Green Eggs and Ham

CNLP 811 | The Myth of 10,000 Hours: David Epstein on How Creativity Actually Works and Why Constraints Set You Free

The Carey Nieuwhof Leadership Podcast, 16 June 2026. The book comes up at 14 sec in.

David Epstein explains that psychologists call the phenomenon the green eggs and ham effect: Dr. Seuss wrote the book on a bet that he could not do it with only 50 words, which forced him to experiment with rhythm in ways nobody had tried before. Carey Nieuwhof asks for the full backstory, which David traces back to the earlier Cat in the Hat vocabulary-list task.

Listen to this episode ↗︎