How to be more creative | The Gray Area

There's a an awesome example in the book um or really a story about Dr. Seuss. His editor bet him that he couldn't write a children's book using only 50 words.

And the result of that bet was green eggs in him. >> That's right. >> Which is incredible. >> Like talk about a lesson in that form may actually

matter more than inspiration. >> Yeah. And I mean it it it forced him to experiment with rhythm because he couldn't be expansive with vocabulary. And then he he ultimately gets frustrated and just says,

"I'm just going to take the first two rhyming words on the list and make a book." The first two rhyming words on the list, cat and hat, and the rest is history. David Epstein, welcome to the show.

>> Thank you for having me. This is a a very interesting book that I think pushes against some pretty basic in intuitions that we all have. Um, so let's just start with you just summing up

the thesis. What is this thing about? The thesis is that we overvalue complete freedom and that useful limits uh in our work and in our lives can actually liberate us to be the most creative and

satisfied versions of ourselves and that it's especially important now because um I think quite frankly it's never been easier to do too much. >> The book starts with a a myth of scientific discovery with which I was not familiar.

Um it's the myth of the Russian chemist Mendelv who dreamt up we are told the periodic table. Uh why start with that story? What is it telling us or not telling us about how creativity and discovery actually works?

I started with it in part because I had learned the famous dream story which was that Mendelv uh was was trying to put in order all the elements the the chemical building blocks of the universe and after three tireless days of work fell asleep and you know drifted

off into the most impactful nap in human history where he sees all the elements arrange themselves in this order. And so then I was uh kind of flabbergasted when I learned the real story, which is that actually Mendelv had a publishing contract to write a two volume intro

to chemistry textbook. And he'd only gotten eight of the then 63 known elements into volume one. So he had to get the other 55 into volume two.

And he realized he couldn't keep going one element at a time. So he had to do it in a logical way also for beginners. And so he started thinking about elements in terms of

families that he recognized this pattern, the periodic pattern, which is that as you move along the table, chemical and physical properties repeat periodically at at certain intervals. And so it struck me as just the exact opposite of the celebrated myth, this uh freedom of your dreaming

brain, you know, loose from the bounds of reality versus really these very tight constraints that forced him into productive experimentation. And I thought that the gap between the myth and the reality was symbolic of something important.

The fact that we overvalue complete freedom and undervalue uh the power of of useful constraints both to to help us clarify priorities and and launch into productive exploration that we would never think of otherwise. So what is the best way?

What is a a simpler, more accurate way to think about the relationship between freedom and creativity? In >> in in a recent international survey by psychologists of known creativity myths. These are things we know from research are not true.