Why Fewer Options Make Better Ideas

**Jake Humphrey** (0:02)
Hi there, welcome along to another episode of High Performance, which once again we've compiled to try and give you the greatest possible value from our show. You're about to hear from guests as diverse as productivity experts, Shane Parrish, Lionesses manager, Sarina Wiegman, to Gymshark co-founder Lewis Morgan and plenty more besides. And today's theme for myself and my co-host Damian, hey Damian.

**Damian Hughes** (0:23)
Hey Jake, how are you?

**Jake Humphrey** (0:24)
Very well, thank you. Our theme today is creativity, how to encourage it and how to harness it. And it is a really fascinating element right around creativity. Because we tend to think, right, that creativity begins when all the obstacles in life disappear and it makes perfect sense in our heads. You know, give me more time, give me a bigger budget, give me more people, give me a blank page and suddenly we can do anything. Now, that sounds like freedom, right?
But actually that often, rather surprisingly, just produces familiar results. And you've learned about this over years, Damian, and heard it quite often, haven't you?

**Damian Hughes** (0:59)
Yeah, I have, Jake. And I've recently been reading a brilliant book by David Epstein. The title of it is called Inside the Box, Why Constraints Actually Make Us Better.
And the point that David makes in his book is this very idea that when we have complete freedom, the brain will take the path of least resistance. So it ends up doing what we already know works or what we already have seen is really effective. So we actually stymie our own creativity, our own ability to connect disparate dots by giving people complete freedom. There are a couple of psychologists called Drew Boyd and Jacob Goldenberg, who called their approach the same title of the book, Inside the Box. And their challenge to the old instructions, I think, outside the box is dead simple. Innovation often begins by working more intelligently with the components and limitations that you already have in front of you. So, a useful constraint removes the obvious escape route and it forces you beyond that default first answer that your brain will reach for, because that's often the safest and the most boring one. And it puts you into territory that you would never necessarily have searched for voluntarily. I remember reading years ago about Jack White from The White Stripes. And one of the things that he would do when he was writing and trying to produce music was he'd set constraints for himself where he could only play certain chords or he would only allow certain instruments on records. And the idea behind it was just to find more creative ways of making music than just doing the default over and over again.

**Jake Humphrey** (2:33)
I love this. So if you're struggling with creativity, if you're wondering why you keep getting the same results despite the fact that you want to do different work, maybe this is the conversation for you. I think what we're saying here is freedom gives you options, but constraints give you direction. So what we're going to do, we're going to dive straight into a clip from one of our favorite ever guests. This is a guy called Shane Parrish, the creator of the Farnham Street Blogs, just an incredible thinker, someone who helped Damian and I to see the world in a very different way when he joined us. And he spoke to us about a key question that we should all be asking.

**Shane Parrish** (3:09)
Before you send this out, I want to know if this is your best work or not.
And of course, he didn't want to admit that was his best work because it wasn't his best work. And then, so he went back, he went away for a couple of days, he did the exact same thing. And then he came back and then he submitted it again, just to me this time, not to the team. And I was like, is this your best work? And he said, no. And he went back for another couple of days, he did it again. Presentation polished, almost perfect by the end of it. And I was like, great, this is what I expect from you going forward. And that story, I learned from Henry Kissinger. I remember reading a story about Kissinger in the 70s, where a staffer gave him a memo.
And he didn't even read the memo, he's like, is this your best work? And the staffer was like, no. He's like, well, go do your best work.

**Jake Humphrey** (3:55)
So this is interesting, right, Damian? Let's talk about this. So the brain experiences fluency as truth, okay? So if an idea arrives quickly, and by the way, I spend my life in this place. If I get an idea quickly and it feels like the right thing, because it's arrived without friction, I latch onto it. And often I say, well, I trust my gut. This is my gut feeling, so I'm going to go with it. And I really think it's interesting that Shane is encouraging us all to add this very small but quite deliberate constraint here, which is you cannot submit the first acceptable answer without examining it one more time. So this kind of sense that the second look might be the thing that changes everything completely, you know, improving just one single sentence, removing one tiny unnecessary element. Those things often can expose all of your work to not necessarily being the very best. So the first idea, I guess, we need to say, the first thing that we think of proves that we can answer the question, the second pass really challenges us to ask whether we have human thought, whether we have creativity, whether we can really take it to the next level, whether we can prove that we offer a point of difference to other people. Otherwise, we get AI to do everything, right? This is an AI conversation, really, because it's a reminder that as human beings, we possess something that computers don't, right? We'll be right back after a quick word from our partners.