Why You Feel Overwhelmed All The Time (and how to fix it) - David Epstein

The Green Eggs and Ham Effect00:00

The Green Eggs and Ham effect describes a finding in psychology that people become more creative when the easiest solution is taken away from them. It is named after the Dr. Seuss book Green Eggs and Ham, which he wrote on a bet that he couldn't write a children's book using only 50 words. That restriction forced him to experiment with his rollicking rhythm because he couldn't experiment with vocabulary.

The brain is made for preventing you from having to think whenever possible because thinking is energetically costly. The brain wants to do the convenient thing, the easy thing, what neuroscientists call the path of least resistance, like just reach for stuff you've seen before. It actually becomes kind of impossible to be creative unless the easiest thing you would reach for is blocked.

Dr. Seuss's Vocabulary Constraints01:00

Before the 50-word bet, Dr. Seuss was asked if he could write a children's book using about 200 words from a vocabulary list for kids so that most kids would have access to it and not be unable to comprehend it. A visionary publisher correctly deemed children's literature at the time very boring and wanted to make something interesting for kids as an assault on illiteracy because kids were not learning to read in as big of numbers as they should.

Dr. Seuss took the list, realized there were almost no adjectives, and complained to his wife that it was like trying to make a strudel without any strudels. He threw his hands up and said he was just going to take the first two rhyming words on the list and write a book. The first two rhyming words were cat and hat, and the rest is history. That forced him to develop the rollicking rhythm he became known for because the things he would have done otherwise were blocked.