Could This book Have Been an Article: A Short Review of Inside the Box

Should I Read This: Maybe

Book Seller Link (non-affiliate, but I do know the owner): Inside the Box a book by David Epstein

Author’s Website: David Epstein

Two maybes in a row; I must be getting mean in my old age.

This is going to be the worst kind of book review: I am about to whine that the author didn’t write the book I wanted him or her to write. That is entirely unfair, of course. People write the books that they feel compelled to write. And while Inside the Box by David Epstein is not the book I wanted to read, that does not mean that it is a bad book. But I could never shake the feeling that if he had written the book I wanted to read, then perhaps this book would feel less like a missed opportunity.

Inside the Box is a book about the concept that constraints aid creativity and performance. This is not, I would not have thought, a radical concept, but perhaps my career has been a bit of an outlier in that respect. I work in IT, and there are very, very, very few times when I am allowed to simply make whatever fits the bill, constraints be damned. Constraints are a natural part of my life. Even when we are building a brand new product, that product still lives within the walls of the systems and business practices we already have. Constraints are the mother of invention. Even when writing, constraining the story in some fashion has usually lead to better works (though, you know, failed writer, so take that last with some salt). So I was primed to accept the argument and I was interested in the mechanics. Which is where I think Epstein and I differ.

Epstein does spend time on the science of performance and creativity, and those parts of the book are the best, in my opinion. Epstein has a real talent for explaining complicated subjects clearly, and I never once got the sense that he was short-cutting or writing down to the audience. Unfortunately for me, those sections are not the majority of the book. The rest of the book reads almost like a self-help tome. He spends a lot of time, more than I think necessary, on discussing how people can take the lessons and apply them to their own lives. It lessens the book for me.

First, because I am not a self-help kind of person. The advice in self-help tomes, in my opinion, is usually general enough that the way to implement it is fairly clear. Where it is not, or where there are factors specific to you (medical, legal, financial, general health, etc) you likely need to discuss the matter with a professional who knows you. Taking the advice of a book is either unnecessary or potentially harmful. I am not, then, the right person for that approach.

But I also feel that, by leaning into the self-help aspect, the book misses a chance to really interrogate the science and build a more nuanced approach. The book does not spend any time that I noticed with skeptics of the premise. Now, perhaps this is an area where the scientific consensus is really that solid, but that doesn’t seem entirely likely. How do you explain people who do come up with completely new ideas in a wide open process? He does talk about people who claimed to have done that but were actually working within constraints, but he doesn’t approach the idea that truly expansive imagination has value. Any findings or voices contrary to the book’s premise are certainly not highlighted or wrestled with to any large degree. And that is, I think, a missed opportunity.

The book is making a point, but by leaning into self-help, it limits the more, to me, interesting aspects of the book. It feels as if the science portion of the book could have been a long article, one focused only on the premise and its support. Which is okay, though not perfect, for one article. It feels more salesman-like in a book, especially combined with the focus on self-help. This feels like a book eventually destined for If Books Could Kill. And that simply does not work for me.

Now, within those constraints (no, I am not sorry), the book is well written and a good explainer of the premise and its supporting arguments with a plausibly useful self-help section. Epstein is a good enough writer and reporter, I feel, though, that he could have written a much fuller, more interesting book.

Cross posted at Bookstack