General Magic was a company that was conceived in the late 80s... CEO Marc Porat... said his goal in doing that was to create heaven for engineers where they were free to play and create with the only limits being their imagination... As it turned out a little less freedom was the thing they really needed because they could do anything. They did do anything. The project kept growing and growing... An engineer named Steve Pearlman... wrote a calendar function... one of the company's leaders comes to him and says... "You have to make this this calendar bigger."... He goes back again, creates a calendar function that starts at the beginning of the universe. If he had just stuck between 1904 and 2096, it would have been about four lines of code and instead it ended up being this long project because it expanded like everything did at General Magic...

Pixar was the absolute opposite... One of the founders, Ed Catmull... made it his mission for the rest of his career to create an organization that could do that repeatedly. The way he did that was with the religious implementation of constraints... They had one called the three pitches rule... directors and small teams were allowed to spend years in story development... but the costs and complexity only explode once they move into production... He called the beautifully shaded penny problem... Pixar came up with a high-tech solution, popsicle sticks velcro-ed to a wall. And each popsicle stick represented the amount of work that one animator could do in one week... Making the constraint visual solved the problem instantly.

It actually plays into a really hardwired human bias. It's called subtractive neglect bias. We overlook subtractive solutions even when they're obviously the best solutions... The subtraction audit is this idea that we have to proactively be made to look at things that we can take away because we have a hardwired cognitive bias always to add to solve problems and never to take away... If I had to kill one thing in the next 90 days, what would it be?

As the cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham says... given full freedom, what you will do is go down what scientists call the path of least resistance. You will reach for solutions that are familiar... Dr. Seuss was given a vocabulary list... it forced him to experiment with rhythm and meter... Virginia Wolf... outlined the traditional forms of narrative structure and then said, "I'm not allowed to use any of them."... forced her to come up with something totally new and that we now call her stream of consciousness. The Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami... decided to try writing instead of in his native Japanese in English, which he barely knew, and then reverse translating it back into his native Japanese. And it gave him this simple, clear, kind of mesmerizing rhythmic style...

Starting in the late 19th... Kierkegaard is writing about the dizziness of freedom... Emil Durkheim decided to do an analysis of suicide... One of the terms Durkheim used was anomie which means essentially rulelessness... Whenever society was thrown into tumult in a way that removed the normal rules... it caused more people to be anxious and desperate... Jonathan Haidt... told me, it's not healthy for anyone to have access to everything everywhere all of the time. We are not equipped to have infinite choice because our brains are comparison engines...

Herbert Simon... was what I call an encouragable satisficer. Satisficing is a term that he developed that means picking something that is good enough. So it's in contrast to maximizing where you try to consider all of the options available and pick the optimal one... Simon showed was that we have finite brains... And when we strive to do it, we end up less happy and less satisfied with our decisions... As Putnam famously noted, your chance of dying in the next year is cut in half if you join a single club... social integration, being grounded by obligations to other people... is hugely important for well-being.

Eli Goldratt... observation became the core of what he called the theory of constraints, which is the idea that a single bottleneck or the single slowest step in a system limits the overall output... Alex Rogo... realizes that some of the kids are really fast hikers, but then there's Herby, this kid who's really slow... he decides to take the backpacks and redistribute some of the weight... speeds up the overall group because it speeds up Herby who was the bottleneck...

The system constraint shows you where to focus because if you apply effort somewhere else, it doesn't change the overall fate of the system... In this case, it dealt with a company... their bottleneck was in the tiny 15 person design office... ravaged by multitasking... So they implemented a rule called stop starting and start finishing... In a few months, they were getting three times as many designs out the door... Sheila Taormina... did like an audit of her training. What's my bottleneck? She asks. And it turns out it's her strength, her power... four years later, in 1996, she swims exactly 3 seconds faster, makes the Olympic team, becomes a gold medalist...

As Herbert Simon said, in an information-rich environment, there's a poverty of whatever it is that information consumes, and that thing is attention... Gloria Mark... switch screens about every 45 seconds... Your brain is like a whiteboard. And when you switch from one thing to another, you erase the whiteboard, but the residue stays on there... batching your tasks... wary of something called the ziggarnic effect, which is this psychological effect that unfinished tasks leave an imprint on your brain...

Finally, do something called cognitive outsourcing. Put a notebook or a pad on your desk next to you... write it down... and improves your ability to focus on the task at hand... Discipline and ritual is actually the structure that then allows people to do their best creative work... The writer Isabel Allende... thrives on this rigid ritual and structure and rhythm. She starts every single book on January 8th... She lights a candle to start her workday. She blows it out at the end... empowered her creativity rather than stifling it.

Individual innovations tend to be identified with individual creators... but it actually is not a good representation... Multiple discovery is a term popularized by Robert Merton... world changing breakthroughs are arrived at by multiple people in almost the same way at almost the same time... Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray actually filed... on the same day...

Dmitri Mendeleev... the story is... he falls asleep... most impactful nap in human history... That story is beautiful... It is also utterly false... Mendeleev had a publishing contract for a two volume introduction to chemistry textbook... he had to get the other 55 into volume 2 and he had to do it in a way that made sense... he was experimenting with a way to save space in his textbook... Malthus was what I like to call a problem setter... defining a problem really well... draws a bounding box for people's creative thinking... Jeff Hawkins... identified a clear customer problem... Palm Pilot... became a smash hit... Demis Hassabis... said recently that the most important skill now... is defining a good problem... because with the tools we have and the brains we have, it's making that definition narrow enough that you really channel thinking.