Helpful boundaries for productivity

Do humans perform better when forced to work within constraints? Blending anecdotes with personal experience, this book sets out to answer the question

Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better

By David Epstein

Published by 

Macmillan Business

278 pages ₹899

 The central thesis of David Epstein’s last book, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, was that people with a wider experience across a large number of fields tend to thrive compared to people who have limited themselves to becoming specialists in a narrower playing field. In his latest offering, Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better, Mr Epstein poses a different yet related idea — humans tend to perform better when they are forced to work with certain constraints and limitations.

 

Mr Epstein begins the book with an intriguing anecdote about Dmitri Mendeleev’s discovery of the periodic table. It is said that the periodic table came to him in a dream after he had spent a considerable amount of time working on a structure to organise the elements without any success. Mr Epstein goes on to dismantle this story as mere hearsay and argues that what prompted Mendeleev’s discovery was simply the fact that he was “boxed in by a book contract.” The idea that Mr Epstein puts forward, and which he returns to throughout the book with varying degrees of effectiveness, is that while we might think we can do better with unbridled freedom, it “frequently hamper[s] our best efforts, because what we really need are helpful boundaries.”

 

 

Mr Epstein builds on this idea across 12 chapters divided into four parts. The Mendeleev anecdote runs throughout the book as a common thread and appears as an interlude as we move from one part to the next. The constraints Mr Epstein talks about are of various kinds. They range from deadlines to the limitation of human memory, from lack of resources to focusing on only one task at a time. What’s common about these constraints is that they create what he calls “helpful boundaries” and help achieve much more than unchecked creative freedom usually does. To prove his point, he begins the book with the example of General Magic, a company that failed despite a great idea, immense talent as well as large-scale resources simply because despite these, “they were bereft of helpful constraints.”  

 

In contrast are the several examples of individuals as well as organisations that were able to come up with creative solutions and innovations because they were working under the constraints of some kind. The examples he cites in support of his thesis range from literature (Dr Seuss, Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf) to music, films, science, military and technology. Then there are examples taken from his own life, something which Mr Epstein describes as “mesearch”.

 

However, not all of the examples and arguments have the same impact. For instance, in the chapter titled “The Remix of Everything”, Mr Epstein refers to Martin Luther King, Shakespeare, Star Wars and UPS’s ORION system to make the point that even when creating something radical, one needs to begin with something that’s already familiar but add the constraint of “repurposing the old” to avoid getting only copies of what already exists. However, most of his examples seem to serve a different idea — that creative people often borrow and build. Added to this is Mr Epstein’s decision across the book of discussing the examples in far greater detail than expounding the central idea of the chapter, which often gets relegated to a few paragraphs towards the end.

 

This structure, which prioritises anecdotes and examples over exploring the central idea of the chapters, makes the book feel both repetitive and sprawling. The examples and case studies seem to pile up and given their wide range, not all of them will be of equal interest to every reader. The sheer number of these examples, even when interesting in their own right, tends to drown the final point and the key idea of the chapter. This adds to the feeling of the book being longer than it is. It’s also of note that Mr Epstein devotes little space to the cases where constraints can have negative effects on creativity and output.

 

Overall, Inside the Box is a mixed bag. It has a strong central thesis, somewhat marred by its structure. Perhaps tighter editing and a reduction of 50-odd pages would have made the book more impactful. At one point, Mr Epstein writes of his decision to not begin his day by checking his email, saying that while this “won’t make sense for everyone, but it will make sense for a lot of people at least some of the time”. This holds true of his book too. Not everything here will appeal to every reader, but most will find something to take away from the book.

         

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  The reviewer is an independent writer and translator