Aiming for the Moon
Aiming for the Moon
116. Anatomy of a Breakthrough: Return of Dr. Adam Alter (Prof. of Marketing @ New York University’s Stern School of Business and NYT Bestselling Author)
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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In this episode, professor of Marketing at New York University Stern School of Business and the Robert Stansky Teaching Excellence Faculty Fellow, dr Adam Alter, returns to the podcast. Last time we heard from Dr Alter, in episode 18, he discussed his New York Times bestselling book Irresistible the rise of addictive technology in the business of keeping us hooked. Today we'll be discussing his new book Ananomy of a Breakthrough how to Get Unstuck when it Matters Most, whether you've had a great year at downright awful year or a lukewarm remakin' it year. The end of 2023 and the beginning of 2024 brings with it a mental fresh start and with it, new resolutions and the bitter memory of some of last year's failed resolutions. However, rather than avoiding these memories of stuctice, I want to confront this universal experience.
Speaker 1:This is the Aiming for the Moon podcast and I'm your host, taylor Bledsoe. On this podcast, I interview interesting people from a teenage perspective. If you like what you hear today, please write the podcast and subscribe. You can follow us at Aiming the Number 4 Moon on all socials and stay up to date on podcast news and episodes. Check out the episode notes for Dr Alter's full bio and links to our website, aimingforthemooncom, and Episode 18, our last conversation with Dr Alter, as well as the podcast, sub-stack Lessons from Interesting People. Alrighty with that? Sit back, relax and listen in. Thanks again to Paxton Page for this incredible music. Alright, well, welcome back, dr Alter, to the episode and the podcast. Thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me, Taylor. It's really good to be back.
Speaker 1: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 this interview.
Speaker 2:I'm really glad to be back. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: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 you want to get out and kind of experience the world in a broader sense from there. And it's something that a lot of people connect with almost immediately because they're like I didn't realize everybody else was going through that. It's kind of like this community experience that no one really talks about until they realize that it's something that happens. And I just wanted to start off the conversation by going there. How common is feeling stuck in a rut, as we tend to say?
Speaker 2:I think it's universal. I think it's something that everyone experiences from time to time, and actually most of us experience it in at least one area of our lives all the time. That's been my experience. I've collected data from thousands of people from lots of different countries and what I find is that very, very quickly, when I ask them if they're stuck, after explaining the concept, almost everyone within 10 to 15 seconds starts typing a response. In other words, there's something top of mind and you're right. It is a sort of weirdly isolating experience where people sort of imagine that they're alone and yet when you look at the data, we're all alone in this, together. It's a very strange thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the other thing is, when we look at successful people you mentioned this in the introduction to your book we see all of their high points and none of the low points, particularly because, one, the low points don't get publicity and, two, we just tend to, through our own mental biases, just kind of phase out those things. Why do we do that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, I think that's one of the major reasons why we don't see the stuckness that other people are experiencing, that you pay so much attention to the headwinds that prevent you from making progress internally. You spend all this time trying to troubleshoot and figure out ways around whatever it is that's preventing you from getting to where you want to be, but those same headwinds that other people are facing are not clear to you from the outside, and that's for a few different reasons. One reason is that we don't like sharing our struggles. People just generally don't share them.
Speaker 2:It's kind of taboo, and especially in this world that's dominated by social media platforms. What we end up sharing is the polished end product of everything, and that's true whether we're regular people or whether we're giant mega-influencers, or whether we're very successful business people or artists or philosophers. It doesn't really matter who you are. What you end up sharing with the world is that success story version of you, and if you see that over and over and over again in other people that you look up to, you end up imagining that you're the only one suffering through these struggles, and obviously that's not true. It's just hard for us to imagine that other people are going through them as well.
Speaker 1:Is that a cultural thing that the Western world that's always obsessed with progress does? Or is that just a tendency over all humanity to push down the things that we don't like and raise up all the things that we're finally doing well?
Speaker 2:It's a really good question and it's actually where I began getting interested in this topic, because I found in some research I was doing about 15 years ago that there are very big differences between how the East and the West think about change in particular, but also about struggling through periods of stuckness. So in the West, in places like the US, in Canada, Australia, the UK, New Zealand, people in those countries tend to imagine that change is rare, that when it does happen they have to spend a lot of time grappling with it. They sort of think the world is just going to keep going the way it has been. And I've done some studies, for example, asking them what's going to happen to the weather over time or what's going to happen to the stock market, and they always kind of imagine that what's been happening in the past will keep happening for a while. If you ask people in the East, people in Japan, South Korea, China the same question, so you ask them that the stock market's been doing badly or it's been doing well, or it's been a rainy period or a sunny period, and you say what do you think is going to happen next, they say I think it's going to change.
Speaker 2:I think change is imminent, because change is just a very big part of a lot of Eastern philosophies, a lot of Eastern religions as well. You've got the idea in Taoism and the yin yang of balance and the movement between oscillating endpoints like day and night and light and dark and so on. And so if that's your philosophy, that's the cultural soup through which you've been swimming, you sort of come to assume that there is going to be a lot of change, which there is. And so in the West we tend to be blindsided by change, and that makes us stuck. In the East, people tend to deal with that a little bit more nimbly, and when they get stuck they start marshalling resources to deal with it much more quickly and efficiently than we do in the West.
Speaker 1:That's very interesting, especially if you look at responses to different things, like the most recent giant thing has been the pandemic and seeing how the world has like. Some people responded very quickly. Other people were like oh no, we have no protocol at all, which would make sense if you hadn't thought about this for 100 years or something In high school. Yeah, you had a thought about that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I was going to say that's exactly right. I mean, over the course of 100 years, 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 be the kind of thing that blindsides you. And yet for much of the world it did.
Speaker 1:It's another fascinating and like a relevant part of this conversation, the political, and then the culture, the geopolitical, as well as, like the not epistemological. I can't think of the word immuno, we're going to skip past the word exactly.
Speaker 2:I'm looking for.
Speaker 1:But yeah, you have stuckness in these breakthroughs and these failures, all over these different realms of knowledge.
Speaker 1:Going back to the other question. In high school you look at the world and you're like life seems linear, because that's how time works. It goes one step after another. And so you're like, okay, I got to get through high school and I want to do well in high school. I want to do well in the SAT and 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 into the right college, maybe grad school, and then we want to have a great career, and then that's all step by step by step by step, and then maybe I'll have a great breakthrough in my great career, something like that. But from my conversations with people who have turned out to be successful authors, innovators and stuff like that, it doesn't seem to really work like that. Time is linear, but not your career and your success. In your story as well. You often seem to backstep and then sidestep. Is that, I guess? Is that a common thing, or is that just different people have different experiences.
Speaker 2:I think that's very, very common, and if you think about it, even if you're not really trying very hard in college, as long as you don't fail, you end up progressing forward.
Speaker 2:You move forward because time means that you go from being a freshman to a sophomore, to a junior, to a senior, and suddenly four years later you've graduated and you have to try fairly hard not to, whereas once you leave the kind of nest of college and then you're in this real world and you've got to figure out what to do next, the world doesn't carry you along that same inevitable way that it does when you're in this kind of very linear structure that is associated with education, and so I think a lot of people are again blindsided by this idea that suddenly you have to make decisions that don't always carry you forward.
Speaker 2:They might carry you sideways or even backwards, and I think that's confronting for a lot of people. If you're not a very self-motivated person or you're unsure of what you want, it can be really confronting to suddenly find that you're not making forward progress as rapidly as you did when you were in this, this structure of a system that did naturally propel you forward. So I think you're absolutely right that a lot of what happens when people are in their early 20s, in particular as they leave college, is they have to grapple with the sense that life can be full of these sticking points, and that's not what they've necessarily experienced up to that point.
Speaker 1:So then, if we know these failures and these stuck points are common, what are the action plans exactly that we might be able to enable in the worst case scenario or, oftentimes, the common situation?
Speaker 2:So there are two broad ways of dealing with sticking points or with a period where you have that kind of uncertainty, and one is known as the process of exploration. Exploration is where you effectively say yes to all opportunities that come your way. And I give a talk to the freshman at NYU some years where I show them that over the course of a decade I got thousands and thousands of emails. But four of those emails changed my life. They were emails where someone sent me something they said. One of the examples is a publisher sent me an email and said hey, I saw some of your research, I think it's interesting and would you consider writing a book? Now, if you're in an exploration phase, when you see an email like that, even if you're busy, even if you feel like you don't have the time, you have to go and follow that thread and see where it's going to take you. So during that exploration phase, you're open to all opportunities and your default response to these opportunities should be yes. And so those four emails that I show, they were moments where my first instinct was I don't have time for this, I'm too busy, I'm working on other things. But because I was in the exploration phase, I said yes and they led to really wonderful things. Now, of course, there are thousands 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, once you've done that for long enough and you've developed a sense of what the options are, you've created a kind of menu. You then know I knew, for example, that I really liked writing and I liked the process of writing books.
Speaker 2:I then became single-minded. This is called the process of exploitation. So you move away from exploration to exploitation. Then you effectively have a default of no, unless whatever you're doing is in the service of this thing that you are single-mindedly focused on. You say no to everything else that's outside of that. And that is a really amazing way to unstick. And what we see in careers across lots of different domains is that when you explore and then you exploit and you can go back and forth between them, you will find that you hit a kind of hot streak or a golden period in your life, whether it's professionally or otherwise. And so it's a really good kind of rule of thumb for unstick that if you feel stuck, go back to exploring.
Speaker 1:For people like me, though, who tend to overthink decisions like that, how do you know when to switch back and forth? Is this thing? When do you get out of your say no phase into exploring a different opportunity? Do you just know, or do you just kind of have to gamble?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's an excellent question. There are really two ways to figure out when to switch between exploring and exploiting and back again, and one of them is to kind of use an external objective cue, especially if you're someone who finds these decisions paralyzing. So what a lot of people do is they'll say okay, for me, maybe a certain season of the year, like spring, is my exploration time, and so every spring I'm going to kind of switch on exploration and then once we hit the summer I'm going to go back to exploiting or something like that. So you use external cues. It could be time, it could be months, it could be some other thing that governs when you switch between them. And the nice thing about doing that is you don't have to then make the decision to switch, you just allow the world to do that for you. But if you're a little bit more sensitive to the cues, that's quite valuable. And so you could say something like I'm going to try five separate things that's what my exploration period is going to be and then, among the five, one of them or two of them I hope will be useful and fruitful and I'm going to follow those two, and so that's not so much about time it's about the number of exploratory processes you go through before you start exploiting.
Speaker 2:And then, if you're in the exploitation phase and you sort of hit a wall, like things start to feel a bit stale. This is what happens A lot of people. They get in a rut and they get comfortable doing what they're doing and they just don't go back to learning new things again. It's very useful, if you feel that staleness creeping in, to say, okay, I've got to do some exploring again, I've got to figure out something. That's a bit of a change. And so, instead of being that kind of person who says, all right, I'm in this kind of comfortable position, I'm going to stick with it for the next 10 years, 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 to start entertaining other options. And so I think it's a combination of these internal cues that signal to you what you should be doing and these external cues that help move you along.
Speaker 1:Another big aspect of your book is there's the thinking part of it, so dealing with the emotional and psychological just effects of being stuck in a rut. But then there's also the action part. So you have, okay, this is my step-by-step plan for how I'm going to get out of this. But then you actually have to commit to that step-by-step plan. So how do you decide? First off, if you've chosen the right plan, I mean, I guess that's kind of trial and error right there and then, two, how do you know when to commit when you actually have? Is this worth doing now, or should I keep exploring different options to try to get out?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's also a good question. So the book is a sort of roadmap. It suggests that there are certain steps you should go through before you act. And action is really the last of those steps Before you get to acting even though when you feel stuck, that's all you want to do is you kind of want to flail and figure out a way through the problem you really have to do some other things.
Speaker 2:First You've got to deal with the emotional consequences of being stuck. You've got to understand what it means to be stuck, that humans are essentially not very good 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 figure out the strategies for getting unstuck. So what am I going to do to move my way forward? And after you've done all of that, then you think about action. And so hopefully, by the time you get to action, you've done enough of the other stuff that you need to do. You've laid enough groundwork that the action you're taking is productive.
Speaker 2:Now, of course, that's not always going to be true. In fact, there's a really interesting idea that action itself is a great unsticker, even if the action that you're taking right now doesn't move you forward, if it moves you sideways, because so much of being stuck is this kind of feedback loop where you feel like you can't make progress and so you don't act and you think more and you ruminate and you feel sad and then you keep going and you go around in circles, whereas if you just act, even if the action itself is not productive say, you're a writer and you can't write this paragraph you've been trying to write. There's a guy named Jeff Tweedy who's the frontman, the singer and the writer for a band called Will Cove, and he also writes books, and he talks about the fact that some days, if you're a creative, you wake up and you don't want to do anything. So what does he do? He basically takes his normally very strict threshold and he says I'm going to lower that all the way down to the ground and I'm going to write the worst sentence I can write or the worst musical phrase I can write. And that's easy, because then all your standards go out the window. But if you do that for 15 minutes, you keep creating bad stuff. Good stuff inevitably follows, because you've shown yourself that you're not static, you're moving, and so I think that's really helpful.
Speaker 2:The other thing you're asking about how do you know you're doing the right thing Like these are the right actions to take? And what happens over time, especially with long term goals, is there is a place where you are and there's a place you want to be, and there's a gap between those two. And you can see, usually with feedback that you get from the world, if you're getting closer, if those two are getting closer. So, if you're learning a language, am I getting more fluent? If you're learning to paint, am I getting better at that? Whatever it might be, are you getting closer and closer to the goal state, or are you staying about the same distance from it? Or, in the worst case, are you getting further away from it? If you're getting further away, that's a sign you should probably try something new, like leave that behind. There are better things to do with 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 pay attention to those cues.
Speaker 1:The other aspects that we don't often think about, or at least we try to kind of push to the side, is something is grit. So you have to bear down and obviously get through these hard points in order to achieve your goal, but oftentimes you might need to just let go of it and move on to something else that might be more productive or more beneficial for you. So where is that balance? Because you don't want to obviously give in too early, as you talk about in your book, or give up too late once you've wasted way too much time doing it. So are there cues when you're working on a project or working on a different goal that are like okay, maybe this is something that I'm stuck with and it's not worth getting through?
Speaker 2:Yes, that's the sort of golden question here is that there are two ends of the spectrum. One end is to say I should always persevere, it's all about grit. Grit is everything, and I don't want to be the kind of person who doesn't see things through. The other end of the spectrum is to say there are a million things I could be doing with my time at any moment. If the thing I'm doing is not bringing me great joy and meaning, why am I doing this? I should quit immediately. Now.
Speaker 2:You can't do either one of those things all the time. You can't always follow everything through to its end, because you'll never move on to new, greener pastures, and you can't always quit because you'll never do anything. So the question that you're asking is how do you know where you are between those two ends of the spectrum? One way is to do what I just suggested, which is to pay attention to the gap between where you are and where you'd like to be, and you should probably keep going, you should probably persevere, you should tap into grit when you're getting closer to the end point, but when you're not, you should probably quit, or at least consider it. But I think another, more useful rule is to always ask what the opportunity cost of continuing is, and by that I mean if you're in a particular career or you're trying a new pursuit, you're trying to learn a language, first of all. How important is it that you achieve that? If you actually reach the goal, will it make your life meaningfully better?
Speaker 2:And the second question is if I'm not doing this, what am I doing instead? So if I imagine committing 100 hours to this task, what else could I be doing with that 100 hours? That would be potentially more fruitful, or definitely more fruitful. And if there is an answer to that that is at hand and it's achievable and it's graspable and you can just pivot slightly and go in that direction, then that's a very good sign that it's probably time to quit. And there are two books that I think make a very strong case for each of those endpoints. There's Angela Duckworth's grit on the one hand, and there's Annie Duke's quit on the other, and they both neither of those very, very intelligent authors would say you should always either quit or continue but they both make a very strong case for each of those approaches and explain when you should pursue them, and so I think there are cues that help guide you as you navigate between those two endpoints.
Speaker 1:The fascinating thing is we talked to Dr Duckworth early in our podcasting career and actually heard Vice to Teenagers towards the end, which we'll get to yours in just a little bit is quit. You should think about what exactly you're missing. What opportunities are you shielding yourself from? That might be useful to invest time in here and there, and that's something that I found fascinating for an author whose book is literally titled Grit. She considers when should you quit? And we talked about that in that episode, but winding our conversation back, kind of wrapping it up, what books have had an impact on you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's funny. So the two that I just mentioned I think are excellent, because I have this very strong philosophy that you can learn a lot about the world by exploring the very extreme versions of all the arguments that are made, and so, if there is a spectrum between quitting and continuing, you should read the most convincing, compelling treatise on each one to understand the best arguments for each and I think that's generally a really good philosophy for making your way through the world Understand the very best, rather than the worst, arguments for a proposition, 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 grit those two books are fantastic, but there are two others that I'll mention. One is written by a very good friend of mine, who I know you've interviewed in the past. Dave Epstein called Range, and Range makes the case that early on in your life you should pursue 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 my life that when David wrote that book it really spoke to me and confirmed a lot of the ideas that I'd been living by without really realizing it for many years.
Speaker 2:And then I'll say also two other authors. Both Michael Lewis and Malcolm Gladwell, are phenomenal authors. They're very. If you ask people in general who they would say are the authors they look up to and pay a lot of attention to, those names will come up often. But for me as a social scientist, as someone who does behavioral science for his career, I had to make the decision about 15 years ago that I wanted to turn that into a sort of more public facing career as well as the academic career that I have. And those two writers the way they took complex ideas and continue to take complex ideas and turn them into really digestible, interesting concepts that anyone can read and understand and get benefit from that really shaped the way I think about what I do and turned me towards this sort of path of being a slightly more public intellectual.
Speaker 1:So the last question that we ask all of our guests that I've alluded to earlier is what advice do you have for teenagers?
Speaker 2:It's got to be the same advice that I give the freshmen that you have to say yes. You have to adopt this default of saying yes, because if you don't, if your default is no, or if you're a void of these opportunities that arise early in your life, you narrow the number of options you have later on in your life. You can only potentially explore the number of things that you try at least once. And so if that menu is 1000 options long, you will have a better, more fruitful, more interesting, more varied life than if that menu is 10 options long. And so I think, very early on in your life, it is absolutely critical that whenever any opportunity even glances by, it doesn't have to be right in your lap, just grab it, take it, see what it's like, be very quick to quit if it's not for you, but you have to say yes to get to the point where you even have the luxury of being able to say no later on. So I think that's the most important thing is to cultivate a life of variety.
Speaker 1:Well, dr Alters, thank you again for coming on the podcast. Check out his book, the Anatomy of a Breakthrough. That'll be linked below. And, yeah, thank you so much again for coming on.
Speaker 2:Thanks, taylor, that was great.
