Why You Feel Overwhelmed All The Time (and how to fix it) - David Epstein - #1121

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
What's the Green Eggs and Ham effect?

**David Epstein** (0:03)
That describes a finding in psychology that people become more creative when the easiest solution is taken away from them. So it is named after the Dr. Seuss book, Green Eggs and Ham, which he wrote on a bet that he couldn't write a children's book using only 50 words. And that restriction forced him to experiment with this rollicking rhythm, right? Because he couldn't experiment with vocabulary. So it got that name in psychology because it represents this huge body of work that shows, as the cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham likes to say, 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 your brain wants to do the convenient thing, the easy thing, what neuroscientists call the path of least resistance, just reach for stuff you've seen before. And so it actually becomes kind of impossible to be creative unless the easiest thing you would reach for is blocked. So the thing that actually led to that bet with Theodore Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss, was before that, he was asked if he could write a children's book using about 200 words from a vocabulary list for kids.

**Chris Williamson** (1:10)
Is that so that most kids would have access to it, not be able to not comprehend?

**David Epstein** (1:15)
That's right. And there was a kind of visionary publisher who correctly deemed children's literature at the time very boring. And so he wanted to, it was an assault on illiteracy. He said, look, kids are not learning to read in as big of numbers as they should, why don't we try making something interesting for them?
And Dr. Seuss takes this list, looks at it, realizes there are almost no adjectives, and starts complaining to his wife. He basically makes this very fine, I think, Seussian comment. He says it's like trying to make a strudel without any strudels. And then he just throws his hands up and says, I'm just going to take the first two rhyming words on the list and write a book. First two rhyming words, cat and hat.
And the rest is history. That's what forced him originally to develop that rollicking rhythm that he became known for, because the things he would have done otherwise were blocked. So that Green Eggs and Ham effect that a psychologist named is summarizing this huge body of work that shows that the best way to prompt creativity is to pull away the path of least resistance, the convenient thing that people would look for otherwise.

**Chris Williamson** (2:15)
What would be the convenient path of least resistance when it came to writing that book? Because what it sounds like is that it is more effort to work with fewer words.

**David Epstein** (2:25)
Yes, definitely. It is more effort because the things that, the easy things, familiar phrases, right? Like one of the things that jumps out about Seuss' work is the phrases are unfamiliar.
Normally, if he'd been left to his own devices, he would have gone for more familiar phrasing, which is what all children's literature did at the time. I mean, it was very literal. Johnny ties his shoes, walks to school and all these things.

**Chris Williamson** (2:47)
Not this sort of LSD absurdism that he ended up with.

**David Epstein** (2:50)
Well put.
He actually used this to co-found a whole book imprint that changed literature for kids and helped boost literacy where he basically put constraints on the authors. It was vocabulary constraints. It was the pictures all have to be continuous across two pages. They can't depict anything that isn't described directly in the text, etc. He said, if you don't like those constraints and some of them didn't, you're just not one of our authors. But they built the most successful children's imprint ever made by restricting people from the things. Those who bought in said, I'll give it a try, found that they were able to do work that they never would have envisioned otherwise.

**Chris Williamson** (3:30)
Why do you think talking about constraints is so unsexy?

**David Epstein** (3:33)
I think the word itself is unfortunately unsexy for me. I think the word itself is almost synonymous with something that's frustrating.
So I think our brains are built for to always overvalue freedom, complete freedom and choice in the abstract. The theory for why this is, is that in our evolutionary history, we didn't really have a problem with having too much of stuff or too much choice, but we did have a problem with having too little.

**Chris Williamson** (4:02)