General Magic invented the cloud, emojis, and virtual keyboards, then collapsed under the weight of its own freedom. Pixar, built on the opposite philosophy, used popsicle sticks Velcroed to a wall to channel its animators’ creativity into masterpieces. The difference? Constraints.
In this interview, David Epstein walks through decades of research exploring why constraints, not freedom, are the engine behind creativity, focus, and breakthrough.
About the speaker: David Epstein is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, The Sports Gene, and his new book Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better.
He was the host of Slate’s popular How To! podcast and a science and investigative reporter at ProPublica. Prior, he was a senior writer at Sports Illustrated, where he co-authored the story that revealed Yankees’ third baseman Alex Rodriguez had used steroids. His writing has been honored by many organizations, from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to the Society of Professional Journalists and the National Center on Disability and Journalism, and has been included in the Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology.
Timestamps
00:00:18 Chapter 1: General Magic vs. Pixar: Why constraints are necessary.
00:08:02 The concept of “subtractive neglect bias”
00:11:12 Constraints as a creative superpower
00:16:08 Chapter 2: The dangers of too much freedom
00:18:15 Too much freedom and modern anxiety
00:22:05 The maximizing trap
00:25:03 Chapter 3: How to fix bottlenecks
00:28:13 Applying the bottleneck to real work
00:34:22 Chapter 4: Regaining our focus in an attention economy
00:35:28 Self-interruption & reclaiming focus
00:37:07 Discipline and ritual as creative liberation
00:41:37 Chapter 5: The myth of the lone genius
00:43:42 Three case studies: Mendeleev, Einstein, Darwin
00:51:34 The power of problem setters
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Transcript
Below is a transcript of the first five minutes of this video interview. This is a true verbatim transcript that captures the conversation exactly as it happened. If you’d like to read the full transcript while following along with the video, click here.
I’m David Epstein. I’m the author of the number one New York Times bestseller, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, and now the new book, Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better.
Chapter 1: General Magic vs. Pixar: Why constraints are necessary.
General Magic was a company that was conceived in the late 80s and founded by a trio of former Apple employees. Two of them had been designers of the original Mac, and the other had this job inside of Apple. His name was Marc Porat, and his job inside of Apple was looking at the future of technology, and he was an absolute visionary. Internally their innovations were legion. I mean they made an early form of USB. They made the precursors to emojis, virtual keyboards, they created a virtual meeting space where devices could communicate to carry out tasks and do commerce. And what did they call that place in 1990? The cloud. Like, they were way ahead of all these things. In fact, in one case, they gave a demonstration of some of their disruptive technology, it happened to be a software modem in this case, to one of their Japanese partners. And one of the Japanese engineers started banging his head on the table. And so they asked, you know, “what’s wrong?” And another one of the Japanese engineers said, you have just obsoleted Kato-san’s division. So this group of people really saw the future of communications technology, and then they formed this massive alliance that was a 17-company partnership that covered so much of the communications world that their meetings had to start with an antitrust lawyer listing all the topics that they were not allowed to discuss.
And Marc Porat, the CEO, started the process to go public, raised more and more money, expanded the team, expanded the office, and he said his goal in doing that was to create heaven for engineers where they were free to play and create with the only limits being their imagination. “What more could anyone ask for,” he said. And as it turned out, a little less freedom was the thing they really needed. Because they could do anything, they did do anything. The project kept growing and growing and every time someone had an idea for something that would be cool they, made it. They started missing deadlines because they kept adding everything and everything got bigger and bigger. They didn’t have a clear idea of who their customer was. So they defined their customer as “Joe Sixpack.” And when the product finally did come out, the first product that ran their operating system was called the Sony Magic Link. It was bigger than a phone. It didn’t contain a phone. It was overloaded with so much other stuff. It had so many features that the battery life was terrible. The user experience was choppy. It had a 200-page user manual, and it sold about 3,000 units in six months, mostly to people who they knew. And pretty soon the company was disintegrating. So they just did not keep a boundary on anything they were doing.
Something that I think was emblematic of the problem, there was an engineer named Steve Perlman and his job at General Magic was to create a calendar function. So he writes a calendar function. It goes from 1904 to 2096. And he checks it in and he thinks he’s done. And then one of the company’s leaders comes to him and says, “Hey, Steve, somebody might make apps that go farther into the future or historical apps. You have to make this calendar bigger.” And so he redoes the calendar and he starts it from year one. So now it goes from year one into the future. He thinks he’s done again. And then a member of another team comes to him and says, “Look, why are you tying this into an arbitrary religious context? You know, starting at year one or year zero, you should start at the beginning of astronomical time.” So then he goes back again, creates a calendar function that starts at the beginning of the universe. If he had just stuck between 1904 and 2096, it would have been about four lines of code. And instead, it ended up being this long project because it expanded like everything did at General Magic, and it was an enormous waste of time and resources.
They just could not put any constraints on what they were doing. When I interviewed a lot of the people who worked there, they kept telling me the biggest challenge was figuring out what not to do. What to do and what not to do. Because they didn't have a bounding box around what they were doing. If General Magic was built for unbridled freedom, where people could work on literally anything that their minds could conceive, Pixar was the absolute opposite. One of the founders, Ed Catmull, was going into grad school about the same time as Marc Porat, the CEO of General Magic, and he had a similarly audacious vision. Ed grew up wanting to be a Disney animator, but he wasn’t that great of a drawer, which is a problem for that. And so he instead set the goal of making the world’s first fully computer-animated feature film. And this was incredibly audacious. When he was starting grad school in the 70s, the cutting edge was like, shapes rotating on a black screen. And yet, 20 years later, with the release of Toy Story, he did indeed create the world’s first fully computer animated feature film. And then he made it his mission for the rest of his career to create an organization that could do that repeatedly. And you think of Pixar as this just unbridled imagination, right? Because that’s how the products look. But the way he did that was with the religious implementation of constraints that were like bumpers in a bowling alley, channeling creative ideas into achievement.
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