miles a week down to about 35, and focused on recovery. It worked like rocket fuel. I not only made the team but became a university record holder.

David Epstein

To me, Inside the Box felt like a natural progression from Range, in part because the most common reader question I got was along the lines of: "I've collected all these broad experiences and broad skills — now what?" I felt that way myself. I have a zigzagging career, expansive curiosity, and great trouble drawing boundaries around my own projects. The need for constraints is especially important for people like that.

The opening of the book tells the story of the discovery of the periodic table. Dmitri Mendeleev was a massive polymath — he left his mark on nearly every industry in Russia — but he needed certain constraints to channel all of that breadth into a particular achievement. And he had one: a deadline for a textbook he was writing. The vision motivates, but the constraint channels.

I find great value in diving into apparent contradictions and trying to find reality within them. Life is messy, and that's where it gets most interesting — how do we find our way through? If range is building a broad toolkit, the question is: how do you focus that into actual achievement so you're not just pinballing your whole life?

David Epstein

That makes perfect sense when I think about him as a thinker — he was someone willing to grapple with ambiguity in ways that few people ever have. You mentioned I critiqued Gladwell and some of Angela Duckworth's grit research publicly. Those two people became friends of mine and are among my favourite people to talk to. I love having the both-sides-of-the-coin discussion. Even Gladwell has more or less come around to my side, so it's perhaps less both-sides now. But even looking at my last two books — breadth, then constraints — the apparent contradiction is where reality lives for most people. The rubber meets the road not in an either/or but in finding your way through.

David Epstein

General Magic was making the iPhone about 20 years too early. They had the perfect vision — they really did — but they couldn't execute because they had too much freedom. As Bill Gurley told me: more startups die of indigestion than starvation. Too much rather than too little. Every cool idea someone had went into the project, and it just grew and grew out of control. They also failed to define their customer — they called him "Joe Sixpack" and after years of missed deadlines realised nobody knew who that was.

Mark Porat, the CEO behind General Magic, and Ed Catmull were in graduate school at exactly the same time, both looking about 20 years into the future: Porat at communications technology, Catmull at computer animation. Both had groups of incredibly creative people. But where General Magic got as big and did as much as possible as quickly as possible, Pixar stayed as small as possible for as long as possible. Ed made it his life's work to put boundaries in place that channelled creative ideas into creative achievement.

At Pixar, directors could stay in story development with a small team for years — stripping away characters, refining the core. That's how they lost the Sigmund Freud character in an early pass on Inside Out. It might seem inefficient, but costs only explode once you move into production; keeping things small until they really have to get big is actually the efficient approach. They had a rule called the three-pitches rule: you're not allowed to pitch one idea — you have to pitch three, because directors anchor on their first idea even when it isn't their best.

One of my favourites was their antidote to what Ed called the "beautifully shaded penny" problem — where animators would get fixated on tiny background details the audience would probably never notice and spend weeks on them. Pixar created a system where popsicle sticks on a board each represented one animator-week of work. If you wanted to keep refining that penny, you had to take a stick away from some other character that needed animation. That very quickly made trade-offs visual. As Ed told me: there are tons of good ideas in organisations. What's comparatively rare is a structured system for channelling those ideas into something that actually matters.

David Epstein

Written in 1952, well before we actually went to the moon, it goes chapter by chapter: here's one problem that has to be solved — how to get out of Earth's gravity, what a space suit will have to do, how to eat in space, and so on. NASA officials used this book when telling Congress they thought the mission was feasible. Ed pulled it off his shelf — amid mostly adult books — to show me: "This is what we did. The vision is the moon, but what is every little chapter of some problem we know has to be solved on the way?"

When Ed set his goal in the 1970s to make the world's first fully computer-animated feature film, the cutting edge was solid shapes rotating on black backgrounds. Twenty years later he did it with Toy Story. Along the way he was very good at resisting the temptation to jump ahead. When a competitor bought a supercomputer, he sat down, calculated how many pixels they'd need, the processing power required, and how many of those machines they'd need for a full film. The answer was: it would cost a billion dollars just for the computers. He concluded the competitor had made a stupid move, went back to solving intermediate problems — how to make an image look blurred when it's moving — and was right. The vision guides, but it doesn't tell you what to do. You need these much smaller, actionable chunks in the short term.

David Epstein

Robert Johnson is one of the first inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and is most famous for the myth that he sold his soul to the devil — the story that he was not a good musician, disappeared for a year, and came back the greatest guitar player in the world. It's mentioned in his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame citation and inspired a film with Ralph Macchio.

What actually happened was that he left town and went to a place called Bogard in Mississippi, where a slightly older and better guitarist agreed to teach him. They would go most nights to a cemetery and work on guitar together. The reality was much more pedestrian than the myth — but I think more interesting. They went to the cemetery because it was quiet and there was nobody to interrupt them. Silence and structure: exactly what Isabel Allende needs, exactly what Gloria Mark says would be the ideal conditions for focused learning.

I road-tripped rural Mississippi so I could sit alone in that cemetery at midnight, just to try to experience what they experienced. I found two graves that were basically benches near one another where the moonlight makes a perfect spotlight. If I had to guess where they sat, that would be the spot. It was an expensive trip — I broke the windshield on the rental car driving down the crossroads — and it produced one paragraph in the book. But it was a reminder that this thing we all know we should do — create silence and structure — we almost never actually do.

David Epstein

After my first few years as a writer I started to view full autonomy as my Mount Olympus — only topics of my own choosing, on deadlines of my own choosing, spending every moment only as I chose. At a writer's retreat where we all had to say what we were optimising for that year, I said: autonomy.

Fast-forward a few years and I learned there is such a thing as too much. I had so little structure that I was making decisions all the time. Not only did I have decision fatigue and a lack of the stability that structure provides, but some of my relationships were suffering because I had individualised my schedule so much I wasn't inconveniencing myself to sync up with other people. I was not thriving.

So I started reeling some of that back. I joined the board of a nonprofit in my community — which meant obligations to be in certain places with other people at certain times. I started dance classes, which meant a commitment, a place to be at a certain time. Once I got into the research I understood why. The Harvard Study of Adult Development ran for 86 years — the longest longitudinal study on adult development, following people from cradle to grave across multiple generations — and what it found is that you want a dense network of reciprocal obligations. That cuts against a life as convenient as it could be. Having that friction provides structure, causes us to sync with other people's schedules, and gives a great deal of meaning to human life.

It always feels like you want more autonomy and more freedom. It's beguiling. But it's not necessarily good for us. As Jonathan Haidt told me, it's not good for anyone to have access to everything everywhere all at once. And there's research on medical decision-making showing that the large majority of people say they want to be involved in choosing their cancer treatment — but almost nobody who actually gets cancer wants that responsibility when it arrives. The idea of having the choice seems appealing in the abstract; the reality is different.

David Epstein

This idea of narrative values comes from a group of philosophers who study how to feel that your life has meaning. What they mean by narrative values are essentially themes in the story of your life — themes that are recognisable if you look back at your life and tell its story to yourself, as if it were a film. For me some of those things were curiosity, open-mindedness, and diligence.

The reason to do this is twofold. First, it helps you have a more coherent identity, which we know is really important for well-being. Second, it helps you consolidate your caring. In a single day of reading the news you could find more things to care about than you could ever attend to in a lifetime. So having a set of themes — here are my values, here are the places where I can add something, here are the threads of my story — instead of being overwhelmed by all the things you could be doing, everything has to interact with those themes. It brings a coherence that adds meaning in a way that can escape us if we have a less coherent story.

I also decided to add forgiveness to my narrative values — something I've not been good at. A close friend of mine named Ben Helfgott was the only living Olympian to have survived a concentration camp, a two-time British weightlifting champion whose entire family except one sister was wiped out in the Holocaust. He became a leader of a group called The Boys — about 750 mostly boys orphaned from Poland who were taken in by England after the war. Every year Ben would preach to them: we have to go back. You have to go back to Poland, to Germany. Build bridges. The people today are not responsible for what happened to you. Seeing that level of forgiveness made me realise I should be better. Rather than saying vaguely "I want to be a better person," I said: forgiveness is a theme I want to add to my story. When the opportunity comes up I'll remember that. It's made a big difference.

David Epstein

I've had a lot of trouble grappling with her death. Jill had two incredibly rare diseases: a type of muscular dystrophy called Emery-Dreifuss that caused muscle wasting, and a much rarer form of fat wasting called partial lipodystrophy. She was a part-time substitute teacher and mother in a small town in Iowa. After hearing me on Good Morning America talking about genetics and sport, she decided — with her characteristic confidence — that this was divine providence.

She had seen a photograph of an Olympic sprinter named Priscilla Lopes-Schliep, a Canadian woman who was incredibly muscular and had been accused of doping her whole life. Jill looked at the picture and said: I think this woman is missing fat in exactly the same places I am, but for some reason her body produced enormous amounts of muscle whereas mine took muscle away. Maybe we have related gene mutations — and maybe if someone studies both of us, they can figure out how to make the body go in her direction rather than mine. She wrote to me asking me to convince a world-class athlete to take a genetic test.

When she sent her full package — family lineage, photos, a biological theory — I thought it was incredibly improbable, but she had done her homework. Long story short: Priscilla agreed, in part because doping rumours had dogged her entire career and she wanted to clear her name. It took us a while to get geneticists on board — when I described it to them they'd say it sounded like someone was stalking a professional athlete. Eventually she was tested, and Jill was right. They had neighbouring mutations on the same gene: one causing lipodystrophy with explosive muscle growth, the other causing lipodystrophy alongside muscular dystrophy. They became subjects of research. The test also triggered emergency medical care for Priscilla for conditions nobody had thought to check for in an elite athlete. Fruit flies were eventually engineered with Jill's genome so she could be studied.

By this point Jill had lost her ability to walk, but she had driven the science. She died unexpectedly — her mother called me to tell me. She had a book coming out, Manufacturing My Miracle, had bought new clothes to wear for the debut. She kept saying she wanted her voice to get strong again before she called me. The thought of that — and of the experimental treatment sitting in her freezer that she had worked so hard to obtain but ultimately decided not to take because of the risks to her family — is hard to bear.

What I wrote in her remembrance was that her appreciation for the tiny joys in life is infectious. There was a story about going to the Iowa State Fair: her husband searched for a carnival game she could play given her physical limitations, and she said she lived ten years in a single night. And her approach to finding a date when she was younger captures her perfectly: she found some survey suggesting that only one percent of men were willing to date a woman with a disability like hers. Instead of focusing on the 99% who wouldn't give her a chance, she said, "This is amazing — I can play the numbers and have a new date every week." How great a perspective is that on life — just asking, what does this situation actually afford me, and how do I make the most of it?

David Epstein

I really appreciate that, and I really enjoyed the conversation. I think you helped me crystallise how I'll talk about the narrative values material in the last chapter — which is also my favourite chapter. It has a lot of implications for how we actually want to live.