David Epstein: How Constraints Drive Innovation, Creativity, and Better Leaders

**David Epstein** (0:00)
And so our brains are actually wired for convenience, not for innovation, not for creativity, unless forced. And so left up with sort of an open field of possibilities, we will go down what cognitive scientists call the path of least resistance, meaning things you've already done before, or things that are just convenient and easy.

**Peter High** (0:17)
Welcome to Technovation. I'm Peter High, president of Metis Strategy.
My guest today is David Epstein. David is one of the most thoughtful and influential writers exploring how people learn, innovate and perform at the highest levels.
He's the best-selling author of Range, Why a Generalist Triumph in a Specialized World, and of the sports gene, Inside the Science and Extraordinary Athletic Performance. Prior to becoming a book author, he was an investigative reporter at ProPublica and a senior writer at Sports Illustrated, where he covered the intersection of science, performance and human potential. Throughout his career, David's developed a reputation for challenging conventional wisdom and uncovering the hidden factors that drive exceptional outcomes. His latest book is Inside the Box, How Constraints Make Us Better, and it examines one of the most counterintuitive ideas in innovation and leadership that the right constraints often produce better thinking, greater creativity, and more meaningful breakthroughs than unlimited freedom. David argues that carefully designed boundaries can be the engine of discovery, learning, and progress. These are topics I look forward to tackling in more detail with him here. David, welcome to Technovation. It's a pleasure to speak with you today.

**David Epstein** (1:20)
Thank you for having me. That was a very thorough introduction. I appreciate it.

**Peter High** (1:24)
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Now on to the interview. Well, there's a lot to it.
As I mentioned to you a moment ago, as somebody who's really enjoyed your books, including the latest one, it's a special pleasure to spend a little time with you today. So thank you again.

**David Epstein** (2:23)
Thank you.

**Peter High** (2:24)
Well, let's begin with the somewhat counterintuitive notion that is the backbone and framework of your latest book. Society tends to equate freedom with creativity, innovation, better outcomes, that the more free we are, the more freed of constraints that we are, perhaps then our mind will not be constrained and therefore more innovation might flow.
And so I wonder the genesis of this project, what would first convince you that this intuition was often wrong and that constraints can actually improve performance, David?

**David Epstein** (3:00)
Yeah, partly it was, you know, for 20 years now, I've been reading research about human performance and initially that was more in physiology and then it became more in psychology and cognitive sciences. And I would see just sort of incidentally, while I was reading about other things, that there would be studies where when people were hemmed in, they would instantly become more creative and that didn't make a lot of sense to me at first. And then the more I read in that area of cognitive psychology, the more I learned that, as this cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham likes to put it, you may think your brain is made for thinking, but it's actually made for preventing you from having to think whenever possible because thinking is energetically costly. And so our brains are actually wired for convenience, not for innovation, not for creativity, unless forced.
And so left up with sort of an open field of possibilities, we'll go down what cognitive scientists call the path of least resistance, meaning things you've already done before or things that are just convenient and easy, not necessarily the best solutions or the most interesting ones. And so actually, to be creative and innovative, you almost by definition have to block the thing that's the easiest to reach for, to force someone off that path of least resistance. And just seeing this again, you know, over time and studies, gosh, there's really something unusual here. And then I finally saw a survey, an international survey of known creativity myths. These are things we know from research are not true. And the top one was that people are most creative when they're most free.