254: Inside the Box by David Epstein

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1. 00:00:00 All right, Mike, we're back and we are going to play inside the box today as we
2. 00:00:05 talk about David Epstein, which for some reason, as I'm like prepping all the
3. 00:00:10 stuff for the show, I keep thinking David Brooks wrote this book, not David
4. 00:00:15 Epstein. So it's like, I've been writing David Brooks and going, no, it's Epstein.
5. 00:00:19 I need to change this.
6. 00:00:20 It's these are two different people.
7. 00:00:22 So David Epstein's inside the box, a book about constraints and how kind of we
8. 00:00:29 need to think about those more, but before we do that, we need to talk about
9. 00:00:34 follow up. So Mike, what do you have for follow up?
10. 00:00:37 I know you have one action item from before, and then you've put something
11. 00:00:42 else in here that will be fun for us.
12. 00:00:44 Yeah, well, that's not actually follow up.
13. 00:00:46 So since we're doing follow up first, I was declaring expectation bankruptcy.
14. 00:00:50 And I guess I did this.
15. 00:00:54 I shared with you prior to recording that we are a surprise, surprise going to
16. 00:00:59 move like eight minutes away.
17. 00:01:01 It's not a huge thing, but wasn't on the bingo card, especially before
18. 00:01:07 soccer season starts and all that craziness.
19. 00:01:11 So we got a lot going on and feel like I'm just just barely hanging on.
20. 00:01:17 That being said, I did hire a VA, by the way, nice.
21. 00:01:20 I don't think I told you this at all.
22. 00:01:22 Yeah, I have a full time VA who is right now helping me post more consistently
23. 00:01:27 to social media while we're creating SOPs and dialing in the systems.
24. 00:01:31 But this morning we chatted about all the posts that we're going to go out this
25. 00:01:35 week. So if you don't see it right right now, you will.
26. 00:01:39 You're listening to this when it's actually released, I'm guessing.
27. 00:01:42 Making a lot of progress there.
28. 00:01:43 That's been great.
29. 00:01:45 I don't know what took me so long, but that's it's a long term follow up item.
30. 00:01:50 I don't know exactly which episode that was that was from, but I know it was one
31. 00:01:54 of the books that we read that got me thinking about, no, I really need an
32. 00:01:57 assistant and I got stopped trying to do all this stuff myself.
33. 00:02:00 Well, I got one.
34. 00:02:01 So in foreshadowing our book today, it might be that you're addressing a bottleneck.
35. 00:02:05 And now you've addressed that.
36. 00:02:06 Absolutely.
37. 00:02:07 Like I've used those words over and over again.
38. 00:02:09 I am the bottleneck.
39. 00:02:10 Yes.
40. 00:02:12 So good.
41. 00:02:13 I'm proud of you for for doing that.
42. 00:02:15 Thank you.
43. 00:02:16 What was your action item?
44. 00:02:18 All right.
45. 00:02:18 So my action item was the Ulysses Pact, which is basically what do I not want to do?
46. 00:02:22 And how do I make it so I can't do that?
47. 00:02:25 So what do I, what do I not want to do and how to make it so I can't do that?
48. 00:02:28 So I'm willing to tell you what I don't want to do.
49. 00:02:30 All right.
50. 00:02:30 And this goes a little bit away for Bookworm and a little bit more into the
51. 00:02:33 personal side of things.
52. 00:02:35 I don't want to snack after seven o'clock.
53. 00:02:41 Right.
54. 00:02:41 So like that's the thing I don't want to do because like I snack too much after
55. 00:02:46 seven o'clock, right?
56. 00:02:47 So the willpower goes down.
57. 00:02:48 I'm tired and I snack too much after seven o'clock.
58. 00:02:52 So my goal is to not snack after seven o'clock.
59. 00:02:56 Now, the problem I have is how do I make it so I can't do that?
60. 00:02:59 Well, the answer to that is I lock all of the food in the house.
61. 00:03:04 Like I know what you're thinking.
62. 00:03:05 Some of the, no, all of the food.
63. 00:03:07 I should lock all of the food in the house after seven o'clock, but I can't do that.
64. 00:03:11 Like I can't put padlocks on the pantry doors and and refrigerator and all that
65. 00:03:16 stuff.
66. 00:03:17 So I have to figure out what is the correct way to make it.
67. 00:03:23 So I quote unquote can't do that.
68. 00:03:25 And I haven't figured that out yet.
69. 00:03:26 So I haven't made it to the second step of that.
70. 00:03:28 I know what I don't want to do, but I need to think harder about what's the
71. 00:03:33 realistic way with the family and just, you know, the way life works is to not do
72. 00:03:39 that.
73. 00:03:39 So that's where I'm at.
74. 00:03:40 So partial, I'm about 50, 50 on, on mine.
75. 00:03:44 All right.
76. 00:03:46 And what's your other one that you added here that wasn't an action item, but is
77. 00:03:49 cool.
78. 00:03:50 And I'd like you to talk about it.
79. 00:03:52 Yeah.
80. 00:03:52 If I was more organized, I would have been talking about this probably the last
81. 00:03:57 couple of episodes, but I think I sort of been teasing it.
82. 00:04:01 Um, I've been thinking quite a bit recently on where AI fits in the
83. 00:04:06 creative process.
84. 00:04:08 And I don't think it's as simple as don't let it right for you.
85. 00:04:14 Um, there are a lot of people, a lot of creators.
86. 00:04:16 I know who hold that view.
87. 00:04:19 And it's almost like a badge of honor that they have an analog process.
88. 00:04:25 It kind of reminds me of the person who wants to write their novel on the type
89. 00:04:32 writer, because they don't want it to be influenced by the machines.
90. 00:04:35 And there's something to be said about that.
91. 00:04:36 The, the devices you use definitely influence the way that you think, which
92. 00:04:41 is why I read all these physical books, but just because you read off a Kindle,
93. 00:04:46 I would argue they still value in the reading.
94. 00:04:48 I know you read off a Kindle Corey.
95. 00:04:49 So there's not just like the one way to do it.
96. 00:04:51 You got to figure out where the lines are for you in terms of how you use the
97. 00:04:55 stuff.
98. 00:04:55 Now on the other side, you've got, especially on LinkedIn, I'm calling them
99. 00:04:58 the AI bros.
100. 00:04:59 It's all the people who are like, uh, Claude has a secret, you know,
101. 00:05:03 entrepreneur mode, just use this prompt to unlock it, you know, comment, whatever,
102. 00:05:08 and I'll send it to you.
103. 00:05:10 It's always comment, comment, bro.
104. 00:05:12 And they'll send it to you.
105. 00:05:14 Yeah.
106. 00:05:14 So side note, I don't mind that, like comment, whatever, and I'll send it to you.
107. 00:05:18 But I see that sort, that specific type of post over and over and over again.
108. 00:05:22 Yeah.
109. 00:05:22 And it's like, ah, that drives me crazy.
110. 00:05:24 So those are the people in my mind who are using AI for everything.
111. 00:05:27 And they don't really care about the, the craft or the, the art.
112. 00:05:32 They just want the job to be done.
113. 00:05:34 And AI is the ultimate easy button and they got their agents working on their
114. 00:05:39 business because they don't want to have to do it themselves.
115. 00:05:41 You know, that sort of thing.
116. 00:05:43 When it comes to creating, though, I feel like AI is not a switch.
117. 00:05:49 It's a dial and you got to figure out when to turn it up and when to turn it down.
118. 00:05:54 And if you can get good at that, you can create and writing is the basis of this
119. 00:06:00 for me, but I think it applies to other mediums as well.
120. 00:06:03 If you got something to say, um, you can use AI in a way that helps you amplify
121. 00:06:08 your human voice and taste and do your best creative work.
122. 00:06:13 So that has kind of been my journey.
123. 00:06:16 The last six months was to figure out what, what's the best way to do that?
124. 00:06:22 And, um, I am taking everything, everything that I have learned and I am
125. 00:06:27 condensing it into a three week cohort.
126. 00:06:29 I'm actually calling it amplify.
127. 00:06:32 So if you want more details, you can actually go to the website.
128. 00:06:35 It is amplify cohort.com and, uh, really happy with how this website turned out.
129. 00:06:42 Uh, it'll kind of give you the delay of the land and what we're trying to do here.
130. 00:06:46 The goal is to build your own AI powered creativity flywheel.
131. 00:06:50 So the creativity of flywheel is a framework I came up with a couple of years ago.
132. 00:06:54 And I was trying to figure out how am I able to create consistently.
133. 00:06:58 And, um, I feel like mapping AI onto the, though, that framework,
134. 00:07:03 because there's five steps that I think are kind of, kind of core to every
135. 00:07:06 creative process where you capture what resonates.
136. 00:07:09 You curate the really good stuff.
137. 00:07:11 You connect it with the other notes and ideas that you have.
138. 00:07:14 You cultivate it, give it time in the oven, let it develop.
139. 00:07:17 And then ultimately there's got to be an output.
140. 00:07:18 You create something new from the component pieces.
141. 00:07:21 And if you can figure out where and how to use AI intentionally in your own
142. 00:07:26 creativity flywheel, connect it to the tools that you use to do the things.
143. 00:07:32 Like add the friction where it should be so you can focus on what really matters,
144. 00:07:36 but then remove it where it shouldn't be so that the flywheel can spin effortlessly.
145. 00:07:39 Then you are cooking with gas and there has never been a better time to be a creator.
146. 00:07:44 So that's what we're going to do.
147. 00:07:45 We're going to build those, uh, those flywheels over a couple of weeks and, uh,
148. 00:07:49 the cohort's going to kick off August 11th and all of the details can be found
149. 00:07:54 again at amplify cohort.com.
150. 00:07:58 Nice.
151. 00:07:58 So while folks can go there to get all the details, the one that popped into my head
152. 00:08:02 is, does it matter what AI I use or that I like, or is it an AI agnostic program?
153. 00:08:11 Great question.
154. 00:08:12 Um, I'm going to say it's AI agnostic.
155. 00:08:14 I'm going to share all the things that I've built and used though.
156. 00:08:19 So I have to figure out how to share some specific skills and things like that.
157. 00:08:25 Um, but I will say as part of the cohort, you will get access to a custom tool
158. 00:08:30 that I built called creator bot.
159. 00:08:32 I think I maybe mentioned this briefly before creator bot.
160. 00:08:34 That practical became.com is actually available.
161. 00:08:37 People can subscribe to a $29 a month, $29 a year.
162. 00:08:40 You actually get a year of that for free when you join the amplify cohort.
163. 00:08:44 And what that does is it helps you build out all the context that you need to get
164. 00:08:50 really relevant results whenever you ask AI to help you with brainstorming or
165. 00:08:54 something like that.
166. 00:08:55 So if you don't know your ideal customer profile, if you don't know your niche,
167. 00:09:00 if you don't know the content buckets that you want to use, if you don't know
168. 00:09:05 the primary attention platform you want to build, if you don't know what sort
169. 00:09:09 of value proposition you want to communicate as you build out your, your
170. 00:09:15 newsletter, creator bot not only like gives you, you know, here's some title
171. 00:09:19 ideas or here's some suggestions for making the hook better, stuff like that.
172. 00:09:23 It actually builds out that context for you and saves it in a profile with
173. 00:09:27 creator bot.
174. 00:09:28 I actually built an MCP so you can connect that to any tool that you would use.
175. 00:09:34 And as you use it, it will write back the context to the profile in creator bot.
176. 00:09:39 So what happens is it consistently gets better and better the more that you you
177. 00:09:44 use it.
178. 00:09:46 I've been trying to test this myself because I use a lot of other AI tools and
179. 00:09:49 I pay for a lot of other AI tools and I'm trying to find, you know, what do I
180. 00:09:52 like about different ones?
181. 00:09:53 What do I not like about other ones?
182. 00:09:55 Um, I have a very small beta, a beta group that's been using creator bot.
183. 00:10:00 The, the biggest user is my wife who uses it for the intentional family.
184. 00:10:04 She says it's, it's great.
185. 00:10:05 Like she'll sit down and be like, I don't know what I want to talk about.
186. 00:10:08 She's got her profile in there.
187. 00:10:09 So then she's like, give me some, some ideas, you know, and it gives 10 different
188. 00:10:13 ideas and eight of them are crap.
189. 00:10:14 But two of them are good.
190. 00:10:15 And oh, that one I like, you know, it helped me brainstorm and outline.
191. 00:10:18 The trick is it's different than the other AI stuff because it's not just
192. 00:10:22 going to write it for you.
193. 00:10:24 It's going to help you think about what it is that you actually want to say
194. 00:10:28 because that voice and taste is the thing that's going to cause whatever you
195. 00:10:31 make to rise above the AI slop tide, I call it.
196. 00:10:35 Yeah, for sure.
197. 00:10:36 Yeah, it sounds great.
198. 00:10:37 I mean, it sounds great.
199. 00:10:38 I'm pretty proud of it.
200. 00:10:39 So I'm, I'm, uh, I'm both excited and terrified to share it with the world.
201. 00:10:46 I can understand that as, as anything good that goes out into the world
202. 00:10:49 and grows legs, you know, you got to be a little bit scared of what it's, where
203. 00:10:52 it's going to run and what it's going to do.
204. 00:10:54 But good work, man.
205. 00:10:55 Good.
206. 00:10:55 One additional detail about this, um, because I think it may be helpful for
207. 00:10:58 anybody else who maybe is facing some sort of fear and sharing something.
208. 00:11:04 They feel the imposter syndrome.
209. 00:11:06 Like they don't, they're not really the person to talk about this.
210. 00:11:09 I was struggling with that with the AI stuff because it's changing so fast.
211. 00:11:11 I can't keep up with all the different models that are released and yada yada yada.
212. 00:11:15 And then at the same time, you see the LinkedIn bros being like, Oh, this model
213. 00:11:18 just dropped. It changes everything.
214. 00:11:20 You know, and here's what I figured out with it.
215. 00:11:22 It did drop 10 minutes ago.
216. 00:11:23 You figured out nothing with this.
217. 00:11:25 Um, but anyways, like you get people saying stuff like that and you, and you
218. 00:11:30 can tell yourself, I have nothing to contribute.
219. 00:11:33 I, my perspective is not, not unique.
220. 00:11:36 And I was in that place and I was doing some coaching with, with, uh,
221. 00:11:39 Darryl Vesterwald, I talked about the growth intensive, um, before and, uh,
222. 00:11:43 been working with Darryl and it's been really, really transformational.
223. 00:11:45 At one point in the, the coaching call with Darryl, um, I was, I was going
224. 00:11:49 through the, the cohort stuff.
225. 00:11:50 And I thought we were going to talk tactics, you know, how much to charge,
226. 00:11:53 how long it should go, stuff like that.
227. 00:11:54 And he just like, okay, put both your feet on the ground.
228. 00:11:57 Let's get centered deep breath in, deep breath out.
229. 00:11:59 Okay.
230. 00:11:59 Now visualize like six months from now.
231. 00:12:02 After this cohort has been amazing, you just absolutely crushed it.
232. 00:12:05 What's true about what happened, you know, and there were some things that came
233. 00:12:09 to mind, like I made this much money or I helped these many people achieve this,
234. 00:12:12 this transformation, but then he's like, no, how do you feel?
235. 00:12:16 Like where are you six months from now when you're reflecting back on this?
236. 00:12:19 And like, how do you feel?
237. 00:12:20 And I got this really vivid picture and he's like, okay.
238. 00:12:23 So that right there, that feeling that that is what you need, that state of
239. 00:12:28 abundance, that's where you need to get to whenever you're going to work on this,
240. 00:12:32 whenever you create anything, because you create different out of that state of
241. 00:12:36 abundance than you do out of a state of fear.
242. 00:12:38 And he's absolutely right.
243. 00:12:40 So he's like, you know, you may feel like you don't have anything to share about
244. 00:12:45 this, or you don't have it all figured out.
245. 00:12:46 He's like, but that is exactly why you should share it.
246. 00:12:50 Because people are going to resonate with that perspective.
247. 00:12:54 And you're really thoughtful about this stuff.
248. 00:12:56 You don't want to, you know, just share whatever comes to mind, whatever
249. 00:13:00 sounds good, you're going to put a lot of thought and care into it.
250. 00:13:03 And that's going to end up being a really great experience for people.
251. 00:13:07 I was like, okay, yeah, you're right. He's like, you got to just go for it.
252. 00:13:11 Okay, Daryl, we'll do it.
253. 00:13:14 I'm glad you did.
254. 00:13:14 I hope it takes off like gangbusters.
255. 00:13:16 And if you're interested in the first round of the cohort, it starts August 11th.
256. 00:13:21 Did I see that right?
257. 00:13:22 Yep.
258. 00:13:22 Yeah.
259. 00:13:22 So August 11th, so a couple weeks that'll, that'll kick off, go to what was it?
260. 00:13:27 Amplify cohort.com.
261. 00:13:28 That's it.
262. 00:13:30 Amplify cohort.com.
263. 00:13:31 All right, Mike, you ready to talk about a book?
264. 00:13:33 Let's do it.
265. 00:13:34 Okay, folks.
266. 00:13:36 We're going to talk about constraints today.
267. 00:13:38 What's interesting about this book is I've known about constraints because I live
268. 00:13:43 in the engineering world.
269. 00:13:44 We do engineering design.
270. 00:13:46 We talk about constraints all the time and how they impact our design.
271. 00:13:49 I also read a book that he references in here, which, if he didn't
272. 00:13:52 reference it in this book, I was going to be really upset.
273. 00:13:55 But it's called the goal by Eli who Goldrat.
274. 00:13:59 And if he hadn't talked about the theory of constraints, I was going to be like,
275. 00:14:02 listen, David, what are you doing?
276. 00:14:04 Right? Like you completely missed the guy on constraints.
277. 00:14:07 So he talks about that.
278. 00:14:09 But like even before we get started into the details of the book, he talks about
279. 00:14:15 how he structured the book based on constraints that he wanted certain number
280. 00:14:18 of parts and he wanted certain number of chapters in each part.
281. 00:14:21 And he kind of set these constraints up for him.
282. 00:14:22 So we've got four parts.
283. 00:14:24 So introduction in part one, how boundaries create breakthroughs.
284. 00:14:28 Part two, creative constraints, part three, uh, where and how to focus in
285. 00:14:32 part four collaboration and contentment, uh, then within each of those are three
286. 00:14:38 chapters, so we got 12 total chapters.
287. 00:14:40 Now, Mike, I'm going to set the stage here before we get into anything and say,
288. 00:14:45 I don't want to talk about the interludes.
289. 00:14:48 I thought the interludes were boring and not good.
290. 00:14:51 And I don't, I want to completely wash over this.
291. 00:14:54 Good.
292. 00:14:54 I'm okay with that.
293. 00:14:55 Just for context.
294. 00:14:56 It's like a two to three page section at the beginning of each part, which ties
295. 00:15:00 back to the story, I think he starts telling in the introduction to like hold
296. 00:15:05 that, that through line throughout the whole book.
297. 00:15:07 So I understand why they're there, but yeah, I'm okay completely skipping those.
298. 00:15:11 I have a question for you though, before we get too far, you mentioned the goal
299. 00:15:15 by Eli Goldrat.
300. 00:15:16 I have that book.
301. 00:15:16 It's sitting on my shelf.
302. 00:15:18 I got it because somebody was raving about it.
303. 00:15:20 This is amazing.
304. 00:15:20 You need to read it.
305. 00:15:21 I got it.
306. 00:15:22 I looked at it and I was like, this looks dumb.
307. 00:15:24 Now you're telling me this book is amazing.
308. 00:15:26 Do we need to cover this for bookworm?
309. 00:15:29 Uh, I will cover this book anytime you want to cover this book.
310. 00:15:32 Um, the, like, I think it's a very, very interesting book.
311. 00:15:36 It's weird.
312. 00:15:37 It's not like the books we typically cover because it's, it's one.
313. 00:15:42 Um, I mean, what was the happiness book we covered by the, by the Japanese author?
314. 00:15:47 Goodness gracious.
315. 00:15:48 I can't remember what it was, but you know how it's like the, it's like a, an allegory
316. 00:15:52 where like there's this other story.
317. 00:15:54 So the guy goes and talks to the wise man and this wise man is telling him all
318. 00:15:57 these things, um, oh, the something about, uh, being unhappy, uh, anyhow, uh, we, we
319. 00:16:04 read a book not too long ago.
320. 00:16:05 I was obviously very, very impactful.
321. 00:16:08 It was not, it was not, but it's written, it's written in that style where it's this
322. 00:16:13 guy runs into his, um, old college professor or something at the airport and he's
323. 00:16:18 asking him all these questions about like manufacturing and he's having all these
324. 00:16:22 troubles with, you know, his, his plant and he's having all these troubles with, um,
325. 00:16:26 his marriage and stuff like that.
326. 00:16:27 And the guy basically gives him advice and the advice is a very academic topic,
327. 00:16:34 theory of constraints, not dumb down, but written in a different way, written in a
328. 00:16:40 way that is, you know, more story like, you know, Patrick Lencioni style.
329. 00:16:45 Um, yeah, yeah, it would be Patrick Lencioni style.
330. 00:16:49 Um, yeah, like it's, it's like that.
331. 00:16:51 So maybe Lencioni got it from, and it, like, in it, this book like went crazy.
332. 00:16:56 Like blew up if you wanted to talk about constraints and you want to talk about
333. 00:17:00 bottlenecks, I mean, it just went crazy.
334. 00:17:02 I mean, the guy has had a huge career consulting because of this book and because
335. 00:17:09 of all the, the marketing materials and all the, um, training materials that were
336. 00:17:13 created out of it.
337. 00:17:13 So, so yeah, anyhow, we can do that later.
338. 00:17:16 Let's go back to, to this book.
339. 00:17:18 The interlude and the introduction talk about, um, the development of the periodic
340. 00:17:22 table, this is all that all we're going to talk about is basically how the challenge
341. 00:17:27 with the periodic table where there weren't boundaries at first.
342. 00:17:31 So therefore it was like kind of chaos.
343. 00:17:34 Like everybody was like all up in the air and they didn't know what to do.
344. 00:17:37 And they were, they saw all these elements and they, they knew all this stuff about
345. 00:17:40 elements, but they didn't really know what to do with any of that stuff.
346. 00:17:44 That's where he starts off.
347. 00:17:45 And that's where he talks about boundaries, creating breakthroughs is that we needed
348. 00:17:49 to put some boundaries on these things, um, and Mendelev did that, right?
349. 00:17:54 And tried to figure out how to do that with the, with the, uh, periodic table of
350. 00:17:58 elements.
351. 00:17:59 Mike, is there anything else from the introduction that you want to, that you
352. 00:18:02 want to hit?
353. 00:18:04 Well, he mentions a personal story at the beginning, which I thought was going
354. 00:18:10 to, uh, set everything up sort of like the story James Clear uses at the beginning
355. 00:18:16 of atomic habits, but other than making you feel, feel bad about that.
356. 00:18:23 This actually happened to somebody.
357. 00:18:25 Uh, I didn't, I didn't think it was a real strong connection.
358. 00:18:28 He mentions that he was, he was an athlete when he was growing up as a kid.
359. 00:18:33 And he was playing football with his friends and they were, you know, throwing
360. 00:18:38 the ball for the, the kickoff and whoever could, you know, throw out the farthest,
361. 00:18:41 typically kicked it off.
362. 00:18:42 And I don't know if you've played like backyard football, but that's, that's how
363. 00:18:46 you do it.
364. 00:18:47 You know, person who throws it the longest, um, gets, gets kicked off.
365. 00:18:50 So he's doing that and he takes his arm back.
366. 00:18:52 He's going to throw it.
367. 00:18:53 He's got one of the stronger arms in his grade.
368. 00:18:55 And then as he goes to throw it, his arm like shatters.
369. 00:18:59 So now he can't play sports and he's like, the only reason to go to school now
370. 00:19:05 is the school part and trying to figure out, um, how to make it interesting.
371. 00:19:14 And, um, he's starting to pay attention to his academics.
372. 00:19:18 He's trying to now like actually learn things.
373. 00:19:22 And he stumbles upon the use of these mnemonics to help him keep up with things,
374. 00:19:27 you know, little shorthand notes, stuff like that.
375. 00:19:30 And, uh, that kind of sets up everything for the book in terms of the constraints
376. 00:19:36 help you think better.
377. 00:19:38 I think that's a, uh, uh, very general oversimplified version of the,
378. 00:19:44 the theme, but would you say that's, that's accurate?
379. 00:19:47 Yeah.
380. 00:19:47 I think so.
381. 00:19:47 I think it refines.
382. 00:19:49 It creates a more clear thinking, um, where, and he, he, I think one of the struggles
383. 00:19:55 I have with this book is I didn't, I didn't get an overwhelming through thread.
384. 00:20:03 The entire book, like I felt like the book jumped around a little bit.
385. 00:20:06 Yeah.
386. 00:20:06 And I had trouble with that while I was reading the 12 chapters.
387. 00:20:09 So as you're, as you're reading through this, if you're kind of like, wait, where's
388. 00:20:12 he going from this?
389. 00:20:14 I didn't get a strong transition thread through the different chapters as we go.
390. 00:20:19 But I think you, you, you summarized it well constraints refine thinking.
391. 00:20:22 Yeah.
392. 00:20:23 I think that's, that's good.
393. 00:20:25 All right.
394. 00:20:25 Yeah.
395. 00:20:25 So then there's the four parts, three chapters per part.
396. 00:20:29 And I think we'll crank through them.
397. 00:20:31 Right.
398. 00:20:32 Yes.
399. 00:20:32 Okay.
400. 00:20:32 So chapter one's a world without limits.
401. 00:20:34 And Mike, I didn't know about general magic.
402. 00:20:38 I had never heard of the company general magic before.
403. 00:20:41 I knew nothing about them, which is surprising because I listened to like a lot
404. 00:20:47 of Silicon Valley stuff, a lot of Apple stuff, a lot of tech stuff.
405. 00:20:51 And I have never heard of, of general magic before.
406. 00:20:54 So general magic was a company in like the late 1900s, like 1990s and so, um, where
407. 00:21:00 basically they had free reign to do whatever they wanted technologically, like
408. 00:21:05 they could develop whatever they wanted, they could program whatever they wanted.
409. 00:21:09 They had essentially absolute freedom.
410. 00:21:12 They had as much money as they needed.
411. 00:21:14 They had as much time as they needed.
412. 00:21:15 They had all the people from a resource standpoint.
413. 00:21:18 They had everything they needed and they were an absolute failure.
414. 00:21:22 Right.
415. 00:21:22 So he describes the story of the fact that like they created nothing.
416. 00:21:26 They, like they never brought anything to fruition, but then a lot of the
417. 00:21:30 people left there, they left general magic, the company, and they went off to
418. 00:21:35 like just be absolute rock stars at these other companies.
419. 00:21:38 You know, whatever it was, Apple or Google or wherever they ended up landing
420. 00:21:43 that it was kind of surreal, the number of a really well-known, good
421. 00:21:48 technological people that came out of general magic.
422. 00:21:51 But the fact that when you put them into general magic, nothing, nothing
423. 00:21:54 ended up happening.
424. 00:21:55 And that's in set, essentially the nature of, of this chapter is they did not have
425. 00:22:00 limits.
426. 00:22:00 So a world without limits and because they didn't have limits, they actually
427. 00:22:04 weren't able to create innovation, successful innovation from that.
428. 00:22:10 So that's kind of the big takeaway for me for chapter one.
429. 00:22:13 Yeah, I had not, I wasn't familiar with this company either.
430. 00:22:18 And the style here, by the way, I think this will either like this or you
431. 00:22:25 won't like this.
432. 00:22:27 I think I tend to fall a little bit more towards the don't like this style
433. 00:22:34 because it reads very much like very opinion, I don't know how to describe it.
434. 00:22:40 It's like an opinionated narrative.
435. 00:22:42 He's obviously like spinning a stories and injecting quotes from certain people.
436. 00:22:46 But the way that it's, it's done, you can tell right away that it's sort of
437. 00:22:51 editorialized.
438. 00:22:54 I agree.
439. 00:22:54 Now it is very polished and it's a very interesting story.
440. 00:22:57 And it's stuff that I wasn't familiar with.
441. 00:23:01 I don't know how this, I had the same reaction as you.
442. 00:23:04 I don't know how this company and this story, I'd never heard of this before.
443. 00:23:08 Their big product was the pocket crystal.
444. 00:23:12 This was a 1988 project and the vision for it actually became what was the iPhone,
445. 00:23:18 but it was very ahead of its time.
446. 00:23:20 And to your point, they had all of these things that they kept adding to it.
447. 00:23:23 And there were no constraints that unlimited budget.
448. 00:23:26 They had all these talented people.
449. 00:23:28 It just kept bolting things on and it was a complete failure.
450. 00:23:34 So it's a very effective setup for the next chapter.
451. 00:23:37 I'll say that, but.
452. 00:23:40 And one of the things that I had never thought about is, you know, I mean,
453. 00:23:43 I work in a technological world all the time, right?
454. 00:23:46 How they weren't thinking about the actual limits of the technological
455. 00:23:51 landscape at the time.
456. 00:23:53 So, and that was a, a problem for them, right?
457. 00:23:58 Like that they, they actually were just creating everything and they weren't like,
458. 00:24:03 well, hold on, touch screen technology isn't ready yet.
459. 00:24:06 Like we can't really do the touch the things because it's the technology is not
460. 00:24:11 good enough.
461. 00:24:11 And I was like, oh yeah, how much, how much does our world get limited or get
462. 00:24:17 constrained by the fact that the tech isn't ready yet?
463. 00:24:19 And we look at this in, you know, we were just talking about the Amplify cohort,
464. 00:24:22 right? Like in AI, we look at it in terms of that too.
465. 00:24:26 Our processing power wasn't ready yet.
466. 00:24:28 Like we weren't ready to be able to process this thing in a parallel way
467. 00:24:33 until what was it, like 2021, 2022, something like that.
468. 00:24:39 And then when that processing power ramped up, boom, GPT comes out and then
469. 00:24:43 everything goes, goes crazy.
470. 00:24:45 And we've just continued to, to grow from that.
471. 00:24:48 So I just think it's like, it's really cool.
472. 00:24:50 You talked about the editorializing.
473. 00:24:52 This, I think comes from his background, right?
474. 00:24:54 Because I believe he was a sports illustrated writer, which in my mind,
475. 00:24:59 that's going to ingrain some editorialization into it.
476. 00:25:02 Like you're not only just going to write the factual article,
477. 00:25:05 you're going to write it factual, but you need to tell a story about it.
478. 00:25:07 So his background or his pedigree helps him out here.
479. 00:25:11 For sure. And what he's sharing here, I don't think the idea, at least to me,
480. 00:25:18 is not completely original because I'm an Apple fan.
481. 00:25:22 And I've heard the stories about the Newton and how it was ahead of its time.
482. 00:25:29 So when he was telling the story, that's where my mind went, because I sort of had
483. 00:25:35 synthesized some of these lessons from just what I know of Steve Jobs
484. 00:25:41 and coming back and taking over the company side note on that.
485. 00:25:46 By the way, at Macstock, they had David Pogue, who wrote the first 50 years of Apple.
486. 00:25:52 He, he was, they had an evening with David Pogue.
487. 00:25:56 And so he was sharing stories from the book and different slides and things.
488. 00:26:00 And one of his things is like he writes these weird al style satire covers
489. 00:26:05 of songs and like applies an Apple bent to them.
490. 00:26:08 And he had a keyboard on stage with them and he did a bunch of those, those live.
491. 00:26:12 It was pretty, pretty entertaining.
492. 00:26:16 So like that's, you know, the world that I'm in and I sort of had these pieces
493. 00:26:22 or these dots connected already of how the Newton was ahead of its time.
494. 00:26:26 But the pieces like were there and eventually it becomes the, the palm
495. 00:26:30 pilot and the iPhone and stuff like that.
496. 00:26:32 But the way that David Epstein told this story here actually gave it a lot
497. 00:26:37 more definition for me.
498. 00:26:39 It was like, I understood some of the stuff, but I didn't really know what it meant.
499. 00:26:43 Like I sort of thought I did.
500. 00:26:44 And so right away in this, this first chapter, I really liked this chapter.
501. 00:26:49 The, the format, I feel like applies maybe some as, because it's
502. 00:26:55 that, that same format throughout the whole book.
503. 00:26:58 And I found myself towards the end of the book, getting a little fatigued from it.
504. 00:27:03 That's the best word I can come up with.
505. 00:27:05 It's like, this is really important.
506. 00:27:06 Pay attention to this.
507. 00:27:07 And there's just so many details I just thrown at you all the time.
508. 00:27:09 It's like, uh, I can't just give me a break.
509. 00:27:14 I get it.
510. 00:27:15 I completely understand.
511. 00:27:17 Are you ready to go to two?
512. 00:27:18 I think so.
513. 00:27:19 Yeah.
514. 00:27:20 All right.
515. 00:27:20 So chapter two is a world with limits now.
516. 00:27:22 So now we go from this general magic where there's no limits.
517. 00:27:26 They've got the worlds that are oyster.
518. 00:27:27 They can do whatever they want to to now doing some examples of companies
519. 00:27:31 and or individuals who intentionally imposed limits on what they were doing.
520. 00:27:38 So the examples, and I'm probably not going to remember all of them, but like
521. 00:27:42 Bell Labs is one of them, uh, Pixar, this American life, uh, Ed Catmull.
522. 00:27:47 But I can't remember if Ed Catmull was Pixar or not.
523. 00:27:50 That might be getting those, those mixed up.
524. 00:27:52 Yeah, Ed Catmull was the one who wrote, uh, Creativity Inc.
525. 00:27:56 Yeah.
526. 00:27:56 Okay.
527. 00:27:56 So, so basically the gist of this is how these companies or these
528. 00:28:01 individuals set intentional limits or they broke problems down into something
529. 00:28:08 that was not just completely over, you know, the world's our oyster.
530. 00:28:13 We can do whatever we want to do with it.
531. 00:28:14 But it's like, no, let's actually look at this and then break it down into
532. 00:28:17 smaller pieces and look at the limits of these smaller pieces and look at the
533. 00:28:19 constraints around these smaller pieces.
534. 00:28:21 And then we're going to build slowly and steadily up to the thing that's
535. 00:28:25 going to actually innovate and revolutionize the world.
536. 00:28:28 So he's intentionally here in part one, taking general magic and contrasting it
537. 00:28:34 with these other, what I would say in his mind, successful act, like
538. 00:28:40 activities or successful organizations where general magic is not.
539. 00:28:44 And then here are these other successful ones and he's, he's, you know,
540. 00:28:47 putting these two opposites against each other to, to prove his point about
541. 00:28:51 constraints or boundaries or whatever, whatever you want to call it.
542. 00:28:54 Yep.
543. 00:28:55 Yeah.
544. 00:28:56 It's a great dichotomy.
545. 00:28:59 You know, there's, uh, these are polar opposites and, uh, Pixar obviously is
546. 00:29:05 known for pushing the technological envelope too.
547. 00:29:08 I mean, they, um, they created the first completely animated motion picture, I
548. 00:29:16 think with Toy Story or there was a specific category of that.
549. 00:29:19 I forget the exact details there, but, uh, and it kind of starts with, I think
550. 00:29:24 it was Ed Catmull wanting to be an animator, but not being great at drawing.
551. 00:29:29 Yeah.
552. 00:29:29 So he's looking at these technological tools and he's like, maybe I could use
553. 00:29:35 these computers to render this stuff.
554. 00:29:37 Maybe there's some new options that are, or new doors that are open to us by the
555. 00:29:42 use of this technology, which I think is, is interesting because, um, the argument
556. 00:29:48 could be made back in the day that, well, if you're not drawn these by hand, you're
557. 00:29:55 not an animator, but the technological tools opened up some new possibilities.
558. 00:30:00 I feel like that is the exact same place we find ourselves with AI currently.
559. 00:30:06 Well, if you're going to use AI, then you're not a writer who says like the, the rules
560. 00:30:14 change and you got to figure out the, the new norms.
561. 00:30:16 Uh, my dad growing up, his dad owned a typography business in Milwaukee.
562. 00:30:22 And I remember when the first Mac came out, because my dad's brother, my uncle took
563. 00:30:28 over the, the, the family business and, um, they did all the typesetting by hand.
564. 00:30:33 And the, the same arguments, oh, well, the computer can't do it as, as well as we can.
565. 00:30:38 We have more attention to detail and we're not going to make the mistakes.
566. 00:30:43 That was only true for a certain period of time.
567. 00:30:46 And there are no manual typesetters anymore.
568. 00:30:48 I shouldn't say that.
569. 00:30:48 They probably are, but, uh, the world changes and you got to figure out, you
570. 00:30:53 know, where, where did the new boundaries get, get drawn?
571. 00:30:56 But that's the key, I think.
572. 00:30:57 And that's sort of the metaphor behind the whole book is inside the box.
573. 00:31:00 Where are the boundaries?
574. 00:31:02 Where are we going to apply?
575. 00:31:05 The word I like to use is intentional friction.
576. 00:31:08 So we don't go beyond this and we stay within the, these parameters.
577. 00:31:12 And that's the big idea.
578. 00:31:13 I think from chapter two, he says that when exploration is free, it is
579. 00:31:17 difficult to learn anything at all.
580. 00:31:20 Cause you're just roaming all over the place and you have no idea how any of that
581. 00:31:23 stuff connects.
582. 00:31:25 Okay.
583. 00:31:25 Let's go to chapter three, which is limit powered learning.
584. 00:31:29 Now, I'll freely admit upfront, this chapter didn't feel like it fit the flow
585. 00:31:36 nearly as well for me.
586. 00:31:37 So I understand what he's trying to do because you said, Hey, when we don't
587. 00:31:40 set these boundaries, we don't set these constraints with it.
588. 00:31:43 We struggle with learning.
589. 00:31:44 Well, he comes in with the example of basically like medical research and how, uh,
590. 00:31:52 he calls it, he, he coins a term in here and that coins it, but he states a term
591. 00:31:56 in here that I'd never heard of.
592. 00:31:57 It's called harking, hypothesizing after the results are known.
593. 00:32:01 And I was like, huh, I've, I've never heard of harking before, but I totally
594. 00:32:06 know that this is a real thing, right?
595. 00:32:09 Like, so basically you get the results and then you find the question that you
596. 00:32:13 want to answer, right?
597. 00:32:14 And you're like, wait a minute.
598. 00:32:15 That's the backwards way of doing this.
599. 00:32:17 This is not the scientific method.
600. 00:32:19 So like the summary way for me to describe chapter three is we're talking
601. 00:32:23 about the scientific method and the way the scientific method should be done and
602. 00:32:27 how we should apply constraints to the front end of the scientific method.
603. 00:32:32 And he gives examples of like people not doing that, like in, in how they, they
604. 00:32:37 essentially were in later on, he talks at, you know, about sharpshooters.
605. 00:32:41 And basically it's like, they would just randomly shot at the wall and then
606. 00:32:44 said, Oh, now we're going to go paint a target, right?
607. 00:32:46 Where, where we shot and it's like, hold on.
608. 00:32:48 That's not the way that's not the way sharpshooting works.
609. 00:32:50 Um, and, and how we're in the same, the same situation here.
610. 00:32:54 So like he would say, like, well, conceived constraints, like those at the
611. 00:32:57 heart of the scientific method, compel us to stop, think and test.
612. 00:33:01 Previously, I think it was chapter two.
613. 00:33:04 He describes it was the chapter, chapter two or chapter one.
614. 00:33:06 He describes the fact that we're going to think slow and act fast.
615. 00:33:10 If we're going to be successful, we want to think slow and act fast as opposed
616. 00:33:14 to acting fast and then thinking, or I guess thinking fast and acting fast and
617. 00:33:18 then trying to back our way into learning.
618. 00:33:21 And that's kind of the gist I get from this chapter.
619. 00:33:23 But I'll tell you what, Mike, when I was reading this, like, I wasn't
620. 00:33:26 nearly that clear about like what he was trying to do with this chapter.
621. 00:33:31 It was just like an example of, hold on.
622. 00:33:33 So yeah, I get these researchers did it the wrong way, but I'm not really
623. 00:33:37 sure how constraints and boundaries really play into this all that well.
624. 00:33:42 Yeah.
625. 00:33:43 Um, the, the way he described the, the, the research that was being done, that
626. 00:33:50 was interesting.
627. 00:33:50 And I hadn't heard of this previously about the replication crisis, basically.
628. 00:33:57 How when they did these studies, they had this hypothesis and they, you know, did
629. 00:34:05 the experiment and what the results showed that that, you know, wasn't true.
630. 00:34:10 But then they would look at those results and see if there was anything
631. 00:34:12 that, that correlated to the results that they got in the, oh, well, let's just
632. 00:34:16 apply this study to something else instead.
633. 00:34:18 I can see where that would make sense in terms of trying to figure out what
634. 00:34:23 is actually going on here.
635. 00:34:24 But I also, the way he described it specifically, uh, had a better understanding
636. 00:34:29 for why that is kind of messed up.
637. 00:34:33 Um, there was a book I have somewhere, I haven't read it yet.
638. 00:34:38 I think it's called science fictions.
639. 00:34:40 And it's basically about like the, that replication crisis.
640. 00:34:44 Um, the statistic that he mentioned specifically in this chapter,
641. 00:34:48 is that 2015, a project to recreate a hundred psychology studies found
642. 00:34:53 that fewer than half could be repeated.
643. 00:34:55 That's not real great.
644. 00:34:57 I agree.
645. 00:34:57 Those are the basis of like all the books that we read, essentially.
646. 00:35:01 So the lesson to be learned here, I guess is, uh, go into it with your eyes open
647. 00:35:08 and take the parts that are useful to you, but don't accept anything as like, oh,
648. 00:35:13 this is absolute truth and I'm just going to base everything off of it.
649. 00:35:16 Even if it's got a hundred different footnotes and the bibliography is huge, you
650. 00:35:21 know, that, that kind of doesn't mean anything.
651. 00:35:24 You can make data, say whatever you want.
652. 00:35:26 So I ask yourself what's really going on here.
653. 00:35:28 That's kind of gets back to, uh, how to read a book by Mortimer Adler and why
654. 00:35:32 that whole idea is in topical reading is so important.
655. 00:35:34 You got to decide for yourself what you think about this stuff.
656. 00:35:37 But I do like the, the main point here was learning to think actually
657. 00:35:43 scientifically about things.
658. 00:35:45 Uh, it mentions that entrepreneurs who were trained scientifically
659. 00:35:49 pivoted more often.
660. 00:35:51 And I think that's real important because when you start a business,
661. 00:35:58 that's what an entrepreneur is, right?
662. 00:35:59 They're a business owner.
663. 00:36:00 They have this idea.
664. 00:36:01 They're going to change the world.
665. 00:36:03 They try this thing and if it either works or it doesn't, uh, if it
666. 00:36:08 doesn't and you're so attached to this one idea, you can feel like, well,
667. 00:36:11 I just got to find the angle of this that works and you can beat your head
668. 00:36:15 against the wall for the rest of your life, trying to make something work.
669. 00:36:19 And the juice just isn't worth the squeeze.
670. 00:36:21 So I think it's real important to recognize that and be willing to try
671. 00:36:24 something completely different.
672. 00:36:26 And there were some cool examples of, uh, of that, that he, that he shared.
673. 00:36:30 So I think that's a real important skill.
674. 00:36:32 I never really made the connection though to the scientific method being at
675. 00:36:37 the heart of being willing to pivot as an entrepreneur.
676. 00:36:40 Yeah.
677. 00:36:41 Yeah.
678. 00:36:41 I mean, like one of the things I think about all the time is like, if you're
679. 00:36:43 trying to answer more than one question, you shouldn't like you should stop that
680. 00:36:47 experiment and you should constrain down your experiment and only try to answer
681. 00:36:51 one thing at a time or else you're setting yourself up, uh, for failure.
682. 00:36:54 Yep.
683. 00:36:55 Are we ready to move to part two?
684. 00:36:57 Let's do it.
685. 00:36:58 Okay.
686. 00:36:58 So part two is creative constraints.
687. 00:37:00 Uh, we're going to go quickly in the chapter four here before we do that.
688. 00:37:04 There's one thing from the interlude.
689. 00:37:05 I thought was interesting.
690. 00:37:06 And it's this cognitive scientist, Daniel Willingham, he quotes him, basically
691. 00:37:11 saying that the brain is not designed for thinking, it's designed for saving us
692. 00:37:14 from thinking, which I had never thought about that before.
693. 00:37:17 And I was like, Oh, that's true.
694. 00:37:19 Like the brain is going to default to the easiest thing possible.
695. 00:37:23 And it's going to say like, Oh, I need to get from here to that location over
696. 00:37:28 there.
697. 00:37:28 I'm not going to walk up the hill.
698. 00:37:31 Like, why would I walk up the hill?
699. 00:37:32 If I can walk through the little valley in the hill, like that'll save me.
700. 00:37:36 And this matters in creativity, right?
701. 00:37:38 Like, so Epstein's going to come in and he's going to say, basically, if we
702. 00:37:42 set up constraints on purpose, it'll help us be more creative, which gets us
703. 00:37:47 right into chapter four.
704. 00:37:48 So chapter four is called the green eggs and ham effect.
705. 00:37:51 And basically he starts off with a story about how Dr.
706. 00:37:54 Seuss was limited in the number of words he could use.
707. 00:37:58 And that's how the green eggs and ham book kind of came, came to play the way
708. 00:38:04 it was.
709. 00:38:05 Mike, I have 50 down written that he was only allowed to use 50 distinct words.
710. 00:38:09 Okay, is that okay?
711. 00:38:10 I wanted to make sure my number was right.
712. 00:38:12 But then there's another story in this one where a jazz pianist, which I had
713. 00:38:18 never heard of, but I'm not like super into into jazz.
714. 00:38:21 So that's not, not uncommon.
715. 00:38:22 Is this the basic Jared story?
716. 00:38:24 Yeah.
717. 00:38:25 But he was, he was trying to play a concert, I think in Austria.
718. 00:38:30 And they, he asked for this specific piano.
719. 00:38:33 So he was famous enough to be like, listen, this is the piano I need.
720. 00:38:37 You must provide it like this.
721. 00:38:38 It needs to be this long and it needs to all this stuff.
722. 00:38:41 And whatever, for whatever reason, they couldn't get him the piano or he
723. 00:38:44 didn't have the piano.
724. 00:38:44 So the one they got him was basically good.
725. 00:38:47 So the details here, there was a woman who ends up being the manager.
726. 00:38:52 And she sells out this, this concert.
727. 00:38:56 And then he needs that specific piano, right?
728. 00:38:59 So it was a specific brand and there were two of them in like a university nearby.
729. 00:39:06 So she arranges to have the good one brought over.
730. 00:39:09 They bring over the crappy one and it's completely out of tune.
731. 00:39:14 It's like a seven foot piano instead of a 12 foot piano, which if you're
732. 00:39:17 going to play in a big hall, that's, that's important because it means that
733. 00:39:21 you're going to be banging on the keys to try to produce the sound that people
734. 00:39:24 can actually hear it.
735. 00:39:26 And so he sits down at it, he plunks on some of it.
736. 00:39:29 It's out of tune.
737. 00:39:29 He's like, there ain't no way.
738. 00:39:32 And she basically is like, look, we are both screwed.
739. 00:39:35 If we don't play this concert, so you got to work with me.
740. 00:39:37 Like she's trying to get the good one there, but they got to bring it across
741. 00:39:41 a cobblestone road.
742. 00:39:43 And by the time we get there, they have to completely retune the whole thing.
743. 00:39:46 So it's a complete disaster.
744. 00:39:48 And finally, he's like, okay, fine, I'll, I'll play the, the show.
745. 00:39:52 They tuned two thirds of it.
746. 00:39:53 So it's a shorter piano, not a full 88 keys already.
747. 00:39:56 And then he can't use the top register.
748. 00:39:59 So it completely changes what notes are available to him as he plays this
749. 00:40:04 piano and he's an improv jazz player.
750. 00:40:07 So it plays for an hour and a half and they record it.
751. 00:40:09 And it's, uh, I think I wrote it down.
752. 00:40:13 Um, it was the most successful best-selling piano album of all time.
753. 00:40:19 That's wild.
754. 00:40:20 It is wild and people absolutely loved it because they'd never heard this
755. 00:40:25 before.
756. 00:40:26 And the key, I think, is that the musician was good enough to work with the
757. 00:40:29 constraints that he had and, you know, ends up playing this stuff that sounds
758. 00:40:33 completely different.
759. 00:40:34 It sounds like there's multiple instruments there because he's playing
760. 00:40:36 the low end so loud, you know, that it sounds like there's a, there's a base
761. 00:40:40 accompanying it or something like that.
762. 00:40:42 Kind of crazy.
763. 00:40:44 Yep.
764. 00:40:44 That's absolutely crazy.
765. 00:40:45 So I, I think this chapter is really, really interesting and really, really,
766. 00:40:50 really strong.
767. 00:40:51 He talks about the, this idea of constraints led approach that basically you
768. 00:40:57 set up constraints that drive the, the learner or the performer or whatever to
769. 00:41:01 come up with their own solution.
770. 00:41:03 And that's how you really push, push things forward.
771. 00:41:05 That's in like the sports domain, but I think it's been applied in, in other
772. 00:41:09 domains as well.
773. 00:41:10 Like I'm a big fan of essentially this whole chapter about making us think
774. 00:41:17 differently about, we often think of constraints or I think of boundaries as
775. 00:41:21 limiting, like, Oh, they're limiting me in a way that like, I'm not going to be
776. 00:41:26 as good as I could be.
777. 00:41:27 And it's like, well, okay, that's true.
778. 00:41:29 Maybe, or maybe it's going to push you to not just go the comfortable route, which
779. 00:41:35 is why I brought up that little tiny section of the interlude before is because
780. 00:41:39 it forces our brains not to take the easy way that we know we can take it forces
781. 00:41:43 our brains to go the hard way or to figure out the solution or the, or the
782. 00:41:48 workaround.
783. 00:41:49 So overall, I mean, we're starting off part two and I'm, I'm in like, I, I
784. 00:41:54 like this.
785. 00:41:54 I think this is a really solid way to start part two.
786. 00:41:57 Yeah, this is a great chapter and part two, just on the creative constraints.
787. 00:42:02 This is right in my wheelhouse.
788. 00:42:04 I love this.
789. 00:42:06 Um, well, I should say it's right.
790. 00:42:07 It's something that I'm very, I'm fascinated by this, this whole topic.
791. 00:42:10 So there's one additional thing in here, the, well, to actually two things.
792. 00:42:14 The Einstein long effect, which is the instinct of problem solvers to employ
793. 00:42:18 only familiar methods, even if others are available.
794. 00:42:21 That was interesting.
795. 00:42:22 And the other thing that I was fascinated by was the description of box
796. 00:42:27 musical style, because I grew up playing classical violin.
797. 00:42:32 One of the more fun pieces that I learned to play growing up was called the
798. 00:42:38 Bach double and it's two violin parts.
799. 00:42:41 And, uh, it's interesting how they layer on top of each other, but in this chapter,
800. 00:42:48 there's somebody who's breaking down what Bach did in these different pieces.
801. 00:42:52 And he's saying, this is the, the phrase.
802. 00:42:54 It's these, you know, set of notes and then the layer, something on top of it.
803. 00:42:57 He's like, there's that set of notes again.
804. 00:42:59 And then there's another layer later.
805. 00:43:00 There's that set of notes, but this time it's inverted.
806. 00:43:03 You know, and so he is intentionally using these constraints to tie all these
807. 00:43:08 things together.
808. 00:43:08 He's not just pulling a bunch of random stuff out of thin air.
809. 00:43:12 He's, he's leaning, leaning all the way into the constraints.
810. 00:43:15 And at one part has an inversion, which is when written out in musical
811. 00:43:21 notation, it's like B flat, A, C, B, which is how you spell Bach.
812. 00:43:28 Yeah.
813. 00:43:29 It's absolutely crazy.
814. 00:43:30 This guy was on a whole nother level when it came to composing and
815. 00:43:34 putting and tying all the stuff together.
816. 00:43:37 All right, so let's go to chapter five.
817. 00:43:39 Let's build a new box in this one.
818. 00:43:42 Now I've heard of this before where basically the military was building
819. 00:43:49 technology or they were designing technology in ways that would fit certain
820. 00:43:54 people, but it doesn't fit others.
821. 00:43:56 And like they're, they're essentially trying to design, you know, for the most
822. 00:44:02 common person, if you will.
823. 00:44:04 And what they realize is like, why is they try to design for the most common
824. 00:44:07 person?
825. 00:44:07 They don't design for anybody, right?
826. 00:44:09 Like it doesn't fit the shorter person.
827. 00:44:11 It doesn't fit the taller person.
828. 00:44:13 It, it like, it ends up becoming a problem.
829. 00:44:15 So we actually study this in human factors in, in my world.
830. 00:44:18 So this was like a, you know, again, we were hitting home here in terms of,
831. 00:44:22 we think about constraints all the time.
832. 00:44:23 We think about how do we, how do we do this best?
833. 00:44:26 And, you know, okay, well, what do you do?
834. 00:44:28 You, you have to somewhat bucket these constraints into different ways that we
835. 00:44:31 can say, okay, well, in this sort of design, we're going to design.
836. 00:44:35 For males that meet this range.
837. 00:44:38 And this is where Mike, I don't know if you've heard of like six sigma comes in.
838. 00:44:43 Right.
839. 00:44:43 Well, this is where the principal of six sigma will come in.
840. 00:44:45 We're basically, we're trying to hit three standard deviations on either side.
841. 00:44:49 And can we, can we fit that well?
842. 00:44:50 And, and how does all that, how does all that work?
843. 00:44:53 Uh, he talks, um, in here, he introduces another example.
844. 00:44:57 So he, he incorporates examples throughout the entire book.
845. 00:45:01 And sometimes he revisits them.
846. 00:45:03 Sometimes he brings new ones and said the new one he's going to bring in here is
847. 00:45:05 Virginia Woolf in about how when she was writing, she would use preclued
848. 00:45:10 constraints and then she would use promote constraints and preclued
849. 00:45:14 constraints, basically block yourself from using previous ideas or previous
850. 00:45:19 solutions, right?
851. 00:45:19 So, okay, I'm going to write a mystery series, but instead of this, this and this,
852. 00:45:24 which is in like 99% of the mystery series from before, I'm going to not allow that
853. 00:45:29 to happen.
854. 00:45:30 I have to preclue that from being part of my even world of, of writing.
855. 00:45:34 And then there's the promote constraints or a specific guideline or structured
856. 00:45:37 new method, um, to do something in place of the old.
857. 00:45:40 So I'm going to promote this is going to happen instead, right?
858. 00:45:43 And I'm going to help myself figure it out.
859. 00:45:46 Again, the whole point of this part two is creativity.
860. 00:45:48 Like how are we encouraging ourselves to be more creative?
861. 00:45:50 Well, I've given myself, I've taken away my ability to use certain things.
862. 00:45:56 Or I've made myself, if you will, use other things.
863. 00:46:00 And again, I just think, I think chapter five, just like chapter four is, is a
864. 00:46:04 really solid one, very clear in terms of how we can use constraints to support
865. 00:46:10 our development of new ideas and innovative thinking.
866. 00:46:14 Um, and I was just a, I was a big fan of, of this.
867. 00:46:16 There's a book in here called anatomy of a breakthrough.
868. 00:46:19 Mike, have you read that book by Adam Alter, not familiar with that one?
869. 00:46:25 Me either.
870. 00:46:25 Like I looked into it and I was like, ah, this actually looks like a fairly, a
871. 00:46:29 fairly interesting book that, um, book, the bookworm audience might read.
872. 00:46:32 I didn't pick it for the next book, but, uh, it's on the short list because I
873. 00:46:36 just think that's a, it's a cool one.
874. 00:46:37 If we can analyze past breakthroughs and try to figure out what, what a breakthrough
875. 00:46:41 looks like.
876. 00:46:41 I think that'd be really cool.
877. 00:46:42 So I, again, I'm a big fan of chapter five as well.
878. 00:46:45 Just like I was of chapter four.
879. 00:46:47 Yeah.
880. 00:46:47 The, the two different types of constraints that you were talking about.
881. 00:46:50 I'm not sure if you use the exact term for this, but that's called the paired
882. 00:46:53 constraints process.
883. 00:46:54 Yeah.
884. 00:46:55 I didn't, I didn't do that, but yes, the promote preclude is paired.
885. 00:46:57 Yep.
886. 00:46:58 And that's where you take a nil structured problem and you provide some
887. 00:47:01 structure for it, which I think that in and of itself, that definition is actually
888. 00:47:05 pretty brilliant.
889. 00:47:05 And I love that a lot.
890. 00:47:06 I think you can extend it beyond the paired constraints idea, but that's,
891. 00:47:11 that's pretty cool.
892. 00:47:13 Um, and then the other thing that I liked from this particular chapter is they,
893. 00:47:18 he actually had a sports study that showed, uh, when a star player on a basketball
894. 00:47:24 team, and I think it's specific to basketball for a specific reason.
895. 00:47:29 And that is that there's only five people on the floor at a time on a team.
896. 00:47:33 But you, let's say you take the star player off of the team, they get hurt
897. 00:47:36 for a little while, how do the other players adapt?
898. 00:47:41 And the bottom line is that they become more collaborative.
899. 00:47:45 They make passes.
900. 00:47:47 They wouldn't have made before they start making plays that they wouldn't have
901. 00:47:50 made before.
902. 00:47:51 And I feel like you see this all the time where the star player goes down and if
903. 00:47:54 the team can figure out how to survive without him by the time he comes back,
904. 00:47:57 one or two things happens, either they're just clicking on all cylinders and
905. 00:48:00 they're, they're going to go all the way or the stars like wait, this is completely
906. 00:48:04 different and they can't figure out how to fit into the, the new system.
907. 00:48:09 Um, and it just kind of, it kind of stalls out, which is a kind of a, kind of a
908. 00:48:13 shame if you ask me, and that I think really comes down to coaching, but it's
909. 00:48:16 kind of kind of interesting and it's a cool, uh, way to, to show that this doesn't
910. 00:48:20 just apply to writing and the creative processes as well.
911. 00:48:24 Really, it's like creative collaboration.
912. 00:48:26 That is, um, really interesting to me.
913. 00:48:30 All right.
914. 00:48:31 Let's go to chapter six.
915. 00:48:32 Let's remix everything.
916. 00:48:33 So this is called the remix of everything.
917. 00:48:36 Can I kick this one off?
918. 00:48:37 Absolutely.
919. 00:48:38 Okay.
920. 00:48:38 Because I really liked this chapter.
921. 00:48:40 This may be my favorite chapter in the whole book.
922. 00:48:45 The story that I loved from here is, um, the one about Martin Luther, Martin
923. 00:48:51 Luther King Jr at the, at the beginning.
924. 00:48:54 So Martin Luther King Jr, um, obviously the, I have a dream speech and, uh, side note,
925. 00:49:02 I guess there's a really cool story about that.
926. 00:49:04 And in, uh, that book by George Raveling that we read where he ends up being at the
927. 00:49:08 place and gets the copy of, uh, of his notes from that speech.
928. 00:49:12 So another plug for that book, one of, one of my favorites, but, uh, I think it's,
929. 00:49:18 I think it's what you're made for, if I remember the title, right?
930. 00:49:21 Yep.
931. 00:49:21 But basically starts dissecting all these famous speeches that Martin Luther
932. 00:49:26 King Jr made and realizes that some of his most popular sermons actually had
933. 00:49:34 the same title and the same like subject text as these other sermons by other
934. 00:49:41 famous preachers.
935. 00:49:42 And there was one in particular, I think it was, what is man?
936. 00:49:46 Which he tied to this one, uh, this one, uh, sermon that was preached like shortly
937. 00:49:54 before, which was tied to another one, tied to another one, tied to another one.
938. 00:49:57 There's like nine of these in this chain that are all using the same name,
939. 00:50:02 like the same core concept, the same sermon name and the same core text.
940. 00:50:09 And back in the day, that's just what people did.
941. 00:50:13 That was how you created something new.
942. 00:50:16 You took something that somebody else did and you riffed on it and you added
943. 00:50:21 your own flavor to it.
944. 00:50:24 And as I was reading that, I'm like, yes, exactly.
945. 00:50:28 This is how the creative process works.
946. 00:50:30 Uh, and he mentions that the idea that creativity, originality or synonymous
947. 00:50:34 was born in the romantic period, the late 18th century, because that was the
948. 00:50:37 question in my head is I'm reading through that.
949. 00:50:39 It's like, when did we decide that you're only creative if you come up with
950. 00:50:43 something that's completely original?
951. 00:50:45 Cause that's the lie that I bought for a long time.
952. 00:50:49 And now he gives us a, a date and place, the late 18th century, which I think
953. 00:50:53 is a bit of a shame, um, that goes obviously far beyond the, the, uh, just
954. 00:50:58 preaching and putting together a sermon, but it was really interesting.
955. 00:51:03 Like that was what people leaned into.
956. 00:51:05 They, they stole like an artist and they were not quiet or shy about it.
957. 00:51:10 It wasn't that Martin Luther King Jr.
958. 00:51:12 was doing this as a way, as like a, and he was hoping that no one would find out.
959. 00:51:18 Like this was intentional and everybody was doing it.
960. 00:51:21 Everybody agreed.
961. 00:51:21 This was the best way to do it.
962. 00:51:23 And I feel like we should go back to that.
963. 00:51:26 Well, it's your, it's your anti intellectual property people.
964. 00:51:30 Like the, so now you have a whole slew of people who will say, you know,
965. 00:51:33 the intellectual property system and the trademark system is actually worse
966. 00:51:37 for innovation and worse for creativity.
967. 00:51:39 And this might be the strongest argument I've ever heard for that is like, oh,
968. 00:51:43 wow, this is how it was done in the past.
969. 00:51:46 And I could see how that could be more creative.
970. 00:51:49 He doesn't just end with, you know, the, the preachers there, but he talks about,
971. 00:51:53 you know, Shakespeare, he talks about jazz musicians.
972. 00:51:56 He talks about Edison.
973. 00:51:57 Like, I mean, he has so many examples of how basically not starting
974. 00:52:03 from scratch and remixing other people's ideas and like innovation
975. 00:52:07 happening kind of simultaneously.
976. 00:52:09 Cause everybody was just kind of showing off what they were doing.
977. 00:52:12 And at the same time they were trying to like, not steal, but like,
978. 00:52:15 take what other somebody else is doing and just turn it a little bit up,
979. 00:52:18 like turn that dial a little bit up.
980. 00:52:20 And I just think this is a really, it's a really powerful set of chapters.
981. 00:52:25 Four, five and six.
982. 00:52:27 When it comes to thinking about constraints and thinking about creativity.
983. 00:52:31 Um, this is, is a really powerful set of chapters.
984. 00:52:34 Uh, the one example that I liked, not surprisingly, because of my world,
985. 00:52:38 uh, the Orion algorithm for the UPS drivers.
986. 00:52:41 Like I had to talk about this one too.
987. 00:52:43 Yeah.
988. 00:52:43 I had always heard that they don't try to make left turns.
989. 00:52:46 Like, and I was like, okay, like I, that makes sense.
990. 00:52:49 You know, you get more accidents.
991. 00:52:50 You have to wait for the flashy yellow light or whatever.
992. 00:52:53 I was like, that makes total sense.
993. 00:52:54 But like what I liked about this was basically they, they stacked a bunch
994. 00:53:00 of little tiny things together and they used what the drivers knew.
995. 00:53:05 Like they didn't come down from on high and say, our algorithm is going to,
996. 00:53:08 you know, shatter anybody else's thinking and you must use our algorithm.
997. 00:53:11 They were, they actually worked with the actual individual drivers
998. 00:53:15 and let the individual drivers come back and say, Hey, if we did this,
999. 00:53:18 that would improve that system.
1000. 00:53:19 And like, and it's kind of this reinforcement learning thing that I really,
1001. 00:53:23 really like the, the Orion system.
1002. 00:53:25 And it's basically UPS's version of how did they go to the next 17 stops in
1003. 00:53:30 the most efficient way possible and can they save a mile?
1004. 00:53:33 Can they save 10 minutes?
1005. 00:53:34 Can they, can they do that in the most efficient way possible?
1006. 00:53:36 Which I think is like really, really fascinating.
1007. 00:53:38 Yeah.
1008. 00:53:39 And this, okay.
1009. 00:53:40 So it's weird that this is in the same chapter or in the same section
1010. 00:53:45 as creative constraints in some sense.
1011. 00:53:47 Cause we're not talking about writing anymore.
1012. 00:53:49 We're talking about logistics.
1013. 00:53:50 We're talking about how quickly the packages can be delivered, right?
1014. 00:53:55 But when Orion suggested these optimized routes for the, the drivers, initially,
1015. 00:54:03 there was a lot of resistance.
1016. 00:54:05 They, and one of the things that caused the resistance was they would
1017. 00:54:10 have to wait for the printout of these are the stops that you should make.
1018. 00:54:13 And this is the order that you should go in for people who really cared
1019. 00:54:16 about getting their deliveries done as quickly as possible.
1020. 00:54:20 Once they knew the first couple stops, they're like, okay, let's get after it.
1021. 00:54:23 And they had to sit there and then wait for this and they didn't want to do that.
1022. 00:54:26 They wanted, they wanted to go start their deliveries.
1023. 00:54:30 So the thing that, that made it click for the, the quote, unquote, good drivers,
1024. 00:54:37 right, was that they could watch the route being built and they could interact
1025. 00:54:41 with it as it was being built.
1026. 00:54:43 And when I, when I, when they described that, I was like, that is Claude.
1027. 00:54:47 That is the exact same thing that is happening with AI right now.
1028. 00:54:50 It's not that you ask it to do something.
1029. 00:54:52 And then, bam, it just spits it out.
1030. 00:54:54 You can see the thought process.
1031. 00:54:56 I don't know, uh, like I never really thought about that.
1032. 00:54:59 Maybe you, you work with it different, but when I, you know, put it in a prompt
1033. 00:55:03 and I see what it's doing and it's saying, this is the approach that I'm taking frequently.
1034. 00:55:07 I'll hit stop and I'll be like, no, I don't want you to do that.
1035. 00:55:09 I want you to do this instead.
1036. 00:55:11 Oh, okay.
1037. 00:55:12 And it like adjusts and I feel like that is the ideal way to work with it.
1038. 00:55:18 And that's exactly what happened in this totally separate scenario from when was this
1039. 00:55:23 like 20 years ago for the Orion thing?
1040. 00:55:27 Yeah, it was a while ago.
1041. 00:55:28 Yeah.
1042. 00:55:28 Yeah.
1043. 00:55:29 Yeah.
1044. 00:55:29 But essentially like it's the same, it's the same pattern.
1045. 00:55:33 It's the same principles being played out in real time history repeats itself, I guess.
1046. 00:55:38 But, uh, I think that the thing that made Orion useful, the being able to map all that
1047. 00:55:43 stuff out, that is the exact thing, maybe it was intentional.
1048. 00:55:46 Maybe it wasn't.
1049. 00:55:47 But that is the exact thing that makes these AI tools, uh, useful, whether you were using
1050. 00:55:51 them to create a webpage or you're using them to sharpen an idea or get an outline on your
1051. 00:55:58 next podcast episode.
1052. 00:56:00 Uh, if you use it intentionally, you kind of know what you are going for.
1053. 00:56:04 What the definition of, of, of done is what the ideal outcome looks like.
1054. 00:56:09 And then you start going back and forth.
1055. 00:56:11 You can start to notice when it goes off the rails, you can course correct it.
1056. 00:56:14 And they actually know I want to do this and said, okay, well recalculating, you know, you
1057. 00:56:18 can end up with something that is pretty awesome.
1058. 00:56:21 If you're willing to kind of co-work together like that, Ethan Malick, the book, co-intelligence,
1059. 00:56:26 right?
1060. 00:56:27 These existing together, working together, you can achieve some pretty awesome results.
1061. 00:56:31 I think, yeah, yeah, I, I agree completely.
1062. 00:56:35 Okay.
1063. 00:56:35 So let's keep moving.
1064. 00:56:36 Let's go to part three.
1065. 00:56:38 So this is where and how to focus.
1066. 00:56:39 So now we've gone from this idea of constraining creativity to help us be more creative.
1067. 00:56:45 So now we're going to think about where to focus.
1068. 00:56:46 So, um, designing for constraints is chapter seven.
1069. 00:56:50 And, uh, I talked about the, the military before and we bring the military, at least
1070. 00:56:55 back in, um, I might have put it the cart before the horse, but that we at least bring it back in.
1071. 00:56:59 And this is the body armor example where basically when they thought more universally
1072. 00:57:05 about, um, how they, how they made the body armor, people, I ended up liking it better.
1073. 00:57:10 So like, oh, okay, we thought we were just designing this for women, but like actually
1074. 00:57:14 the smaller men like this better too.
1075. 00:57:16 Okay.
1076. 00:57:16 Cool.
1077. 00:57:16 Like that, that's great.
1078. 00:57:17 Right.
1079. 00:57:17 Just because of the physical anatomy and different structure, um, that gets into the principle
1080. 00:57:21 of universal design, um, the general idea that to design things, products, processes, spaces,
1081. 00:57:27 everybody can use them.
1082. 00:57:28 And what you find is that when you do that, um, you end up helping everyone, right?
1083. 00:57:32 As, as you go universal design.
1084. 00:57:34 Now there are full textbooks on universal design.
1085. 00:57:36 I've seen these textbooks.
1086. 00:57:37 I've used some of these textbooks, uh, in my, in my life.
1087. 00:57:40 So an example of this might be, um, you go to a curb, so you're walking down the street.
1088. 00:57:44 You go to a curb and it'll slope down.
1089. 00:57:46 The curb will slope down.
1090. 00:57:48 So there's no like step off the curb and then they'll put those little kind of rubber
1091. 00:57:52 mats there that have the little bumps in it.
1092. 00:57:54 And you would think like, Oh, those are for folks in wheelchairs.
1093. 00:57:57 That way they have like friction to help them stop before they, okay, yeah, that's true.
1094. 00:58:02 But it also helps people on scooters.
1095. 00:58:05 It also helps people who are walking.
1096. 00:58:07 It also, it helps everybody.
1097. 00:58:08 They're like, it's universally helpful.
1098. 00:58:11 And what he's trying to say here is he's trying to say, we need to think more
1099. 00:58:15 about universal design.
1100. 00:58:17 We need to think more about like design in a way that like it helps kind of everybody
1101. 00:58:22 because that will help kind of, um, the entire ecosystem as opposed to just the one,
1102. 00:58:29 the one user and he directly counters that.
1103. 00:58:32 If I'm, if I'm remembering the chapter correctly, he directly counters that with, uh,
1104. 00:58:35 Taylor, so Frederick Winslow Taylor, who is basically the father of scientific
1105. 00:58:40 management and he basically came in and he was just like, we're going to make this
1106. 00:58:43 the most efficient thing in the world.
1107. 00:58:45 And we're, we're going to forget about individual differences and we're not going
1108. 00:58:48 to worry about those and we're just going to kind of, um, be the, the most
1109. 00:58:51 effective and efficient that we can.
1110. 00:58:52 And he's kind of countering those two things, uh, against each other, which I think is
1111. 00:58:56 a, uh, an interesting approach to, to doing this.
1112. 00:58:59 So I'm trying to get like the problem I have with this chapter is like, I get it's
1113. 00:59:03 about designing for constraints, but I don't exactly know what my one takeaway
1114. 00:59:07 is from this chapter, right?
1115. 00:59:09 And I've tried to think about it and I can't get one from, from this chapter as
1116. 00:59:12 easily as I could for others.
1117. 00:59:14 Well, I've got one, I've got an action item from this chapter, but it really is
1118. 00:59:17 sort of, uh, uh, anecdote to the main idea.
1119. 00:59:20 So just to reiterate the universal design thing, basic idea there is that you
1120. 00:59:25 design things so that everyone can use them and those challenges faced by the
1121. 00:59:29 extreme users frequently represent more severe versions of challenges faced by
1122. 00:59:33 many other users.
1123. 00:59:35 And I experienced this growing up working with the family business because we
1124. 00:59:39 designed software for special education.
1125. 00:59:42 And there were lots of things that we would, uh, implement in our software to
1126. 00:59:48 make them more accessible for people with physical disabilities.
1127. 00:59:52 Um, and that actually our standard features in a lot of things right now.
1128. 00:59:58 So we would have closed captioning on all the videos.
1129. 01:00:02 We would record all of the, like text to speech ourselves.
1130. 01:00:06 Now there are, you know, you can just upload text and get good sounding
1131. 01:00:10 audio and it'll, you know, read it to you, that sort of thing.
1132. 01:00:13 But, uh, that's the fact that it's so mainstream right now, it just kind of
1133. 01:00:18 shows how, how far people have come and how true that principle really is.
1134. 01:00:22 But the thing that I have from this as an action item has to do with the, uh,
1135. 01:00:27 section about if you want to learn, you need to get as much information as
1136. 01:00:31 possible outside on paper, whiteboard, et cetera, where you can refer to it,
1137. 01:00:37 but you don't have to hold it in your mind while you're trying to analyze it.
1138. 01:00:40 So my action item is to whiteboard more.
1139. 01:00:44 I do that a lot, but I want to start doing it like multiple times a week.
1140. 01:00:48 Feel like that would, uh, be useful.
1141. 01:00:50 And when I have something really big that I want to tackle, I'll go to the white
1142. 01:00:55 board and it's always worth my time.
1143. 01:00:57 But I think there are a lot of times where I'm like, no, I can figure this
1144. 01:01:01 out without that.
1145. 01:01:02 And I'm like, no, just externalize it.
1146. 01:01:03 Go ahead and do it.
1147. 01:01:04 I've got a whiteboard right over there for crying out loud.
1148. 01:01:07 I just use it.
1149. 01:01:08 I do, I find myself doing this quarterly, not because I want to, but because I feel
1150. 01:01:11 like my brain fills up so much that I'm like, okay, I have to get everything out
1151. 01:01:15 onto some piece of paper or some whiteboard and see it all together.
1152. 01:01:20 So yeah.
1153. 01:01:22 All right.
1154. 01:01:22 Let's go to my favorite chapter of this book, my theory of constraints chapter.
1155. 01:01:26 We're going to go chapter eight.
1156. 01:01:27 We're going to widen the bottleneck here.
1157. 01:01:29 And basically, if we're going to go as Epstein did, we're going to summarize this.
1158. 01:01:34 Theory of constraints is the notion that a single bottleneck determines the fate
1159. 01:01:37 of a system.
1160. 01:01:38 So he's going to describe Goldrat's theory of constraints.
1161. 01:01:41 He's going to talk about a little bit and he's going to say, okay, we're going to
1162. 01:01:43 now think about how do we focus on the single bottleneck in the system.
1163. 01:01:48 And what I can tell you is like, I could not agree more.
1164. 01:01:52 Like this is an absolute fantastic way to think about it.
1165. 01:01:55 Like you think about any system that you have.
1166. 01:01:58 You think about any process you have and you go, okay, what's my goal with this?
1167. 01:02:03 Am I achieving my goal?
1168. 01:02:04 No, I'm not achieving my goal.
1169. 01:02:06 Okay.
1170. 01:02:06 What's the single bottleneck that's, that's doing it.
1171. 01:02:10 And there may be more bottlenecks to it than others, but like what's the single bottleneck?
1172. 01:02:15 So I don't know.
1173. 01:02:16 Do you know Dave Ramsey?
1174. 01:02:17 Like, are you familiar with the snowball method?
1175. 01:02:20 Yep, absolutely.
1176. 01:02:21 Yeah.
1177. 01:02:21 So he would like this would be an application of theory of constraints where it's like, okay,
1178. 01:02:26 you're looking at your debt, you've stacked your debt up and you go, which debt am I paying
1179. 01:02:30 the most interest on?
1180. 01:02:31 And you go, that's the one I'm going to attack first.
1181. 01:02:34 And you attack that one because that's your bottleneck.
1182. 01:02:36 That's the one that's taking more of your money that is not going to good payback.
1183. 01:02:40 And then you then you'd roll to the next one, you roll to the next one.
1184. 01:02:43 And I just, I mean, Mike, I love theory of constraints.
1185. 01:02:47 Like I'm a big, big fan of theory constraints.
1186. 01:02:49 He gives a really good example here of an Olympic athlete who wasn't an Olympic athlete
1187. 01:02:54 until she started to use the idea of theory of constraints.
1188. 01:02:57 I just think this is a really solid principle.
1189. 01:03:00 It's a great principle.
1190. 01:03:02 I don't have very many notes from this chapter, though, because I guess I kind of
1191. 01:03:05 thought like this is a little obvious.
1192. 01:03:07 I don't know, but I do think it's a powerful idea.
1193. 01:03:10 And when I was doing business consulting, this was basically what I did.
1194. 01:03:14 We identified what are all the different stages to your, your business?
1195. 01:03:19 How do you track people?
1196. 01:03:21 How do you turn them into warm leads, customers, upsell them?
1197. 01:03:26 Maximum, customer lifetime value, all that kind of stuff.
1198. 01:03:29 And at each point, there's a bottleneck.
1199. 01:03:31 This is what we do in the creator business accelerator too.
1200. 01:03:33 It's like, okay, so we have this many, you know, YouTube followers.
1201. 01:03:37 We're trying to get those people on our email list and almost the number, the
1202. 01:03:42 percentage, the conversion percentage there between those two things doesn't matter.
1203. 01:03:46 It's really just the trend.
1204. 01:03:48 So whether it's 2% or 20%, you want to, whenever you look at that, try to make it
1205. 01:03:53 a little bit better, try to optimize it a little bit more, if that's the thing that
1206. 01:03:56 you're focusing on.
1207. 01:03:57 And then you want to see if it goes up or you want to see if it goes down.
1208. 01:04:01 If it goes way down, okay, let's not do that.
1209. 01:04:03 Let's roll that back, right?
1210. 01:04:04 But then once you get that, once you get them on your newsletter list, then it's
1211. 01:04:08 like, okay, how do we turn them into into customers?
1212. 01:04:12 And just to be clear, like if people are on my newsletter list and they never
1213. 01:04:16 buy something from me, that's totally fine.
1214. 01:04:18 I consider my newsletter my most important product, but for the person that I'm
1215. 01:04:22 really trying to help and I have a paid solution and that can solve a problem
1216. 01:04:25 for you, that's a, it, that should be a very clear value exchange.
1217. 01:04:29 It should be worth the money that you pay.
1218. 01:04:31 It helps me feed my family, right?
1219. 01:04:33 You're not just doing me a solid and throwing money my way because you like me.
1220. 01:04:37 I mean, you are cool.
1221. 01:04:38 Thank you.
1222. 01:04:40 But hopefully I'm exchanging something of value back.
1223. 01:04:43 And so it's just, it's that every step of the, the letter and you identify the
1224. 01:04:47 bottlenecks.
1225. 01:04:48 It's like, okay, that one right there, that's the biggest one that we have to deal
1226. 01:04:52 with.
1227. 01:04:52 So you fix that and then there's another bottleneck.
1228. 01:04:54 So you fix that.
1229. 01:04:55 And that's literally business in a nutshell.
1230. 01:04:57 Entrepreneurship 101, fix bottleneck repeat, fix bottleneck repeat.
1231. 01:05:02 Exactly.
1232. 01:05:03 Yeah, exactly.
1233. 01:05:05 Okay.
1234. 01:05:05 Are you good to move to nine?
1235. 01:05:07 Yep.
1236. 01:05:08 All right.
1237. 01:05:08 So nine, I don't need to spend a lot of time.
1238. 01:05:10 One chapter nine, chapter nine is called one thing at a time.
1239. 01:05:12 It's the anti multitasking chapter.
1240. 01:05:15 So we're going to get, you know, a bunch of different examples here of how multitasking
1241. 01:05:19 is bad and how we switch too often.
1242. 01:05:21 Uh, I don't know, Mike, is this the one where Jonathan Hight comes in?
1243. 01:05:26 Cause I can't remember this chapter later, but I can't remember, but, uh, I will say
1244. 01:05:31 that wasn't a whole lot revolutionary to me in this chapter.
1245. 01:05:34 Maybe if that's the first time you've, you've heard the science behind multitasking,
1246. 01:05:38 not working, it would be, but yeah, it's okay.
1247. 01:05:41 And the key, the key example with, with Epstein does in all, all this is, um, it's
1248. 01:05:45 an author, um, her last names, uh, a lend a, and she basically on January 8th starts
1249. 01:05:49 writing and then does only that for like all the time, like, that's all she does.
1250. 01:05:55 And then she'll like, when she gets done writing, she takes a break.
1251. 01:05:57 And then on January 8th, she starts writing again.
1252. 01:05:59 And it's basically, she does one thing at a time.
1253. 01:06:01 So, um, I don't really have much else to say about this chapter.
1254. 01:06:05 Other than, yep, don't multitask.
1255. 01:06:08 Yeah, it's kind of weird that is a kind of cool story.
1256. 01:06:12 Not the one I would have chosen to make the point, don't multitask, but whatever.
1257. 01:06:19 Yep.
1258. 01:06:20 Okay.
1259. 01:06:21 Uh, we'll move on to part four then.
1260. 01:06:23 Part four is called collaboration and contentment.
1261. 01:06:26 Uh, in chapter 10, it's called the rules of the game.
1262. 01:06:30 And basically like we're thinking now about, you know, intellectual honesty.
1263. 01:06:35 Um, he describes here that, um, basically the great enrichment has changed things to
1264. 01:06:43 where like life isn't what it, it's not as constrained as it used to be.
1265. 01:06:47 Like we, we were moving out of the poverty, you know, scenario.
1266. 01:06:52 Um, kind of societies going up, Mike, I'm going to be very clear.
1267. 01:06:57 Like part four is kind of out there for me.
1268. 01:07:01 Like I don't know really what to do with part four.
1269. 01:07:06 Um, like the point of, of this is like, I don't know.
1270. 01:07:11 Clear constraints allows to trust each other.
1271. 01:07:14 Like, I mean, that's maybe like the best I can, I can get it to clear norms,
1272. 01:07:17 allow us to play a fair game.
1273. 01:07:19 Like I don't know, I didn't have a lot on this chapter.
1274. 01:07:22 So if you could help me with chapter 10, that'd be wonderful.
1275. 01:07:26 I mean, I think it's overcomplicated.
1276. 01:07:29 Um, but there is a very powerful visual, which generally shows that the higher
1277. 01:07:35 the percentage of people that believe that most people can be trusted, the more
1278. 01:07:41 gross domestic product that was countries end up producing.
1279. 01:07:45 Okay.
1280. 01:07:46 So if you want to be productive, if you want to have more business, you have
1281. 01:07:52 to have this level of trust.
1282. 01:07:55 The stories that he mentions in here are a little bit of a stretch for me,
1283. 01:07:58 but they're pretty extreme where there's this lady who's running a, uh,
1284. 01:08:03 tailor shop and she's got a collaborate and like the place where she is.
1285. 01:08:08 Basically the men can do whatever they want.
1286. 01:08:10 So if she works with a, a male, it goes in, goes in on a business deal with,
1287. 01:08:16 with a male, then she can produce more potentially make more money,
1288. 01:08:21 but she's more likely to be screwed over because he could just, you know,
1289. 01:08:24 take the money and run and there's nothing she can do.
1290. 01:08:26 She has no legal rights, that sort of thing.
1291. 01:08:28 Which is kind of crazy to think about, but I do recognize that that, that sort of
1292. 01:08:32 stuff happens.
1293. 01:08:32 So that's setting the, the stage for an environment where you can't trust the
1294. 01:08:37 people that you, you work with.
1295. 01:08:39 Um, so I think the big takeaway really is just find a, uh, a group of people
1296. 01:08:46 be a part of an organization, um, even broader, like do business with people
1297. 01:08:52 that you, you can trust.
1298. 01:08:54 And there's a whole bunch of tactical stuff from business books that I've read
1299. 01:08:57 that sort of touch on this, you know, when you do business with somebody,
1300. 01:09:01 you're doing business with the individual, not with the, the company.
1301. 01:09:04 If you can't trust the person, you can't trust the, the company.
1302. 01:09:07 Um, I don't know.
1303. 01:09:09 Like, I think the larger point for me is I have enough older people in my life
1304. 01:09:16 who are senile about, uh, all these bad things that are happening in their
1305. 01:09:22 borderline conspiracy theorists and they're like, when are people going to
1306. 01:09:26 wake up to this stuff that is happening?
1307. 01:09:28 It's so obvious wake up sheeple, you know, and I'm just like, I never want to get
1308. 01:09:33 that way because look how bitter and negative you are.
1309. 01:09:37 Look how much it is affecting you when we come across statistics, like the ones
1310. 01:09:42 that are shared in this chapter was like the people who are going to thrive are
1311. 01:09:45 the ones who don't let themselves think like that.
1312. 01:09:48 Yes.
1313. 01:09:48 Who are willing to give people the benefit of the doubt.
1314. 01:09:51 Are you going to get taken advantage of occasionally?
1315. 01:09:54 Yeah.
1316. 01:09:55 But it doesn't matter.
1317. 01:09:56 It doesn't matter.
1318. 01:09:58 It's going to be a net win if you can, if you can stay positive.
1319. 01:10:01 And the other thing from this is that clear norms that apply equally to everyone
1320. 01:10:04 and foster teamwork.
1321. 01:10:05 I've heard it said that clear is kind when it comes to workplace expectations,
1322. 01:10:09 trying to keep that in mind as I work with my VA.
1323. 01:10:14 Okay.
1324. 01:10:15 All right.
1325. 01:10:15 Let's move the, the chapter 11, um, I thought chapter 11 was really interesting
1326. 01:10:20 from the standpoint of you always hear about these breakthrough innovations that
1327. 01:10:24 come from that one individual and, you know, whatever.
1328. 01:10:27 And then over the years, I've heard more about like how multiple things were
1329. 01:10:32 happening at the same time, right?
1330. 01:10:35 Like how they were developing the jet engine in Europe at the same time that
1331. 01:10:40 they were developing the jet engine in America.
1332. 01:10:43 And it just so happens that somebody came out with it faster or somebody got it
1333. 01:10:47 in the newspaper, or paper quicker.
1334. 01:10:49 He talks here about like how patent filings, if you look at patent filings,
1335. 01:10:53 you know, there are very similar dates when the, the first thing was filed.
1336. 01:10:58 Um, I, I always look for where authors get the title of their book.
1337. 01:11:02 And I try to find it in the book.
1338. 01:11:03 He gets it from this chapter.
1339. 01:11:05 So he talks about a neuroscience and psychology, um, professor Robert Weisberg,
1340. 01:11:10 the creative process based on inside the box thinking we use old ideas and creating
1341. 01:11:14 new ones. Um, then there's a, there's an idea in here that basically if we can
1342. 01:11:21 strain the problem well, and we limit our space.
1343. 01:11:25 It's actually easier to innovate within that, which I can tell you a hundred
1344. 01:11:29 percent, having led, I mean 15 years of design teams that, you know, of college
1345. 01:11:36 kids, if you can constrain them well and you can, what we would call it scoping
1346. 01:11:41 the problem, if you can scope the problem appropriately, which is essentially
1347. 01:11:45 constraining it, your success or your likelihood of success at the end of the
1348. 01:11:49 project is exponentially better.
1349. 01:11:51 Like it's not even close because when the problem is too great,
1350. 01:11:56 when the, the box is too big that you're playing in, there's just too many ideas
1351. 01:12:01 that float around and people start stepping on each other's toes.
1352. 01:12:03 And, and you end up just fighting with each other the whole time.
1353. 01:12:07 So I really like that.
1354. 01:12:08 We, we learn about, um, Herbert Simon, which he's going to talk about Herbert
1355. 01:12:12 Simon in a lot in the next chapter, but that's one of the, the individuals.
1356. 01:12:16 He's really like kind of looked up to and, and base this work off of.
1357. 01:12:19 So really, you know, framing for, for invention is we're, we're kind of reaching
1358. 01:12:25 what I would consider the peak of the mountain where it's like, Hey, listen,
1359. 01:12:28 if you want to do really good things, frame that with constraints.
1360. 01:12:33 You like figure out a way to limit the problem space or the opportunity space
1361. 01:12:38 with constraints, work inside that box.
1362. 01:12:40 And I think this is like, in my mind, this is the culminating chapter.
1363. 01:12:43 Chapter 11 is the culminating chapter.
1364. 01:12:46 Yeah, um, the things that set out to me from this are that most breakthroughs
1365. 01:12:50 are evolutionary, not revolutionary.
1366. 01:12:52 They always come from somewhere.
1367. 01:12:54 And the role of the problem, or the problem setter.
1368. 01:12:58 I think that's how he defined it.
1369. 01:13:00 Yep.
1370. 01:13:00 Being an important part in the, the breakthrough.
1371. 01:13:03 There's also an idea here that creativity is not some privilege,
1372. 01:13:08 kind of thought free from constraint.
1373. 01:13:10 It's normal problem solving, just directed at a very specific and
1374. 01:13:15 interesting problem.
1375. 01:13:16 Reminds me of Richard Feynman and his 12 favorite problems.
1376. 01:13:20 Okay.
1377. 01:13:20 Yeah.
1378. 01:13:20 You're not in your head.
1379. 01:13:21 You're familiar with that.
1380. 01:13:22 Yeah.
1381. 01:13:22 I have a note of my 12 favorite problems in obsidian.
1382. 01:13:24 I should probably revise that.
1383. 01:13:26 You know what?
1384. 01:13:26 I'm going to give myself an action item.
1385. 01:13:27 I'm going to update my 12 favorite problems.
1386. 01:13:30 Nice.
1387. 01:13:32 Nice.
1388. 01:13:32 Mike, have you noticed I don't have any action items from this book yet?
1389. 01:13:34 I have noticed that.
1390. 01:13:36 Yeah.
1391. 01:13:37 Yeah.
1392. 01:13:37 Okay.
1393. 01:13:37 So are you good with chapter 11?
1394. 01:13:38 Are we ready to move to chapter 12 or?
1395. 01:13:40 Yep.
1396. 01:13:40 Let's do it.
1397. 01:13:41 Okay.
1398. 01:13:41 All right.
1399. 01:13:41 Chapter 12 is maximizing by satisfying.
1400. 01:13:45 So maximizing by satisfying.
1401. 01:13:46 I'm going to tell you, um, I don't like the word satisfying at all.
1402. 01:13:50 Like I think that word bothers me.
1403. 01:13:52 Just, they just random, uh, but basically we're now going to take this idea of
1404. 01:13:59 constraints and we're going to try to like turn the dial up and we're going to
1405. 01:14:02 try to make it more influential or more have more of an impact.
1406. 01:14:06 Uh, Mike, I did not like this chapter.
1407. 01:14:11 Like I actively didn't like this chapter.
1408. 01:14:14 I don't like there's no conclusion to the book.
1409. 01:14:17 So you've noticed that when we talked about the outline, there's no conclusion
1410. 01:14:21 to this book.
1411. 01:14:21 So was this chapter trying to act like a conclusion?
1412. 01:14:25 I think kind of did it do it for me?
1413. 01:14:29 No, uh, he talks about some more studies.
1414. 01:14:32 He talks about how he likes Berkman's 4,000 weeks.
1415. 01:14:36 He likes Herbert Simon.
1416. 01:14:38 Um, I just like, I just don't understand.
1417. 01:14:42 Like, I think he's trying to tell us, just be satisfied and working inside the
1418. 01:14:46 box and stop trying to like push it and work outside of the box.
1419. 01:14:51 But I, I just didn't like this chapter at all.
1420. 01:14:54 And I did not get a lot out of this chapter.
1421. 01:14:56 So hopefully you did or we're just, we're just going to call it and say, Hey,
1422. 01:15:00 wasn't a very good end to the book.
1423. 01:15:02 Well, there's a couple important things here, I think, which do sort of tie things
1424. 01:15:07 together.
1425. 01:15:08 So number one, it's okay to be satisfied, which a specific type of person,
1426. 01:15:13 which happens to be past me definitely needs to hear that.
1427. 01:15:18 You don't need to be maximizing everything.
1428. 01:15:22 Um, he talks about how maximizers are less satisfied with their decisions and
1429. 01:15:26 their lives are less optimistic, they're less happy, they're more prone to regret,
1430. 01:15:29 more likely to endlessly compare themselves to others, et cetera.
1431. 01:15:33 Just yesterday was having to talk with my kids because there's a family in our
1432. 01:15:37 community where the, um, they have three kids.
1433. 01:15:41 I think two of them are in college.
1434. 01:15:44 Um, one of them is, yeah, uh, in, in Joshua's class junior this year.
1435. 01:15:50 And, um, it's good friends with him.
1436. 01:15:52 He's on the soccer team and their dad just decided that he married the wrong
1437. 01:15:56 person and wants a divorce and is leaving town and just like tearing
1438. 01:16:02 everything apart. And, uh, it's really a sad situation, but we had a
1439. 01:16:09 conversation about it because, uh, that phrase married the wrong person.
1440. 01:16:15 I feel like that, I guess I should, I should probably try to be a little bit
1441. 01:16:20 careful with my advice here, because there are situations where you do want to,
1442. 01:16:24 you do want to leave, um, but I, I personally feel that with, uh, a marriage
1443. 01:16:30 decision to a certain degree, like who you choose to marry doesn't really matter.
1444. 01:16:39 And how you go into the marriage does.
1445. 01:16:43 I mean, you look at all the places that have arranged marriages and they
1446. 01:16:46 legit learn to love each other and it's a fantastic relationship.
1447. 01:16:50 Is that just random chance those people got connected?
1448. 01:16:54 I don't think so.
1449. 01:16:56 I do think there's, uh, there's, there's a balance there, but I, I think once you,
1450. 01:17:03 you make a decision and you let go of the other options, you have a, that,
1451. 01:17:10 that's kind of a tipping point.
1452. 01:17:11 You can go one of two ways there.
1453. 01:17:13 You can be like, I am just going to make the best of the decision that I've made.
1454. 01:17:18 And unless there's like some really off the wall stuff there where it's,
1455. 01:17:22 it's dangerous and you really do need to leave.
1456. 01:17:25 I feel like that's probably the best approach for most people.
1457. 01:17:28 The minute though that you start asking yourself, Oh, did I make the right
1458. 01:17:33 decision and you start looking for evidence that you did or evidence that you
1459. 01:17:37 didn't, you will find a boatload of evidence for the reason that you didn't.
1460. 01:17:42 I mean, smaller scale, let's say you're trying to decide which, which camera to
1461. 01:17:47 buy or something, like you're trying to make a purchase online and you start doing
1462. 01:17:50 research, well, this is the one I'm going to, I'm going to go with.
1463. 01:17:53 And I think this shows up there too.
1464. 01:17:54 From that point, you can either, yeah, I made the right choice and find a whole
1465. 01:17:58 bunch of evidence to support.
1466. 01:17:59 Like this is the one you got to get or you can be like, Oh, I wonder if I made
1467. 01:18:03 the right one and you tried a little bit.
1468. 01:18:05 Ah, it's not as intuitive as I thought it was.
1469. 01:18:07 Well, I should have got that other one.
1470. 01:18:08 I'm going to return this and get something else.
1471. 01:18:09 And I know people like that.
1472. 01:18:12 I'm going to try this app, this tool, whatever.
1473. 01:18:14 Nothing really, nothing really fits.
1474. 01:18:16 They're looking for the Goldilocks.
1475. 01:18:18 You know, this one is just right.
1476. 01:18:19 And it's never like that.
1477. 01:18:20 It's all in your approach.
1478. 01:18:22 Yeah.
1479. 01:18:23 In the words of Epstein, right?
1480. 01:18:25 That's the wrong problem setting.
1481. 01:18:27 Yes.
1482. 01:18:27 You're setting yourself up to fail in the way you answer that question or the way
1483. 01:18:31 you solve that.
1484. 01:18:32 I'm not even kind of a problem.
1485. 01:18:33 The way you address that situation, you're setting yourself up to solve it in
1486. 01:18:38 certain ways.
1487. 01:18:39 And I think that is a really interesting way for us to say, like, I think that
1488. 01:18:43 might be what Epstein's trying to tell us here.
1489. 01:18:45 Like, like one of the things he's trying to get across to us is the way we
1490. 01:18:49 approach the world, the way we approach creativity, the way we approach
1491. 01:18:53 invention, it matters how we go into that problem.
1492. 01:18:58 And working inside the box isn't a terrible way to do it, even though we think
1493. 01:19:04 it's so limiting, like we think we limit ourselves in that way so much.
1494. 01:19:09 So yeah, like, I mean, I didn't get that.
1495. 01:19:12 Like, had you not, you know, talked about that right now?
1496. 01:19:16 Like, I don't think I would have gotten that.
1497. 01:19:19 But like, I can see where he's coming from.
1498. 01:19:21 I can really can.
1499. 01:19:23 Yeah.
1500. 01:19:23 And the Herbert Simon tie in here, he mentions that he was once asked how he
1501. 01:19:29 became so proficient, these multiple fields, because he won all these crazy
1502. 01:19:32 awards for all these different unrelated things.
1503. 01:19:36 Um, and he said that his reply was he was just fanatically exploring a single
1504. 01:19:40 topic, how humans make decisions.
1505. 01:19:42 Yep.
1506. 01:19:43 Yeah.
1507. 01:19:43 Stay curious.
1508. 01:19:45 And the other thing that he mentions here is a question, what are you
1509. 01:19:49 optimizing for?
1510. 01:19:50 This was in the context of like a mastermind or something, but I love that
1511. 01:19:55 question.
1512. 01:19:55 And I use that question all the time.
1513. 01:19:58 What are you optimizing for?
1514. 01:19:59 They were using it in a one year period as a pertain to their business.
1515. 01:20:05 But I feel like you can apply that to any area of your life.
1516. 01:20:08 And you can set any time period that you want.
1517. 01:20:10 I like the personal retreats every 90 days.
1518. 01:20:13 What am I optimizing for for those 90 days?
1519. 01:20:16 And then you can take a break.
1520. 01:20:18 You can read, you can look at the data that you collected, decide, okay,
1521. 01:20:22 that, you know, I've decided I'm going to shift or pivot and optimize for
1522. 01:20:26 something else.
1523. 01:20:27 Now that is totally fine.
1524. 01:20:29 But you got to be able to focus essentially on one thing.
1525. 01:20:33 And the minute that you're like, what are all the other options?
1526. 01:20:35 What are all the other possibilities?
1527. 01:20:37 I got to make sure that my head's on a swivel.
1528. 01:20:39 So I see stuff as it, you know, comes from, from left field, you're not going
1529. 01:20:43 to get anything worthwhile done.
1530. 01:20:46 Yep.
1531. 01:20:47 Yep.
1532. 01:20:47 You just gave me my action item though.
1533. 01:20:49 And I don't know if it should be, but it's like, what am I optimizing for?
1534. 01:20:52 Yeah.
1535. 01:20:52 Think about that.
1536. 01:20:53 I really do need to think about that.
1537. 01:20:54 I feel like that he didn't set it up this way.
1538. 01:20:57 So I don't blame you for not making this connection.
1539. 01:20:58 But I feel like that could be the conclusion is what are you optimizing for?
1540. 01:21:04 And how can, and even like an extension of that is how can you establish
1541. 01:21:08 constraints to help you optimize?
1542. 01:21:11 Or how can you play inside the box to help you optimize for the thing you're
1543. 01:21:14 trying to optimize for it?
1544. 01:21:15 Like that would be a really good extension to this book.
1545. 01:21:19 Exactly.
1546. 01:21:20 All right.
1547. 01:21:21 So we did it.
1548. 01:21:22 We're now through the 12 chapters.
1549. 01:21:24 There's no conclusion after this.
1550. 01:21:26 We go straight to acknowledgments, which personally, we'll talk about this in
1551. 01:21:30 style and rating more, but like I felt like the book just fell off a cliff.
1552. 01:21:34 Like, I mean, absolutely just do, do, do, do, do and boom.
1553. 01:21:37 And it was just done.
1554. 01:21:38 And I was like, wait, what?
1555. 01:21:39 I was like, we're done.
1556. 01:21:40 So I mean, okay, like that's just the way it went.
1557. 01:21:44 Uh, we'll talk about actual items now.
1558. 01:21:46 I'll go first since I already started mine.
1559. 01:21:47 I'm going to ask the question, what am I optimizing for?
1560. 01:21:50 Generally speaking.
1561. 01:21:52 And I think I'm going to limit this to my, um, nah, I'm, I'm just going to do
1562. 01:21:56 it in my whole life, right?
1563. 01:21:57 Like, so whatever that looks like, it was like, what am I optimizing for and work?
1564. 01:22:00 What am I optimizing for with family?
1565. 01:22:01 What am I optimizing for a church?
1566. 01:22:03 Like, what am I optimizing for in, in these different areas?
1567. 01:22:05 And then I'm going to try to think about, I'm not going to commit to this
1568. 01:22:08 one, but I'm going to try to think about, like, are there constraints
1569. 01:22:10 I can set up to help me optimize for, uh, for those things?
1570. 01:22:14 So that's mine.
1571. 01:22:15 Mike, what action items got did you have come into this book?
1572. 01:22:18 I've got two of them.
1573. 01:22:19 Um, not really pertaining to any of the main themes in this book, but that's okay.
1574. 01:22:25 Uh, the first one was to whiteboard more.
1575. 01:22:30 I actually have a set of markers and an eraser in my backpack.
1576. 01:22:36 I like to book, uh, the room at the library and go whiteboard there as well.
1577. 01:22:42 So I, uh, I'm just going to say whiteboard more, but I'm going for multiple times
1578. 01:22:46 per week with an extended session, like an hour or more at a whiteboard.
1579. 01:22:51 Good.
1580. 01:22:51 You got to plan it.
1581. 01:22:52 If you plan it, you're not doing it.
1582. 01:22:54 And then the other one is to update my favorite problems.
1583. 01:22:56 This is just a note that's in my obsidian vault.
1584. 01:22:58 I created it probably a couple of years ago at this point.
1585. 01:23:01 I just want to update it and see what, uh, what's changed there.
1586. 01:23:06 Good, good, good.
1587. 01:23:07 All right.
1588. 01:23:08 We'll move on to style and rating.
1589. 01:23:09 It's my book.
1590. 01:23:10 So I get to style it and rate it first.
1591. 01:23:13 Um, as you have heard, it is clear that, uh, part two is my favorite part of this book.
1592. 01:23:19 Like without a doubt.
1593. 01:23:20 So part, if you added part two with chapter eight, like those are my, those are my
1594. 01:23:25 four chapters in this book, the other eight chapters.
1595. 01:23:30 I mean, they were, they were okay.
1596. 01:23:33 Like they weren't like, they didn't blow me away.
1597. 01:23:35 Like, and remember, this is my book, like I'm the one who picked this book.
1598. 01:23:39 So I was kind of disappointed.
1599. 01:23:42 Like as I'm reading this, there were times when I thought it was like really slow.
1600. 01:23:47 There were times when I was just like, ah, that's just not that interesting.
1601. 01:23:51 There are times when I was like, that point doesn't really, like we could have made
1602. 01:23:55 that point in a lot less pages, you know, kind of a thing.
1603. 01:24:00 I mean, and then we get to the end and there's the, the no conclusion conclusion.
1604. 01:24:05 Um, you know, like I, I'm just going to throw it out there.
1605. 01:24:09 Like this was without a doubt, not one of my favorite bookworm books that we've ever done.
1606. 01:24:15 And I'm the reason why we did it.
1607. 01:24:17 Do I think the main thesis of this book is legitimate and solid and fantastic?
1608. 01:24:25 Yes, I really do.
1609. 01:24:27 I think we could spend more time inside the box and it would help us in a bunch of different areas.
1610. 01:24:33 It would help us make decisions, it help us be creative, it help us solve problems.
1611. 01:24:37 Absolutely.
1612. 01:24:38 I am on board with David Epstein's main point.
1613. 01:24:42 I will not read this book again.
1614. 01:24:45 Like I, I mean, like unless like there's some like crazy reason to read this book again.
1615. 01:24:50 This was a one and done for me.
1616. 01:24:52 I'm kind of like, okay, we're good.
1617. 01:24:54 Like I, I just don't think I need to do it again for all of the reasons I stated before.
1618. 01:25:00 I'm going to, because the idea is so strong, right?
1619. 01:25:04 Like I'm going to rate it a three out of five because the idea keeps it out of three.
1620. 01:25:09 Like it's a really good idea.
1621. 01:25:11 Some of the stories keep it up to a three, but they don't bounce it for me to a four.
1622. 01:25:17 And it's definitely not a five book, five star book for me.
1623. 01:25:19 So that's where I'm at, Mike.
1624. 01:25:21 This is a three star book for me.
1625. 01:25:24 All right.
1626. 01:25:25 Did you read his previous book range?
1627. 01:25:28 No, okay.
1628. 01:25:31 I did and I love that one.
1629. 01:25:33 So maybe that is coloring my perspective a little bit.
1630. 01:25:40 I'm going to give this four stars.
1631. 01:25:43 And the reason is that like you mentioned, I think it is a very powerful idea.
1632. 01:25:50 I, as you were talking, I realized my issues with this book really could have been solved
1633. 01:25:57 by David Epstein being a little bit more inside the box with how he wrote this one.
1634. 01:26:05 Okay.
1635. 01:26:06 It's a little bit far reaching some places and the stories.
1636. 01:26:10 Like I mentioned at the beginning, I got a little bit fatigued by some of the stories,
1637. 01:26:15 because there's just so much information that's being thrown at you.
1638. 01:26:19 And it sounds like, oh, this is really important.
1639. 01:26:20 I don't know.
1640. 01:26:21 It's different.
1641. 01:26:23 He's a good storyteller, but there are books where we read this story.
1642. 01:26:27 Kind of like Ryan Holiday, I guess, is the one that comes to mind.
1643. 01:26:31 And it's just, you can tell it's color commentary.
1644. 01:26:34 Like, oh, this is cool, but it doesn't feel like log this away for later.
1645. 01:26:38 You're going to need to know this.
1646. 01:26:40 Maybe it's the way that he kept coming back to the stories,
1647. 01:26:43 whereas like, I didn't remember that detail that you shared earlier.
1648. 01:26:47 And I feel a little bit bad about that.
1649. 01:26:49 I can't put my finger on it exactly, but it feels a little bit.
1650. 01:26:55 I feel a little bit stretched thin after reading a book about how constraints make us better.
1651. 01:27:03 It's valid.
1652. 01:27:03 It feels weird.
1653. 01:27:05 Some really great stuff in here.
1654. 01:27:08 Some topics in this outline that, like the multitasking thing where the stuff that he
1655. 01:27:17 talked about, I was like, I don't know why you chose that example.
1656. 01:27:21 Like the multitasking and the attention residue.
1657. 01:27:25 I have heard so many books talk about Sophie Leroy's research at the University of Minnesota on that.
1658. 01:27:32 And on the one hand, you're like, this is additional details.
1659. 01:27:34 This is a different perspective.
1660. 01:27:36 That's kind of refreshing.
1661. 01:27:37 But on the other hand, the points that he draws from the stuff that he cites here,
1662. 01:27:41 it's like, that's not as strong as the Sophie Leroy stuff.
1663. 01:27:44 So it's, I don't, I don't have a, I've not written a book like this.
1664. 01:27:47 So I don't know how I would approach this.
1665. 01:27:49 But the tension from the reader's perspective is balancing, I guess, new stuff with effective stuff.
1666. 01:27:58 And I feel like some of the new stuff just wasn't quite as effective.
1667. 01:28:01 It worked against him a little bit.
1668. 01:28:04 But I do think it's a very entertaining read.
1669. 01:28:08 I think the stories are really good.
1670. 01:28:10 I think a lot of this stuff, I knew some of these stories and he had a bunch of additional
1671. 01:28:17 details and different perspective, which kind of helped fill in the patchwork of understanding for
1672. 01:28:24 me. Like he mentions Tony Fadel quite a bit in here.
1673. 01:28:27 Tony Fadel is the guy who was behind the iPod, I believe, and then later left to do
1674. 01:28:33 the Nest thermostat.
1675. 01:28:35 And I actually read at one point an entire book by Tony Fadel, but still learned a bunch of stuff
1676. 01:28:43 about his experience with general magic that I was not familiar with.
1677. 01:28:50 What's that book, Bill?
1678. 01:28:53 I think so. Tony Fadel book.
1679. 01:28:56 Yeah, I think maybe we covered that one before you joined Bookworm.
1680. 01:29:01 But it was pretty good.
1681. 01:29:04 Tony Fadel is an interesting guy, but all that to say that this book is very well researched.
1682. 01:29:11 And he makes a note somewhere about how he got into this topic and it was really, he was
1683. 01:29:18 chasing his curiosity on something and it led to the discussion of the periodic table.
1684. 01:29:23 And so I think that part is cool.
1685. 01:29:26 He's sort of dogfooding what he's talking about here.
1686. 01:29:31 It is a little bit, I don't know, it just feels like a little bit much.
1687. 01:29:38 Maybe this is just off top of my head, but maybe this is more effective if
1688. 01:29:43 he chooses one of these areas to really drill down in.
1689. 01:29:47 So like the one that I was most lit up by was the creative constraints.
1690. 01:29:52 You know, what does this book look like if either he writes it or somebody else writes it
1691. 01:29:58 and it's, you know, inside the box how creative constraints make us better writers or something
1692. 01:30:06 like that. Or if his different parts were creativity, a different type of constraint,
1693. 01:30:12 like that would be another way that I think it would have resonated better with me
1694. 01:30:16 than the way it did. Yeah, that could be.
1695. 01:30:19 I do think it's a good book though, and I do like him as an author.
1696. 01:30:23 I don't think it's as good as range, but I do think I would generally recommend
1697. 01:30:27 that people read this one, at least until I find a better book about the value of constraints.
1698. 01:30:35 I'm going to point people to theory constraints first to the goal.
1699. 01:30:38 Well, see, we got to read that one. I've not read that one.
1700. 01:30:41 I've taken. It's on the bookshelf and I've looked at it and I'm like,
1701. 01:30:45 how is this so popular? The guy's picture is on it and I'm like, really?
1702. 01:30:49 Listen, like it is not fancy at all, but I don't know.
1703. 01:30:54 It's just a, I thought it was a really good book.
1704. 01:30:56 Okay, Mike, let's put inside the box on the shelf. What's next?
1705. 01:31:00 Next is The Psychology of Money by Morgan Hausle. I have read, maybe we have read,
1706. 01:31:06 Morgan Hausle books in the past, and this is the one that put him on my radar.
1707. 01:31:13 I don't know that this is the one that made him popular necessarily, but
1708. 01:31:17 I feel like this is the first one that he wrote where I was like, oh, now I see that
1709. 01:31:22 name popping up over and over again. I actually have purchased multiple copies of this book.
1710. 01:31:29 Accidentally, because I tend to buy a book when I stumble across and oh, I should read that one.
1711. 01:31:35 I buy it and it shows up and then I can pick it up and read it later and then occasionally I have
1712. 01:31:40 this bad habit of going to half-price books and just browsing the sections.
1713. 01:31:44 So I don't have my library at home and I'm just like, oh, that looks interesting.
1714. 01:31:48 That looks interesting. I walk out with a stack of books. So I have one delivered by Amazon
1715. 01:31:52 and one picked up at half-price books, but I have not read either of them. So we're going to read
1716. 01:31:57 it together. We need to put a constraint on your book buying. That's what we need to do. Absolutely
1717. 01:32:02 not. That is one place where you should not be put in a box. Tell me after you move, right?
1718. 01:32:08 Because you have a lot of books to carry, my friend. You have a lot.
1719. 01:32:12 We have moved probably because the house that we are moving to, we can put stuff in the garage,
1720. 01:32:20 and so we've been bringing stuff over there. And we brought over probably about a third to a half
1721. 01:32:26 of the books that we have in our house because we have books everywhere and the window sill,
1722. 01:32:32 bookshelves all over the place. So we're trying to get it to the point where we feel good people
1723. 01:32:37 can come take pictures so we can list it. We are just getting there about half of the books being
1724. 01:32:43 gone. There's still quite a few that we've got to get over there. But I am fully aware of how
1725. 01:32:49 heavy these books are and I am okay with it. That's awesome. Okay, then I'm after that.
1726. 01:32:55 We're going to read uncommon sense, rethinking ordinary problems in extraordinary ways by William
1727. 01:33:01 Brody and then with Mike Field. It's a kind of a two author book. But basically it's just thinking
1728. 01:33:06 about kind of how we get lessons from medicine, engineering, entrepreneurship, leadership,
1729. 01:33:14 and how do we get the best thinking out of those problems and apply them in different ways.
1730. 01:33:22 So this one just randomly came across me and I thought it looked pretty good. So we'll look
1731. 01:33:26 at that one after the psychology of money. Mike, do you have any gap books for us?
1732. 01:33:31 I do not. I'm trying to launch a cohort. I'm moving soccer season is starting. There will be no
1733. 01:33:39 gap books. Okay, I have one, but it is not like an intense gap book. This is a fun... I like to
1734. 01:33:48 preview the books before I hand them off to my boys for them to kind of free reign. And this one's
1735. 01:33:54 called "Kingdom's Dawn" and it's by Chuck Black. And it's basically like a medieval night kind of
1736. 01:34:00 book. So I'm reading "Kingdom's Dawn" by Chuck Black right now. That's my... And it's fun. It's a goofy
1737. 01:34:07 fiction book. So it's not anything serious or heavy. Nice. Well, we just want to thank everybody for
1738. 01:34:13 listening. On the pro show that we do before this show, we talked about national parks. We talked
1739. 01:34:20 about long car trips and we talked about our experiences doing those. If you're interested in
1740. 01:34:25 that, you can become a pro member. You get a longer ad-free pro show. You get a bootleg that's
1741. 01:34:30 released usually about a week or two early. There's a bookworm wallpaper. Mike has generously shared
1742. 01:34:36 his reading masterclass with us. The pro subscription is $7 a month. It helps us just with all the
1743. 01:34:43 kind of back-end stuff that we need to run the show. And we just really, really appreciate
1744. 01:34:46 anybody who's willing to support us and just come alongside us and partner with us in that.
1745. 01:34:52 If you're interested in that, you can go to bookworm.fm/pro and sign up that way for us.
1746. 01:34:58 All right. And if you're reading along with us, pick up "The Psychology of Money" by Morgan
1747. 01:35:02 and we'll talk to you in a couple of weeks.