Do something, not everything

Monday, July 13th, 2026

Inside the Box by David EpsteinIn the spring of 2024, David Epstein explains (in Inside the Box), he met up with a group of General Magic alumni to discuss their proto-iPhone:

It had been three decades since they went public—with no revenue—in Silicon Valley’s first “concept IPO.”

[…]

On the day of the IPO, Sony’s investment in General Magic instantly appreciated so much that it was more than they had anticipated making in their five-year business plan for the product. “And then it was gone,” Gruzen said. “For a moment, it was fantastic.”

[…]

Professor Tom Eisenmann, author of Why Startups Fail, rolled in a whiteboard so that the General Magic group and the audience could compile a list of what had gone wrong. The board filled up quickly. Too many partners; too early; too little attention to the limits of available technology; too vague a customer; too much making everything on their own instead of building on others; too little management. One audience member, an entrepreneur and mentor to Harvard and MIT students, described at length how watching the film reminded her of her mentees, whose giant visions often get in the way of accomplishing anything at all. Professor Eisenmann distilled her wisdom on the whiteboard: “Do something, not everything.” Laughter and head nods spread around the room.

Steve Jarrett explained to the audience that the software engineers were so skilled that they could imagine and build new things literally overnight. “We just kept inventing new ideas, and it kept making the product bigger, and bigger, and bigger.” The CEO, he said, “would just tell a new story every time there was a new idea.”

Jarrett recounted how one of the third-party app developers he managed, Jeff Hawkins, did what they could not—something, not everything. Hawkins had designed an app called Graffiti that could be used on General Magic’s platform. It allowed users to make quick strokes with a stylus that would be recognized as letters and punctuation. “So Jeff called and said, ‘How many devices have you sold?’ ” Jarrett explained. Jarrett shared the disappointing news, to which he recalled Hawkins replying: “Oh my God.” After that, Hawkins and his small team decided to build their own, simpler product. “When he told us that, we said there’s no way. How are you going to compete with Sony and Motorola?” Jarrett recalled. “And he crushed us, because he took this simple iterative approach to solving problems.”

Hawkins took his one tiny component of General Magic’s giant ecosystem and made it the basis of a much simpler device. It started just with functions for a calendar, contacts, a to-do list, a memo pad, and a calculator. That was the PalmPilot, which became a smash hit in the same era.

[…]

“We had too much on our plate,” Stern told me. “If you don’t whittle it down, you’re not gonna make it. And we kept piling it on. Why did we need sixteen partners? We didn’t. But there was all this FOMO.”

Why Startups Fail by Tom EisenmannIn Why Startups Fail, Eisenmann describes six patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures:

Bad Bedfellows. Startup success is thought to rest largely on the founder’s talents and instincts. But the wrong team, investors, or partners can sink a venture just as quickly.

False Starts. In following the oft-cited advice to “fail fast” and to “launch before you’re ready,” founders risk wasting time and capital on the wrong solutions.

False Promises. Success with early adopters can be misleading and give founders unwarranted confidence to expand.

Speed Traps. Despite the pressure to “get big fast,” hypergrowth can spell disaster for even the most promising ventures.

Help Wanted. Rapidly scaling startups need lots of capital and talent, but they can make mistakes that leave them suddenly in short supply of both.

Cascading Miracles. Silicon Valley exhorts entrepreneurs to dream big. But the bigger the vision, the more things that can go wrong.

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The median salary for an aviation technician was $79,140 in 2024

Friday, July 10th, 2026

Graduates in aviation maintenance from the Pittsburgh Institute of Aeronautics are in demand, NPR reports, due to a labor shortage:

After shifting their tassels and hugging their parents, they head to a nearby building for one last test.

“Every one of the 54 Maintenance students took their final test graduation day or the morning after,” says Derek Vrabel, the student services coordinator at PIA.

The test isn’t for a class grade. It’s to earn the Federal Aviation Administration’s Airframe and Powerplant (A&P) certification for mechanics to work on plane airframes and engines. The coveted credential offers a foothold in an industry eager for new hires: Even before putting on their cap and gown in late June, nearly half of the graduates had already locked in new jobs, while others were narrowing down their choices. Options range from small regional airlines to loftier aspirations.

“I do have a couple of interviews next week with a couple of contractors, and SpaceX in Texas,” says class salutatorian Jon Wojcik, from Buffalo, N.Y. “I’d be applying my airframe skills for that, for the assembly of Starship rockets.”

As for how the new graduates did on the series of oral, practical and written exams that make up the test, Vrabel says 47 of them succeeded on their first attempt. He expects the remaining seven to pass in the coming days.

[…]

“There’s a shortage for both pilots and mechanics,” Wojcik says. “All these people are retiring, I think the average age is 57, of mechanics.”

The commercial aviation industry will need to hire 123,000 aviation maintenance technicians in North America through 2044, according to a forecast in Boeing ‘s widely cited Pilot and Technician Outlook. Compare that to nearly 161,000 U.S. jobs in the field as of 2024, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Many of the awaiting jobs promise good wages. The median salary for an aviation technician was $79,140 in 2024, according to federal data. That’s $30,000 above the median wages for all jobs — quite a leap for a program that takes less than two years to complete and costs about $42,000 at PIA.

[…]

There are about 220 aviation mechanic schools around the country, according to the FAA. They range from specialized schools like PIA to programs at community colleges, which usually cost less, and at universities.

Data from the U.S. Department of Education puts the cost of attending PIA at well above the mid-point for U.S. certificate-level colleges. But the agency’s College Scorecard also reports that, four years after graduating, PIA’s graduates earn a median of $80,825 — more than twice the wages of other certificate-granting colleges.

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Studying what, exactly, workers in a knowledge economy do all day

Saturday, June 27th, 2026

Inside the Box by David EpsteinGloria Mark, David Epstein’s explains (in Inside the Box), has been at the forefront of studying what, exactly, workers in a knowledge economy do all day:

Early on, this meant that she and her colleagues were shadowing office workers with stopwatches and logging all of their activity.

[…]

The resulting paper was published in 2004, and for its title she borrowed an emblematic quote from one of the subjects: “Constant, Constant, Multi-tasking Craziness.”

Mark found that the typical office worker switched tasks every three minutes, on average. When her team studied “working spheres”—basically groups of tasks that are connected to the same project—they found that people switched about every twelve minutes and cycled through ten different working spheres per day. Whenever a sphere was interrupted, it took about twenty-five minutes on average to get back to it.

[…]

By 2012, office workers were switching tasks every seventy-five seconds. By 2022, it had stabilized at about every forty-five seconds.

[…]

In simplified form, the shift between tasks actually occurs in two steps: “goal shifting” (switching what you want to do) and then “rule activation” (mentally turning off the rules of one task and on those of another). This takes effort and time, and it is why studies of drivers, in both simulators and the real world, have shown that those having conversations react slowly to hazards, and the impact is the same whether they’re talking on a handheld or hands-free phone.

[…]

Even when people are allowed to switch between tasks at their own discretion, the more they choose to switch, the longer everything takes. As Mark has written: “We find that in real-world work, the more switches in attention a person makes, the lower is their end-of-day assessed productivity.” They also perform worse on important tasks. Multitasking physicians and pilots make more prescribing and in-flight errors, respectively. Famed investor Charlie Munger had it right when he said: “I see these people doing three things at once, and I think, God what a terrible way that is to think.”

[…]

Perhaps the most surprising of Mark’s findings has to do with “self-interruptions.” Self-interruptions are what they sound like: not a phone call or an app notification, but a thought, perhaps about something left undone or what’s happening on social media, that commandeers our attention and leads us to switch goals. Mark found that we are nearly as likely to self-interrupt as we are to be interrupted by some external cue. And here’s the frightening part: We gravitate to a customary level of interruption. If you are disrupted all day, every day by notifications, even if those external triggers magically disappear, you will unconsciously increase your self-interrupting in order to maintain the rhythm of distraction to which you have become accustomed. It is as if we have some sort of internal distraction barometer that, once used to a certain rhythm, will work to maintain it. That is why the mere presence of a smartphone on a desk, or in a pocket—even if it is turned off—has been shown to impair performance on cognitive tests particularly among people who are more phone dependent.

[…]

Background music can have energizing or calming effects that improve performance, but it also has a distracting effect that becomes important when a task is new. Rousing background music has been shown to impair performance among new surgeons learning an unfamiliar task, and a survey of more than two thousand professional software developers found that they tend to turn music off when learning new tools.

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Stop starting and start finishing

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2026

Inside the Box by David EpsteinThe idea that growth can come from a focus on limits, rather than limitless expansion, David Epstein explains (in Inside the Box), is at the core of a simple but profound idea:

In the 1970s, Israeli physicist Eli Goldratt was working on algorithms to predict the behavior of atoms in heated crystals, when a friend asked for help with a comparatively quotidian problem: constructing chicken coops.

[…]

Goldratt realized that shifting a lone extra worker from a non-bottleneck over to the bottleneck could multiply the total output of the business. He crafted a new schedule that actually called for some workers at non-bottleneck steps to work less. If they worked at full capacity, they just produced more parts that piled up wastefully before the bottleneck. Without changing the workforce, the new schedule tripled chicken-coop output. This was the beginning of what Goldratt would call the “theory of constraints,” or TOC: the notion that a single bottleneck determines the fate of a system.

[…]

In 2011, Time magazine named [The Goal] one of the twenty-five most influential business books, alongside genre classics like Dale Carnegie’s 1936 How to Win Friends and Influence People. In 2013, Jeff Bezos hosted an all-day book club on The Goal with Amazon executives.

[…]

But for managers judged only by the efficiency of their particular stage in production, there was little incentive to change. Goldratt had a saying: “The sum of local optimums is not equal to the optimum of the whole.” He saw that separate parts of an organization had their own incentive structures, all set up to optimize production in their silo—like Boy Scouts running ahead of Herbie—even when it was wasteful for the whole.

Long-time readers might know that I’ve discussed the Theory of Constraints plenty here, just not recently. Kevin Fox‘s Blue Light anecdote is an excellent soft introduction to the key concept. I discuss a more detailed example from The Haystack Syndrome in another post, if you’re interested in a bit of a puzzle, with numbers.

Epstein offers a few unconventional examples that don’t quite match Goldratt’s concept, including this one:

In one theory-of-constraints case study I encountered, a factory that made custom gearboxes for industry had a severe bottleneck, not on the factory floor, but in the fifteen-person design office where the gearbox plans were conceived. The designers had so many projects in progress that their workday was ravaged by multitasking. These were intricate endeavors, and the designers were switching focus more than fifty times a day. It led to errors, and then to quitting. Ultimately, the design team implemented a rule: “Stop starting and start finishing.” Orders kept coming in, but the design office was forbidden from working on any new order until one already in progress was finished. Multitasking plummeted, and a few months later the office was getting three times as many designs out the door.

This is more an example of Goldratt’s concept of the Critical Chain, or classic project management.

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The ideas that made an impact in the long run were those that embedded something new in something already established

Wednesday, June 17th, 2026

Inside the Box by David EpsteinIn Shakespeare’s era, David Epstein explains (in Inside the Box), creativity was more associated with the ability to improve upon something that existed than with sheer originality:

If the audience already knew the story, they could readily take in the unique aspects that each new creator brought to it.

[…]

Robert McKee, in his classic screenwriting book Story, coined the term “Archplot” to describe the structure of nearly every Hollywood hit.

[…]

The more creative the setting of a film, McKee explains, the more closely it must hew to Archplot in order to resonate with a wide audience. He points to the counterintuitive fact that “of all genres Fantasy is the most rigid and structurally conventional.”

[…]

The stranger the setting, the more conventional the plot. (Conversely, for Woolf to use new narrative methods, she had to stick with extremely conventional settings.)

[…]

In a classic paper on technological innovation, a pair of researchers coined the term “robust design” to describe features that help the intended audience immediately place a new thing in the context of a familiar world.

[…]

At every turn, Edison used design choices that made adoption easy. He initially limited bulbs to 13 watts so that they would produce light similar to familiar gas lamps, and he retained lampshades even though they were no longer needed to protect gas flames from a draft. The effect was such that adopters might hardly realize that they were bathed in a new kind of light. For charging customers, Edison employed meters based on the familiar devices used by gas companies, even though this meant that early customers got six months of free lighting because he hadn’t yet figured out a way for meters to measure usage. Every choice Edison made prioritized the social context, even when that made his job more difficult, and even when it meant defying his most important backers.

In order to mimic the existing utility distribution system, Edison wanted to use underground wires to carry electricity from a central generation point to many buildings. But two of his biggest investors, William Vanderbilt and J. P. Morgan, insisted that Edison instead sell isolated systems of small generators, wires, and lights to individual customers. Edison had to threaten to resign to get his way. It led to lighting that was far easier for new customers to understand and use than if everyone had to manage their own isolated system. In just a decade, Edison replaced not only New York City’s gas lights with incandescent bulbs, but the gas infrastructure that had been both physically and deeply politically ingrained in the city for fifty years. “Edison triumphed over the gas industry not by clearly distinguishing his new system,” the researchers wrote, “but, rather, by initially cloaking it in the mantle of these established institutions.”

[…]

What I’ve been calling “Virginia Woolf’s rope”—the link to something familiar when trying something new—a Harvard Business School professor referred to with the more management-like moniker: “optimal newness.”

[…]

Some papers relied on highly novel combinations of knowledge: They primarily cited areas of research that rarely (or never) appeared together. Others cited only familiar combinations that recur constantly. But the “hit” papers, those that went on to be used by a huge number of other scientists, struck a balance. Papers that were grounded in conventional knowledge combinations, but featured an injection of unusual combinations, were at least twice as likely as average papers to become scientific blockbusters.

[…]

Most management concepts were fads that disappeared quickly. The ideas that made an impact in the long run were those that embedded something new in something already established.

[…]

Whether it is making new music, new Broadway shows, new movies, new video games, or new companies, the most successful teams tend to comprise members who have a wide variety of prior work experiences, but also some team members with prior collaborations or common background experiences. Creative teams that include only repeat collaborators, or, conversely, teams with only new members who have no common background experience, are less likely to find their way to the familiarity/ originality sweet spot.

[…]

There was no need for many early electric vehicles to be charged via a cable that looks just like a gas hose with a gas nozzle that plugs into a port near where a nonexistent gas tank would be, nor for an electric pickup truck with no engine under the hood to keep the same shape as its gasoline-powered cousins.

[…]

Today, this design principle is sometimes called skeuomorphism: New stuff retains facets of old stuff (like the “folders” on your computer) in order to communicate to users what the new stuff can do. “Without invoking existing understandings,” the Edison researchers warned, “innovations may never be understood and adopted in the first place.”

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General Magic had a right to any IP developed by employees

Monday, June 1st, 2026

Inside the Box by David EpsteinGeneral Magic was already in trouble, David Epstein explains (in Inside the Box), when a tech-support guy named Pierre Omidyar used his free time and personal website to start AuctionWeb:

General Magic had a right to any IP developed by employees, so Omidyar dutifully showed the company’s lawyer that his site was generating traffic, connecting people, and facilitating commerce. Isn’t that what General Magic wanted to do? But they were already too committed to the partners of the gigantic Alliance and to a proprietary e-commerce network to change direction, even though the explosion of the internet should have completely altered their plans. General Magic passed on AuctionWeb. Omidyar, who didn’t have a business bank account and had been collecting checks in a pile at his desk, kept it going. He left General Magic, and changed the name of his site to eBay.

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Businesspeople weren’t going to use the Newton unless it included a phone

Saturday, May 30th, 2026

Inside the Box by David EpsteinLarry Tesler, who was leading Apple’s Newton group, hired an anthropologist named Eleanor Wynn, David Epstein explains (in Inside the Box), to test the theory behind their business plan:

Wynn reported back that business­people weren’t going to use the Newton unless it included a phone. But adding a phone at that point (as General Magic was busy learning the hard way) was unreasonable. In that case, Wynn reported, the market will be workers who already carry separate pieces of communication equipment, like police officers and firefighters. In an oral history interview for the Computer History Museum, Tesler recalled Apple CEO John Sculley’s response:

Sculley is deflated, “I thought my market was CEOs, like me. Not firemen.” And “No, no, no, we don’t want that. That answer is not acceptable.”

So they went hunting for another answer, using what Tesler called the “famous fake focus group.” Tesler was told that the supposed focus group would be in Minnesota, because people in the Bay Area were too tech savvy, and neither he nor Wynn were invited, and unfortunately there would be no recording of it they could watch. The focus-group team came back with a message: “We’re building the exact right product.” Apple plowed ahead, and the Newton flopped spectacularly.

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For every person who needs more freedom, there are ten people who need more help in finding their way

Tuesday, May 26th, 2026

Inside the Box by David EpsteinBell Labs is often remembered as the epitome of unfettered exploration, David Epstein explains (in Inside the Box), but that framing misses a crucial point:

Eric Gilliam, who studies and writes about innovation history, coined the beautiful phrase “long leash, narrow fence” to describe the ethos at Bell Labs in its heyday. New researchers were given extraordinary latitude in determining what to work on, but were expected to interact with engineers and manufacturing facilities to identify specific problems that needed solving.

[…]

John R. Pierce, a Bell Labs scientist and “father of the communications satellite,” recalled in an oral history: “Too much freedom is horrible. It’s like telling a young child, ‘Do whatever you want to.’… It’s certainly bad to be directed to do things very, very narrowly and with no freedom. It’s my guess that for every person who needs more freedom, there are ten people who need more help in finding their way.” What they had at Bell Labs, as another famous scientist put it, was “circumscribed freedom”—freedom within a framework.

Gilliam shares just an excerpt from an interview with Pierce, from 1979, after he had earned acclaim as the father of the communications satellite:

LYLE: I want to talk about research in the Bell Labs and how that’s done. That is, when you first started there, you were working with vacuum tubes. Who decides what problems will be worked on?

PIERCE: That’s very different then and now. I was told to do research on vacuum tubes. People sort of just left me alone. They did suggest that I go and see Philo Farnsworth, who was working on electron multipliers and television pick-up tubes, but I was left pretty much to myself. This was very, very confusing to me. I didn’t know what to do.

LYLE: Were you doing it alone?

PIERCE: Yes.

LYLE: Did they say, “So-and-so has been doing this and this is where he left off”?

PIERCE: No. I was just supposed to plan something to do and do it. I think that is close to cruel and unusual punishment.

LYLE: And full of anxiety, I’m sure.

PIERCE: Yes, but I didn’t know enough to be unhappy. I did crazy things. I did some useful things. I invented an electron multiplier. I was greatly helped at this point, but not so much by the people who were close to such work. I felt a certain secretiveness in the people who were working near to me. They were doing their own thing, and I was doing other things. Heaven knows how I found anything useful to do. I was exposed to things by some of the people who were less secretive. I was very much helped by Bill Shockley, who came to Bell Laboratories about the same time I did. He had been an undergraduate at Caltech but did his graduate work at MIT. He was a very sympathetic person, and taught me a good deal. Somehow I hit on things that were worth working on — electron multipliers and the question of noise in electron multipliers, and later trying to make high transconductance vacuum tubes.

Then, as the war came, I was drawn into microwave tube work, and the outcome of that was a little bit by accident. First, I tried to make klystron amplifiers—I’d heard about klystron. Then I stumbled onto reflex klystrons, which was not a new idea, but I stumbled onto it independently. Gerry [William Gerald] Shepherd, who’s now at the University of Minnesota, and I made some klystrons that were in all American microwave radar receivers. The magnetron was the big thing of the day, but we made these beating oscillators for receivers instead.

Too much freedom is horrible. It’s like telling a young child, “Do whatever you want to.” You’ve heard this story. There are various outcomes. One is, “Do I have to do what I want to?” Complete freedom is not very helpful to a person who is inexperienced in the world. It’s certainly bad to be directed to do things very, very narrowly and with no freedom. It’s my guess that for every person who needs more freedom, there are ten people who need more help in finding their way.

LYLE: So, did they tell you why they wanted the vacuum tubes, when you started off?

PIERCE: Not really. I found out some way, inadvertently. Some people were working on electron multipliers, and I made some improvements on them. It became clear that people needed better vacuum tubes for building negative feedback amplifiers, and I worked on that. I don’t think I was told this formally; I just found out by talking to people. Then, as the war approached and we got into war, it became apparent that microwave radar was very, very important, and I worked on tubes for radar. It was a process of osmosis rather than direction that led me into these things, as I remember it.

LYLE: How was the research tied in with the general business of Bell Telephone? kind of a relationship exists between these two parts of the company?
That is, what kind of a relationship exists between these two parts of the company?

PIERCE: It’s a very important relationship. The Bell System has AT&T, which is sort of a holding company, but it also runs the long lines that provide long distance telephone service. It establishes engineering practices for the Bell System. It owns Western Electric, which is a manufacturing organization, and it also owns, together with Western Electric, the Bell Telephone Laboratories.

I remember that during the war we saw a good deal of people from Western Electric, who were going to manufacture the things that we devised. Because all of these people were engaged in telephony, or during the war because they were all engaged in radar and other military things, you got to talk to people who were engaged in the operation of things, who were engaged in the manufacture of things, and you got a picture of the rest of the world which certainly influenced what research you did.

I can understand a university, which does teaching and research. But the idea of a research institute without ties to either teaching or to manufacturing or operational organization seems a terribly sterile idea. You see that in the Soviet Union; there’s a lot of good activity that never results in anything. When they want to build automobiles, they hire Fiat to build an automobile plant, instead of relying on what they have learned.

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Not too much time, not too much money, and not too many people on the team

Sunday, May 24th, 2026

Inside the Box by David EpsteinPrior to his This American Life experience, David Epstein explains (in Inside the Box), he was apt to think of freedom as an absence of editing:

It seems silly to me in retrospect, but it’s the same kind of “no limits” thinking that animated General Magic, and its failure left a powerful impression on those who lived it.

Tony Fadell came away from the General Magic experience obsessed with constraints. “If you don’t have constraints, then make up constraints!” he told me the first time we spoke.

[…]

After General Magic, Fadell joined Philips as a twenty-five-year-old chief technology officer, where initially he “swung the pendulum too far the other way,” he said, and fell into micromanaging.

[…]

He got the initial call from Apple in January 2001. In March, he showed Steve Jobs a Styrofoam model of a music player and got the green light. He wasn’t given a deadline to ship a first version, but Fadell insisted on setting one linked to an external beacon, “so that everybody has an understanding of what it looks like, and it isn’t just the boss cracking the whip.” He chose Christmas. It meant that rather than building the giant from the toes up like at General Magic, the team had to use existing technology resourcefully. Their soon-to-be famous scroll wheel, for instance, was inspired by the wheel on a Danish cordless phone that a team member brought to a meeting. The first iPod shipped that November.

Fadell eventually moved on to the iPhone, where the team set internal deadlines for experimental prototypes. Fadell refers to those deadlines as “heartbeats,” because they determine the rhythm of work from the inside. They gave themselves just ten weeks to make a first basic version of an iPod-plus-phone, during which time they learned that the wheel would take up too much space. They allotted five months for a second version, and learned that more of their assumptions were wrong; an antenna and speaker couldn’t be as close together as they’d wanted. The third version worked, enough. The internal deadlines (or heartbeats) weren’t for finishing the entire project; they were signals for everyone to pause, collect lessons, and regroup.

Fadell later wrote: “We would have never reached that third design if we hadn’t given ourselves hard deadlines with the first two — if we hadn’t cut ourselves off after a few months, reset, and moved on. We forced as many constraints on ourselves as possible: not too much time, not too much money, and not too many people on the team.”

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The costs only explode once a film moves into production

Wednesday, May 20th, 2026

Inside the Box by David EpsteinAfter Toy Story fulfilled Ed Catmull’s twenty-year dream, David Epstein explains (in Inside the Box), he turned his attention to creating a place that could do it repeatedly:

The “Three Pitches Rule” required directors to pitch not one but three film ideas, so that they wouldn’t get stuck on one and fixate too early. Pixar directors were then allowed to spend years with a tiny team in the development phase of a film, probing ideas, trying out script drafts, and creating and re-creating storyboards while they hunted for and simplified the core of a story.

[…]

The costs only explode once a film moves into production, at which point experimenting and learning become slow and expensive.

[…]

Once in production, Catmull and his colleagues used the schedule to enforce regular feedback and learning. There were “dailies” every single morning, in which animators shared incomplete work with colleagues; “Braintrust” meetings, in which a small group watched a version of a film and highlighted aspects that weren’t working, without mandating solutions (Steve Jobs was barred, lest his powerful persona carry undue weight); and, after a film was done, postmortems, the main benefit of which was the pre-postmortem—the fact that the looming postmortem forced team members to collect and reflect on their lessons. Boundaries

[…]

Creativity, Inc. by by Ed Catmull

In his memoir, Creativity, Inc., Catmull recounts how the director of The Incredibles became obsessed with getting the fish in an aquarium in the background of a scene to flicker like flames, so animators worked on the inconsequential detail for months. Meanwhile, major characters still needed work. Eventually, a producer and department manager created a system in which popsicle sticks — each one representing the amount of work a single animator could complete in a week — were Velcroed to a wall and arranged next to characters that needed to be animated. If the director wanted to keep obsessing over the fish, he’d have to start taking sticks away from some other character and moving them to the fish. As it turned out, crafting visible constraints did the trick.

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The “think slow” part of Pixar planning started before Pixar even existed.

Monday, May 18th, 2026

Inside the Box by David EpsteinThe “think slow” part of Pixar planning, David Epstein explains (in Inside the Box), started before Pixar even existed:

Catmull was surprised then, in 1980, when a Lucasfilm competitor spent $10 million on a Cray-1 super­computer. He and his colleagues wondered if they should chase that competitor, so they sat down and made specific estimates for the computing power it would take to animate an entire film. Their estimate: It would take one hundred Cray-1 computers, which would cost $1 billion. Totally out of the question. “It was like, OK, they’ve just done something unwise economically,” Catmull told me. “So we decided we’re not going to worry about them, and there are a whole bunch of other things we have to solve first.”

[…]

At one point, they calculated the exact number of pixels (five million) and “micropolygons” (eighty million) that they figured software would need to render in order to make a Star Wars quality sequence, down to the realistic blur of speeding objects. Like the summaries in By Space Ship to the Moon, the estimates were guiding lights that helped them keep track of the distance between their current work and their goal.

[…]

In 1988, Pixar released its RenderMan software, and changed filmmaking forever. It was used to seamlessly integrate computer graphics into live-action films like Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park. And then, in 1995, to create an entire film: Toy Story. After twenty years of small steps, Catmull finally achieved his personal moonshot.

The Last Starfighter came out in 1984, well before then:

Computer graphics for the film were rendered by Digital Productions (DP) on a Cray X-MP supercomputer. The company created 27 minutes of effects for the film. This was considered an enormous amount of computer generated imagery at the time.[6] For the 300 scenes containing computer graphics in the film, each frame of the animation contained an average of 250,000 polygons and had a resolution of 3000 × 5000 36-bit pixels. Digital Productions estimated that using computer animation required only half the time and between a third to half of the cost of traditional special effects. The result was a cost of $14 million for a film that made close to $29 million at the box office.

The computer graphics are quaint:

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Even literal Moon shots aren’t “moonshots”

Saturday, May 16th, 2026

Inside the Box by David EpsteinEd Catmull, the cofounder and longtime president of Pixar, was watching the General Magic documentary with David Epstein when he headed to the bookshelf, Epstein explains (in Inside the Box):

When Catmull returns from the shelf, he’s holding a laptop-size book with giant red letters splashed across the cover: By Space Ship to the Moon, published in 1952.

By Space Ship to the Moon by Fletcher Pratt and Jack Coggins Medium

The text is clearly targeted at adolescents, but it gives meticulous summaries of the state of 1952 technology — everything from space fuel to space food — and the distance between the current state of the art and how far it needs to go for a trip to the Moon.

[…]

Nearly two decades before the actual Moon landing, scientists and engineers were thinking slow, breaking a giant challenge into tiny pieces. “It goes through chapter by chapter the things that have to be solved,” Catmull explains. “The supplies; the fuel; how do you get up into space; what’s it like to actually be there; landing; food; the process of getting back. It’s a step-by-step of what it takes to get to the Moon.” His point is that even literal Moon shots aren’t “moonshots” in the way they’re often mythologized — just give bright people an inspiring vision and tons of money and the rest will fall into place. General Magic, he suggests, went the mythical moonshot route.

Returning to the documentary:

“The greatest people are self-managing,” the man says. “They don’t need to be managed. What they need is a common vision. Once they know what to do, they’ll go figure out how to do it.”

Catmull looks like he just opened a carton of sour milk. The man on screen was his longtime Pixar business partner, Steve Jobs. It doesn’t sound like the person Catmull knew, the one who obsessed over the number and placement of bathrooms in the Pixar office such that people would be forced to bump into one another and talk. “That is not how Steve ended up working,” he tells me. He concludes that Jobs was either just very young in that clip, or in “mythmaking” mode, providing inspirational soundbites for the media.

I managed to find some scanned pages from the book:

By Space Ship to the Moon 1 Medium

Crewman wheels fuel tank from cave, as moon-to-earth missile is readied for firing.

The station on the moon would be pretty safe against any kind of attack from earth…and guided missiles fired from the moon against a target on earth would be almost impossible to stop. So the first trip to the moon will be made to explore for a place where a military base can be set up.

By Space Ship to the Moon 2 Medium

Base ship will be dismantled to build moon-base. Observatory will be re-erected on mountain top,

By Space Ship to the Moon 3 Medium

Battery-powered, tractor-mounted drill at work. Gravity one-sixth that of earth makes handling of heavy equipment easy

There is nobody on earth rich enough to pay for a rocket that would go to the moon. The big business corporations might possibly find the money, but they would want to see some way of getting it back. At present, it is believed that many valuable minerals are to be found on the moon, but nobody knows for sure. It is not very likely that the big corporations will risk their money. So it appears that the moon rocket will have to be a government project

By Space Ship to the Moon 4 Medium

Sun’s rays are focused by large reflector on mercury boiler. Vapor will drive engines to furnish electric power.

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Think slow, act fast

Thursday, May 14th, 2026

Inside the Box by David EpsteinIn Inside the Box, David Epstein explains how, since the 1990s, researcher Bent Flyvbjerg has kept a database that tracks giant undertakings:

Only 8.5 percent of projects finished on time and on budget; 0.5 percent did that and delivered the prophesied benefits. Almost every major infrastructure project goes over budget, but at least not by as much as IT projects, which have a greater tendency to go hundreds of percent over budget. The pattern of disaster that Flyvbjerg has documented is relatively simple: With few constraints, exciting projects get too large too fast, going from big idea to giant endeavor extremely quickly. Flyvbjerg’s conclusion could fairly be called the General Magic problem: Rather than accelerating like a plane speeding up and gradually ascending, it’s more like a harrier, lifting straight into the air. He calls the disaster pattern “think fast, act slow.”

“Think fast” means that the period when a project was small enough for frequent experimentation, and for defining constraints, is essentially skipped. On the back of an intoxicating idea, resources pile into the project. It grows without clear boundaries. Lessons that early on could have helped define the project will now come slowly, and painfully, because the undertaking is large and changing its momentum is difficult. Inevitably, regular surprises will now lead to major delays, and—as was the case at General Magic—the project team can work furiously but will effectively still “act slow” as deadlines whiz by.

Flyvbjerg has also documented the (comparatively rare) pattern of big projects that succeed. They take the opposite course: “Think slow, act fast.” They take time to work out boundaries that make the scope of a project clear. Then, when it’s time to hit the gas, work can proceed quickly. Flyvbjerg has a term that he uses to refer to the successful pattern: “Pixar planning.”

How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan GardnerIn his own writing, Flyvbjerg refers to these as megaprojects:

Mega­projects are large-scale, complex ventures that typically cost a billion dollars or more, take many years to develop and build, involve multiple public and private stakeholders, are transformational, and impact millions of people.

Economist Albert Hirschman called such projects “privileged particles of the development process” and pointed out that often they are “trait making.” That is, they are designed to ambitiously change the structure of society, as opposed to smaller and more conventional projects that are “trait taking,” i.e., they fit into pre-existing structures and do not attempt to modify these.

Megaprojects, therefore, are not just magnified versions of smaller projects. Megaprojects are a completely different species in terms of their level of aspiration, lead times, complexity, and stakeholder involvement.

[…]

To illustrate just how big megaprojects are, consider one of the largest dollar figures from public economic debate, the size of US debt to China. This debt is around one trillion US dollars and is considered so large it may destabilize the world economy if the debt is not managed prudently. With this supersize yardstick, now consider the fact that the combined cost of just two of the world’s largest megaprojects — the Joint Strike Fighter aircraft program and China’s high-speed rail project — is also approximately a trillion dollars. The cost of just a couple of the largest megaprojects in the world will dwarf almost any other economic figure, and certainly any investment figure.

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We have a deep-seated compulsion always to add

Tuesday, May 12th, 2026

Inside the Box by David EpsteinIn Inside the Box, David Epstein explains how General Magic exemplified the adage that more startups die of indigestion than starvation.

“Overflowing with resources and talent,” he says “they were bereft of helpful constraints.”

Another telling scene [in the General Magic documentary] features a young Darin Adler, who had already led a team that built a Mac operating system before coming to General Magic. Engineers are sitting on the floor in a circle listening to Adler as he tells them that there are “moments where somebody has to start doing something, and what we’ve decided is that for each of those important moments we want to make sure that there’s real responsibility for someone to say, ‘I’m at this important moment, start doing your work.’”

The response, Adler recalled: “They said, ‘Oh, we don’t need a manager. We don’t want you because we don’t need a manager. Our leaders are Andy and Bill. That’s what makes this place great is we don’t have managers.’”

Boundaries can be helpful, because we have a deep-seated compulsion always to add:

Mythical Man-Month by Frederick Brooks Jr.

In the 1960s, computer scientist Fred Brooks led the development of the IBM computers that NASA used to send humans to the Moon. He later founded the computer science department at the University of North Carolina. But he is most widely remembered for his popular writing on design and project management, including what became known as Brooks’s Law, the idea that adding people to a software project that is already late will make it even more late. We underestimate how adding stuff, including team members, also adds complexity.

[…]

Subtract by Leidy Klotz

Leidy Klotz, an engineering and architecture professor at the University of Virginia, has shown that humans reflexively add in order to solve problems — more people, more money, more features, etc. — even when subtracting is better. In the simplest demonstration in Klotz’s research, adults were given a Lego structure that needed to be strengthened in order to hold a masonry brick over the head of a Star Wars stormtrooper action figure. Each problem solver could earn money by completing the task, but there was a catch: Every Lego piece they added reduced their reward. And yet, most added multiple pieces even though removing just a single, obviously precarious piece would have solved the problem instantly.

Subtract by Leidy Klotz Lego Puzzle

[…]

Long before their work documented it scientifically, product designers had come up with various names for this tendency, like “featuritis” or “the Christmas tree effect.”

[…]

Journalists have the macabre phrase “drown your kittens” to refer to getting rid of lines the writer has fallen in love with but that don’t serve the reader.

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He called it the Pocket Crystal

Sunday, May 10th, 2026

Inside the Box by David EpsteinAs I mentioned recently, 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.

He opens with the famous story of Dmitri Mendeleev seeing the periodic table in a dream and contrasts that myth with the reality that Mendeleev had a deadline approaching for the second volume of his textbook, and he needed a way to discuss dozens of elements more sensibly and efficiently.

His primary example though — or counter-example, since it demonstrates what a lack of constraints does — is General Magic, founded by two Apple legends and the guy who coined the term Information Economy, Marc Porat:

One day, Porat took a Sharp Wizard — a new electronic organizer with a calendar and phone book — and duct-taped it to a Motorola analog cell phone. He had his concept.

[…]

He called it the Pocket Crystal.

[…]

The Pocket Crystal schematic depicted a thin glass rectangle with no protruding buttons—just a touch screen. It would be a computer that combined a phone and fax machine; you would use it to send text messages, watch movies, play video games, buy plane tickets, and download new apps. It would fit in your pocket, and it would be beautiful. Following the sketch, Porat wrote in his red book: “It must offer the kind of personal satisfaction that a fine piece of jewelry brings. It will have a perceived value even when it’s not being used. It should offer the comfort of a touchstone, the tactile satisfaction of a seashell, the enchantment of a crystal.”

In 1989, only 15 percent of American households even had a computer, which didn’t fit in anyone’s pocket; zero percent were browsing the web, because it didn’t exist. And yet, there was Marc Porat, essentially sketching the iPhone.

Apple took a board seat, Sculley introduced them to Sony, and soon “General Magic’s partners controlled so much of the world’s communications industry that Alliance meetings had to begin with an antitrust lawyer listing all the topics they were prohibited from discussing.”

Porat raised so much money so quickly to create “heaven for engineers.”

“They were free to imagine and play and invent and write,” he said. “They were inventing one thing after another, after another, after another and for an engineer, what more can you ask for?”

The answer, it turned out: a little less freedom.

The General Magic documentary explains:

Posted in Business, Science, Technology | 2 Comments »

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