The budget didn’t grow. The staff didn’t grow. But maybe your thinking still can.
As the new academic year opens, our Fosgail Community Book Club is gathering around David Epstein’s Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better—a book that makes an unlikely case for the very limits most of us are bracing to fight this fall. Epstein (author of Range) argues that boundaries don’t just restrict creativity and progress; they often produce it. Dr. Seuss wrote Green Eggs and Ham under a 50-word limit. Pixar built its creative process around a rule that forces fewer options, not more. Epstein’s case: the box isn’t what’s holding you back. It might be the thing making the good work possible at all.
This feels like a natural next step in this quarter’s theme of adjusting expectations. We’ve been talking about recalibrating what we expect from this season. Epstein pushes that a layer deeper: what if we also adjusted our expectations of the constraints themselves—treating them not as the obstacle to our real work, but as part of the work itself?
You do not need to have read the book, or even started it, to join us. Skim the introduction, listen to an interview, or just show up curious about why a book making the case for limits might be exactly what a season of adjusted expectations calls for. This is an open, practical conversation for librarians, educators, and leaders who are heading into a new year with real constraints and want good company thinking through them.
Bring one constraint you’re currently working inside—budget, staffing, time, format, anything—and come ready to ask whether it’s only a wall, or also, maybe, a box worth building something inside of.
