In this episode, professor of Marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business and the Robert Stansky Teaching Excellence Faculty Fellow, Dr. Adam Alter, returns to the podcast. Today, we’ll discuss his new book, Anatomy of a Breakthrough: How to Get Unstuck When It Matters Most.
Whether you’ve had a great year, a downright awful year or a lukewarm, we’re-making-it year, the end of 2023 and the beginning of 2024 bring a mental fresh start. And, with it, new resolutions and the bitter memory of some of last year’s failed resolutions.
Rather than avoiding these memories of stuckness, I want to confront this universal experience.
Last time we heard from Dr. Alter in episode 18, he discussed his New York Times bestselling book, Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked.
Topics:
- Feeling stuck is universal. But, why do we not talk about it?
- Consequences of avoiding discussing stuckness
- Time is linear; life is not: breaking out of your constant progress expectations
- Becoming unstuck
- The Explore v.s. Exploit mindset - what are they?
- Deciding when to explore and when to exploit
- "What books have had an impact on you?"
- "What advice do you have for teenagers?"
Bio:
Adam Alter is a Professor of Marketing and Psychology at New York University’s Stern School of Business, and the New York Times bestselling author of Drunk Tank Pink, a book about the forces that shape how we think, feel, and behave, Irresistible, a book about the rise of tech addiction and what we should do about it, and Anatomy of a Breakthrough, a book that presents a roadmap for getting unstuck on the path to breakthroughs.
Alter was recently included in the Poets and Quants “40 Most Outstanding Business School Professors under 40 in the World,” and has written for the New York Times, New Yorker, Wired, Washington Post, and The Atlantic, among other publications. He has shared his ideas at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity and with dozens of companies around the world.
Alter received his Bachelor of Science (Honors Class 1, University Medal) in Psychology from the University of New South Wales and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Psychology from Princeton University, where he held the Charlotte Elizabeth Procter Honorific Dissertation Fellowship and a Fellowship in the Woodrow Wilson Society of Scholars.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
In this episode, professor of Marketing at New
York University Stern School ofBusiness and the Robert Stansky
Teaching Excellence FacultyFellow, dr Adam Alter, returns
to the podcast.
Last time we heard from DrAlter, in episode 18, he
discussed his New York Timesbestselling book Irresistible
the rise of addictive technologyin the business of keeping us
hooked.
Today we'll be discussing hisnew book Ananomy of a
(00:33):
Breakthrough how to Get Unstuckwhen it Matters Most, whether
you've had a great year atdownright awful year or a
lukewarm remakin' it year.
The end of 2023 and thebeginning of 2024 brings with it
a mental fresh start and withit, new resolutions and the
bitter memory of some of lastyear's failed resolutions.
However, rather than avoidingthese memories of stuctice, I
(00:55):
want to confront this universalexperience.
This is the Aiming for the Moonpodcast and I'm your host,
taylor Bledsoe.
On this podcast, I interviewinteresting people from a
teenage perspective.
If you like what you hear today, please write the podcast and
subscribe.
You can follow us at Aiming theNumber 4 Moon on all socials
and stay up to date on podcastnews and episodes.
(01:18):
Check out the episode notes forDr Alter's full bio and links
to our website,aimingforthemooncom, and Episode
18, our last conversation withDr Alter, as well as the podcast
, sub-stack Lessons fromInteresting People.
Alrighty with that?
Sit back, relax and listen in.
Thanks again to Paxton Page forthis incredible music.
Alright, well, welcome back, drAlter, to the episode and the
(01:43):
podcast.
Thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
Thanks for having me, Taylor.
It's really good to be back.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
Yeah, it's been three years since we last spoke, at
least in the podcasting world,and yeah, I've been really
looking forward to thisinterview.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
I'm really glad to be back.
Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
Yeah, of course, your most recent book is all about
getting out of ruts creatively,not financially, but kind of
figuring out plans financially,just thinking through situations
in which you're stuck and youwant to get out and kind of
experience the world in abroader sense from there.
And it's something that a lotof people connect with almost
(02:19):
immediately because they're likeI didn't realize everybody else
was going through that.
It's kind of like thiscommunity experience that no one
really talks about until theyrealize that it's something that
happens.
And I just wanted to start offthe conversation by going there.
How common is feeling stuck ina rut, as we tend to say?
Speaker 2 (02:39):
I think it's universal.
I think it's something thateveryone experiences from time
to time, and actually most of usexperience it in at least one
area of our lives all the time.
That's been my experience.
I've collected data fromthousands of people from lots of
different countries and what Ifind is that very, very quickly,
when I ask them if they'restuck, after explaining the
concept, almost everyone within10 to 15 seconds starts typing a
(03:01):
response.
In other words, there'ssomething top of mind and you're
right.
It is a sort of weirdlyisolating experience where
people sort of imagine thatthey're alone and yet when you
look at the data, we're allalone in this, together.
It's a very strange thing.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Yeah, the other thing is, when we look at successful
people you mentioned this in theintroduction to your book we
see all of their high points andnone of the low points,
particularly because, one, thelow points don't get publicity
and, two, we just tend to,through our own mental biases,
just kind of phase out thosethings.
Why do we do that?
Speaker 2 (03:35):
Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right.
I mean, I think that's one ofthe major reasons why we don't
see the stuckness that otherpeople are experiencing, that
you pay so much attention to theheadwinds that prevent you from
making progress internally.
You spend all this time tryingto troubleshoot and figure out
ways around whatever it isthat's preventing you from
getting to where you want to be,but those same headwinds that
(03:55):
other people are facing are notclear to you from the outside,
and that's for a few differentreasons.
One reason is that we don'tlike sharing our struggles.
People just generally don'tshare them.
It's kind of taboo, andespecially in this world that's
dominated by social mediaplatforms.
What we end up sharing is thepolished end product of
everything, and that's truewhether we're regular people or
whether we're giantmega-influencers, or whether
(04:16):
we're very successful businesspeople or artists or
philosophers.
It doesn't really matter whoyou are.
What you end up sharing withthe world is that success story
version of you, and if you seethat over and over and over
again in other people that youlook up to, you end up imagining
that you're the only onesuffering through these
struggles, and obviously that'snot true.
It's just hard for us toimagine that other people are
(04:37):
going through them as well.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
Is that a cultural thing that the Western world
that's always obsessed withprogress does?
Or is that just a tendency overall humanity to push down the
things that we don't like andraise up all the things that
we're finally doing well?
Speaker 2 (04:52):
It's a really good question and it's actually where
I began getting interested inthis topic, because I found in
some research I was doing about15 years ago that there are very
big differences between how theEast and the West think about
change in particular, but alsoabout struggling through periods
of stuckness.
So in the West, in places likethe US, in Canada, Australia,
(05:12):
the UK, New Zealand, people inthose countries tend to imagine
that change is rare, that whenit does happen they have to
spend a lot of time grapplingwith it.
They sort of think the world isjust going to keep going the
way it has been.
And I've done some studies, forexample, asking them what's
going to happen to the weatherover time or what's going to
happen to the stock market, andthey always kind of imagine that
(05:33):
what's been happening in thepast will keep happening for a
while.
If you ask people in the East,people in Japan, South Korea,
China the same question, so youask them that the stock market's
been doing badly or it's beendoing well, or it's been a rainy
period or a sunny period, andyou say what do you think is
going to happen next, they say Ithink it's going to change.
I think change is imminent,because change is just a very
(05:54):
big part of a lot of Easternphilosophies, a lot of Eastern
religions as well.
You've got the idea in Taoismand the yin yang of balance and
the movement between oscillatingendpoints like day and night
and light and dark and so on.
And so if that's yourphilosophy, that's the cultural
soup through which you've beenswimming, you sort of come to
(06:15):
assume that there is going to bea lot of change, which there is
.
And so in the West we tend tobe blindsided by change, and
that makes us stuck.
In the East, people tend todeal with that a little bit more
nimbly, and when they get stuckthey start marshalling
resources to deal with it muchmore quickly and efficiently
than we do in the West.
Speaker 1 (06:32):
That's very interesting, especially if you
look at responses to differentthings, like the most recent
giant thing has been thepandemic and seeing how the
world has like.
Some people responded veryquickly.
Other people were like oh no,we have no protocol at all,
which would make sense if youhadn't thought about this for
100 years or something In highschool.
Yeah, you had a thought aboutthat.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
Yeah, no, I was going to say that's exactly right.
I mean, over the course of 100years, we know that, on average,
there will be one pandemic and,yes, it was surprising when it
happened in 2020.
But over the long span of time,you would expect it to happen
and therefore that should not bethe kind of thing that
blindsides you.
And yet for much of the worldit did.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
It's another fascinating and like a relevant
part of this conversation, thepolitical, and then the culture,
the geopolitical, as well as,like the not epistemological.
I can't think of the wordimmuno, we're going to skip past
the word exactly.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
I'm looking for.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
But yeah, you have stuckness in these breakthroughs
and these failures, all overthese different realms of
knowledge.
Going back to the other question.
In high school you look at theworld and you're like life seems
linear, because that's how timeworks.
It goes one step after another.
And so you're like, okay, I gotto get through high school and
I want to do well in high school.
(07:48):
I want to do well in the SATand ACT, sometimes the CLT, and
then we got to go to college.
We got to do well in college.
First off, we got to get intothe right college, maybe grad
school, and then we want to havea great career, and then that's
all step by step by step bystep, and then maybe I'll have a
great breakthrough in my greatcareer, something like that.
But from my conversations withpeople who have turned out to be
(08:09):
successful authors, innovatorsand stuff like that, it doesn't
seem to really work like that.
Time is linear, but not yourcareer and your success.
In your story as well.
You often seem to backstep andthen sidestep.
Is that, I guess?
Is that a common thing, or isthat just different people have
different experiences.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
I think that's very, very common, and if you think
about it, even if you're notreally trying very hard in
college, as long as you don'tfail, you end up progressing
forward.
You move forward because timemeans that you go from being a
freshman to a sophomore, to ajunior, to a senior, and
suddenly four years later you'vegraduated and you have to try
fairly hard not to, whereas onceyou leave the kind of nest of
(08:49):
college and then you're in thisreal world and you've got to
figure out what to do next, theworld doesn't carry you along
that same inevitable way that itdoes when you're in this kind
of very linear structure that isassociated with education, and
so I think a lot of people areagain blindsided by this idea
that suddenly you have to makedecisions that don't always
carry you forward.
They might carry you sideways oreven backwards, and I think
(09:09):
that's confronting for a lot ofpeople.
If you're not a veryself-motivated person or you're
unsure of what you want, it canbe really confronting to
suddenly find that you're notmaking forward progress as
rapidly as you did when you werein this, this structure of a
system that did naturally propelyou forward.
So I think you're absolutelyright that a lot of what happens
when people are in their early20s, in particular as they leave
(09:31):
college, is they have tograpple with the sense that life
can be full of these stickingpoints, and that's not what
they've necessarily experiencedup to that point.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
So then, if we know these failures and these stuck
points are common, what are theaction plans exactly that we
might be able to enable in theworst case scenario or,
oftentimes, the common situation?
Speaker 2 (09:53):
So there are two broad ways of dealing with
sticking points or with a periodwhere you have that kind of
uncertainty, and one is known asthe process of exploration.
Exploration is where youeffectively say yes to all
opportunities that come your way.
And I give a talk to thefreshman at NYU some years where
I show them that over thecourse of a decade I got
(10:13):
thousands and thousands ofemails.
But four of those emailschanged my life.
They were emails where someonesent me something they said.
One of the examples is apublisher sent me an email and
said hey, I saw some of yourresearch, I think it's
interesting and would youconsider writing a book?
Now, if you're in anexploration phase, when you see
an email like that, even ifyou're busy, even if you feel
(10:34):
like you don't have the time,you have to go and follow that
thread and see where it's goingto take you.
So during that explorationphase, you're open to all
opportunities and your defaultresponse to these opportunities
should be yes.
And so those four emails that Ishow, they were moments where
my first instinct was I don'thave time for this, I'm too busy
, I'm working on other things.
But because I was in theexploration phase, I said yes
(10:55):
and they led to really wonderfulthings.
Now, of course, there arethousands of emails that I said
yes to, that were time consuming, that led nowhere, but you
don't know which is which.
You have to say yes.
And then eventually, onceyou've done that for long enough
and you've developed a sense ofwhat the options are, you've
created a kind of menu.
You then know I knew, forexample, that I really liked
writing and I liked the processof writing books.
(11:16):
I then became single-minded.
This is called the process ofexploitation.
So you move away fromexploration to exploitation.
Then you effectively have adefault of no, unless whatever
you're doing is in the serviceof this thing that you are
single-mindedly focused on.
You say no to everything elsethat's outside of that.
And that is a really amazingway to unstick.
And what we see in careersacross lots of different domains
(11:40):
is that when you explore andthen you exploit and you can go
back and forth between them, youwill find that you hit a kind
of hot streak or a golden periodin your life, whether it's
professionally or otherwise.
And so it's a really good kindof rule of thumb for unstick
that if you feel stuck, go backto exploring.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
For people like me, though, who tend to overthink
decisions like that, how do youknow when to switch back and
forth?
Is this thing?
When do you get out of your sayno phase into exploring a
different opportunity?
Do you just know, or do youjust kind of have to gamble?
Speaker 2 (12:12):
Yeah, it's an excellent question.
There are really two ways tofigure out when to switch
between exploring and exploitingand back again, and one of them
is to kind of use an externalobjective cue, especially if
you're someone who finds thesedecisions paralyzing.
So what a lot of people do isthey'll say okay, for me, maybe
a certain season of the year,like spring, is my exploration
(12:34):
time, and so every spring I'mgoing to kind of switch on
exploration and then once we hitthe summer I'm going to go back
to exploiting or something likethat.
So you use external cues.
It could be time, it could bemonths, it could be some other
thing that governs when youswitch between them.
And the nice thing about doingthat is you don't have to then
make the decision to switch, youjust allow the world to do that
for you.
But if you're a little bit moresensitive to the cues, that's
(12:56):
quite valuable.
And so you could say somethinglike I'm going to try five
separate things that's what myexploration period is going to
be and then, among the five, oneof them or two of them I hope
will be useful and fruitful andI'm going to follow those two,
and so that's not so much abouttime it's about the number of
exploratory processes you gothrough before you start
exploiting.
(13:17):
And then, if you're in theexploitation phase and you sort
of hit a wall, like things startto feel a bit stale.
This is what happens A lot ofpeople.
They get in a rut and they getcomfortable doing what they're
doing and they just don't goback to learning new things
again.
It's very useful, if you feelthat staleness creeping in, to
say, okay, I've got to do someexploring again, I've got to
figure out something.
That's a bit of a change.
(13:38):
And so, instead of being thatkind of person who says, all
right, I'm in this kind ofcomfortable position, I'm going
to stick with it for the next 10years, you are the kind of
person who says actually no,that's probably not great for my
well-being.
At the very least, I'm going tostart entertaining other
options.
And so I think it's acombination of these internal
cues that signal to you what youshould be doing and these
external cues that help move youalong.
Speaker 1 (14:01):
Another big aspect of your book is there's the
thinking part of it, so dealingwith the emotional and
psychological just effects ofbeing stuck in a rut.
But then there's also theaction part.
So you have, okay, this is mystep-by-step plan for how I'm
going to get out of this.
But then you actually have tocommit to that step-by-step plan
.
So how do you decide?
First off, if you've chosen theright plan, I mean, I guess
(14:25):
that's kind of trial and errorright there and then, two, how
do you know when to commit whenyou actually have?
Is this worth doing now, orshould I keep exploring
different options to try to getout?
Speaker 2 (14:37):
Yeah, that's also a good question.
So the book is a sort ofroadmap.
It suggests that there arecertain steps you should go
through before you act.
And action is really the lastof those steps Before you get to
acting even though when youfeel stuck, that's all you want
to do is you kind of want toflail and figure out a way
through the problem you reallyhave to do some other things.
First You've got to deal withthe emotional consequences of
being stuck.
(14:57):
You've got to understand whatit means to be stuck, that
humans are essentially not verygood at being stuck.
We imagine, as we said earlier,that we're isolated in that and
it feels lonely and unpleasant.
And then you've got to figureout the strategies for getting
unstuck.
So what am I going to do tomove my way forward?
And after you've done all ofthat, then you think about
action.
And so hopefully, by the timeyou get to action, you've done
(15:18):
enough of the other stuff thatyou need to do.
You've laid enough groundworkthat the action you're taking is
productive.
Now, of course, that's notalways going to be true.
In fact, there's a reallyinteresting idea that action
itself is a great unsticker,even if the action that you're
taking right now doesn't moveyou forward, if it moves you
sideways, because so much ofbeing stuck is this kind of
(15:39):
feedback loop where you feellike you can't make progress and
so you don't act and you thinkmore and you ruminate and you
feel sad and then you keep goingand you go around in circles,
whereas if you just act, even ifthe action itself is not
productive say, you're a writerand you can't write this
paragraph you've been trying towrite.
There's a guy named Jeff Tweedywho's the frontman, the singer
(16:03):
and the writer for a band calledWill Cove, and he also writes
books, and he talks about thefact that some days, if you're a
creative, you wake up and youdon't want to do anything.
So what does he do?
He basically takes his normallyvery strict threshold and he
says I'm going to lower that allthe way down to the ground and
I'm going to write the worstsentence I can write or the
worst musical phrase I can write.
(16:23):
And that's easy, because thenall your standards go out the
window.
But if you do that for 15minutes, you keep creating bad
stuff.
Good stuff inevitably follows,because you've shown yourself
that you're not static, you'removing, and so I think that's
really helpful.
The other thing you're askingabout how do you know you're
doing the right thing Like theseare the right actions to take?
And what happens over time,especially with long term goals,
(16:46):
is there is a place where youare and there's a place you want
to be, and there's a gapbetween those two.
And you can see, usually withfeedback that you get from the
world, if you're getting closer,if those two are getting closer
.
So, if you're learning alanguage, am I getting more
fluent?
If you're learning to paint, amI getting better at that?
Whatever it might be, are yougetting closer and closer to the
goal state, or are you stayingabout the same distance from it?
(17:08):
Or, in the worst case, are yougetting further away from it?
If you're getting further away,that's a sign you should
probably try something new, likeleave that behind.
There are better things to dowith your time.
But if you're getting closer,you're converging on the goal.
Then you've got to continue,and often that takes longer than
we think.
So it's important to payattention to those cues.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
The other aspects that we don't often think about,
or at least we try to kind ofpush to the side, is something
is grit.
So you have to bear down andobviously get through these hard
points in order to achieve yourgoal, but oftentimes you might
need to just let go of it andmove on to something else that
might be more productive or morebeneficial for you.
(17:48):
So where is that balance?
Because you don't want toobviously give in too early, as
you talk about in your book, orgive up too late once you've
wasted way too much time doingit.
So are there cues when you'reworking on a project or working
on a different goal that arelike okay, maybe this is
something that I'm stuck withand it's not worth getting
through?
Speaker 2 (18:09):
Yes, that's the sort of golden question here is that
there are two ends of thespectrum.
One end is to say I shouldalways persevere, it's all about
grit.
Grit is everything, and I don'twant to be the kind of person
who doesn't see things through.
The other end of the spectrumis to say there are a million
things I could be doing with mytime at any moment.
If the thing I'm doing is notbringing me great joy and
meaning, why am I doing this?
(18:29):
I should quit immediately.
Now.
You can't do either one of thosethings all the time.
You can't always followeverything through to its end,
because you'll never move on tonew, greener pastures, and you
can't always quit because you'llnever do anything.
So the question that you'reasking is how do you know where
you are between those two endsof the spectrum?
One way is to do what I justsuggested, which is to pay
attention to the gap betweenwhere you are and where you'd
(18:50):
like to be, and you shouldprobably keep going, you should
probably persevere, you shouldtap into grit when you're
getting closer to the end point,but when you're not, you should
probably quit, or at leastconsider it.
But I think another, moreuseful rule is to always ask
what the opportunity cost ofcontinuing is, and by that I
mean if you're in a particularcareer or you're trying a new
(19:10):
pursuit, you're trying to learna language, first of all.
How important is it that youachieve that?
If you actually reach the goal,will it make your life
meaningfully better?
And the second question is ifI'm not doing this, what am I
doing instead?
So if I imagine committing 100hours to this task, what else
could I be doing with that 100hours?
That would be potentially morefruitful, or definitely more
(19:33):
fruitful.
And if there is an answer tothat that is at hand and it's
achievable and it's graspableand you can just pivot slightly
and go in that direction, thenthat's a very good sign that
it's probably time to quit.
And there are two books that Ithink make a very strong case
for each of those endpoints.
There's Angela Duckworth's griton the one hand, and there's
Annie Duke's quit on the other,and they both neither of those
(19:57):
very, very intelligent authorswould say you should always
either quit or continue but theyboth make a very strong case
for each of those approaches andexplain when you should pursue
them, and so I think there arecues that help guide you as you
navigate between those twoendpoints.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
The fascinating thing is we talked to Dr Duckworth
early in our podcasting careerand actually heard Vice to
Teenagers towards the end, whichwe'll get to yours in just a
little bit is quit.
You should think about whatexactly you're missing.
What opportunities are youshielding yourself from?
That might be useful to investtime in here and there, and
(20:33):
that's something that I foundfascinating for an author whose
book is literally titled Grit.
She considers when should youquit?
And we talked about that inthat episode, but winding our
conversation back, kind ofwrapping it up, what books have
had an impact on you?
Speaker 2 (20:50):
Yeah, it's funny.
So the two that I justmentioned I think are excellent,
because I have this very strongphilosophy that you can learn a
lot about the world byexploring the very extreme
versions of all the argumentsthat are made, and so, if there
is a spectrum between quittingand continuing, you should read
the most convincing, compellingtreatise on each one to
understand the best argumentsfor each and I think that's
(21:11):
generally a really goodphilosophy for making your way
through the world Understand thevery best, rather than the
worst, arguments for aproposition, and then, when you
pit them against each other,you're dealing with the A-plus
version of each one.
And so I think quit and gritthose two books are fantastic,
but there are two others thatI'll mention.
One is written by a very goodfriend of mine, who I know
(21:31):
you've interviewed in the past.
Dave Epstein called Range, andRange makes the case that early
on in your life you shouldpursue as many different kinds
of paths as possible.
You should essentially explore,and I feel that that's so
central to the way I live mylife that when David wrote that
book it really spoke to me andconfirmed a lot of the ideas
(21:51):
that I'd been living by withoutreally realizing it for many
years.
And then I'll say also two otherauthors.
Both Michael Lewis and MalcolmGladwell, are phenomenal authors
.
They're very.
If you ask people in generalwho they would say are the
authors they look up to and paya lot of attention to, those
names will come up often.
(22:12):
But for me as a socialscientist, as someone who does
behavioral science for hiscareer, I had to make the
decision about 15 years ago thatI wanted to turn that into a
sort of more public facingcareer as well as the academic
career that I have.
And those two writers the waythey took complex ideas and
continue to take complex ideasand turn them into really
(22:34):
digestible, interesting conceptsthat anyone can read and
understand and get benefit fromthat really shaped the way I
think about what I do and turnedme towards this sort of path of
being a slightly more publicintellectual.
Speaker 1 (22:48):
So the last question that we ask all of our guests
that I've alluded to earlier iswhat advice do you have for
teenagers?
Speaker 2 (22:55):
It's got to be the same advice that I give the
freshmen that you have to sayyes.
You have to adopt this defaultof saying yes, because if you
don't, if your default is no, orif you're a void of these
opportunities that arise earlyin your life, you narrow the
number of options you have lateron in your life.
You can only potentiallyexplore the number of things
(23:16):
that you try at least once.
And so if that menu is 1000options long, you will have a
better, more fruitful, moreinteresting, more varied life
than if that menu is 10 optionslong.
And so I think, very early onin your life, it is absolutely
critical that whenever anyopportunity even glances by, it
doesn't have to be right in yourlap, just grab it, take it, see
(23:38):
what it's like, be very quickto quit if it's not for you, but
you have to say yes to get tothe point where you even have
the luxury of being able to sayno later on.
So I think that's the mostimportant thing is to cultivate
a life of variety.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
Well, dr Alters, thank you again for coming on
the podcast.
Check out his book, the Anatomyof a Breakthrough.
That'll be linked below.
And, yeah, thank you so muchagain for coming on.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
Thanks, taylor, that was great.
In this episode, professor of Marketing at New
York University Stern School ofBusiness and the Robert Stansky
Teaching Excellence FacultyFellow, dr Adam Alter, returns
to the podcast.
Last time we heard from DrAlter, in episode 18, he
discussed his New York Timesbestselling book Irresistible
the rise of addictive technologyin the business of keeping us
hooked.
Today we'll be discussing hisnew book Ananomy of a
(00:33):
Breakthrough how to Get Unstuckwhen it Matters Most, whether
you've had a great year atdownright awful year or a
lukewarm remakin' it year.
The end of 2023 and thebeginning of 2024 brings with it
a mental fresh start and withit, new resolutions and the
bitter memory of some of lastyear's failed resolutions.
However, rather than avoidingthese memories of stuctice, I
(00:55):
want to confront this universalexperience.
This is the Aiming for the Moonpodcast and I'm your host,
taylor Bledsoe.
On this podcast, I interviewinteresting people from a
teenage perspective.
If you like what you hear today, please write the podcast and
subscribe.
You can follow us at Aiming theNumber 4 Moon on all socials
and stay up to date on podcastnews and episodes.
(01:18):
Check out the episode notes forDr Alter's full bio and links
to our website,aimingforthemooncom, and Episode
18, our last conversation withDr Alter, as well as the podcast
, sub-stack Lessons fromInteresting People.
Alrighty with that?
Sit back, relax and listen in.
Thanks again to Paxton Page forthis incredible music.
Alright, well, welcome back, drAlter, to the episode and the
(01:43):
podcast.
Thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
Thanks for having me, Taylor.
It's really good to be back.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
Yeah, it's been three years since we last spoke, at
least in the podcasting world,and yeah, I've been really
looking forward to thisinterview.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
I'm really glad to be back.
Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
Yeah, of course, your most recent book is all about
getting out of ruts creatively,not financially, but kind of
figuring out plans financially,just thinking through situations
in which you're stuck and youwant to get out and kind of
experience the world in abroader sense from there.
And it's something that a lotof people connect with almost
(02:19):
immediately because they're likeI didn't realize everybody else
was going through that.
It's kind of like thiscommunity experience that no one
really talks about until theyrealize that it's something that
happens.
And I just wanted to start offthe conversation by going there.
How common is feeling stuck ina rut, as we tend to say?
Speaker 2 (02:39):
I think it's universal.
I think it's something thateveryone experiences from time
to time, and actually most of usexperience it in at least one
area of our lives all the time.
That's been my experience.
I've collected data fromthousands of people from lots of
different countries and what Ifind is that very, very quickly,
when I ask them if they'restuck, after explaining the
concept, almost everyone within10 to 15 seconds starts typing a
(03:01):
response.
In other words, there'ssomething top of mind and you're
right.
It is a sort of weirdlyisolating experience where
people sort of imagine thatthey're alone and yet when you
look at the data, we're allalone in this, together.
It's a very strange thing.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Yeah, the other thing is, when we look at successful
people you mentioned this in theintroduction to your book we
see all of their high points andnone of the low points,
particularly because, one, thelow points don't get publicity
and, two, we just tend to,through our own mental biases,
just kind of phase out thosethings.
Why do we do that?
Speaker 2 (03:35):
Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right.
I mean, I think that's one ofthe major reasons why we don't
see the stuckness that otherpeople are experiencing, that
you pay so much attention to theheadwinds that prevent you from
making progress internally.
You spend all this time tryingto troubleshoot and figure out
ways around whatever it isthat's preventing you from
getting to where you want to be,but those same headwinds that
(03:55):
other people are facing are notclear to you from the outside,
and that's for a few differentreasons.
One reason is that we don'tlike sharing our struggles.
People just generally don'tshare them.
It's kind of taboo, andespecially in this world that's
dominated by social mediaplatforms.
What we end up sharing is thepolished end product of
everything, and that's truewhether we're regular people or
whether we're giantmega-influencers, or whether
(04:16):
we're very successful businesspeople or artists or
philosophers.
It doesn't really matter whoyou are.
What you end up sharing withthe world is that success story
version of you, and if you seethat over and over and over
again in other people that youlook up to, you end up imagining
that you're the only onesuffering through these
struggles, and obviously that'snot true.
It's just hard for us toimagine that other people are
(04:37):
going through them as well.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
Is that a cultural thing that the Western world
that's always obsessed withprogress does?
Or is that just a tendency overall humanity to push down the
things that we don't like andraise up all the things that
we're finally doing well?
Speaker 2 (04:52):
It's a really good question and it's actually where
I began getting interested inthis topic, because I found in
some research I was doing about15 years ago that there are very
big differences between how theEast and the West think about
change in particular, but alsoabout struggling through periods
of stuckness.
So in the West, in places likethe US, in Canada, Australia,
(05:12):
the UK, New Zealand, people inthose countries tend to imagine
that change is rare, that whenit does happen they have to
spend a lot of time grapplingwith it.
They sort of think the world isjust going to keep going the
way it has been.
And I've done some studies, forexample, asking them what's
going to happen to the weatherover time or what's going to
happen to the stock market, andthey always kind of imagine that
(05:33):
what's been happening in thepast will keep happening for a
while.
If you ask people in the East,people in Japan, South Korea,
China the same question, so youask them that the stock market's
been doing badly or it's beendoing well, or it's been a rainy
period or a sunny period, andyou say what do you think is
going to happen next, they say Ithink it's going to change.
I think change is imminent,because change is just a very
(05:54):
big part of a lot of Easternphilosophies, a lot of Eastern
religions as well.
You've got the idea in Taoismand the yin yang of balance and
the movement between oscillatingendpoints like day and night
and light and dark and so on.
And so if that's yourphilosophy, that's the cultural
soup through which you've beenswimming, you sort of come to
(06:15):
assume that there is going to bea lot of change, which there is
.
And so in the West we tend tobe blindsided by change, and
that makes us stuck.
In the East, people tend todeal with that a little bit more
nimbly, and when they get stuckthey start marshalling
resources to deal with it muchmore quickly and efficiently
than we do in the West.
Speaker 1 (06:32):
That's very interesting, especially if you
look at responses to differentthings, like the most recent
giant thing has been thepandemic and seeing how the
world has like.
Some people responded veryquickly.
Other people were like oh no,we have no protocol at all,
which would make sense if youhadn't thought about this for
100 years or something In highschool.
Yeah, you had a thought aboutthat.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
Yeah, no, I was going to say that's exactly right.
I mean, over the course of 100years, we know that, on average,
there will be one pandemic and,yes, it was surprising when it
happened in 2020.
But over the long span of time,you would expect it to happen
and therefore that should not bethe kind of thing that
blindsides you.
And yet for much of the worldit did.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
It's another fascinating and like a relevant
part of this conversation, thepolitical, and then the culture,
the geopolitical, as well as,like the not epistemological.
I can't think of the wordimmuno, we're going to skip past
the word exactly.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
I'm looking for.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
But yeah, you have stuckness in these breakthroughs
and these failures, all overthese different realms of
knowledge.
Going back to the other question.
In high school you look at theworld and you're like life seems
linear, because that's how timeworks.
It goes one step after another.
And so you're like, okay, I gotto get through high school and
I want to do well in high school.
(07:48):
I want to do well in the SATand ACT, sometimes the CLT, and
then we got to go to college.
We got to do well in college.
First off, we got to get intothe right college, maybe grad
school, and then we want to havea great career, and then that's
all step by step by step bystep, and then maybe I'll have a
great breakthrough in my greatcareer, something like that.
But from my conversations withpeople who have turned out to be
(08:09):
successful authors, innovatorsand stuff like that, it doesn't
seem to really work like that.
Time is linear, but not yourcareer and your success.
In your story as well.
You often seem to backstep andthen sidestep.
Is that, I guess?
Is that a common thing, or isthat just different people have
different experiences.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
I think that's very, very common, and if you think
about it, even if you're notreally trying very hard in
college, as long as you don'tfail, you end up progressing
forward.
You move forward because timemeans that you go from being a
freshman to a sophomore, to ajunior, to a senior, and
suddenly four years later you'vegraduated and you have to try
fairly hard not to, whereas onceyou leave the kind of nest of
(08:49):
college and then you're in thisreal world and you've got to
figure out what to do next, theworld doesn't carry you along
that same inevitable way that itdoes when you're in this kind
of very linear structure that isassociated with education, and
so I think a lot of people areagain blindsided by this idea
that suddenly you have to makedecisions that don't always
carry you forward.
They might carry you sideways oreven backwards, and I think
(09:09):
that's confronting for a lot ofpeople.
If you're not a veryself-motivated person or you're
unsure of what you want, it canbe really confronting to
suddenly find that you're notmaking forward progress as
rapidly as you did when you werein this, this structure of a
system that did naturally propelyou forward.
So I think you're absolutelyright that a lot of what happens
when people are in their early20s, in particular as they leave
(09:31):
college, is they have tograpple with the sense that life
can be full of these stickingpoints, and that's not what
they've necessarily experiencedup to that point.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
So then, if we know these failures and these stuck
points are common, what are theaction plans exactly that we
might be able to enable in theworst case scenario or,
oftentimes, the common situation?
Speaker 2 (09:53):
So there are two broad ways of dealing with
sticking points or with a periodwhere you have that kind of
uncertainty, and one is known asthe process of exploration.
Exploration is where youeffectively say yes to all
opportunities that come your way.
And I give a talk to thefreshman at NYU some years where
I show them that over thecourse of a decade I got
(10:13):
thousands and thousands ofemails.
But four of those emailschanged my life.
They were emails where someonesent me something they said.
One of the examples is apublisher sent me an email and
said hey, I saw some of yourresearch, I think it's
interesting and would youconsider writing a book?
Now, if you're in anexploration phase, when you see
an email like that, even ifyou're busy, even if you feel
(10:34):
like you don't have the time,you have to go and follow that
thread and see where it's goingto take you.
So during that explorationphase, you're open to all
opportunities and your defaultresponse to these opportunities
should be yes.
And so those four emails that Ishow, they were moments where
my first instinct was I don'thave time for this, I'm too busy
, I'm working on other things.
But because I was in theexploration phase, I said yes
(10:55):
and they led to really wonderfulthings.
Now, of course, there arethousands of emails that I said
yes to, that were time consuming, that led nowhere, but you
don't know which is which.
You have to say yes.
And then eventually, onceyou've done that for long enough
and you've developed a sense ofwhat the options are, you've
created a kind of menu.
You then know I knew, forexample, that I really liked
writing and I liked the processof writing books.
(11:16):
I then became single-minded.
This is called the process ofexploitation.
So you move away fromexploration to exploitation.
Then you effectively have adefault of no, unless whatever
you're doing is in the serviceof this thing that you are
single-mindedly focused on.
You say no to everything elsethat's outside of that.
And that is a really amazingway to unstick.
And what we see in careersacross lots of different domains
(11:40):
is that when you explore andthen you exploit and you can go
back and forth between them, youwill find that you hit a kind
of hot streak or a golden periodin your life, whether it's
professionally or otherwise.
And so it's a really good kindof rule of thumb for unstick
that if you feel stuck, go backto exploring.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
For people like me, though, who tend to overthink
decisions like that, how do youknow when to switch back and
forth?
Is this thing?
When do you get out of your sayno phase into exploring a
different opportunity?
Do you just know, or do youjust kind of have to gamble?
Speaker 2 (12:12):
Yeah, it's an excellent question.
There are really two ways tofigure out when to switch
between exploring and exploitingand back again, and one of them
is to kind of use an externalobjective cue, especially if
you're someone who finds thesedecisions paralyzing.
So what a lot of people do isthey'll say okay, for me, maybe
a certain season of the year,like spring, is my exploration
(12:34):
time, and so every spring I'mgoing to kind of switch on
exploration and then once we hitthe summer I'm going to go back
to exploiting or something likethat.
So you use external cues.
It could be time, it could bemonths, it could be some other
thing that governs when youswitch between them.
And the nice thing about doingthat is you don't have to then
make the decision to switch, youjust allow the world to do that
for you.
But if you're a little bit moresensitive to the cues, that's
(12:56):
quite valuable.
And so you could say somethinglike I'm going to try five
separate things that's what myexploration period is going to
be and then, among the five, oneof them or two of them I hope
will be useful and fruitful andI'm going to follow those two,
and so that's not so much abouttime it's about the number of
exploratory processes you gothrough before you start
exploiting.
(13:17):
And then, if you're in theexploitation phase and you sort
of hit a wall, like things startto feel a bit stale.
This is what happens A lot ofpeople.
They get in a rut and they getcomfortable doing what they're
doing and they just don't goback to learning new things
again.
It's very useful, if you feelthat staleness creeping in, to
say, okay, I've got to do someexploring again, I've got to
figure out something.
That's a bit of a change.
(13:38):
And so, instead of being thatkind of person who says, all
right, I'm in this kind ofcomfortable position, I'm going
to stick with it for the next 10years, you are the kind of
person who says actually no,that's probably not great for my
well-being.
At the very least, I'm going tostart entertaining other
options.
And so I think it's acombination of these internal
cues that signal to you what youshould be doing and these
external cues that help move youalong.
Speaker 1 (14:01):
Another big aspect of your book is there's the
thinking part of it, so dealingwith the emotional and
psychological just effects ofbeing stuck in a rut.
But then there's also theaction part.
So you have, okay, this is mystep-by-step plan for how I'm
going to get out of this.
But then you actually have tocommit to that step-by-step plan
.
So how do you decide?
First off, if you've chosen theright plan, I mean, I guess
(14:25):
that's kind of trial and errorright there and then, two, how
do you know when to commit whenyou actually have?
Is this worth doing now, orshould I keep exploring
different options to try to getout?
Speaker 2 (14:37):
Yeah, that's also a good question.
So the book is a sort ofroadmap.
It suggests that there arecertain steps you should go
through before you act.
And action is really the lastof those steps Before you get to
acting even though when youfeel stuck, that's all you want
to do is you kind of want toflail and figure out a way
through the problem you reallyhave to do some other things.
First You've got to deal withthe emotional consequences of
being stuck.
(14:57):
You've got to understand whatit means to be stuck, that
humans are essentially not verygood at being stuck.
We imagine, as we said earlier,that we're isolated in that and
it feels lonely and unpleasant.
And then you've got to figureout the strategies for getting
unstuck.
So what am I going to do tomove my way forward?
And after you've done all ofthat, then you think about
action.
And so hopefully, by the timeyou get to action, you've done
(15:18):
enough of the other stuff thatyou need to do.
You've laid enough groundworkthat the action you're taking is
productive.
Now, of course, that's notalways going to be true.
In fact, there's a reallyinteresting idea that action
itself is a great unsticker,even if the action that you're
taking right now doesn't moveyou forward, if it moves you
sideways, because so much ofbeing stuck is this kind of
(15:39):
feedback loop where you feellike you can't make progress and
so you don't act and you thinkmore and you ruminate and you
feel sad and then you keep goingand you go around in circles,
whereas if you just act, even ifthe action itself is not
productive say, you're a writerand you can't write this
paragraph you've been trying towrite.
There's a guy named Jeff Tweedywho's the frontman, the singer
(16:03):
and the writer for a band calledWill Cove, and he also writes
books, and he talks about thefact that some days, if you're a
creative, you wake up and youdon't want to do anything.
So what does he do?
He basically takes his normallyvery strict threshold and he
says I'm going to lower that allthe way down to the ground and
I'm going to write the worstsentence I can write or the
worst musical phrase I can write.
(16:23):
And that's easy, because thenall your standards go out the
window.
But if you do that for 15minutes, you keep creating bad
stuff.
Good stuff inevitably follows,because you've shown yourself
that you're not static, you'removing, and so I think that's
really helpful.
The other thing you're askingabout how do you know you're
doing the right thing Like theseare the right actions to take?
And what happens over time,especially with long term goals,
(16:46):
is there is a place where youare and there's a place you want
to be, and there's a gapbetween those two.
And you can see, usually withfeedback that you get from the
world, if you're getting closer,if those two are getting closer
.
So, if you're learning alanguage, am I getting more
fluent?
If you're learning to paint, amI getting better at that?
Whatever it might be, are yougetting closer and closer to the
goal state, or are you stayingabout the same distance from it?
(17:08):
Or, in the worst case, are yougetting further away from it?
If you're getting further away,that's a sign you should
probably try something new, likeleave that behind.
There are better things to dowith your time.
But if you're getting closer,you're converging on the goal.
Then you've got to continue,and often that takes longer than
we think.
So it's important to payattention to those cues.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
The other aspects that we don't often think about,
or at least we try to kind ofpush to the side, is something
is grit.
So you have to bear down andobviously get through these hard
points in order to achieve yourgoal, but oftentimes you might
need to just let go of it andmove on to something else that
might be more productive or morebeneficial for you.
(17:48):
So where is that balance?
Because you don't want toobviously give in too early, as
you talk about in your book, orgive up too late once you've
wasted way too much time doingit.
So are there cues when you'reworking on a project or working
on a different goal that arelike okay, maybe this is
something that I'm stuck withand it's not worth getting
through?
Speaker 2 (18:09):
Yes, that's the sort of golden question here is that
there are two ends of thespectrum.
One end is to say I shouldalways persevere, it's all about
grit.
Grit is everything, and I don'twant to be the kind of person
who doesn't see things through.
The other end of the spectrumis to say there are a million
things I could be doing with mytime at any moment.
If the thing I'm doing is notbringing me great joy and
meaning, why am I doing this?
(18:29):
I should quit immediately.
Now.
You can't do either one of thosethings all the time.
You can't always followeverything through to its end,
because you'll never move on tonew, greener pastures, and you
can't always quit because you'llnever do anything.
So the question that you'reasking is how do you know where
you are between those two endsof the spectrum?
One way is to do what I justsuggested, which is to pay
attention to the gap betweenwhere you are and where you'd
(18:50):
like to be, and you shouldprobably keep going, you should
probably persevere, you shouldtap into grit when you're
getting closer to the end point,but when you're not, you should
probably quit, or at leastconsider it.
But I think another, moreuseful rule is to always ask
what the opportunity cost ofcontinuing is, and by that I
mean if you're in a particularcareer or you're trying a new
(19:10):
pursuit, you're trying to learna language, first of all.
How important is it that youachieve that?
If you actually reach the goal,will it make your life
meaningfully better?
And the second question is ifI'm not doing this, what am I
doing instead?
So if I imagine committing 100hours to this task, what else
could I be doing with that 100hours?
That would be potentially morefruitful, or definitely more
(19:33):
fruitful.
And if there is an answer tothat that is at hand and it's
achievable and it's graspableand you can just pivot slightly
and go in that direction, thenthat's a very good sign that
it's probably time to quit.
And there are two books that Ithink make a very strong case
for each of those endpoints.
There's Angela Duckworth's griton the one hand, and there's
Annie Duke's quit on the other,and they both neither of those
(19:57):
very, very intelligent authorswould say you should always
either quit or continue but theyboth make a very strong case
for each of those approaches andexplain when you should pursue
them, and so I think there arecues that help guide you as you
navigate between those twoendpoints.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
The fascinating thing is we talked to Dr Duckworth
early in our podcasting careerand actually heard Vice to
Teenagers towards the end, whichwe'll get to yours in just a
little bit is quit.
You should think about whatexactly you're missing.
What opportunities are youshielding yourself from?
That might be useful to investtime in here and there, and
(20:33):
that's something that I foundfascinating for an author whose
book is literally titled Grit.
She considers when should youquit?
And we talked about that inthat episode, but winding our
conversation back, kind ofwrapping it up, what books have
had an impact on you?
Speaker 2 (20:50):
Yeah, it's funny.
So the two that I justmentioned I think are excellent,
because I have this very strongphilosophy that you can learn a
lot about the world byexploring the very extreme
versions of all the argumentsthat are made, and so, if there
is a spectrum between quittingand continuing, you should read
the most convincing, compellingtreatise on each one to
understand the best argumentsfor each and I think that's
(21:11):
generally a really goodphilosophy for making your way
through the world Understand thevery best, rather than the
worst, arguments for aproposition, and then, when you
pit them against each other,you're dealing with the A-plus
version of each one.
And so I think quit and gritthose two books are fantastic,
but there are two others thatI'll mention.
One is written by a very goodfriend of mine, who I know
(21:31):
you've interviewed in the past.
Dave Epstein called Range, andRange makes the case that early
on in your life you shouldpursue as many different kinds
of paths as possible.
You should essentially explore,and I feel that that's so
central to the way I live mylife that when David wrote that
book it really spoke to me andconfirmed a lot of the ideas
(21:51):
that I'd been living by withoutreally realizing it for many
years.
And then I'll say also two otherauthors.
Both Michael Lewis and MalcolmGladwell, are phenomenal authors
.
They're very.
If you ask people in generalwho they would say are the
authors they look up to and paya lot of attention to, those
names will come up often.
(22:12):
But for me as a socialscientist, as someone who does
behavioral science for hiscareer, I had to make the
decision about 15 years ago thatI wanted to turn that into a
sort of more public facingcareer as well as the academic
career that I have.
And those two writers the waythey took complex ideas and
continue to take complex ideasand turn them into really
(22:34):
digestible, interesting conceptsthat anyone can read and
understand and get benefit fromthat really shaped the way I
think about what I do and turnedme towards this sort of path of
being a slightly more publicintellectual.
Speaker 1 (22:48):
So the last question that we ask all of our guests
that I've alluded to earlier iswhat advice do you have for
teenagers?
Speaker 2 (22:55):
It's got to be the same advice that I give the
freshmen that you have to sayyes.
You have to adopt this defaultof saying yes, because if you
don't, if your default is no, orif you're a void of these
opportunities that arise earlyin your life, you narrow the
number of options you have lateron in your life.
You can only potentiallyexplore the number of things
(23:16):
that you try at least once.
And so if that menu is 1000options long, you will have a
better, more fruitful, moreinteresting, more varied life
than if that menu is 10 optionslong.
And so I think, very early onin your life, it is absolutely
critical that whenever anyopportunity even glances by, it
doesn't have to be right in yourlap, just grab it, take it, see
(23:38):
what it's like, be very quickto quit if it's not for you, but
you have to say yes to get tothe point where you even have
the luxury of being able to sayno later on.
So I think that's the mostimportant thing is to cultivate
a life of variety.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
Well, dr Alters, thank you again for coming on
the podcast.
Check out his book, the Anatomyof a Breakthrough.
That'll be linked below.
And, yeah, thank you so muchagain for coming on.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
Thanks, taylor, that was great.
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