What Dr Seuss & The Periodic Table Teach Us About Capacity
In many ways we’ve never been as free as we are today, wandering through a digital and physical landscape of unlimited choices, endless tabs, infinite scrolling and boundless opportunity.
The lack of friction appears like freedom. In actuality, all too often, it manifests as a biological tax. Our human brains weren’t designed to occupy limitless terrain. Every open loop and unmade choice drains our prefrontal cortex, piling unnecessary load onto a nervous system doing its best to manage under the weight of daily demands.
To really dial in our clarity and capacity, we need borders. In recent decades these have been stripped away. In turn, we must introduce them ourselves to perform at our best.
Enter David Epstein and his new book Inside The Box, a piece of work that focuses entirely on the raw mechanics of how countless luminaries across all manner of productivity have used constraints to make themselves, and their work, better.
Here are three you need to know about.
Dr. Seuss and Fifty Words
Children's literature used to be an ocean of bland, repetitive stories “depicting the slicked-up lives of other children,” according to author John Hersey. In 1954, Hersey wrote an article in Life magazine challenging his contemporaries, including Dr Seuss (real name Theodor Geisel), to do better.
Geisel’s publisher challenged him to write a book using only a vocabulary list for six and seven year olds – less than 240 words. To narrow down the task, he found the first two rhyming words (cat and hat) and got to work. By 2017, over 16-million copies of The Cat in the Hat had been sold.
In 1960, another man called out Seuss: Bennett Cerf, the founder of Random House. Cerf bet that the author wouldn’t be able to write an entertaining children’s book using only 50 words. Seuss accepted the challenge, won the $50 and also created Green Eggs and Ham, which went on to sell over 200 million copies and is one of the best-selling children’s books of all time.
By artificially restricting his options, Dr Seuss was suddenly working with different tools to everybody else. The restrictive boundaries and ruthless subtraction enhanced his process. In deliberately starving his options, rhythm and storytelling took centre-stage, with the strict limitations creating two classics that permanently altered the category of kids books forever.
The Poison of Infinite Resources
Many high performers believe the gap between where they are and where they want to be boils down to more money or more expertise. General Magic, a tech startup that spun out of Apple in 1990, proved the exact opposite.
Funded by vast financial backing from brands like Sony and Motorola, the team behind General Magic had all the money and personnel they needed. But they had no boundaries.
Their first design was called the Pocket Crystal, a computer that combined a phone and a fax machine. “You would use it to send text messages, watch movies, play video games, buy plane tickets and download new apps,” writes Wired. Essentially the iPhone, 17 years before it came out.
The engineers were granted total freedom. But without any narrowing of their focus, they attempted to do it all: custom building hardware, an operating system and a new programming language. Lacking any defined target customer or firm deadlines, developers burned capacity coding animated coins and walking lemons while the core hardware failed.
The company collapsed under the crushing weight of unlimited possibility. When a device finally shipped after four years, it was a bloated, battery-draining disaster requiring a physical phone line. The failure was absolute, but the talent dispersed. General Magic alumni eventually went on to create the iPod, iPhone, Android and eBay. They built category defining products only after learning to restrict their options and execute within unforgiving parameters.
Periodic Table Deadline
The fundamental organisation of the physical universe was born from a rigid constraint. In early 1869, the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev faced a hard deadline. He was writing the second volume of his textbook, The Principles of Chemistry, ahead of a trip to Europe.
Mendeleev’s first volume had taken six hundred pages just to cover eight of the sixty-three known elements. He had severe page limitations and a contract deadline to finish the rest.
The task ahead was unmanageable. He lacked the time and physical space to explain the remaining fifty-five elements individually. The demand of the project far exceeded his capacity. To survive the deadline, Mendeleev needed a shortcut.
He wrote the atomic weights and chemical properties of each remaining element on blank cards. Mendeleev arranged and rearranged them on his desk over and over again. He noticed a recurring, periodic pattern when the elements were grouped by weight. He built a grid, even leaving physical gaps for elements that remained undiscovered.
And so, the periodic table was born from a scheduling problem. Instead of infinite time to bloat hundreds of pages with words, time forced him to find a solution. Mendeleev organised the chaos of chemistry into a clear and stable system, solely by way of a due date.
The Architecture of Limits
So, what to take away from all of this? Our modern professional landscape lacks clear rules, flooding the nervous system with endless variables.
When we self-impose strict, non-negotiable limits we can shrink the exhausting breadth of the world into a manageable size. It’s easy to think “what more can I do?” but, all too often, fashioning tighter guard-rails around what we’re trying to achieve can have an outsized impact.
When we subtract, we restrict the environment to force adaptation. When we limit the variables, we force the system to find more efficient pathways. It’s obvious the landscape we occupy is designed to keep us chronically overstimulated. When we cap our options, we gain more control over our cognitive load.
Limits provide the necessary friction to ground us. The next time you’re struggling to make something happen and graft alone isn’t cutting it, introduce constraints. They might just be the answer you’re looking for.
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