685: David Epstein - The Freedom Trap, Narrative Values, General Magic, The Nobel Prize Winner Who Simplified Everything, Wearing the Same Thing Everyday, and Why Constraints Are the Secret to Your Best Work

23:31And immediately the pressure was to write The Sports Gene 2. I just didn't want to do that. I mean, I was burned out from doing it. That book addressed a lot of my own questions I found the most fascinating about sports. And so I almost caved to that pressure, but I didn't. And that meant it took me a lot longer to get to my second book, right? It was six years between books, but I also think I was much better for it, but it was a challenge. It was a challenge. I mean, I had to part ways with my agent because we didn't see eye to eye. So yeah, it's tough. Do you have any advice? Cause I'm all ears.

24:04Ryan Hawk:I mean, I would love to have this problem, David. So I think a lot of people would, and most people in the world do not know it. Morgan's approach, I asked him the same thing. seem to be like, look, is it weird that the psychology of money is going to be the biggest selling book I ever have? Yeah, I guess, but I'm just going to keep writing. I'm just going to keep going and keep moving forward, knowing that the next one probably will not sell as much. And in his case, the next two have not sold as much. They're still amazing books, but they just haven't sold as much. They haven't caught fire like that.

24:34Ryan Hawk:It just seems like almost divorcing yourself of the results. You're proud of the work. The book is awesome. I mean, it's really, really good. you know this you worked like crazy on the research the storytelling at this point you're going to work really really hard to seed the market and sell a lot of them but then it's out of your control after that you know it's almost like you have to be okay with whatever happens that's right and you touched on a few important things actually that i want to highlight one is a lot is out of your control again with my first book i remember a colleague at sports illustrated told me well at that point i thought it was just my side passion project i wasn't even really it was stuff that I had pitched to Sports Illustrated and hadn't been able to get in.

25:12So, and I remember a colleague telling me, because the book's about genetics and athleticism. And he said, you know, if a book about genetics and of vampires comes out the same day, you're screwed. And there's nothing you can do about it. And he was right. You know, lots out of your control. And to Morgan's point, I think the one thing I will say with Inside the Box was, when I transitioned out of science into writing, for a while I was saying, this is something I'm doing for a specific purpose. I had specific topics I wanted to write about. but then I'll get back to this other stuff. But somewhere along the road that changed and I very strongly identify as a writer now, as like a craftsman and look at other people's craft.

25:50And I've taken, you know, fiction writing courses just to learn about craft and things like that. And so with this book, this structural experiment where I made the architecture ahead of time and drew the introductory story back every three chapters to highlight a new layer of constraints that led to a world-changing breakthrough. That was a new structural experiment for me. And I found it so engaging. I think it worked, but that will be for other people to judge. But I found it so engaging because I like to start a book project that in order to finish it, I don't presently have the skills that I will need to have to bring it to fruition.

26:28I want it to force me because I can't learn as ferociously when I'm not writing a book. There's just like something about that constraint that forces me to learn in a way with like a velocity that I just can't otherwise. And I'm naturally kind of shy and it forces me to just talk to everybody in the world that might know anything about what I'm talking about. And so I found the writing experiment so engaging that there was so much along the way where I was like, this is a really worthwhile thing to be doing. I'm really glad I'm doing this experiment. I think I'm getting better at my craft. So to some degree, that made me feel if it doesn't work as well commercially, this was a worthwhile thing to do.

27:04anyway. And so I think that's been really helpful.

27:07Ryan Hawk:Isn't it cool to see? I found one of maybe the greatest tools for learning in the world is to teach. And writing is definitely a form of teaching. Getting up and speaking about it in front of a group is teaching. Actually going to a university and guest lecturing is teaching. I just find when I am put in the position to quote teach, it is such an amazing learning. I even wrote that, I think in my next book, I said, this book's for me. This is for me first and foremost, because I wanted to learn more about the power of compounding. I want to learn more about excellence. I want to learn more. Yeah, exactly.

27:44Ryan Hawk:And I certainly hope it helps other people, but it started out of my own desire to aggressively chase down my curiosity with great rigor. And this is what's come out of it. And so at that point, yeah, I'm going to try to sell like crazy just like you are. And then after that, though, it's still a win. It's a big win because I learned so much in the process. I think that applies, though. And I'd love to hear your thoughts on this idea of why leaders should regularly put themselves in the position of being a teacher because it's such a great tool to learn. Yeah. And by the way, since you're highlighting the me search point, too, that's another thing that made this book project worthwhile to me, no matter what happened, is I needed to get better at this.

28:23I often felt overwhelmed. I often felt too much choice, too much decisions, not enough structure. In the age of AI, I find the tools fascinating and they allow me to do more. I also find it even more overwhelming than the world before, right? So I was looking for the antidote myself. And so the book has improved my life for sure. In terms of teaching, there's actually a quote in Inside the Box from Seneca, the famous Stoic philosopher, docendo discamus in Latin, which means by teaching we learned. So that's a quote from an ancient philosopher, but it's now been backed up by modern science, which has found that if people think they're going to have to teach certain material, they organize it more coherently in their own mind.

29:08Like they start pulling out main ideas and attaching different ideas together. And it's called a brain semantic network, how you connect ideas together. And it seems like you should always do this when you're trying to assimilate information. But the fact is, like many good constraints, if you're not being forced to teach it, you just don't do it. It's very difficult to do that. Teaching it is even better. But in these studies, just making someone think they're going to have to teach it makes them learn it in this much more coherent way where they can use the knowledge, they remember the knowledge better.

29:38So it's like forcing someone to consume information to that frame of I'm going to have to teach this just activates a different network in the brain that makes you learn in a much more durable and flexible way. So the teaching is for the teacher often. So I think it's something that we should all do really frequently. I don't know if you find this, but when I'm working on my book ideas, talking them off of people is one of the most important things I do in the process. That teaches me where I don't know what I'm talking about, where I have holes, you know, how to make the argument, what ideas are connected, all those sorts of things.

30:12One of the questions I ask every leader I work with, when's the next training you're leading?

30:17Ryan Hawk:When's the next paper you're publishing or you're going to post or you're going to share with your team? So it's whether it's getting those messy thoughts out of your head onto the page from a writing perspective, again, teaching or standing up in front of a group of people who are very valuable to you because they work within your company and you're tasked with teaching them something you're going to benefit as much or more than anybody. So I think that's a great prompt or great thing for a leader. They'll say, I don't have time for that. Are you kidding me? You don't have time to get better.

30:47Ryan Hawk:You don't have time to help other people. You don't have time to get really, really clear on what you believe, what you think. You're out of your mind. Of course you have time for that. That's like the most important thing to do. So it's definitely something I push on people, but they don't always love to hear that because it takes time. It takes effort to organize those thoughts, to get really clear. But I think it's super valuable and important for us to do on a regular basis. Totally. the kendo disk moose for the win, but it's a desirable difficulty, right? There's this whole area of cognitive psychology about desirable difficulties, things that often slow learning down, make it more frustrating in the short term, things that are inconvenient.

31:23And the fact is, those are the best ways to learn. But again, going back to our brains will prevent us from thinking hard if we ever have to. I think that's why you need things like constraints. You need the directive to you're going to teach this. it would be wonderful if we could just flip it on and say, I'm going to learn this really well now, but it just doesn't work that way. So I think we need to embrace these desirable difficulties and they're called desirable difficulties for a reason, because they're difficult, but desirable in the long term.

31:56Ryan Hawk:You came across some philosophers, Susan Wolf and Todd May, this concept of narrative values, the recurring themes that give like a coherence to a life. Can you tell me more about what you learned from Susan Wolf and Todd May and this idea of narrative values, as well as what you've identified are yours. That's so interesting because I have not done a ton of podcasts, but I was wondering if I would ever be asked about this because it's late in the book. It's sort of more conceptual. One of my favorite parts. Interesting. Interesting. I will say in all my books, the things that I predict will be the most interesting to people.

32:31I must have an okay radar because the books overall have worked, but within the book, I'm terrible at predicting what other people will find most interesting. What did you think of this one?

32:41Ryan Hawk:Of this specific part, this idea of narrative values? Oh, I loved it. But one of the reasons it's later in the book is because it's sort of more abstract and conceptual and personal. So I'm like, this is for people who got this far. They got through chapter one that talks about the most important company nobody's ever heard of. This stuff is if they're really with me on this journey in a more personal way. And the narrative values you're referring to. So this is a part, you know, in the last part of the last chapter where I'm talking about things like how constraints can help make a life more coherent.

33:15Because we know it's really important for well-being to have a coherent life story. These two philosophers you mentioned write about meaning, how to find meaning in life. And Susan Wolf said, well, meaning comes from subjective attraction to something that is objectively attractive, meaning that you are personally drawn to something that has objective value. Then the question is like, what is objective value? And Todd May says it comes from narrative values. And those are qualities that are prized across all cultures. These could be things like loyalty, heroism, hospitality, caring, love. and so he advocates identifying those values certain you know kind of universally respected values in your own life story and telling them through your story and it's also a way to consolidate your caring where there's so much stuff you could care about in the world it's overwhelming but if you can kind of pick out certain clear values that helps you feel agency it helps you feel more coherent and so for me I went and looked back in my life and some of the ones I identified were curiosity and open-mindedness and diligence and resilience.

34:24Now that I've started telling my story in that way, it shows up everywhere. I'm like, of course I did this because that's my value. But going forward, I realized I also wanted some things in my story that I didn't have. So I identified forgiveness in particular, because that has not been a strong suit for me. I don't know why. I have no trauma in my life that I can point to why I've been like bad at grudges, like why I've held grudges for things. I don't know why. But as I write in the book, when I was at Sports Illustrated, I wrote about this guy named Ben Helfgott, who was the only living Olympian to have survived a concentration camp, two-time British weightlifting champ.

35:03You know, almost everybody in his family and extended family was killed in the Holocaust. He became the head, basically, of this group called the Boys, these kids who were orphaned in Poland and brought to England and kind of re-socialized. And he just preached forgiveness all the time. Like he would tell these guys, you have to go back to Poland or Germany or wherever and rebuild bridges. The people today aren't responsible. Like we have to rebuild. And when I would see what he was doing, these like petty grudges that I'm holding are nothing compared to what this guy has forgiven. And I want to be like that because you're just, you're poisoning yourself, right?

35:40When you hold these grudges, like feeding yourself your own poison. And so I decided that I wanted forgiveness to become one of my narrative values. So I had these ones that already come easily to me that give me a coherent life story. And then I chose one out of all the things that I see that I wish would be better in the world that I'd like to work on. You can't do them all. And so I wanted to pick this one value to sort of add to my holster of themes in my story going forward.

36:06Ryan Hawk:I love it. Curiosity, diligence, open-mindedness, and adding forgiveness as kind of an aspirational value. So I go back and forth on this one element. I'm just going to drill down on this forgiveness for a second because, you know, your backgrounds in studying athletes and greatness, there are stories of Tom Brady, Michael Jordan, others where they, they definitely held grudges and they've got a huge chip on their shoulder. And sometimes they even make it up in Michael Jordan's case, which I'm sure you've seen all about, right? Yeah. And I have friends that I work with that are leaders where they openly ask questions like, what's the chip on your shoulder?

36:44Ryan Hawk:Or what grudge do you hold? Who are you striving to prove wrong? And they kind of like it because maybe it'll be a motivating factor and that'll help their company. And so I go back and forth on this because I, David, I am very motivated to prove my supporters right. right yeah i feel very lucky to have great support great loving parents brothers my wife my family amazing you know friends and i just so badly want to say you were right for believing in me and let me go out and prove that right way more than the people who have not believed in me or said mean things you know what i mean and so i don't know i go back and forth what do you think when it comes like motivation and excellence and winning and and doing big things when it comes to chips on your shoulder versus proving people right.

37:30Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. Like you mentioned, Michael Jordan, he was redressing made up grievances in many cases.

37:37Ryan Hawk:The Bradford Smith, remember? Yeah. Made stuff up. I mean, I have found that to be powerful for me sometimes that prove people wrong as they say, you know, as I think Josh Wolf says, chips on his shoulders, put chips in pockets. Yep. And I think there's some truth to that, but I think that can be separated from a kind of forgiveness. I think you can want to prove people wrong or prove people right without harboring a personal feeling of having been wronged in some way that can't be recovered. Because otherwise, I think it just, you're like harming yourself over the long term. So I think it can be separate.

38:14Like, I think you can still want to prove people wrong. I mean, I want that all the time to prove people wrong. Do you have a lot of doubters or haters? Probably some fake ones, but also like, if I'm being honest, you know, so I just started making long form videos that I started posting online. And anytime I do anything like that, it's a different audience. And so a huge amount of the commentary is nasty comments about my last name, you know?

38:36Ryan Hawk:Oh God, I never thought of that. Wow. It's never going to work. And I'm, and I'm shadow banned. That's the thing when I just, I just posted a video that's taking off kind of, but, and all the comments are just about, oh, you're shadow banned because of your name. Like if I'm shadow banned, how did you and your 50 ,000 friends get here? You know, but yeah, that motivates me a little, but I don't, I don't, I'm not mad at those people. I don't care. I wish they'd be a little more creative with their jokes. Like I want to laugh, but it is sort of like, I'm going to show you, but I don't actually have any animosity for them.

39:05You know, it's just like, you want to prove them wrong.

39:08Ryan Hawk:Yeah. I mean, it's a reflection of them, not you. Talking about this book, you said there's a thinker who's really influenced this one. It's a guy named Herbert Simon. I had not heard of him. Yeah. What is it about him that has influenced you so much? Yeah, by the way, can I just say, I'm really enjoying this interview. You're asking me all kinds of things that nobody's asked me about. I've digressed into some things that I hope I didn't go too far off because I have a digressive brain, but yeah, I'm quite enjoying this conversation. Herbert Simon, yeah, definitely the most, his thinking is behind so many pages in this, in Inside the Box, where he was trained as a political scientist, but he won the highest award in computer science, the Turing Award, because he did the first AI demonstration.

39:48ever. He won the highest award in psychology. He's one of the founders of cognitive psychology, so meaning not like therapy, but like how our brains solve problems. And for good measure, he won the Nobel Prize in economics. One of his quotes serves as the epigraph of the book. It is a myth widely believed, but not less mythical for that, that people are most creative when they are most free. And so much of his work is about constraints, both in how important they are for people in problem solving, like to cut down problems, what he called the problem space to make problems manageable, and also just personally.

40:20So he coined this term satisficing in his most famous work. That's a combination of satisfy and suffice. And it means basically having good enough decision rules. And he contrasted that. Well, what has been contrasted to by people who followed up on his work is maximizing. Maximizing, maybe we would call it optimizing now in optimizer culture. And it turns out, from a mountain of psychological research, that it is almost always bad to be a maximizer, someone who is trying to get the perfect choice in every decision. Maximizers are less happy with their decisions. They're less happy with their lives.

41:00They're more prone to regret. There's not much evidence they actually make better decisions most of the time. Whereas satisficers will tend to have, whether they do it explicitly or not, good enough rules. And once good enough has exceeded, you may go to outstanding. But once good enough has succeeded, you can accept it and move on. And I think this is an incredibly important tool for life today where we have so much choice, right? consumer choice has multiplied by a hundred million fold compared to before the industrial revolution. Wealth has only multiplied 400 fold. So it's a massive increase in choice.

41:36There are evidence from surveys now that these maximizing tendencies are on the rise, probably because you can do so much comparison online of what you could be doing or what you could be buying or who you could be, that it's leading people to have more maximizing tendencies. and those are really, really bad for well-being. So Simon was a proactive satisficer. He said, you need three sets of clothing, one on your back, one in the wash, and next one ready to wear. And he just simplified all the decisions in his life so that he could save cognitive bandwidth for the really important ones. And reading about his life, you'd almost think, hey, here's a guy who has low expectations.

42:09Like he would be terrible in optimizing influencer culture because he was always settling for good enough. He famously said, the perfect is the enemy of the good. So you might say this guy just has low expectations if he hadn't won the highest possible awards in economics, computer science, and psychology. And so his thinking just about how important constraints are both for human problem solving and for well-being kind of pervade the book. He really introduced him at length in the last chapter, but his work is sprinkled throughout.

42:40Ryan Hawk:So I really identify with this as well because I own 15 of these shirts and I wear this, I've worn this every day for the last four years and ate the same breakfast every day. I know this guy wore the same socks. He lived in the same house for 46 years, ate the same breakfast every day. Some would say, God, dude, get a life. That's boring or whatever. To me, I don't know if I'm going to act like the Barack Obama. I'm wearing the same suit so I don't have to spend mental bandwidth. But that's kind of where I read about it initially and thought that's what I'm trying to do that I never want to decide what I'm wearing ever.

43:14Ryan Hawk:And I don't. I don't decide. I may spend zero time. I never want to decide what I'm eating. I eat breakfast at usually around like 12 o 'clock and it's the same eggs, fruit, and protein oatmeal like every day. And to me, like it's, I love it. I think it's great. Do you subscribe to this? What do you do? Yes, choosing when to choose. You're choosing when to choose. And that's what you want to be doing because otherwise you're just making decisions all the time. So many people make fun of me that when I go to like my daughter's soccer games or I go anywhere else, like there's the black shirt again.

43:43Ryan Hawk:I'm like, why does it matter? Why do we care about this? Well, I don't understand, you know? Yeah, I get like, I have a t-shirt that I think fits me well. I'm like, then I'm going to have eight of those in different colors. Yes, why would you? Coming in a pack, baby. Yeah. Because you want to choose when to choose. Like if I were a fashion designer, I wouldn't do it that way, but I'm not. And so I want to choose when to choose and save my cognitive bandwidth for the things where I really want to expend my energy. And I think with so much choice, there's one study I cite in the book that shows that as consumer choices exploded, people are more likely to see all of their purchase decisions as expressions of their identity.

44:17It's like freighted with even more weight and stress and all this stuff. Like don't do that to yourself. Where you can simplify, where you can get good enough. And this is, I should say, because I think I've had maximizing tendencies. So one of the things that was really important for me, again, after range, this thread keeps coming back of what do you do after you have a book that went well? But it's an interesting thread where, again, I didn't have a normal journalism job anymore. And so I'm like, what do I do? Do I only write books now? That means everything has to be this huge project. So that's when I started a newsletter.

44:48And the newsletter was basically a satisficing exercise for me. I already knew a lot of Simon's work. So if a book has to be a 9 or 10, I said, if a newsletter post, once it hits 6 1⁄2, I'm sending it. Maybe it goes to 8, you know. But if I feel I've gotten to 6 1⁄2, I send it. Because there's always more stuff I want to add or more tweaking I want to do. So that became a—I'm not really selling people on my newsletter here very well, am I? But that became a really useful, satisficing exercise for me because I was kind of getting stuck in a little bit of perfectionism syndrome. And so I think everybody should have those.

45:24And now I do, I start doing like beginner dance classes and stuff. I often choose to be a beginner at something to make sure that I'm having some satisficing in my life. And I think we all should. Because it doesn't, we gotta get over the idea that good enough means you have low standards. It actually means that you're saving your bandwidth for the most important things. And there's something I write about inside the box called Fredkin's paradox, which is this finding that we spend the most energy on the least important decisions because we agonize when the options are really similar. So either we're agonizing because they're similar, we can't tell the difference.

46:00But that either means they're so similar, the difference doesn't matter much, or we can't tell the difference. And so agonizing more isn't going to make a big deal anyway. And so you don't want to be falling prey to Fredkin's paradox. You have satisficing limits, good enough decision rules.

46:13Ryan Hawk:What do you think of the phrase, how you do anything is how you do everything? I definitely don't subscribe to that overall. I would say overrated phrase because, look, thinking about us and our fashion taste, like we wouldn't be very good writers, would we? Because we're mailing it in with our church selection. Can I just say it is so wrong? It's not even close to right. I mean, why do people keep saying this? There's no element of that that is correct. Maybe you could tell this has been a thing for me. I keep seeing it everywhere on Instagram. Everybody says it to me and I go, no, that's not right.

46:50Ryan Hawk:Why are we saying that? That's not how we are, you know? Also, it's insane because everybody is bad at some things. Yes, of course. And is entitled to be bad at some things. And so, you know, when we think about telling people to lean into their superpower, identify it, we are implying that a bunch of other things are not their superpower, right? Yeah. And so to the extent that it means you should take risks or practice with something when you're training that you should take it seriously. Yes. But otherwise, I think paddling the untrue. Like I said, otherwise you and I would be in trouble just based on our fashion choice alone.

47:24Ryan Hawk:I meant to bring this up earlier and we're running out of time, but I want to get into general magic just because I love the documentary so much and you write about general magic. maybe for the business leader who is within corporate America trying to lead something that they have aggressive goals, they have a tough job. In general, Magic is a little bit different than that because it's kind of a startup. They're trying to do something new that hadn't been done. They're way ahead of their time. What can we learn as leaders from the story about General Magic? Yeah, as I say, most important company nobody's ever heard of.

47:53And they have a vision of the future of telecommunications. They're essentially building the iPhone starting in the late 80s, before the internet even existed. They have designers of the original Mac. It's so alluring that Goldman Sachs takes them public in the first so-called concept IPO, meaning they didn't have a product. They went public with an idea. They built this huge consortium of international businesses, all this stuff. And they did have the right vision. Like if you go back and look at what they were doing and read their documents, they saw what was coming for the next generation. But it turned into a massive failure because they had so much talent.

48:33They had so many resources. They could do anything. And so they did do anything. Everything got bigger and bigger. So they're basically making this personal communicator and it's like every cool idea that an engineer has, they do it. Does it fit in? I don't know, but it's cool. So they do it. They never identified a clear customer. They called their customer Joe Sixpack. After a few years of missed deadlines, they realized nobody knew the guy who was that. So they didn't have a clear problem to solve. When I was interviewing a lot of the people who worked there, they kept saying, we couldn't decide what not to do because there were no boundaries.

49:07I think a really telling interview was with an engineer there named Steve Perlman, who was making a calendar function for this personal communicator. and he writes it to go from 1904 to 2096 and checks it in and thinks he's done. And then one of his, someone else comes to him and says, Steve, someone might write apps for historical stuff or way into the future. You got to make this calendar bigger. So he writes it to go from year one and then he thinks he's done again. And then someone else comes to him and says, why are you starting with an arbitrary religious context? You should go back to the beginning of astronomical time.

49:41So he opens it up again and writes the calendar function going from the beginning of the universe. And as he said, if he'd left it at 1904 to 2096, it would have been four lines of code. But this was how everything operated at General Magic. They could do it. So they did do it. And when the device came out, it didn't solve a clear customer problem. So nobody was sure it was for them. It had a 200 page manual. It had so many features that it was battery life was terrible. The user experience was choppy. They sold 3000 units in the first six months, mostly to people who they knew. And meanwhile, people inside of General Magic who bit off much smaller chunks had success.

50:20So one low-level service engineer started a website called Auction Web that was facilitating auctions online. And he went to his bosses and said, look at this. This is doing one of the things we want. Do you want it? And they said, no, you know, too small for them. He left and changed the name to eBay. So that was Pierre Omidyar. He He was a low-level service tech there. Another third-party app developer created an app called Graffiti, where with strokes of a stylus would be turned into writing. And he said, when it was clear General Magic was going to fail, he took his app and said, I'm going to solve a clear customer problem.

50:51Busy professionals want their contacts and calendar on the go to sync with their computer. And so he did just calendar, contacts, and a memo pad. And that was the Palm Pilot. In the same era, by doing way less, by doing something, not everything, And so General Magic became this kind of cautionary tale in the book where they could not draw boundaries. They had no constraints. And it was a disaster. But people inside, I still think the company was a success in a different way, where people inside the company learned such important lessons about constraints that they then took out of there and they made Android and the iPod and the Apple Watch and led Google Maps and founded LinkedIn, co-founded LinkedIn and eBay, obviously.

51:35and nest. So Tony Fidel, who's an important character in the book, it was his first job out of college. So he was like deeply traumatized because these were his heroes. When I first interviewed him, by the way, Bill Gurley, the prominent venture capitalist, when I told him I was thinking about constraints, he said, we have a saying in venture, more startups die of indigestion than starvation. And he said, you got to talk to my friend Tony if you're interested in constraints. So I called Tony Fidel, who is known as the pod father because he was the lead designer of the iPod. He's a very energetic guy.

52:06He's almost yelling at me. He's like, if you don't have constraints, make up constraints. And he told me that when he co-founded Nest, the smart thermostat company, he made his team work inside a literal box where he made them prototype the box before they had the product because that was how it was going to look to the end user. And if it didn't fit on that box, it was not a priority for them. So as he told me, with these ultra-constraint-based things, it makes you think really hard. it slows you down he said but it forces that thinking that's kind of the mindset shift that i hope this book engenders is from seeing limits purely as obstacles to seeing them as opportunities to clarify priorities and launch into productive exploration so good hey one more question before

52:50Ryan Hawk:we run this is a personal one you're cool with it sure it's one year from today you're with the people that you love and you're popping bottles you got champagne everywhere you're spraying it all over the place. I don't know if you drink champagne or not. Okay. Go with me here. Okay. And freaking metaphorical champagne. You're celebrating. What are you celebrating? A year from now? Honestly, the first thing that comes to mind is my dad, I think has made a lot of healthy life changes in recent years. You know, I was like a national level, 800 meter runner, and he'll send me his like very slow, you know, mile or 5K when he PRs.

53:32And I find it very exciting and very cool. And I wanted him to work out like this for years and years. And so I would love to be celebrating if you could get up to a 10K, say PR, I think that would be fun. So I know I'm supposed to say something about my book and there are certainly things that I would celebrate. Like would I love to have another number one New York Times bestseller? Absolutely. I would. But if I were popping champagne, I think it would be more likely to be about family stuff, probably.

54:01Ryan Hawk:God, that is so good. Thank you. It gives me chills thinking about that. We'll talk in a year. I want to hear about your dad, okay? The book is called Inside the Box, How Constraints Make Us Better. Not surprisingly after sports gene and range, but it's super useful. Storytelling's insane. It's so good. Thank you, man. And thank you for your kindness and generosity away from the recording. Because when you meet your heroes, your literary heroes, and they're even better humans, better people than they are as writers, man, it just makes you feel good about the world. I root so hard for you. Not that you need it, but I root so hard for you because you're just a great dude.

54:40Ryan Hawk:And I'm super appreciative for you, man. I appreciate that. I need it. We all need it. And I really enjoyed this conversation, really. Thank you. I appreciate it, man. We'll talk soon. Thanks so much.

54:54Ryan Hawk:It is the end of the podcast club. Thank you for being a member of the end of the podcast club. If you are, send me a note, Ryan at learningleader.com. Let me know what you learned from this great conversation with David Epstein. A few takeaways from my notes. Identify your narrative values. Pick three to five qualities you want running through your life story. David's are curiosity, diligence, and courage. And then he added on forgiveness as an aspirational value. Pick whatever is true to you and let those values make decisions for you before you ever face the decision. So good. And then design a constraint you don't have.

55:44Ryan Hawk:Create a deadline, a word limit, a candle you light at the start of the workday and blow out when you're done. Whatever it is, do not wait for structure to be imposed on you. Build it for yourself. Then think about general magic. Do something, not everything. The general magic engineers could build anything, so they built everything. Jeff Hawkins took one small piece and made the Palm Pilot. Another created eBay. The list of things you could do is so long. It's infinite, but you should create some constraints. It's weird. It feels counterintuitive, but the constraints actually make you better.

56:27Ryan Hawk:Once again, I would say thank you so much for continuing to spread the message and telling a friend or two, hey, you should listen to this episode of The Learning Leader Show with David Epstein. I think he'll help you become a more effective leader because you continue to do that, and you also go to Spotify, Apple Podcasts, subscribe to the show, rate it, hopefully five stars, write a thoughtful review by doing all of that. You are continually giving me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so, so much. Talk to you soon. Can't wait.