I went to a writer's retreat after my last book came out, and there was a question everyone had to answer, which was, what are you optimizing for this year? And I said autonomy. Fast forward a few years, and I learned there's definitely such a thing as too much autonomy, because I think I, like, caused myself to suffer in certain ways by over-indexing on freedom.

Hey, everyone, it's Adam Grant.

Welcome back to Rethinking, my podcast with Ted on the science of what makes us take.

I'm an organizational psychologist, and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people

to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.

David Epstein is one of my favorite science writers, a journalist who specializes in understanding success. His last book, Range, was about how generalists are primed to succeed

over specialists in our modern world. His new book, Inside the Box, set some boundaries on

that by exploring the power of constraints

for unlocking creativity and potential. Setting limits wasn't just a professional curiosity for David.

It was a personal challenge. When he was outlining this book, he gave himself an unusual

constraint. So I have to ask you, there's a rumor going around that you wrote your latest book with an extreme constraint, that you had to write the entire book on one sheet of paper.

I did write, and I actually have right behind me, I forced myself to outline it in a detailed

way on a single page of paper, because in the past my outlines were really long. So it's actually

here. Oh, wow. So I set myself this constraint in part because for my first two books, I wrote basically

150% of a book to get 100% of a book, which is extremely inefficient. Like, I had to cut a trip to Arctic Sweden in my

first book. You don't want to do that. So I set this limit for myself, both to make a macro-structural

plan before I started and have it fit on one page. And as you can probably see from that writing,

I tried to cheat my own system by writing as small as possible, but it still had to fit on that page.

And if it wasn't there, it is not in the book.

And consequently, the book is 20% shorter than my other two.

My writing process was what's much more efficient, which was important because I became a parent between the last two books.

So I love that you actually held yourself to this discipline because I think

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