This is a book that’s likely to be of interest to the people who follow Focused, where David Epstein’s previous book Range has been mentioned a few times.
Just got my copy this morning; read the (actually interesting) preface and first chapter. Mac Power Users will likely enjoy chapter 1, which starts with Apple veterans Bill Atkinson/Andy Hertzfeld/Marc Porat founding General Magic, which ultimately fails. The common story on why they failed is lack of constraints: big amounts of startup investments by giant companies and no constraint to produce a specific thing. So they kept changing their product ideas. They didn’t have Steve Jobs saying “Real Artists Ship”.
The overall theme of the book is how constraints are necessary for us to succeed and to be happy.
This book is clicking, right from the start, in a way that few books do. I keep referencing other ideas in the same space:
- the acronym coined by Mike Johnson (The Online Photographer) for how to radically improve your photography: OCOLOY, One camera, one lens, one year. Don’t mess with gear options, just find out everything you can do with a single combination.
- Eliyahu Goldratt’s “Theory of Constraints” and how you should use the constraint in a system to govern it
- SF editor John Campbell’s warning to authors that SF and fantasy still needs constraints: “In a story where anything can happen, who cares what does?” [It’s been decades since I first ran into this one, so attribution to Campbell may be incorrect].
- poets talking about the sonnet, and how forces you to be creative because you can say anything (subject and vocabulary) but must say it in a specific form (fourteen lines, organized into either an octave and a sestet or three quatrains and a couplet)
- and many other things I’ve ingested over the years about how you need bounds, limits, constraints.
- and one observation: as the Star Wars movies came out, I’ve always thought that George Lucas told better stories when he had less money and fewer special effects to lean on
Anyway, it just came out so you can find multiple podcasts where David Epstein is being interviewed this week, if this book sounds interesting.
It’s been a long time since anything clicked like this one is clicking.