Hello and welcome to Money Talks. I'm your host, Elizabeth Spires, and today I'm happy to have David Epstein, who is the author of the New York Times bestsellers range in the sports gene. We're here to talk about his new book, Inside the Box, How Constraints Make Us Better. Welcome, David.

Thanks so much for having me. So introduce yourself

and tell us a little bit about what the book is about. I'm a science writer and investigative reporter.

I was previously investigative reporter at ProPublica. Before that, I was the science writer at Sports

Illustrated. And this book is about how limitations can be our most useful tools for creativity, collaboration, and even personal contentment.

So I read a lot of books like those for work and for my own edification. And I really loved it,

partly because a lot of the books that I read, I read them and I think this probably started as a magazine article.

It should have stayed a magazine article. It should have

stayed a magazine article. And they're just kind of low levels of ideas and information density.

And I felt the opposite about your book. I kept making notes. I have a Google Doc. My 10-year-old

and I contribute to where it's just interesting facts and stories about things. That's cool.

And I used a lot of stuff from your book.

So what originally got you interested in the thesis?

Kind of two things.

One was that my previous book, Range, was about the benefits of broad experiences and

skills in an increasingly specialized world.

And the nature of a lot of the questions that I would get after that from readers was, okay, I've got this diverse background, but now what? I'm sort of having trouble figuring out what to do. And so partly it was responsive to that and saying, okay, well, once you have that broad toolbox, you have to focus that into achievement. And I guess the second impetus, which is related, was a hefty dose of me search. I mean, I had that same question, having a zigzaggy career myself. And I would have been terrible at putting boundaries around my own work in the past. So like with my first two books, I wrote over length by about 50 percent and then had to cut back because I didn't really define well what I was doing ahead of time.

Once I became a parent, I really wanted to use my time a lot more efficiently.

And so it was partly me wanting to learn to be better at these things in my own life.

And so I completely overhauled my own writing system, ultimately where I forced myself to outline the book, make a structural architecture before I started. I didn't start writing for a year, only researching and interviewing, and then did a one-page structural outline. And if it's not on that page, it's not in the book. And it made it so much more coherent so I could work too much more efficiently. So it was partly responsive to readers and partly just me wanted to be better at things that I was terrible at yeah on a selfish basis I also appreciated the book because I felt like I needed to hear some of what you're reading if you just picked up the book and said okay this is a book about how to constraints make us better you come into it with an idea like you know what the book's going to be about, but you go in so many different directions that all do come back to that theme, but they're

interesting kind of concepts and stories by themselves. But the first thing you go through is

the corporate case for trying to do too much and where companies fail. And General Magic,

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