285. Think Inside the Box: How Constraints Spark Creativity and Communication

The secret to better communication isn’t adding more—it’s knowing what to leave out. Communication isn’t clearer when you say more — it’s clearer when you say less. As David Epstein https://www.fastersmarter.io/guests/david-epstein/ puts it, we’re wired to keep adding, even when “the better solution is often what you take away.” The challenge isn’t having ideas; it’s choosing which one actually matters. Epstein is an author and investigative journalist known for his New York Times bestseller Range. In his latest book, Inside the Box https://www.fastersmarter.io/inside-the-box/, he explores how constraints can sharpen creativity and elevate thinking, a theme that reflects his broader work at the intersection of psychology, performance, and innovation. “If you assume someone will only remember one thing,” he explains, “decide what that is before you start talking.” That simple constraint forces clarity — and changes how we communicate entirely. In this episode of Think Fast Talk Smart https://www.fastersmarter.io/, Epstein and host Matt Abrahams unpack why limits make us better communicators and thinkers. From the dangers of “featuritis” to the creative breakthroughs sparked by restriction, they explore how blocking familiar paths leads to more original ideas and communication. To listen to the extended Deep Thinks version of this episode, please visit FasterSmarter.io/premium https://www.fastersmarter.io/premium/. Episode Reference Links: David Epstein https://www.fastersmarter.io/guests/david-epstein/David’s Book: Inside the Box https://www.fastersmarter.io/inside-the-box/Ep.108 All In: How Improv Helps You Show Up and Communicate Well https://www.fastersmarter.io/108-all-in-how-improv-helps-you-show-up-and-communicate-well/ Connect: Premium Signup >>>> Think Fast Talk Smart Premium https://www.fastersmarter.io/premium/Email Questions & Feedback >>> [email protected] Transcripts >>>Think Fast Talk Smart Website https://www.fastersmarter.io/david-epstein-communication-strategies/Newsletter Signup + English Language Learning >>>FasterSmarter.io http://fastersmarter.io/Think Fast Talk Smart >>>LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/think-fast-talk-smart/,Instagram https://www.instagram.com/thinkfasttalksmart/, YouTube https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6caGRBUYZCmgDGM2RK6mxKB9jG_ccmm3Matt Abrahams >>>LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/maabrahams/ Chapters: (00:00) - Introduction (00:46) - Featuritis & Overload (02:25) - Constraints & Creativity (06:35) - Chunking Information (07:56) - Familiarity & Innovation (08:58) - Clarifying Through Feedback (11:29) - Defining the Problem (12:51) - Precluding Default Approaches (14:31) - The Final Three Questions (20:25) - Conclusion ******** Thank you to our sponsors. These partnerships support the ongoing production of the podcast, allowing us to bring it to you at no cost. Learn more about how Notion https://www.notion.com/?utm_source=podcasts&utm_medium=thinkfast can support your business at notion.com/thinkfast. https://www.notion.com/?utm_source=podcasts&utm_medium=thinkfast Join our Think Fast Talk Smart Learning Community and become the communicator you want to be. https://learning.fastersmarter.io/?redirect_from=podpage

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Matt Abrahams?

  In the moment, conflict is difficult for everyone. In our October newsletter, out now, you will learn ways to help yourself handle these challenges better. Not only do you get specific advice, we're also providing an infographic to help you remember. Find our newsletter on the Think Fast, Talk Smart LinkedIn page or at fastersmarter.io under Resources. Constraints catalyze communication. My name's Matt Abrahams and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. Today, I look forward to chatting with David Epstein. David is a science writer and investigative journalist, best known for his number one

• 0:43Matt Abrahams?

  New York Times bestseller, Range, and The Sports Gene. In his latest book, Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better, he explores the counterintuitive cognitive science showing that the limits we have free us up to be more creative. Well, welcome, David. Thanks for being here. I really look forward to learning from you today.

• 1:04Speaker 01

  It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

• 1:06Matt Abrahams?

  Okay, shall we get started?

• 1:07Speaker 01

  Let's do it.

• 1:08Matt Abrahams?

  In reading Inside the Box, I really resonated with when you talk about the Christmas Tree Effect or featureitis. Can you share what these ideas mean and how can we prevent when we communicate and our core ideas from being drowned in just the unnecessary complexity of so many of the things we end up communicating about?

• 1:27Speaker 01

  That's a great question because those are phrases that come from designers primarily, featureitis and the Christmas Tree Effect, that essentially mean the same thing, adding more. So featureitis, like you get carried away by always adding features to things. The Christmas Tree Effect is similar, meaning you just keep putting ornaments on the tree over and over and over. And humans have a hardwired, what's called additive bias, to always solve problems by putting more and more on. And a related bias, the flip side, called subtractive neglect bias, we tend to overlook solutions that involve taking things away. And I think when it comes to communication, and I've been guilty of this for sure, I'm curious about a lot of things and I have a desire to impart everything that I think

• 2:11Speaker 01

  is interesting to someone. And I think that shows in my first book, which did well, but in retrospect, going back, there are things in here that I would take out, looking at it now. So I feel like an antidote to featureitis when it comes to communication would be something like... Assuming the other person's going to forget everything except one thing you said, now decide what that one thing is before you're open your mouth. That doesn't mean you can't add other things, but that one thing you want to make sure that you get across. And I think that's an approach, like many good constraints do, can help you clarify priorities when you're trying to communicate clearly.

• 2:47Matt Abrahams?

  Yeah, one of the things that I coach, the people I coach and the students I teach, is to really think of the bottom line first before you speak. And I like how you said, what's the most important thing? And then build the message from there, rather than thinking of everything you have to say and hoping that some of it sticks. Growing up, one of my favorite books as a kid was Green Eggs and Ham. I love Dr. Seuss. Can you tell the story of Dr. Seuss, Theodore Gazelle, and The Cat in the Hat? And how that was written with vocabulary restriction in mind? And how can that type of restriction lead to new and novel input and output? And have you thought about that in the way you do your communication? And perhaps all of us could do our communication.

• 3:32Speaker 01

  So Dr. Seuss, we take for granted now that there's a lot of interesting children's literature. But at the time, he was working, it was boring. I went back and read some of the stuff and it was just super literal stuff, very pedantic. And Dr. Seuss was asked to create a children's book using only 200 words from a kid's vocabulary list that he was given. And so what does he do? First, he starts complaining to his wife because he looks through and he says, there's basically no adjectives. And in fine Sussian form, he compares it to trying to make a strudel without any strudels, which I love because it's like he was the same person in private as he was in public. But then he gets exasperated and decides he's just going to take the first two rhyming words on the list

• 4:17Speaker 01

  and write a book around them. And the first two rhyming words are cat and hat. And the rest is history. But that restriction forced him to experiment with rhythm because he couldn't experiment with vocabulary. And after he did that, this famous publisher bet him that he couldn't do it again, using only 50 words. And he did that for Green Eggs and Ham, where he had to Experiment with rhythm even more because what can you do with 50 words? And it became this rollicking tale, of course, that spawned imitators and changed children's literature and gave rise to psychological effect known as the green eggs and ham effect, which is the idea that the quickest path to creativity is by blocking familiar solutions. So our brains are actually lazy. You may think your brain is made for thinking,

• 5:01Speaker 01

  but it's actually made for preventing you from having to think whenever possible, because thinking is energetically costly. And so if you're given complete freedom, you'll just go down what cognitive scientists call the path of least resistance. You'll just do the thing that feels convenient or that you've done before. And so the best way to become creative or have new ideas is to take that away. So in a communication perspective, one thing I would think of is, let's say, you're going into a client meeting or something and you say, if we were not allowed to pitch or recommend or say the usual thing, what would we do instead? And I think that can be a fruitful thought exercise for thinking of what are other ways we could frame this, or what are other ways we could propose this, or maybe even directly in the communication medium, if we were not allowed to communicate this using PowerPoint

• 5:46Speaker 01

  slides, or whatever it is that we're used to, how would we do it? And I'm not saying you necessarily have to do that, but it tends to be a very generative exercise in figuring out what is the core of this thing and what are ways to communicate it.

• 5:58Matt Abrahams?

  I love the backstory on Dr. Seuss's initial successes and this idea of putting constraints into communication to get you to think differently about it. I have a colleague who, when they do an activity in class and they're teaching conflict resolution, they ask the students to have a conflict. They create a simulated conflict and the students can only ask questions. They can't make declarations. And you can see how it would change the dynamic, right? And again, she's not advocating that every conflict should be resolved through questioning exclusively, but it changes your mindset and it changes how you listen.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  When I'm in my mode as a journalist, I think I'm legitimately a better person because it's not that I'm only asking questions, but it's that I go into every conversation with the mindset of trying to understand, not to be right. And that frame just makes so much difference in how the conversation goes.

• 6:57Matt Abrahams?

  Yeah, absolutely. And I think the challenge for all of us, you first have to recognize the habits and patterns heuristics that you have to then begin to challenge them and say, okay, now we're not going to do this. But I think there are a lot of possibilities and another reframe you could use. Go into any situation as a journalist, what would a journalist do here could be really helpful. What is chunking and how can it help us in our communication?

• 7:21Speaker 01

  Chunking is, in the sense that psychologists use it, means essentially the grouping together of information. So maybe I can give you an example, it'd be an easy way to explain the phenomenon. If I said 20 random words to you right now and asked you to repeat them back, you'd have trouble doing that. But if I gave you 20 words in a sentence, you may well be able to repeat that back to me, or at least most of it. And they could be the same 20 words, just in the first case, mixed up. But it will make your memory seem so much better because you've learned a system of grammar and groups and phrases of words that are chunked or collected into groups in your brain. So you're not actually remembering 20 different things. You're remembering just a few different chunks that fit together in some coherent scheme.

• 8:05Speaker 01

  And that's how humans are able to remember and access as much information as we can because we chunk information into related, meaningful groups and then into these broader networks or templates of knowledge.

• 8:18Matt Abrahams?

  So how does this lead to novelty? How does it lead to creativity and new ideas when you're attaching to previously existing old information?

• 8:26Speaker 01

  Our older ideas or familiar ideas are actually the jumping off point for new ideas typically. In fact, as I was doing the research for the book, one of the things I learned was that the idea that creativity and originality are synonymous was not even a thing until the late 18th century. And this group of people that wanted to say, not everything is logical. Like creative inspiration comes in these lightning strikes out of the blue and there's no rhyme or reason to it. And that's not really true. It actually typically comes from modifying ideas that are already very familiar.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  And I think if we're thinking about this in a communication frame, one of the important things is that if you want to get people to come along with creative or radical ideas, a really important thing you have to do is ground it in things that are very familiar to them and then layer the more radical thing on top of it, so that this vision of change also comes along with it, an embedded vision of continuity.

• 9:20Matt Abrahams?

  Demonstrating consistency and showing how what you're talking about is familiar, it makes it easier for people to, one, buy into it and to follow through. Anybody listening to the show knows that I am a huge advocate for frameworks and structure in communication, for the very reasons you've just talked about. They allow us to understand and predict what's coming, so we can dedicate and focus more information on it. We're not good at remembering just list after list, item after item. When you package it in a structure like problem, solution, benefit, past, present, future, all of a sudden, that chunking allows us to have a framework that we can attach to, and it makes it more memorable. So I definitely appreciate you defining

• 10:03Matt Abrahams?

  that term that helps us see something that we often talk about on the show. In your book, you talk about the podcast This American Life, one of my favorite shows. Can you share with us what you learned from your interviewing of them?

• 10:16Speaker 01

  I did a piece for This American Life, and I had never written anything for radio or narrative podcasts, essentially. And this was like a 35-minute piece that I'm writing. I know nothing about what I'm doing. And I'm a science writer, so I was used to putting a lot of technical information in articles, or reasonably technical. And that's okay when people can stop and reread it, or slow down. Not so okay when it's flying by them in audio. And so This American Life had this system where you do these read-throughs, where it's like Ira Glass sitting there holding a stopwatch. You're reading the narration. Your producer hits play when you want to play some interview audio. And then people say, what confused them? They don't tell you how to solve it. You have to do something. You can't ignore, but they don't tell you how. And then you keep redoing that. And every time you do it, there'd be at least one new person

• 10:59Speaker 01

  who had never heard it before, every time. And that person gets to say what confused them. And then you just do that over and over, until the new person comes in and says, nothing confused me. I got everything. And so the process titrated out confusion and it's a brutal process, but the greatest editing process I've ever been through because it just relentlessly exposes all the assumptions you're making about things that you know really well and that you've even lost track of the fact that not everybody knows this stuff. And even though I'm sensitive to that as a professional science communicator, I'm thinking about that all the time and yet there's still stuff that just becomes so routine or so obvious to you, once you know about it, but it's not obvious to people

• 11:42Speaker 01

  who don't. So it's a great system in that way that people can really lose track of what the other party doesn't understand if they start taking for granted the meaning of things in their world.

• 11:51Matt Abrahams?

  The American Life story highlights the importance of making sure your audience understands, but what I really like about it is the question they ask. They said, what is confusing? Many of us will say, did you understand everything? Were things clear, et cetera? But when you put it in, hey, what was confusing? That helps people be more specific and I really like that they don't then give suggestions for how to make it less confusing. They leave that to you. So that I think is where that creativity comes in and I think you learn more when you're not given direction on how to fix it. And I'm really going to take this lesson to heart as a parent, as a teacher, as a coach, because often it's my reaction to then immediately give, here's what I think you could do to fix it.

• 12:34Speaker 01

  I thought it was fantastic because just wrote a book, obviously about useful constraints, but there is clearly such thing as too much constraint, right? If you're telling someone what they have to do and how they have to do it, if the person says, there's no room for me to surprise myself, then it's too much constraint. But in this case, it really impressed upon me the power of having someone define the problem for you really well. And instantly you're fired up about solutions. I'd say, I just did not understand this beat in the story, whatever it was. And if they could define it really well, it feels very empowering for then doing the problem solving. I see the problem clearly and many cases, I think a clear definition of the problem is the best tool for getting it solved.

• 13:13Matt Abrahams?

  Right. It helps to still that down. Very good. Another term I need you to define for our listeners. What is precluding and how does it work?

• 13:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, precluding is, in this context, blocking the most familiar solutions. So in the history of innovation, preclude constraints are basically ever-present, where either by someone's choice. In artistic innovation, it was often the case that people did this by choice in order to innovate. In technological innovation, in many cases, it was more of a necessity. But that a preclude constraint means it precludes the previous solution. It blocks the path that has been taken most regularly. And once that's gone, it's maybe the most generative creative prompt you can possibly have. The thing you're used to, the thing everyone's always done, you're not allowed to do it.

• 14:07Speaker 01

  So what now? How can you get this done? It kind of reminded me, actually, one of the early readers of the book was a guy named Ed Hoffman, who was the first chief knowledge officer at NASA, basically like the head psychologist. He stopped partway through and said, I gotta tell you about this mission called LCROSS, where the team ended up with half the time and budget they expected. And so what did they do? First, they complained. And then they said, well, if we were gonna get this done anyway, how would we do it? And it led them to repurpose things. So they took imaging equipment from Army tanks and engine temperature sensors from NASCAR and created a probe that confirmed water on the moon. It was incredibly innovative and it led to other missions where they realized they could repurpose lots of technology, but they just never would have done this if they hadn't been forced off of the convenient path, basically.

• 14:53Matt Abrahams?

  And we can challenge ourselves to do that. We don't have to have some external thing or people tell us that. We can say, what if this weren't possible or this were taken away? So we can actually leverage this as a tool ourselves. Before we end, I'd like to ask everybody three questions. One I make up just for you and two I've been asking everybody I've interviewed in the past. Are you up for that?

• 15:15Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 15:16Matt Abrahams?

  All right, I'm going to give you a constraint. If you were to give our listeners one boundary that could help them in their communication, what would that advice be?

• 15:28Speaker 01

  Make the other person's argument first. I realize there's no rule that applies to every situation, but I found this when I critiqued Malcolm Gladwell pretty stridently in my first book and we ended up, we first met for a public debate and then we became really good friends. So this was a very generative relationship based on disagreement. One of the things that really helped was at that initial debate, we decided to start, he and I together, by stating what we thought the other person's argument was. And I think one, that gave you some first empathy for the other person's argument, but it also gave the other person a chance to decide if they were actually being misunderstood. So you both had an understanding of if the other person heard you and then you could know what you were talking about when you were having this discussion.

• 16:14Speaker 01

  And so because of that, he and I then became running buddies and all this stuff. I started taking that forward to other situations where I thought I might have a different perspective than someone to start off, even if it's just to myself, like that was a formal debate with him. But even to myself, what do I think the other person's point of view is? And I will, if I think it's appropriate, try to work that in early in a conversation. So what I'm hearing you say is, and then you're basically fact checking in real time and they'll correct it if you're wrong and that's useful. So I think that idea of going in with making the other person's argument first, even if it's just to yourself, is a really useful constraint to enter certain types of conversations with.

• 16:50Matt Abrahams?

  I really, really like that. If nothing else, it puts you in service of the audience and makes you focus on what's going on for them. Question number two, who is a communicator that you admire and why?

• 17:01Speaker 01

  Not to be redundant here, but I do want to say it's Malcolm Gladwell because in those series of disagreements that led to us becoming good friends, he was very open-minded. So we had a debate at the same forum five years apart. And the second time around, he started saying the things that I had convinced him of. And I didn't have nearly as much professional capital the first time we met for a debate. You could have just crushed me just because of who you are and you're very clever. And he said, yeah, but I have the luxury of learning from my critics. And that's stuck with me so much, the idea that in earnest critic, you have the luxury of learning from them instead of becoming defensive. And now I've seen that in his writing where he has decided some things that he wrote that became very famous are not right and has changed direction.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  And I think that's an amazing thing to do when you've been so successful with a certain idea. Because I've definitely seen the opposite of other writers who, once they become successful with an idea, they are not changing their mind, no matter the evidence. So his ability to acknowledge that and address it even directly, I think is rare and amazing. And quite frankly, became really a role model for me.

• 18:09Matt Abrahams?

  That notion of there's something to be learned from the criticism and just the openness there. I think we could all learn something from. Final question for you, David. What are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe?

• 18:23Speaker 01

  I think identifying the type of conversation you're having. We've all probably had this issue at some point where you're saying something or someone else is saying something you're upset about. And one party offers solutions. And really, it's an I need to be heard conversation. And I think that can be a very upsetting disconnect for both sides. So identifying the conversation type. I think keeping in mind what psychologists call the peak end rule, which is that the way your brain remembers an experience is more or less an average of the moment of peak intensity and the last moment. You may not be able to do much about the moment of peak intensity, but you can end on a good note. That end moment has more weight than just an average moment.

• 19:03Speaker 01

  And the third, I would say, and this is more group focused, would be relatively equal conversational turn-taking. So not that everyone has to have a turn in every case, but there is a body of research that I write about in the new book that shows that one of the hallmarks of teams that are good at solving problems together is that over the course of a day, for example, if they're working together, there will be relatively equal conversational turn-taking. When I was writing about Pixar, where Ed Catmull, the co-founder, told me that they banned Steve Jobs from certain feedback meetings, specifically because as he became this larger-than-life personality, they felt his voice would take up too much space and crowd out other people who might have a lot to add but not be quite as eloquent.

• 19:47Speaker 01

  Or there's this colloquial term hippo, highest-paid person's opinion, where if that person speaks, everyone will start to gravitate around them. So I think putting boundaries in place that facilitate more equal conversational turn-taking.

• 20:00Matt Abrahams?

  I really appreciate the three ingredients. They're very specific and they're all science-based. Be aware of what type of conversation you're having, what's needed in this conversation, what's your role in it. Think about how they end, and can you end it in a way that increases the likelihood that people will remember it and have the experience you want them to? And then to really consider the turn-taking that takes place, because that does impact how people feel about it and the quality of the interactions. David, this has been fantastic. In many ways, you've unconstrained my thinking and hopefully that of our listeners, even though the book was all about constraints. Thank you so much. Good success on Inside the Box, and I appreciate learning from you and having our conversation.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  I enjoyed this very much. Thank you.

• 20:47Matt Abrahams?

  Thank you for joining us for another episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. To learn more about constraints, please listen to episode 108 with Dan Klein, Adam Tobin, and Patricia Ryan-Madsen. This episode was produced by Catherine Reed, Ryan Campos, and me, Matt Abrahams. Our music is from Floyd Wunder, with special thanks to Podium Podcast Company. Please find us on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and rate us. Also, follow us on LinkedIn, TikTok, and Instagram. And check out FasterSmarter.io for deep-dive videos, English language learning content, and our newsletter. Please also consider joining the Think Fast, Talk Smart learning community at fastersmarter.io/learning.

• 21:31Matt Abrahams?

  You'll find video lessons, learning quests, discussion boards, my AI coach, and our book club. Again, that's fastersmarter.io/learning to become part of the Think Fast, Talk Smart learning community.

• 21:46Matt Abrahams?

  Before we wrap up, I just want to say thank you for listening. It really means a lot to hear how people all over the world are using these ideas in their own lives. It inspires me and the whole team that brings you this show. If you want more episodes and resources, feel free to follow, subscribe, and explore past conversations. We're grateful for your support of Think Fast, Talk Smart.