March 14, 2024

Epidose 296 - Adam Alter: The Anatomy of a Breakthrough

March 14, 2024

Adam Alter is a Professor of Marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business and the Robert Stansky Teaching Excellence Faculty Fellow, with an affiliated appointment in the New York University Psychology Department.

Adam is the New York Times bestselling author of two books: Irresistible (March, 2017), which considers why so many people today are addicted to so many behaviors, from incessant smart phone and internet use to video game playing and online shopping, and Drunk Tank Pink (2013), which investigates how hidden forces in the world around us shape our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

Adam has also written for the New York Times, New Yorker, Washington Post, Atlantic, WIRED, Slate, Huffington Post, and Popular Science, among other publications. He has shared his ideas on NPR's Fresh Air, at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, and with dozens of companies, including Google, Microsoft, Anheuser Busch, Prudential, and Fidelity, and with several design and ad agencies around the world.

Feeling stuck is a common human experience and almost all of us will go through it at some point in our lives. Whether it’s relationship struggles, dissatisfaction with work, an inability to progress financially, or a pending midlife crisis, all of these situations can bring up a range of mixed emotions like anxiety, fear, anger, and even numbness. We are joined today by Adam Alter, whose new book Anatomy of a Breakthrough: How to Get Unstuck When It Matters Most serves as a much-needed guide to help readers escape inertia and flourish in the face of freedom. Adam is a professor of marketing at New York University's Stern School of Business with an affiliated appointment in the New York University Psychology Department. His research is primarily focused on judgment, decision-making, and social psychology, and his two previous books, Irresistible and Drunk Tank Pink, are both highly acclaimed New York Times best-sellers. In today’s episode, we talk with Adam about the concept behind Anatomy of a Breakthrough, the many forms that feeling stuck can take, and what he has learned about getting unstuck. Tuning in you’ll learn about the fundamentals of goal-setting, why striving for excellence is infinitely more sustainable than settling for nothing less than perfection, and how learning to enjoy the journey will help you find meaning and avoid the aimlessness that can come after achieving your goal. We also get into the nature of breakthroughs, the role of luck and creativity, plus a whole lot more. To hear all of Adam’s thought-provoking insights and practical advice on getting unstuck, be sure to tune in!

Key Points From This Episode:

(0:00:18) Introducing today’s guest, Adam Alter, and the concept behind his new book Anatomy of a Breakthrough.

(0:05:41) An overview of the many ways that you can be financially stuck, the role of financial advisors, and when you should seek out help and guidance.

(0:09:04) Insight into the different types of stuckness and how to recognize when you’re stuck.

(0:12:42) Why people tend to question their lives with the arrival of a new decade.

(0:17:10) Unpacking the risks and benefits of major life decisions and the concept of lifequakes.

(0:20:25) The boundless nature of goal-setting and how it impacts the search for contentment.

(0:23:27) How lifequakes influence the search for contentment and how to prepare for them.

(0:26:00) What a breakthrough looks like, how it interacts with creativity, and the role of luck.

(0:35:17) A breakdown of the random impact rule; particularly in the context of careers.

(0:38:01) One key practical difference between striving for excellence versus perfection.

(0:40:05) The originality trap: why trying to do something completely new can cause paralysis.

(0:43:13) Understanding the plateau effect: why being stuck can actually be a sign of progress.

(0:44:23) The fundamentals of goal setting: the dangers of setting unachievable goals and the benefits of making it about the journey rather than the destination.

(0:49:03) Advice for processing the success of other; especially in the age of social media, and how Adam defines success.

Read The Transcript:

Ben Felix: This is the Rational Reminder Podcast, a weekly reality check on sensible investing and financial decision-making from two Canadians. We're hosted by me, Benjamin Felix and Cameron Passmore, portfolio managers at PWL Capital.

Cameron Passmore: Welcome to Episode 296. Do we feel stuck, Ben? That's what today's conversation is all about. We had an unbelievable conversation with Adam Alter, who recently released his book, Anatomy of a Breakthrough: How to Get Unstuck When It Matters Most. That's what this book is about, how to break through being stuck creatively to get to the other side. It's a great book. This is a great conversation.

As he says, "To be alive is to battle stuckness. Barriers are universal, but how can you have that breakthrough?" He goes through all kinds of different areas of your life where you can get stuck. The book is about exactly that, how to overcome inertia, and to achieve the breakthroughs in critical moments in your life.

Adam is a professor of marketing at New York University's Stern School of Business with an affiliated appointment in the New York University Psychology Department. His research focuses on judgment, and decision-making, and social psychology. He received his Bachelor of Science in Psychology from the University of New South Wales, and has MA and PhD in Psychology from Princeton University. He has also written two other books, New York Times bestsellers, Irresistible and Drunk Tank Pink. Ben, what did you think?

Ben Felix: Yes. That's a great introduction to the episode. I don't have a ton to add. But I think it's a very practical and useful episode, because stuckness is something that everybody goes through. Adam says, he hedges the statement a little bit, but he says that it's probably close to universal. People feeling stuck in some area of their life, especially if you take a minute to think about it. As much as this episode is about stuckness, and getting unstuck through breakthroughs, it's really about living a good life that you enjoy.

Ultimately, we came back to that theme multiple times throughout the conversation. I think Adam has a lot of practical, useful information for people to think about. Well, being and living a good life through this lens of stuckness, and breakthroughs, which I thought was a really interesting angle to take on that concept. A few times, I thought back to our episode with Chris Hadfield, because Adam talks about enjoying the process, basically, which is one of the things that we ask Chris Hadfield. How did you think about your own well-being while having this massive goal of becoming an astronaut? He basically said that he would have been happy with the way he lived his life, even if he never attained that big goal. The same theme comes up through Adams research.

Cameron Passmore: Okay. With that, let's go to our conversation with Adam Alter.

***

Cameron Passmore: Welcome to the Rational Reminder Podcast.

Adam Alter: Thank you both for having me. I'm happy to be here.

Cameron Passmore: It was great to meet you, and congratulations on your book.

Adam Alter: Thank you. I appreciate it.

Cameron Passmore: Off the top, what does it mean to be stuck?

Adam Alter: There are lots of definitions of stuckness. The stuckness that I'm interested in, in this book has, I think, two critical features. One of them is, I'm not talking about momentary daily frustration. I think we all experienced daily frustrations that last minutes, or maybe sometimes hours. That's not psychologically, all that interesting to me. I'm much more interested in these protracted frustrations, that set up roadblocks, that sometimes, if you don't manage them, or deal with them can last for years, decades, lifetimes. I'm focusing on these big issues. But I'm also not interested in the kinds of stuckness that are intractable that we can't do anything about. I'm really interested in the kinds that are susceptible to intervention.

An example of the kind that's not susceptible to intervention is, say, there's a global pandemic, and you want to travel somewhere, but you can't, because there are no flights out. You're not allowed to do it for government legislation reasons. You can't travel, and you're stuck, and that's unfortunate. But again, I'm not interested in that kind of situation that's impossible to fix. It's got to be something that's protracted, that's important to you, that goes on for a long time, and also, that's susceptible to your intervention that you can do something about.

Ben Felix: Can you give an example?

Adam Alter: There are so many. I've been running the survey on thousands of people around the world, asking them, "Are you stuck in some respect and tell me about it?" And you get every flavour of response? First of all, it's almost universal, almost everyone is stuck in some way. The things they talk about, our financial stuckness. I can't afford something, and I wish I could. Or, there's something I'd like to be able to do, but I can't afford it. There are relationship-based stucknesses, work-based stucknesses. People get stuck in creative pursuits. Maybe they make progress towards a goal, and then they can't make any further progress. Business-based stuckness they have certain business goals that they can't achieve. Investing-based stuckness, every flavour you can imagine. It's a very broad palette.

Ben Felix: You mentioned the survey, how common is it for people to be stuck somewhere?

Adam Alter: I'm cautious about saying that it's universal. But I think when people spend more than a few minutes thinking, they realize there's an area of their lives they would like to be different. That's often in the background humming along, whispering in their ears occasionally. It's something that I think you want to think about, but they often don't have the time or energy to do it. It goes along on the backburner not being addressed. When I give people a bit of time, it's almost everyone can come up with something.

Cameron Passmore: One of the objectives of this podcast is to help people with financial decision-making. Can you expand a bit on what it looks like to be financially stuck?

Adam Alter: There are lots of forms of financial stuckness. There are people who have self-control issues. So they'd like to be in a different financial position from the one they're in, and perhaps, they haven't made the right decisions, they don't save enough, they haven't saved enough of their retirements. They spend too quickly, and save too slowly, and so on. All those kinds of very natural common problems that we see in financial decision-making domains.

It could be that they are trying to afford something very specific, that's very important to them that they just can't afford. They're stuck in that respect. They don't have the resources for that thing. What's interesting to me is that it often bleeds over into time. It's not just about financial resources, but it's that, they don't have the money to afford the time they want to do certain things. They lose autonomy of their own time. That for them is what money represents. A lot of the financial stuckness is things like, "I feel like life is getting away from me. I see the years ticked by. I work the vast majority of my waking hours, and I'm not sure what it's all for." So it often gets quite existential and philosophical quite quickly.

Cameron Passmore: How do you think advisors can help people become financially unstuck?

Adam Alter: Well, I think one of the most important things for advisors to think about is that money means on some level the same thing to everyone. It means freedom over your time, freedom over your decisions, freedom over how you live your life. But also, on a different level, that means something quite different. I think very concretely, the best advice is, at least the ones I've interacted with don't talk about money. They talk about what money is for, and they get there very quickly. They'll say something like, "If you had the money to do everything you wanted to do, what would that look like?" or "If we have a goal in mind, tell me what that goal actually means in a concrete sense. So you wake up tomorrow with the money you need, what are you doing with it? Are you going to play golf? Are you travelling? Are you having a good meal? Are you spending time with family and friends in a beautiful location?"

What that reveals very quickly is the priorities that drive you and what the money is for. Once you speak at that level, people are much more receptive psychologically to your suggestions. You're not just saying, let's make sure that we hit $100,000, or a million dollars, or a billion dollars." You're saying, "Let's make sure you can spend time at a ski lodge with your family, overlooking a mountain if that's important to you once a year for a week. Make the goal very concrete, very quickly. I think people then are automatically activated, motivated to make changes. I think the best advice is to do a really good job of turning what is abstract about money into something quite meaningful and concrete.

Cameron Passmore: When someone is feeling stuck financially, when do you think they should look for help? Should it be from an advisor?

Adam Alter: Look, this is not really my world. I'm not a financial advisor. I've had quite a lot of interactions with them. My dad is a financial advisor. I've seen the profession up close for many, many years. I have always seen great value in advice in general. I think there are some problems that are technical enough that you always need someone who knows a little bit more about them to help you.

Now, if you're a financial genius, and you've done all the right things all your life, and you've been coached by her dad, who's a financial advisor, I'm not saying I'm that financial genius. But if you've got the right coaching, and you don't need an advisor, Godspeed, go and do your thing. But I think for most people, it's such a complex, hairy problem psychologically, intellectually in all sorts of different ways. That having advice, whether it's an advisor or someone else is truly valuable. I would say. the natural place to look a financial advisor, ideally, someone who doesn't have a sort of vested interest in making certain suggestions, maybe a fiduciary or something like that. I think there's huge value in that.

Ben Felix: When you talked about stuckness being almost universal, you said that when people think about it for a few minutes, they can find something. Do people realize they're stuck if they don't take those few minutes to reflect on it?

Adam Alter: Yes, it's one of the good, very common questions that comes up that I've thought about a lot is, are there essentially two kinds of stuckness in terms of how explicit or available that stuckness is? There's one kind of stuckness where you think about it metaphorically. You walk up to a wall and you're trying to get to the other side of the wall. It's very clear in that moment that you're stuck. You'd like to be somewhere else and you're not there. Until you find a way around the wall, you're stuck. A lot of stuckness is like that, where it's very explicit, it's transparent, it's clear, it's actually something you can't remove from your attention because it occupies so much of your time and energy.

But there's another kind that I think is sneakier that is implicit, it's in the background. Often, these are traps where you don't realize you're stuck until much later on. Then, the fact that you've allowed yourself to be in that situation for a long time is the problem. I think a lot of financial stuckness is like that. That's one, you asked about fiduciaries, or financial planners, or financial advisors. I think one valuable addition that you get from someone like that is, you know what questions to ask to reveal to yourself whether you might be stuck. You could very easily sail through 50 years of a career, wake up one day, and find you don't have enough money to enjoy the last whatever percentage of your life. That will be a form of stuckness that could have been dealt with 50 years earlier with different decisions.

You didn't realize you were stuck, but you were stuck in the future 50 years in the future. There is that kind of stuckness that is hidden to some extent from you. And that with the right questions, with the right advice, you might be able to head off at the pass or avoid completely.

Ben Felix: Can people be stuck in their general well-being?

Adam Alter: Yes. It's interesting, there's this story that I found fascinating, as I was talking to people about this book and about this idea. One of my friends said to me, his dad is a math professor or was a math professor for many years. He spent 30 years working on a single problem, and he didn't make measurable progress from the outside. So he spent 30 years, objectively speaking, not getting all that much closer to a solution. This is one of the great problems in the mathematical world.

But every single day, he went to work and he enjoyed it. So when my friend asked his dad, "Don't you feel stuck?" His dad said, "Not for a minute. This is my life's work. This is my passion. On a certain level, yes, I'd love to find a solution. But every day, I'm invigorated, I love going to work. I love working with the students who are helping me on the problem. I love interacting with other mathematicians. I don't for a minute feel stuck, even though from the outside, it looks like I might be." So subjectively, he doesn't feel stuck, but objectively, he is.

But then, there's the other kind of person. You look at people who look like they're sailing by. Maybe they're in a job where they're incredibly successful from the outside, they have all the things that most people talk about wanting. Maybe they have a wonderful family, they have lots of money, they spend their time exactly the way they want to spend it. But when you look inside their heads, on some level, perhaps they're tormented, or unhappy, or they actually subjectively are stuck. So you get this interesting interplay, where some people look like they're stuck from the outside, but they're actually happy with not making meaningful objective progress. Then, you get people who are sailing along from the outside. But when you look inside their heads, you realize actually, wellbeing-wise, they're stuck, something is just not quite working for them. I think those are the people that need a lot of attention and help. This book I wrote is largely in the service of these people who are quietly stuck.

Cameron Passmore: Why do people tend to question their lives on the arrival of a new decade? I think in the book, you called it the nines.

Adam Alter: This is work with my friend and colleague, Hal Hershfield. I know you both know him as well. This was funny when I was 29, I had just moved to New York City and I had just taken the job at NYU as a professor. I have felt a bit stuck in certain respects. I wasn't sure if I was moving in the direction I wanted to be moving. I decided to run a marathon my first, and only marathon. Part of what was confronting was I was 29, and I was thinking about turning 30, and I'd been in the US already for four, or five years, I think it was at that point.

I felt like time was really marching on. I wanted to just take on a goal that felt big, and meaningful, that would occupy several months of my time, that would involve physical exercise. It involved charity. I was raising money for our charity. It seemed to sort of check a lot of different boxes. It had a little philanthropic element, it had an element of goals, movement, it had a lot of things that seemed appealing to me.

Several years later, Hal and I were sitting and chatting. I said to him, it's interesting if I think back to that one marathon I ran, there was something about being 29, about having a nine at the end of my age that pushed me to think about what was about to come. I didn't normally think that way. When he and I spoke. I was probably 32 or 33 at that point. I said to him, in the middle of these decades, there's a lull in how much we think about the meaningfulness of life. Time doesn't pass as fast. Things just move a little more slowly. Then suddenly, you hit, say, 38, 39. I remember this happened when I was 39 as well. I'm now in my mid-40s.

We studied this. We wanted to investigate, is this actually true. There are surveys that ask people, to what extent do you consider the meaningfulness of your life? Do you audit your life for meaningfulness? We found this little wave that begins at the eights, peaks at the nines, and then for some people, it extends into the zero-ending age. So 28, 29, 30, 38, 39, 40, et cetera. It's not just about considering the meaningfulness of your life. But what you find, as I found at 29, was that you're driven to drum up meaning. In my case, I was running a marathon, and you do see a big spike in first-time marathon runners with nines at the end of their ages. It's the most common ending digit in an age for that kind of thing.

People do all sorts of things. They do some very productive things. They run marathons. There's some evidence that perhaps they give more to charities or they buy a red sports car to show themselves that they're still young, and they have it, and all of that sort of stuff. There's also some stuff that's less productive. You see a rise in extramarital affairs. We have some evidence of that. You even see a small spike in suicides that appears. This is a very confronting time for us every 10 years, but it's also a very productive time when we're able to make very big decisions that are quite meaningful to our lives and to us.

Cameron Passmore: Aren't there also clusters and marathons of times around target times, like 3:40, 3:50 or the famous four hours, for example?

Adam Alter: Yes. These things pop up in lots of different areas. Humans are goal-oriented as a species, and a lot of our goals are numerical, or they're driven by some sort of benchmark, or yardstick. In the context of a marathon, obviously, there's the sub-three, which is very quick. There's a sub-four for a lot of people. There's a sub 3:30. What you find, if you look at the distribution of times, is that it's not a smooth distribution. It's not like, the most common time is, say, four hours, and either side of that, you got this perfect little slope down to the less common times that are either slower or faster. That's what you might expect with some sort of human performance discipline.

If I gave you a device that measured your grip strength, and I gave that to a thousand people, you would see a very smooth distribution. With marathons, you don't see that. What you see is these little peaks, and then, this drop. Because no one wants to run four, or 4:01, 4:02. They somehow liberate latent energy, they say. That's what they call it. Liberating latent energy to make sure they ran the 3:57, 3:58, or 3:59. I ran a 3:57, and I remember thinking, what a miracle that I just finished under four hours. Then. it turns out, that's the second most common time in marathon running.

Ben Felix: Does the decade matter? Did you see clusters around 40, versus 50, versus 20?

Adam Alter: It's a little patchy. We don't have a huge amount of data. I think you'll see fewer extreme effects in the 20s. I think the spectre of time is not quite as great when you're in your 20s, moving into your 30s. It seems that the midlife crisis 40s seems to be a time when a lot of people are making big decisions. Again, late 40s into 50s seems to be a big one as well. I think it's slightly less prominent for the 20s, into 30s, and the 50s, into 60s, but there's not really, really robust evidence for that.

Ben Felix: Are there risks to making major life decisions during those periods?

Adam Alter: I think there are always risks to making major life decisions. You've got to ask yourself, depending on what the decision is. Is the decision revocable? That's one good question to ask. Is it something I can fix if I've made a mistake? If it's not revocable, there are still risks worth taking? I think one really useful guide when you're making these kinds of decisions is to ask how important is this decision. If it's sufficiently important, I should know what the full menu of options looks like. I should go through a full accounting process. Here are the pros, here are the cons of each one. Be really thoughtful about it.

That's what you should do when you're picking a town to live in, or which university to go to, or whether to settle down with a spouse, whether to have kids. All that stuff is sufficiently important that you should devote a lot of time to it. Judgment and decision-making parlance, you would say, you're maximizing, you're finding the very best outcome. The alternative is to satisfice. We don't have the time or energy to maximize on every potential question we have. The other way to do it is to say, is this good enough? I'm not really a car person, I buy cars, because I want to safely get from A to B, and make sure my kids and my wife are safe. For me, for some people, buying a car is a maximizing decision. They'll check out every car on the market. They want to know everything about every car.

But for someone like me who doesn't care about that stuff, there is a safety benchmark. If it reaches that benchmark, and it's otherwise affordable, and it checks all the boxes, it fits everyone in the car, good enough. I stopped searching. I don't even know what the other options are. That's satisfying. When you make major life decisions, you probably want to maximize on some of them, but also satisfies on others. And really wise people know when to do each.

Ben Felix: What are lifequakes?

Adam Alter: Lifequakes, this is a term that a writer named t coined. I think it's a really brilliant idea. I interviewed him when I was writing my most recent book. He basically found that in interviewing hundreds of people, roughly every decade, we have a major, major life event. He called them lifequakes, much like an earthquake, fear for our lives. These are major events that change some aspect of our lives in a fundamental way. Some of them are good, some of them are negative. They can be anything like getting married, having a child moving to a new town, major illness, the death of a loved one.

There are all sorts of different things that are lifequakes. Some of them are predictable, you know, they're coming ahead of time. So you know, for example, that you're about to become an empty nester, or that you're about to move to a new place because you've been planning it for a while, that you're about to retire. But then others are unexpected or uninvited, there's not much you can do about them.

The big insight with live quakes is that they do happen. They're inevitable. They're universal. We all experienced these big changes. Most of them are not predicted, and not invited, and a lot of them are negative. So, if you know that, if you know across the course of your life that you're going to be grappling with these major changes, that suggests certain methods of preparation. At least not being blindsided when these things happen, not feeling like there's some personal affront in the way life has turned out. Because, actually, you're in good company, you're in the company of eight billion other people. That's important to understand, and that's what this idea of lifequakes is designed to do. It's designed to give you the sense that the bumps in the road that you experience, often very big bumps are not about you. It's just what it means to be a human.

Cameron Passmore: You wrote, and I'm quoting here. There isn't a bright finish line when you're pursuing many goals, and they are boundless. This might be a deep question, but how does this impact one's search for contentment?

Adam Alter: It's a very, very deep and very interesting question. Something that I think about a lot. Another way of asking it is, when is it enough? Whether it's hunting for assets, income, net worth, how long should you work? If you had every dollar in the world, if every dollar in the world was to your name, what would you do with your time? Now, we're not going to get there. No one's going to have every dollar in the world. But is there a point at which you reach a certain number of dollars, or whatever the currency may be, where you say, "Hey, that's enough? Now, I'm going to start spending. I'm going to decumulate?" That's the question that I think is important to ask here.

There's a lot of really interesting research showing that on average, people in Canada, in the US, in a lot of Western countries tend to overwork. So they accumulate more than they should, and they decumulate too little. In other words, they don't enjoy the fruits of their labours. That's a feature of the way our culture has evolved over time. That's also a function of the boundlessness of these goals. If you have a goal, if your goal is to run a marathon, which we've discussed, it's very clear where you're going to stop, and then you can rest on your laurels, and enjoy it, and put a metal around your neck.

One thing I would suggest is that, if you're on a path towards a goal that is boundless, figure out what your 26.2 miles/42.2 kilometres is. Where do you know you've got to a point where you can say, all right, I'm going to enjoy this for a bit. Or if you're running the marathon, using the same analogy, and you're halfway through, and you feel like this is a good place to celebrate the halfway through, do that as well. Find times to enjoy what you've been doing. Enjoy the journey much like this mathematical professor enjoyed the fact that every day, he did not cross that finish line, but he still enjoyed the journey nonetheless. I think that's really a worthwhile philosophy.

Cameron Passmore: Do you think our culture sometimes convinces ourselves that labour does lead to more contentment?

Adam Alter: Yes. I think there's something to that. I think being busy in a particular way is really valuable. There's a kind of busyness that I think is really richly rewarding. If you can find for you what that math puzzle was to that professor for 30 years, you're going to lead a very happy life. You're going to spend hours, and hours working every day, and enjoying those hours to a large extent. No one enjoys every working hour. But the more you can enjoy, the better. I think the busyness for busyness sake is not a goal. It's not an aim. It's not something you should strive for. But busyness in the service of something that brings you meaning, or even an act that you enjoy sufficiently that it brings you meaning while perhaps also earning you an income, bringing you closer to friends, and family, and so on. There's huge value in that.

Yes, I think our culture prizes busyness. We're very proud to tell other people how busy we are. I couldn't possibly meet with you, I'm absolutely slammed at the moment. That's the kind of thing that a lot of people are proud to say. But it's a stand-in for something else, very important. I don't think that doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

Ben Felix: How do lifequakes interact with the search for contentment?

Adam Alter: I think what they do is they force you to make a change. A lot of people get stuck when they experience a lifequake. Because whatever they were doing in the past isn't going to continue working in exactly the same way. They've got to pivot, they've got to do something differently. If you're searching for contentment, sometimes a lifequake brings you contentment, sometimes that change is welcomed. It's good for you. At other times, it's something that's sort of a hardship that you have to grapple with. So it can get in the way of contentment temporarily. I think some people are really adaptive, and malleable, and they're really good at dealing with these lifequakes, and they come up with ways to work around them really fast.

They turn them to their advantage to the extent they can. But I think in general, they frustrate our contentment initially. But if you deal with them the right way, you often are able to get unstuck.

Cameron Passmore: Is there something we can do to prepare for these inevitable lifequakes?

Adam Alter: This seems maybe superficial. But I think a huge part of it is just knowing that they're going to come and not being blindsided by them. And also, recognizing that there will be a period where if they're not positive things, you're going to be unhappy, you're going to have to grapple with them. You may have to mourn, you may have to deal with the fact that they're introducing a hardship into your life, and that's okay, and to anticipate that as well. In anticipation, before it even happens, you could say, "Hey, when that lifequake comes, I'm going to give myself the license to spend X amount of time just dealing with it, and being okay with being sad, or having to pivot, and being frustrated that I'm not yet making the right moves."

I think a lot of it is in the preparation. There's some really interesting evidence that in particular, in East Asian countries, places like Japan, Korea, China, people anticipate change much more than they do in the West. Part of our belief system is that things just progressed, they get better, things improve, there's a linearity to life. We acquire skills, we get more wise, we get stronger, and better, and more impressive in all sorts of different ways. That drives a lot of our decision-making. Drives a lot of the ideas we consume as well, about mastery, and all that stuff.

If you look at the way, the philosophies, particularly the religious philosophies of East Asia work, a lot of them suggest that there is balance in the world. It's yin and the yang, the day, the night the hardship, and then the ease, and so on. If you adhere to that philosophy, when things get hard, you're like, "Well, that's just part of the cycle." But if you think that life's always progressing, and it's always getting better, and everything is essentially like the stock market across time going in one direction. Then, you're going to be blindsided when you have these blips. That preparation and anticipation is a big part of dealing with these hardships.

Ben Felix: The title of your book, Anatomy of a Breakthrough. We've talked about stuckness, but what is a breakthrough?

Adam Alter: A breakthrough is the other side of stuckness. It depends what you're looking for, but it's what happens after you're no longer stuck. I call it the anatomy of a breakthrough, because the way I break it down is into heart, head, and habit. These are sort of bodily terms or bodily action terms. The idea is that, when people get stuck, they feel blindsided, it feels like a very personal affront. It's unpleasant. They often don't really know how to grapple with it. They flail. Instead of being thoughtful, they often do things rationally to just break out of the problem. It's a roadmap. In fact, the last part of the book, I titled the epilogue, 100 Ways to Get Unstuck. It's essentially a summary of the book. So really is a roadmap.

If you're stuck, check off these 100 things on this list, and you'll be unstuck basically, in most cases. That's what a breakthrough is. When you've done all of that, and you've come through the other side, you're no longer stuck, and you found a breakthrough.

Ben Felix: Can you talk a little bit more about the heart, head, and habit?

Adam Alter: I think a lot of people jump to the third of those. Habit is action. When you are stuck, your first instinct is to act. There's a part of what it is to be human that deals very, very well with being physically stuck. There are these interesting cases of what is known as hysterical strength. Where maybe, someone's trapped under a car, and you go over, and you lift the car, and you free them. Then, when you interview people, they say, I don't know where that came from. I don't normally have the ability to lift a car. But adrenaline helped me do that. That's incredibly useful in that situation, that physical stuckness.

But that flailing behaviour that's very useful physically is completely counterproductive in terms of action. If you just flail, and you act, you're often acting in the wrong direction, you're not doing something helpful. So habit is action, but it's got to come after heart and head. Heart is the first thing. It's dealing emotionally with being stuck, figuring out the best next step to make grappling with what it feels like to be in that position. A lot of people overlook that. They don't think much about the emotions, they're already thinking about strategy and action.

Once you deal with the emotional component of being stuck, there's head, which is the strategies, the approaches you can use to get unstuck. Then. the actual action comes in the last part habit. That's those three sections.

Ben Felix: How does creativity interact with a breakthrough?

Adam Alter: Often, in lot of the domains that I look at that I'm very interested in, whether they're business-based, or creativity-based, or in the arts, in music, in film, and so on. Creativity is what the breakthrough is all about. That's the stuff of breakthroughs. The theory here is that, if what you were doing is working, in other words, if you don't need to be creative, then you wouldn't be stuck. You just keep doing the thing that was working before. But if you're stuck by definition, whatever's been happening in the past isn't doing the job. The way forward has to be an act of creativity, where creativity is just defined as something different from the default, from the way you would think about doing things normally or naturally.

A lot of getting unstuck, it doesn't have to be incredible creativity. We're not talking about writing a screenplay that wins an Oscar. We're just talking about doing something a bit different, and doing it in a different way that liberates you from whatever it is that's been miring you, because of the way you've been doing things in the past.

Cameron Passmore: You gave a practical piece of advice in the book. I'm curious if you're still doing it where you have a document that's got years of ideas in this document. When you get stuck, you often refer back to that document for, I guess, inspiration or ideas. Is that true?

Adam Alter: It's true. It's not just one document. It's a few documents. There are a few for different purposes. But yes, absolutely. I have one very broad, these are just good ideas document. I have research ideas. It's much more about my work and my academic work. I have a documents. It's probably 250 research projects long. That's several careers worth of ideas that could be tested in the lab, and I will never get to them. But I like writing them down, because if I ever get to a point where I say, a new student comes to NYU and says, "I want to work with you. What can we work on?" I go, "Read those 250 ideas." Pick out five that seem like they've meshed with what the student's background is and ideas are. And we can talk about them and say, "Hey, let's whittle this down." I absolutely still do that. In fact, I'd say the most recent time I opened that document was two days ago, it's always open.

Cameron Passmore: How important is persistence in creativity?

Adam Alter: Well, there are two ideas that people bring to understanding creativity. The one is known as the insight lens. The insight lens suggests that creativity is essentially just waiting for ideas to fall from the sky. There's something mystical about the process. It's almost religious. The idea drops on you from above, and you're just lucky, and you're there to receive it. You catch it as it falls. That's that the Eureka effect, where you don't see the origin of your good ideas. That's one way to think of creativity, and certainly, some creative ideas do seem to just drop from the sky. That's not quite true. They're often the product of all sorts of background work, but they do feel like they fall from the sky.

But the alternative is the productivity lens, where creativity is essentially the result of a lot of hard work. I adhere to that belief. I think it's easy to fall into the trap of saying we don't fully understand something, it seems a bit mystical, so let's just assume it happens in a way that can't be explained by science, and hard work, and grit. But I actually think a lot of creativity, there's a lot of evidence for this. Creativity often does come from application from failing many, many times. But failing in an ever more valuable way, where you're moving closer to or converging on the goal. There's a lot of evidence for this.

There's this really interesting effect known as the creativity cliff illusion. What it suggests is that, when you ask people, you give them a task. So you say to them, "You have a new business, it doesn't matter what the business does. But you're selling a product, you tell them what the product is, and then you say, "I want you to come up with 20 different names for this company." That's our creative brief, is to come up with 20 names. Then you say to them, "Do you think the best names you come up with, the most creative names will be among the first five or the last five of those 20? Will they be within ideas one to five, or in ideas 16 to 20?"

Almost, universally, people say, "Well, if I think about it, the first few tumbles out. They feel like the product of great inspiration. They're easy to access, but then it gets kind of hard. I associate in general, something that's difficult with a lack of proficiency. So they assume that those six ideas, 16 to 20, that's so far down the line. Those are going to be hard to come by, they're not going to be very good. What they say is that, my creativity is going to hit a cliff, and that's going to drop. I think my best ideas will come up front. That's the instinct a lot of us have.

But actually, when you get people to do this task, the first five ideas I've tried, and boring, and they look a lot like what everyone else is coming up with. There's a reason we're all swimming through the same cultural soup, that's inspiring those obvious ideas that tumble out of our heads. What happens by the time you get to 16 to 20, those ideas down the line is, you've diverged from the way you normally think of the world because you've been forced to. That difficulty you're experiencing is a sign that you're diverging from the herd, and from the way you'd normally approach the problem. That's where the magic happens.

A lot of people quit too early. But if you persist, say 50% beyond where you thought you needed to, the good stuff will flow at that point. A lot of us are blindsided by that.

Ben Felix: My dad always used to say, and still says that success comes when opportunity meets preparation. I was thinking about that, as you're talking just now. On that line of thought, though, can you talk about the role of luck in breakthroughs?

Adam Alter: I think what your dad was suggesting there is exactly right, that luck is a big part of that. That you could be the perfect person to found a massive company that's going to be worth billions of dollars. But unfortunately, you were born in the year 1312. So it turns out, you're about 700 years too early. That's unfortunate. That's bad luck. The idea here is that time matters a huge amount. That's an intractable stuckness. If you imagine the Internet in the year 1312, unfortunately, there's no way you're going to be able to make that happen. You're probably very interesting, unusual person, maybe burned at the stake for some of your ideas. But you're born at the wrong time, there's nothing you can do about that. Maybe you can turn that to other good use.

But in a more narrow sense, in a more local sense, luck is a huge part of breakthroughs, because you kind of have to be available to capture the serendipities that arrive, the unplanned good things that happen that make something possible. The idea here is that, you're essentially throwing a lot of darts at the dartboard. A lot of the times, we fail, and there's a lot of evidence for this. It doesn't matter what you do. Whether you're an actor going for auditions, whether you're a painter trying to find a new style, whether you're an entrepreneur who's founded 27 companies, and the 28th one happens to be the hit. You're going to fail a huge amount, but in order to win, you've got to be in the game.

Essentially, luck is about – the idea we have is that luck is this mystical thing, again, a little bit like creativity. But actually, luck is just about how long you're playing the game. Because across a lifespan, if you keep applying yourself, there will be moments where luck works, where the timing is right, where serendipity arrives. But if you're out of the game, it's a little bit like being out of the stock market on certain golden days. You're going to miss out on those really big returns. So luck is essentially, I think of it as just being in the game, being ready for it, being receptive to it. That's often where really big, unplanned breakthroughs happen.

Ben Felix: Another thing my dad says is, "You make your own luck."

Adam Alter: That's it. Yes, you got to be in the game to make it.

Cameron Passmore: What's the random impact rule?

Adam Alter: I think that's in the context of careers. I think there's this work that focuses on, when in our careers, we have a hot streak, when our work is going to be most effective, when we're going to hit these golden periods of our working lives. It's this interesting idea that most of us during our working lives have at least one hot streak. We have at least one golden moment. Some of us have more than one. But actually, the way those are distributed across time varies pretty dramatically. Some people have what's known as a springtime career where the hottest period in their careers is early on. Some people have a winter career, where the end of their career is the best period. Most people have a summertime career where it's somewhere in the middle.

Then, there are people who have these recurring hot streaks over and over again. The question is, what exactly is it that produces these cases, where you have a career, where you have multiple hot streaks. The thing that seems to predict the best, according to a lot of researches. If you engage in two processes in order, and the processes are, first one is known as exploration. Exploration is where you essentially say, I'm going to spend a little bit of time gathering as much intel as I can, trying different approaches.

So in the context of, say, a career of an artist, the artist, Jackson Pollock spent about seven years trying every imaginable art style. He tried Expressionism, and Fauvism, and Cubism, and Surrealism. If you look at his works during that time, it was an absolute hodgepodge of different styles. And one day, he tried the drip technique that ended up becoming what he became best known for it, made him one of the wealthiest artists of his time as well. He was successful in commercial respects, in critical respects as well. What happened was, he was doing this exploration, and then he moved – as soon as he found a style that seemed to work pretty well, he moved to exploitation, where he became one track focused on just a style.

You see him almost schizophrenically jumping around from style to style. Then he says, "Done, I know what I'm looking for." And he spends this seven-year period just doing this one thing over and over again a thousand times. Now, you can't do just one of those things, you can't always be the person who's like, "I'm going to try 15 different hobbies, and I'm going to try 27 careers, and then I'm going to wake up one day, and realized I didn't actually get deep on any of them." But you also can't be the person who says, "I think what I'm going to do is spend the rest of my life on this one thing without having any idea what the alternatives are."

There's a balance there, and these people have these recurring hot streaks across time. The people who go broad, and then they go very narrow, they go broad, and they go very narrow. That cycle seems to project great productivity in our working lives, and otherwise, creativity as well.

Ben Felix: Can you talk about the practical difference between striving for excellence and for perfection?

Adam Alter: Every now and again, you'll come upon an idea that just changes dramatically how you think about major aspects of life. I think this was one of them. If you're a perfectionist by nature, you're the kind of person who wants to be the best at everything you do, or you want to be your best version of everything. You're incredibly driven. The question is, how do you do that? How do you do that also without burning out? How do you do it in a way that's sustainable across time?

The nice thing about this difference between excellence and perfection is that perfection is an incredibly demotivating, unrealistic ideal. It's not something you can sustain over time. It's probably not something you can ever reach. By definition, it's unattainable, in most instances. Sure, you can get 100 out of 100 on a math test. What really matters is not whether you get 100 out of 100 on a math test. But there are domains where perfection is unattainable, and that's what really, really matters, I think in a lot of our lives.

That's what the stuff that matters the most. If you try to be perfect at everything, it's demotivating, because you never quite reached that goal, and you might always feel a little bit less than what the goal implies. Excellence is a much better alternative, because excellence recognizes that there is room between excellence and perfection that you can, on any one day be excellent without being perfect. In fact, excellence, the nice thing about it is that it bobs up and down on the water. On a really good day, you might wake up and excellence is 99% the way towards perfection. On another day, you're exhausted, you're overwhelmed, you're overworked, too many things are going on. Excellence today is just getting through the day. It's 50%. Excellence is a much more flexible, malleable target to aim for. It recognizes that humans are human. Whereas, perfection is, by definition, kind of superhuman, and it's not a valuable way to think about your striving and your approach to goals.

Ben Felix: Similar theme to the mathematician anecdote.

Adam Alter: I totally agree. He was not perfect in solving this problem, but he was excellent every day.

Cameron Passmore: I was just thinking about your book, and I want to go back to your list that you have in terms of inspiring for creativity. I remember in your book, you talked about how trying to do something completely new can actually be a recipe for paralysis. Can you expand on that?

Adam Alter: Yes. This is the originality trap that in our culture, we prize radical originality. This idea that you've got to do something completely new. That's true of, say, businesses that your business has to be your product, your idea has to be completely new. Your approach to some problem has to be just radically different from anything that's come before. If you're an artist, a musician, a filmmaker, doesn't matter what you do, you got to come up with something really radically new. First of all, that's a fiction. It's not even a real thing. This idea of radical originality doesn't exist in the real world, that really, almost everything is evolution rather than revolution. That's an important thing to understand, because it changes how you try to manufacture these new things, recognizing that they're not radically new.

In the book, I talk about some examples. One of them that's always been interesting to me is Bob Dylan, that in the 20th century, looking back, and thinking about Western music. When you ask musical experts who is a true original of the 20th century, someone who is unlike anyone else. There are lots of responses to that. The single most common response is Bob Dylan, people talk about his songwriting, the way he sang, the way he played the guitar. Everything that he did, you have a way of thinking of what he did is being truly original.

But actually, when you go back, you look at the DNA, and look at what filtered through his work, and where he was inspired by what. You find that actually, it's just not true. Even he was quick to admit that he was inspired by several genres. He mashed them all together in a way that was unique. Certainly, the product was unique. No one else was Bob Dylan. But he was basically the product of a whole lot of different building blocks.

What's important about the difference between this radical originality idea and what Bob Dylan was, is that he wasn't radically original. He was just a radically original combination of old building blocks, of existing building blocks. That's what most creativity, and originality, and newness actually is. It's not radically new, it's not something that we've never seen the likes of before. It's the natural consequence of taking these old things and moving them together and putting the jigsaw together in a radically new way. When you know that, you asked me earlier about this document of ideas I have. This document of ideas, it's essentially in the service of combinatorial newness. Taking these old things, recombining them in new ways, and finding something new.

If you want to write a book, do you want to write a book that's radically original? Maybe, maybe that's what you're trying to do. But it turns out that most radically original books stand on the shoulders of lots of other books. If you have a really big list of ideas to draw on, and then you mash them together in new ways, you'll find something great.

The nice thing about that practically is, if you're stuck, trying to find something radically new is, how do you even begin to do that? I don't even know how you do. You just sit down and bang your head against the desk. If you say to yourself, what I'm trying to do is find new ways to take old things and move them in ways that fits them together, you can actually do something with that. There are steps you can take. So I think it's really liberating, but also a true way of thinking of what originality and newness actually is.

Ben Felix: That rhymes with the history of technological progress. It's that same pattern. Can being stuck actually be a sign of progress?

Adam Alter: I think so. One of the reasons it can be a sign of progress is because there's an effect that's pretty robust across lots of different areas known as the plateau effect. The plateau effect suggests that for a while, you will make progress doing a certain set of things with a certain strategy. Then, you'll hit a plateau where your progress stops, where you get stuck. This seems to be true in lots of domains. There's a lot of evidence for this in physical pursuits.

So athletes who always train the same way, no matter how effective that training technique is, when they begin, eventually, it stops paying dividends. It's not just this linear endless growth chart where you just keep doing well, and keep getting better, and better, and better. What eventually happens is, you hit a plateau, you've got to change things, you've got to move things.

I think stuckness in this sense, it implies if you've been making progress in the past, that you've made so much progress that you now need to do something a little bit different to make further progress. This is true, by the way, not just athletic pursuits, but also of learning, say, new languages, or new skills. That if you keep using the same tactics to learn, you will eventually get stuck, and you'll need to do something different.

Cameron Passmore: You may have alluded to this earlier, but what are the risks of being incapable of reaching the pinnacle of your own definition of success?

Adam Alter: This gets a couple of question. One is, is your definition of success a realistic one or is it perfectionism? Is it unrealistic? If it's realistic, and you're not reaching those goals, you're not reaching the place you'd like to reach. There are a lot of very productive things I think you can do. You can pivot, you can change the goal, you can lower your standards briefly. I talk in the book a lot about the idea that stuckness is essentially just having standards that are too high in the local sense.

If you're having a really rough day, and you're a writer, and you just can't quite write the 500 words you plan to write before breakfast, then maybe what you need to do is say, "Hey, that's too stringent requirement today. Excellence for me today is not 500 words, it's 20 words." Something like that. You can be flexible with your goals. But systematically, not reaching the standards you set for yourself is obviously incredibly demotivating. It suggests that perhaps your standards are too high, or perhaps, you need to look in a different domain for inspiration. Or maybe, you should be doing something different with your time. What you get when you consistently don't reach those heights is, I think, a lot like what you get when you have that nine-ending age situation. You say to yourself, is my life meaningful? Are things working out the way I'd like them to?

I think, consistently not achieving your goals is likely to inspire maladaptive responses. So you're going to be finding other ways to cultivate meaning that might be a little bit counterproductive. In the same way that some of the responses people have to being, say 39, 49, 59 are themselves counterproductive ways of trying to generate meaning. Obviously, not a good feeling to be a human who just never achieved his or her goals.

Ben Felix: It must interact on some level with how much you enjoy the process of trying to achieve that possibly unattainable goal, like the mathematician example.

Adam Alter: It also sort of reveals, for me, one of the key problems with goal setting. I don't think there's anything wrong with knowing this is where I'm trying to get to. In a grand sense, this is my lodestar, this is where I'm heading. I'm going in this particular direction as much as I can. I think that's fine to orient your action in a certain direction. There's nothing wrong with that. But the problem with goal pursuit is, there's this fundamental illogicality to it. Because what you're doing is you're saying, I think the goal is, say it's writing 100,000 words, you're writing a book. If your only goal is to write 100,000 words, you are in a failure state until you achieve 100,000 words.

But as someone who's written books, there's nothing more demoralizing than finishing the book, feeling like you reach that goal, and saying, but it doesn't feel how I thought it would feel. I thought it was going to be amazing. There's even this incredible case of the long jumper, Bob Beamon, who in 1968, jumped 8.90 meters, which was just way two feet further than anyone had jumped before, 60 centimetres further than the next best jump. It was the absolute peak of success in what he had been doing. It was the goal. No one had even imagined the goal could be 8.90 meters.

He spent many years after that, just feeling lost, and aimless, and saying like, "What comes next? I don't know what to do next." I'm lost in my success. It's demotivated me, and left me wondering what I'm supposed to do with my life. So he actually left athletics behind to a large extent. I think better than goals is a system of behaviour that is productive. It's the mathematician going to work for 30 years, doing something he loved, and not paying attention to the goal as much as he paid attention to the system of working towards that goal, very loosely. It wasn't about progress, it was about the journey.

I think that's a much more productive way of thinking about our lives, especially our working lives. Is that, every day, I'm going to bring my most excellent self in what I can bring today to work, and I'm going to do it for a certain number of hours. My system is to do these following things. This is how I'll know I've succeeded on this day. I'm not going to pay attention to these extraneous goals as much. Maybe in the long run, it's worth keeping them in mind. But I'm going to just keep doing this thing that seems to be working for me, in general, that makes me feel like I'm generally making progress in my world.

Ben Felix: I don't remember the academic terms for it, but I know I've read a paper on post-goal attainment pleasure versus progress pleasure. The progress being more enjoyable generally, and the post-goal attainment being short-lived.

Adam Alter: That's exactly the idea, yes. It's the journey that keeps bringing returns. But the goal itself, humans are just not wired to achieve those goals. It leaves you wondering what's the next goal. You get goal escalation. The next one becomes more unattainable. You're on this treadmill that gets faster, and faster, and faster across time. As you can master that speed, you set a higher speed for yourself. Eventually, you or the treadmill, or both are going to break down. It's just not a sustainable way to conduct our lives.

Ben Felix: So you can have a fuzzy, big picture of objective, but then a system that might allow you to attain that, and you have to enjoy the system. How should people process or think about the success that they observe other people having?

Adam Alter: I actually start the book talking about this idea that success is really visible and a lot of struggle is invisible. There are lots of reasons for that. I think one of the reasons is that we live in a social media age, where everyone shares is the very best 1% of their lives. We also look at the accounts that are most successful. We all sort of follow the same basic accounts. Those are the accounts of the wealthy, the famous, the successful, the people who have teams that are doing their very best to make that person's life look as manicured and as impressive as possible.

By contrast, if you're sitting on the toilet scrolling through Instagram, your life in that moment is probably less exciting than everything you're looking at on Instagram. That's just not going to be the way to make yourself feel good about what you're doing with your time. I think social media is a really big part of it. The other part of it is just the way our culture prizes success and makes a taboo out of failure. Whatever we do, we're very quick to share successes, and there are good reasons for that. They bring us promotions, and they bring us fame, and wealth, and all this other stuff, and a claim from our friends and so on.

But actually, when you find these cases of people who are transparent about their failures, it's very disarming, and it's unusual, and it's hugely heartening. In the book, I opened the book, actually, with the case of Brie Larson, the actress who posted this two-part YouTube video talking about her failures. It's an amazing video, because she's achieved both kinds of success in Hollywood. She has roles that have made her fabulously wealthy, she's also won an Academy Award for Best Actress. The highest kinds of objective metrics you can think of in the acting world. But she talks in these videos about having failed by her accounting 98% to 99% of the time. She goes through just film, after film, after film. Where either she didn't get a callback, or she didn't even get to the interview, or she got to the interview second round, but didn't make it.

And you look at that, and you're like, here is the most successful person in this field failing 99% of the time. The only way we know that from the outside, the only way we get beyond the Academy Award, and the fame, and the wealth, and the Captain Marvel and all of this stuff, is because she's making this video that tells us this. Now, that's true of every life that you see out there. Most people aren't making videos about their failures, she is an exception. I think it's a really useful idea that the very best people at what they do are still failing most of the time, and most of that is hidden from us.

Cameron Passmore: Our final question for you, Adam, how do you define success in your life?

Adam Alter: I define success as – I think there are a few different aspects. But for me, one of the biggest things is money as much as command over time. If I think about my days, the days when I have the most control over what I'm doing with the moments within that day, those feel like successful days. That doesn't mean they're easy, and I'm lying on a beach, and I'm sipping a cocktail. That's not what I'm talking about.

I mean, in general, I'm like the mathematician striving for that problem. Where at the end of the day, I look back and say, I can't imagine having spent my working day in a better way, a way that made me feel more enriched, gave my life more meaning. I'm very lucky, I spend a lot of my days feeling that. I have a lot of variety in my life. I think of that as success. I also think success has to be about more than you as the individual. Success is also going to be about having people around you who are enriched for your presence, for the fact that you exist. I think it's a really good way to measure your success. Not just, do I have all the things I want, but also is the fact that I exist in this world a good thing to other people, other people who benefit from my existence. I think that's true success.

Cameron Passmore: That's a beautiful answer. Adam, this has been an incredible hour. Thank you for coming on.

Adam Alter: Thanks so much for having me. Well, thank you. I appreciate it. It's been fun.

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