General Magic had everything. The mid-1990s Silicon Valley company had unlimited funding, an alliance including Apple, Sony, and AT&T, and a founding team that included two creators of the original Mac. Their CEO had sketched the iPhone—a thin glass rectangle, touchscreen only, rectangular apps—in his Stanford dissertation in 1976, before 15% of American households even owned a computer.

They also failed spectacularly. When their product finally launched, it was expensive, incoherent, and missing its core feature. "About three quarters of the people I interviewed said some version of 'I just couldn't figure out what not to do,'" says David Epstein.

David is the author of Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better and the New York Times bestseller Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. General Magic opens his new book because it illustrates the central argument: that freedom, in large enough doses, is the enemy of creative work. And that the leaders who understand this design limits for their teams on purpose.

David joined Mina Seetharaman on the Creative Confidence Podcast to unpack the science, share stories of limits leading to creative breakthroughs (and cautionary tales of constraint-less projects) and what it means for the way we lead, create, and get things done.

Listen on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Article Summary

Why total freedom produces average work

Intentional constraints in practice: Pixar vs. General Magic

How great leaders design limits on purpose

Additive bias and the case for subtracting

Put it into practice

Why total freedom produces average work

"As the cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham says, you may think your brain is made for thinking," David explains. "But it's actually made for preventing you from having to think whenever possible, because thinking is energetically costly."

Give people an open field of possibility, and they reach for the most familiar path, or the most convenient solution. Researchers have a name for what happens when that path gets blocked: the Green Eggs and Ham Effect. 

Dr. Seuss wrote Green Eggs and Ham on a bet that he couldn't do it using only 50 words. Unable to experiment with vocabulary, he developed the rollicking rhythm that made the book famous and then built a legacy around the artificial limits that produced some of children's literature's most original work.

The research replicates across contexts: when people are given fewer choices, not more, their creative output improves. For most of us, in most situations, the issue isn't too little freedom. It's too much.

Intentional constraints in practice: Pixar vs. General Magic

Pixar was building its own 20-year vision—creating the first fully computer-animated feature film (Toy Story)—at the same moment General Magic was imploding, and the contrast is eye opening.

Ed Catmull, Pixar's co-founder, spent those years what David calls "titrating constraints." Small teams simplified story cores for years before moving into production. Directors were required to pitch three ideas rather than one to counteract the mistaken belief that our best ideas come first. Trade-offs were made visible: animators' time was represented as popsicle sticks on a physical board so that their time constraints were obvious. Instead of these constraints limiting creativity, they were central to Pixar’s success.

The advertising industry has a phrase that captures Catmull's whole operating philosophy: Give me the freedom of a tight brief.

How great leaders design limits on purpose

Tony Fadell, who led the design of the iPod, set deadlines he called heartbeats and then froze feature iteration until the next cycle of development. At Nest, he made his team prototype the product's packaging before the product itself: if something didn't fit on the box, it wasn't a priority. His advice to entrepreneurs: write the press release before you start. It forces you to define who you're building for and what problem you're actually solving.

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in the late 1990s, the company was making printers, servers, the Newton, and dozens of computer models. He drew a 2x2 on a whiteboard—consumer/pro on one axis, portable/desktop on the other and said: we're only doing four things. "Complexity steals clarity," David observes. A well-set constraint returns it.

One CEO David shadowed used a thought experiment he calls a legacy constraint: Pretend we're going out of business in two years. Only we know it. What would we stop doing? People immediately identified where the real value was. The exercise also gave them ownership of the prioritization. Constraints that people help design are more effective.

Additive bias and the case for subtracting

The reason constraints feel unnatural is partly neurological. Humans have what researchers call additive bias: we almost always reach for addition when solving a problem. Its cousin is subtraction neglect: we systematically overlook solutions that involve removing something. 

In one study, participants were asked to stabilize a LEGO structure to support a masonry brick over a stormtrooper's head. They had to pay for every piece they added. Almost everyone added pieces anyway, when simply removing one would have solved it instantly.

The practical fix: look for things to remove. Make all current commitments visible, identify the actual amount of time you have to work on them, map high and low priorities, and choose one thing to stop doing. 

Put it into practice

Try the Hemingway Principle. Hemingway ended his workday in the middle of a sentence so he always knew exactly where to start the next morning. Name what you'll start with tomorrow before you end today. Don't turn on your phone until it's done.

Run a subtraction audit. Make all current commitments visible, identify at least one thing to cut in the next 90 days, and hold the line: nothing new in until something comes out.

Write the press release first. Before your next project begins, define in writing: who is this for, what problem does it solve, and what's on the box? If you can't answer those questions, you're not ready to build.

Try the legacy constraint. Ask your team: if we were going out of business in two years and only we knew it, what would we stop doing? Let the answers surface real priorities, and let the team help generate them.

Explore More

Listen to more episodes

David was previously on the Creative Confidence Podcast to discuss Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. Listen to that conversation here. Subscribe so you don't miss what's coming next.

Read the book

Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better by David Epstein.

Get the exercises

David has a set of constraint exercises for teams on his website, as well as other tools and downloads.

Take a course

IDEO U's Leading for Creativity is built for leaders who want to create the conditions where great work—and the people doing it—can thrive.

About the Speaker

David Epstein

NYT Bestselling Author

LinkedIn

David Epstein is the author of two New York Times bestsellers: Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World and The Sports Gene. His work explores the science of human performance, learning, and creativity, drawing on research from psychology, economics, evolutionary biology, and beyond. In his new book Inside the Box, Epstein investigates one of the most counterintuitive findings in the creativity research: that constraints consistently produce more original, more effective solutions than open-ended freedom. David has written for Sports Illustrated and ProPublica, previously hosted Slate's "How To!" podcast, and has been featured in outlets including the New York Times, The Atlantic, and NPR. His TED Talk on sports performance has been viewed more than 10 million times.