Why Fewer Options Make Better Ideas

0:02Hi there, welcome along to another episode of High Performance, which once again we've compiled to try and give you the greatest possible value from our show. You're about to hear from guests as diverse as productivity expert Shane Parrish, Lioness's manager Serena Vigman, to Gymshark co-founder Lewis Morgan and plenty more besides. And today's theme for myself and my co-host Damian. Hey Damian. Hey Jake, how are you? Very well, thank you. Our theme today is creativity, how to encourage it and how to harness it. And here's a really fascinating element right around creativity. Because we tend to think, right, that creativity begins when all the obstacles in life disappear.

0:37And it makes perfect sense in our heads. You know, give me more time. Give me a bigger budget. Give me more people. Give me a blank page. And suddenly we can do anything. Now, that sounds like freedom, right? But actually that often, rather surprisingly, just produces familiar results. And you've learned about this over years, Damien, and heard it quite often, haven't you?

0:59Jake Humphrey: Yeah, I have, Jake, and I've recently been reading a brilliant book by David Epstein. The title of it is called Inside the Box, Why Constraints Actually Make Us Better. And the point that David makes in his book is this very idea that when we have complete freedom, the brain will take the path of least resistance. So it ends up doing what we already know works or what we already have seen is really effective. So we actually stymie our own creativity, our own ability to connect disparate dots by giving people complete freedom. There are a couple of psychologists called Drew Boyd and Jacob Goldenberg who called their approach the same title of the book, Inside the Box.

1:42Jake Humphrey: And their challenge to the old instructions, I think, outside the box is dead simple. Innovation often begins by working more intelligently with the components and limitations that you already have in front of you. So a useful constraint removes the obvious escape route and it forces you beyond that default first answer that your brain will reach for because that's often the safest and the most boring one. And it puts you into territory that you would never necessarily have searched for voluntarily. I remember reading years ago about Jack White from The White Stripes and one of the things that he would do when he was writing and trying to produce music was he'd set constraints for himself where he could only play certain chords or he would only allow certain instruments on records.

2:24Jake Humphrey: And the idea behind it was just to find more creative ways of making music than just doing the default over and over again. I love this. So if you're struggling with creativity, if you're wondering why you keep getting the same results despite the fact that you want to do different work, maybe this is the conversation for you. I think what we're saying here is freedom gives you options but constraints give you direction. So what we're going to do, we're going to dive straight into a clip from one of our favorite ever guests. This is a guy called Shane Parrish, the creator of the Farnham Street blogs, just an incredible thinker, someone who helped Damien and I to see the world in a very different way when he joined us.

3:01And he spoke to us about a key question that we should all be asking. Before you send this out, I want to know if this is your best work or not. And of course, he didn't want to admit that was his best work because it wasn't his best work. And then so he went back, he went away for a couple of days. He did the exact same thing. And then he came back and then he submitted it again, just to me this time, not to the team. And I was like, is this your best work? And he said, no. And he went back for another couple of days. He did it again. Presentation polished, almost perfect by the end of it. And I was like, great.

3:36This is what I expect from you going forward. And that story I learned from Henry Kissinger. I remember reading a story about Kissinger in the 70s where a staffer gave him a memo and he's like, is this, he didn't even read the memo. He's like, is this your best work? And the staffer was like, no. He's like, well, go do your best work. So this is interesting, right, Damien? Let's talk about this. So the brain experiences fluency as truth, okay? So if an idea arrives quickly, and by the way, I spend my life in this place. If I get an idea quickly and it feels like the right thing because it's arrived without friction, I latch onto it.

4:10And often I say, well, I trust my gut. This is my gut feeling. So I'm going to go with it. And I really think it's interesting that Shane is encouraging us all to add, this very small but quite deliberate constraint here, which is you cannot submit the first acceptable answer without examining it one more time. So this kind of sense that the second look might be the thing that changes everything completely, you know, improving just one single sentence, removing one tiny unnecessary element, those things often can expose all of your work to not necessarily being the very best. So the first idea, I guess, we need to say the first thing that we think of proves that we can answer the question.

4:48The second pass really challenges us to ask whether we have human thought, whether we have creativity, whether we can really take it to the next level, whether we can prove that we offer a point of difference to other people. Otherwise, we get AI to do everything, right? This is an AI conversation, really, because it's a reminder that as human beings, we possess something that computers don't, right? We'll be right back after a quick word from our partners.

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6:13That's U-P-W-O-R-K dot com. Upwork.com. Hi, this is Becca Moore of For the Girls Podcast. All right, a quick shout out to our presenting sponsor, Apple Cash. Summer is here, which means the group chats are already spiraling with festival and summer plans. And we all know the worst part of being the one who fronts the money for the passes or housing. That's why this year we're only using Apple Cash. It's a super easy way to settle up because you can do it right in messages. Just tap the plus sign to get started. And the best part is you can spend the money you get right away anywhere Apple Pay is accepted.

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7:29So I guess the question is then, what are the tools that we could put in our toolkit to help us to do this?

7:35Jake Humphrey: What Shade offers us there, Jake, is the bridge into three really useful tools that anyone can adopt. Each tool removes a different kind of easy exit that your brain will naturally seek, which are unlimited time, unlimited methods and unlimited scope. So let me just run through the three of them very quickly. So tool one is creating a fake deadline for ourselves and deciding when searching stops and we actually start getting on with the work. So a deadline is often treated as if it's a threat that hangs over the work, but if we use it intelligently, it can become a creative device because it stops us making endless comparisons and cuts off the fantasy of having a perfect option and it forces the mind to commit to a workable one.

8:16Jake Humphrey: So the fake deadline means deliberately giving yourself less time than a task appears to deserve. And that's not to create careless final work, but it's to create a real first version before doubt and over analysis take control. Rule two is the one rule. This is where you remove the method you use automatically. So the one rule means choosing a single artificial restriction for the task and then holding true to it. The rule should take away a habit and force a different pathway or give the work a distinctive shape. The rule might be that if you're presenting, no slides, no jargon, you've only allowed one sentence per idea.

8:52Jake Humphrey: only questions one audience one location one camera one ingredient or one touch the point's not to have aesthetic purity the point is to make autopilot unavailable and then tool number three is to put it in a small box where you shrink the canvas so every choice has got to earn its place so the small box idea reduces the number of variables before the work even begins so you might have fewer slides or fewer words or fewer ingredients if you're working on a project you might have a smaller budget or think of just one customer a large canvas encourages us to postpone because no individual choice ever appears to be decisive but a small canvas makes every choice clear you can't hide a weak idea behind drowning it in volume so why don't we look at how a number of our guests have taken these tools and adopted them in their own high performance worlds brilliant well can i take tool number one then the fake deadline i want to take us to uh renee mulenstein doing exactly this at manchester united here's the clip and then we'll talk about it in just a moment i had uh five clips of federer uh in games uh on five different tournaments and i asked the players you need to tell me which tournament it is um what point what um what point it is what game it is and what's sad they started all laughing the only thing you could figure out was this you know what tournament yeah oh it's rolling girl or this is wimbledon the other three they couldn't and basically what i wanted to show with them was is that that federer was always focused on the execution and the performance rather than whatever was surrounding what happened before or what was going to happen.

10:43Push the reset button and make sure that the players look ahead rather than, you know, what's behind.

10:49Jake Humphrey: That's where the mind goes, the rest will follow. So I really love this idea, right, of René Munenstein using clips of someone like Roger Federer to show United players how little his emotional state changed from one moment to another because I think the players could identify, right, the tournament, but they were unable to know as he said whether Federer was facing a routine point or a decisive one I think this sort of travels nicely for us into this idea of pressure and creativity like like a game of tennis like a game of football like the lives that all of us are living that are listening to this episode we're not trying to solve the whole thing we're not trying to solve the final we're not trying to solve the season or the whole project on one thought so this idea of reducing the horizon so actually the next point which is what all that roger federer was dealing with the next point is a really small box you know it's enough for us to be able to get our heads around so this kind of fake deadline i think you'd agree here works in the same way you know we're not asking people to create the definitive answer we're asking them to win the next 20 minutes so that is the thing that works for me and i and i'm a as you know i'm a procrastinator um and what really worked for me and it definitely improved my creativity was I said I have to start within the next five minutes and what I found Damien for me was I would I would prevaricate and procrastinate for an hour two hours I'd find like boring jobs that don't need doing and I would do them purely to delay and I wouldn't even know why I'm delaying the thing I'm delaying right but when I said I have to start in the next five minutes I wouldn't find that I would only do five minutes of work i would find that suddenly an hour or two hours of work comes out because i think that we start the ball rolling and the kind of the energy starts to build and we remove the fear that we have inside us so i love i love this idea of creating i suppose you know you talked about it as a fake deadline i talked about it as a kind of a fake full stop if i don't do it the next five minutes then something will go wrong yeah i think it's really powerful i mean i know you're a big fan of federer as well i mean what was that start that when he gave that famous commencement address oh yeah so he spoke about um he said he only won 54 percent of the points that he played for so right the really important thing there is that roger federer is teaching all of us that the greatest tennis player in the world almost half the time was on the losing end of a point i think that's fantastic like because we're so scared of failure and we think that every time we get an L, it's moving us further away from our goals.

13:26This is a reminder for all of us that every time Roger Federer got an L, he was strangely making one step closer.

13:33Jake Humphrey: Yeah. And again, as you're describing it there, Jacob, my mind's sort of throwing up some of our other guests over the years, like Mel Robbins with a 5-4-3-2-1 rule of countdown and then you have to get up out of bed. Or Alan Wynne-Jones, the Welsh rugby great, talking to us about how his one USP was hard work. He would win the moment in training to believe that he could win it when games were really competitive. That this fake deadline is such a powerful method for people. I would love anyone listening to this just to try it today and see, because I think not only will it make them more creative, because anything's more creative if you go for it, but I think it will also make them more productive as well.

14:17We'll be right back after a quick word from our partners. We'll be right back. In a world where AI is changing every role in every industry, knowing who actually has deep expertise matters more than ever. Upwork connects you with the highly skilled freelance professionals with proven track records so you can hire with confidence. Upwork gives your business fast access to highly skilled specialists with deep expertise so you can fill critical skill gaps, launch projects faster, and scale support up or down without committing to full-time headcount. With Business Plus, you can access the top 1 % of talent on Upwork.

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16:36So let's talk about the one rule then, this idea, this sense that you spoke about of choosing a single artificial restriction for the challenge. can we play the clip from Serena Wigman and maybe you can talk to us about that

16:49Jake Humphrey: yeah one of my favourite coaches so I'd love to share her insight into the one rule we were always horrible referees when we referee ourselves but now we even on purpose were even worse than horrible so they got really annoyed and what we saw in the training session we filmed all the training sessions that they started doing totally different things I mean one of the things that I've heard Serena speak about is this idea that we have to be better than the worst referee in performance you know that we can't ever use that as an excuse so I like the fact that she would badly referee training games to show that same one rule principle in action so it's not the environment that players would choose but it's the environment that they have so complaining about it doesn't improve your next action so the constraint here is forcing a different skill.

17:42Jake Humphrey: It's about staying clear when the conditions feel unfair. So players learn to solve the decision rather than sacrificing their attention or their energy on things that they don't control. So again, if there's anyone listening to this, think of how they could apply it for themselves. So for the next 10 minutes, you can only control your response to whatever's happening to you rather than trying to influence the action. Think about how we're responding. I remember reading a story from Jack Nicklaus years ago how he trained himself to be patient and to slow his thinking down by driving behind slow-moving trucks on a motorway.

18:21Jake Humphrey: So even though he had the capacity to be able to drive past it really quickly, to see how long he could sit behind it for without getting impatient, he saw it as a way of learning to control his own response rather than his own impulses and reactions. I think it's really interesting, this idea of forcing ourselves to learn about the world in a new way. I mean, I remember when we interviewed, you mentioned already Mel Robbins, and I hope you don't mind me telling the story, but off camera, before she joined us, because it was done remotely, you went, oh, I'm not sure about all this high five bollocks.

18:52Do you remember? And then when we got her on, and I said, well, ask her the question. And you said, I'm a bit sceptical about all this. No, you said, I'm a cynic. You said, I'm a cynic when it comes to this stuff. And she goes, Damien, tell me, how's cynicism working out for you in everyday life? And I just think it's so powerful because there'll be people listening to this now that go, you want me to artificially change my environment to force me to do something in a different way? You know, like, it's almost like going to one of the editors in high performance and going, hey, guess what? You can only use half the keys on the keyboard to edit these shows.

19:25And they'd be like, what a stupid idea. But actually, what that would force is more creativity from them. Hey, guess what? You can edit high performance with no external clips and no music. It doesn't make it a better show necessarily. You wouldn't want to do it all the time.

19:37Jake Humphrey: Well, in David Epstein's book, he talks about something like that, where he talks about the Dr. Seuss books, you know, the green eggs and ham. And that came about because a publisher challenged whoever Dr. Seuss was, I don't remember his real name, but he could only write a book using 50 words. So the old Dr. Seuss series only uses the 50 words that the publisher gave him and it made him be creative and come up with innovative ways of engaging kids that, you know, have ended up selling millions of books. So sometimes that constraint forces us, as we say, to look for innovative ways that your brain would never seek out if complete freedom was offered to it.

20:21So cool. Can I now talk about or bring in a guest who I think perfectly epitomises the final box, which is this idea of making something small. Yes, I'll just set the scene for this one for people. So when we first started High Performance, and this is interesting, right, because this plays perfectly into what we're talking about here. When we started High Performance, it was way smaller than it is now. I reckon when we recorded this interview with Lewis, and we've got Will, our evergreen producer, who's been with us from day one on the call. Will, when we recorded this episode with Lewis, I reckon we had five or six staff working on High Performance, right?

20:57Probably. Five or six people max. We now have how many? 40? We produce one show. How many do we do now? Seven different shows through all of our programs. So we were a way smaller team. We were existing in a world where podcasting itself was a small box. You were so restricted. There was no video. Advertising was totally different. Nobody was kind of linking their podcast to their socials. People weren't creating brands out of podcasts. It basically was, as you remember, Damien, you and I having a conversation, enjoying the conversation and going home. But weirdly, creativity was so central to the business in those early days.

21:38And that's how we ended up doing a tour where we travelled around the country. And it was like a bit spit and sawdust, wasn't it? Like we were like, oh, can we get a guest to come and join us? Yeah. And you were like, yeah, I've spoken to Steve Clarke, the Scotland manager. He'll be with us for an episode in Glasgow, wherever we were. And then we were like, oh, who can we get in Birmingham? him oh how about lewis morgan the co-founder of gym shark and then he turns up on stage we have a chat with him anyway that's how we ended up where we were and it's the perfect example of the fact that creating a small box or having restrictions actually made us more creative how funny that we would be talking about it on today um and this is what lewis told us it was a great question actually that you came up with damien i believe which is no no it was yours this

22:18Jake Humphrey: one jake you so you had this one yeah yeah i've got to give giving you the creativity is also being there gives giving credit so you came up with this idea because i remember that you said i'm going to ask him this and and lewis came alive didn't he like people uh in the audience could see his eyes lit up and the energy as he then went into del boy wheeler dealer mode in answering it was brilliant sweet well let's um let's play this for you and this is lewis morgan and we asked him what would he do if we gave him£1 ,000 and asked him to turn it into a much larger amount of money? If someone took all of your assets away and then gave you£1 ,000, what would you do with it?

23:01Jake Humphrey: So that's from Liam in P7. Where are you, Liam? I'd probably... He's gone home. Liam, are you still here? Hello, Liam. Thank you very much for being here this evening. I'd probably flip on Facebook if I'm on this marketplace. I'd probably buy loads of different things like golf clubs, furniture, and I'd sell them. That would be the easiest way for me to make money that's guaranteed. I cannot say, yeah, you can put it into crypto, all this riskier stuff, let's say. But if I've only got£1 ,000 and I've got nothing else to my name, I'm going to get a stable job and I'm going to flip on the side. And do you think you can make genuine money out of£1 ,000?

23:39Oh, yeah, easy. Really? Yeah, definitely. There's so many different niches. Again, I'll just use golf clubs, right? people don't even know people so fast to sell off a golf club but you can get like a nice tartly swedge and you can get it for 60 and you can sell it for 100 there's four you can't do that i mean you can't make it almost double bubble on most things so this is really interesting right damien because i think you look at that question and you think it's a question about not having enough money but i think actually it's a question about um needing to be creative isn't it it's forcing you to find speed to observe the world to be ingenious to think in a way that other people aren't to put bravery at the forefront of what you're doing it's it's nothing to do with

24:23Jake Humphrey: the money actually isn't it yeah definitely and and again it's a theme that we've spoken about uh for the last seven years is this idea of the um of taking responsibility for the circumstances you have and louis was at pains to point out he he hadn't done particularly great at school he wasn't from an affluent background he didn't have a contact list to die for but he saw himself as being in charge of the opportunities he created for himself and that was the message he was keen to uh to give us that that we can we can make the best of any situation we find ourselves in however humble it might first appear to be yeah i think it's so interesting and i love i love looking back on the conversations we've had over the years and it's a great reminder for people that scarcity, I think, can make these hidden assets suddenly visible.

25:14And I would ask people, I'd challenge you at this point to think, what in your world are the things you have that you haven't seen? You just haven't seen them. They are there, but you just haven't seen them. And they could make a difference to your life. Imagine you have scarcity. You know, you have one day to change your setup, your life, your situation. What would you do? I know you've put together a little challenge for our listeners, Damien, which I think is really cool. It'll take them only 15 minutes and I think can really change things for them. So do you want to talk us through it before the end of the episode?

25:43Jake Humphrey: So this is a 15-minute challenge for any listener to choose one piece of work that they've been delaying because it might feel that it's too open-ended or it's too important and they need to have the perfect moment to start or it might just feel a little bit too difficult to begin. So the first minute is define one concrete output. So not something vague like I'm going to work on the idea, but one page, one idea or one message or decision that you're going to take. The second minute is set a 12-minute fake deadline for yourself and then the third one is to choose one rule. For example, you're not allowed to research it.

26:20It might just think about one person that you want to impress.

26:23Jake Humphrey: It might be summarise your challenge in five sentences. And then the next challenge is to work inside that small box without renegotiating it or bargaining for alternatives. Just work with what you've given yourself. And then read the result and ask Shane Parish's question. Is that your best work? And then after you've answered that, improve one thing only. The central idea, the opening, the final sentence, the decision, whatever it is, just work on one aspect of it. Because the idea is not about creating perfect in 15 minutes. It's about trying to prove that movement and originality don't require perfect conditions.

27:03Jake Humphrey: and that is the very genesis of where our creativity starts. I love that, Damien. I love it. And I love having these conversations. I mean, you know, we're in the sports category in podcast. I mean, we shouldn't be really because we're so much more than just a sports show. But, you know, as we record this, as we have this conversation, we are the, once again, the number one sports show in the UK. And I sometimes think it's really interesting just to stop and reflect for a moment and thank people really for their continued support and, yeah, patience with the two of us, really, that here we are seven years, seven-plus years into the journey, and despite the fact there have been thousands and thousands of new podcasts created, including some behemoths in the podcasting space with people with far higher profile and bigger budgets than us, that we can still sometimes punch above our weight and turn on our phones and see that we're number one in the charts.

27:56It does mean a lot, doesn't it?

27:58Jake Humphrey: Oh, massively, yeah. we've always said this like I never take anybody's time for granted you know in that age of infinite choices the fact that people allow us to come with them in their commute or the dog walk or in the gym and exercise with them and they trust us enough to listen and to allow us to be part of their world is incredible it's incredibly humbling so thank you to anybody that has allowed us over the last seven years to be part of your world but like you said jakey that when we spoke about johnny wilkinson quite early on and he said that line that you know sometimes you've got to make sure that that the climb is worth the view at the top and i think the climb of what we've been through the amazing people we've been lucky enough to meet and to work with and the opportunities we've had to pick the brains of some of the planet's finest people that's like that's been the biggest privilege.

28:55Yeah, so cool. Well, Damien, thank you so much for your time. Lovely to chat to you. Please, if you enjoy these conversations, if they mean a lot to you, if they're valuable to you, we don't ask for much. All we ask is that you like and subscribe to the show, maybe share it with just one person that you think could take value from this conversation that we've had today about creativity. And just keep on coming back for more from High Performance. Wherever you're listening in the world, we don't take your support for granted. It means a great deal that people right now right across the world are tuning in and listening to our show.

29:26So have a great one. Thank you for listening. Remain humble, curious, and empathetic. And we'll see you next time.

29:43Thumbtack presents Uncertainty Strikes. I was surrounded. The aisle and the options were closing in. There were paint rollers, satin and matte finish, angle brushes, and natural bristles. There were too many choices. What if I never got my living room painted? What if I couldn't figure out what type of paint to use? What if I just used Thumbtack? I can hire a top-rated pro that knows everything about interior paint, easily compare prices, and read reviews. Thumbtack knows homes. Download the app today. Quick question. When was the last time a display ad changed your mind? Now think about the last time a friend told you about something they loved.

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