On Constraints

Through one of my jobs I'm going to have the chance to attend a talk with David Epstein, author of the new book, Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better. A lot of folks know him from his previous book, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World.

I have learned to see constraints in a new way beyond how they are often treated in higher education (like the worst thing ever) living with disabilities and through my creative art practice. For example, challenging myself to make a bunch of the same form (mugs) in ceramics over and over helped me to improve my craft, come up with new ideas for how I could get creative within the constraint, like through my glazing, and also, I think, nudges my ADHD to play a bit nicer with completing tasks. Of course, anyone disability knows a ton about how to adapt to constraints.

When I was writing the ADHD book, I came across a concept that will live rent-free in my mind forever: RICH, or resource-induced coping heuristic. Basically it's the idea that having to work within constraints makes people scrappier, more creative, and better able to adapt to challenging circumstances. Researchers found that ADHDers were "more RICH" than non-ADHD peers. 

I am curious if Epstein will discuss disability. If not, it's a question I plan to ask him. To be honest, I'm going into it with low expectations on this front, which is kind of depressing. It's wild how many people who are doing what appears to be great work are doing great work that assumes a sort of wildly assimilated population of humans. Like I don't get out much at all, but even I can see that a fundamental trait of our species is our diversity. It's just kind of a thing that I deal with and that others do too, that you never know when you go to a workshop or course or talk if the facilitator will have any sense of human diversity and disability. But it sure would be cool if he did!