I quite enjoyed David Epstein’s The Sports Gene and Range, so I went ahead and got Inside the Box the day it came out. It’s a light, Gladwellian collection of pop-sci bits exploring How Constraints Make Us Better.
“It is a myth — widely believed but not less mythical for that — that people are most creative when they are most free.”
— Herbert Simon
He opens with the famous story of Dmitri Mendeleev seeing the periodic table in a dream. There’s very little evidence of that, but there is plenty of evidence that he was struggling to fit the remaining dozens of elements into the second volume of his new chemistry textbook, and he needed a way to group them.
“He was boxed in by a book contract,” Epstein notes, “and that made all the difference.”
Looking forward to reading more excerpts, I thoroughly enjoyed, “The Sports Gene,” so much so that I went and bought a copy a few years ago. I expect some similarly provocative and interesting fodder from this one.
On the topic of the book, whenever I was struggling to write a drum part for the band I played for in college, I would begin systematically taking pieces of my kit away until I developed something that worked, and then slowly add pieces back in. Limiting myself forced my approach to be more creative within the narrow constraints, whereas I found myself leaning on the same old, “crutches,” when I tried writing with my full kit for too long. Neil Peart and Geddy Lee of Rush did something similar when they wrote, “Malignant Narcissism,” off of the 2007, “Snakes and Arrows,” album, and the result was phenomenal, and a-typical, for a Rush composition:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeUWJbs9Q5E
That’s exactly the kind of thing he’s talking about, Phileas.
I don’t want to share too many lengthy excerpts from a brand new book, but I’m happy to pique everyone’s interest.