The Art of Manliness - The Art and Science of Getting Unstuck

00:00:00.000 brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast

00:00:10.980 do you feel stuck in life that you aren't making progress in a relationship job or goal and you

00:00:16.580 don't know how to fix the problem and move forward well perhaps you can take a little

00:00:20.620 solace in the fact that it's a universal human experience even amongst history's highest

00:00:24.920 achievers indeed when adam alter a social psychologist and professor of marketing looked

00:00:30.200 at the lives of successful actors musicians writers filmmakers and entrepreneurs he found

00:00:35.740 that they had all passed through times in their lives and careers when they felt totally stuck

00:00:39.660 today on the show adam who's the author of anatomy of a breakthrough how to get unstuck when it matters

00:00:44.540 most explains why getting stuck is inevitable in life as well as mindset shifts and practices to

00:00:49.520 escape from stuckness we first talk about what contributes to getting stuck including the goal

00:00:53.860 grading effect and how the illusion of the creative cliff can keep you from seeing that you may end

00:00:58.320 up doing your best work later in life we then talk about dealing with the emotional angst of feeling

00:01:02.360 stuck and how it can be better to initially accept your stuckness and kick against the pricks from

00:01:07.340 there we turn to some tactics for getting unstuck including doing a friction audit and copying the work

00:01:11.920 of others in my favorite part of the conversation we discuss the importance of recognizing when to move

00:01:16.520 from exploring to exploiting vice versa we end a conversation with why the mantra for getting unstuck

00:01:21.840 is action overall after the show's over check out our show notes at aom.is slash unstuck

00:01:26.860 all right adam alter welcome back to the show thanks so much for having me back again brett so

00:01:45.620 we had you on a few years ago to talk about your book irresistible you got a new book out called

00:01:49.660 anatomy of a breakthrough how to get unstuck when it matters most you walk readers through and how

00:01:55.100 to get unstuck so let's start out what do you mean by getting stuck yeah i mean it's a good question

00:02:00.640 because you can get stuck for 10 seconds and you can get stuck for a lifetime and i'm much more

00:02:05.120 interested in these bigger instances of being stuck across days weeks months years even decades and

00:02:10.940 those tend to be fairly common i've been running a survey for a number of years now on thousands of

00:02:15.140 people around the world asking them about their experiences of being stuck and everyone in some

00:02:19.840 respect says yeah you know when i think about it there's an area where i do feel stuck and i'd like

00:02:24.220 to make some movement and so i'm i'm also not just interested in these big instances but also instances

00:02:29.520 where we have some control so you know the april 2020 we were all stuck in place because the

00:02:35.600 government had mandated that we couldn't travel that that's not psychologically interesting to me there's

00:02:39.980 not much you can do about that you might feel stuck but that's that's just how it is for that period of

00:02:44.780 time but it turns out that far more common than that are these instances where we do have room to

00:02:49.600 move and that's what this book is focused on yeah you give three things to define being stuck in life

00:02:55.160 or in work you're temporarily unable to make progress in a domain that matters to you you've been fixed in

00:03:00.400 a place for long enough to feel psychological discomfort and your existing habits and strategies aren't

00:03:05.640 solving the problem and as you said being stuck can be caused by external forces or internal forces in this

00:03:11.600 book you're trying to focus on the internal correct yeah i i mean sometimes you're caused to be stuck by

00:03:16.880 something external but that doesn't mean you don't have the power to shape it or change it so i'm i'm interested

00:03:21.640 in cases where we have some agency where there is room for a better way and that's really what this

00:03:27.820 roadmap that i provide in the book is focused on all right so let's talk about why getting stuck is

00:03:32.400 inevitable and you highlight a few factors that contribute to getting stuck the first one is this

00:03:37.160 idea of the goal gradient effect what is that and why does it contribute to stuckness yeah so the basic

00:03:43.560 idea is that when you do something that takes sustained effort across a period of time there will

00:03:49.080 be a lull in the middle and if you think about it at the beginning of any goal you have the energy

00:03:53.720 of the excitement that comes from starting something new you tend to do things fast and effectively and

00:03:59.060 efficiently and then as the goal is it is within sight as you approach it you speed up again because

00:04:04.440 you can see the finish line either metaphorically or literally in the middle though there's this long

00:04:09.820 period of lull a sort of quiet where you are in the middle and you don't have a sense of that early

00:04:15.140 push and you don't have the sense of the goal finish line and so there's this midpoint lull which

00:04:20.340 happens in pretty much all goals whether you're a charity trying to attract money for a particular

00:04:24.380 campaign whether you're an artist trying to create a work whether you're a business it doesn't really

00:04:29.260 matter what it is you will find this midpoint lull and so that's the goal gradient effect but it's

00:04:34.980 it's also made worse by the fact that in the middle of the goal you you tend to hit a plateau so if

00:04:39.740 you keep doing things the same way let's say you're you're trying to become fit you do the same exercise

00:04:45.600 regime over and over again on your way to losing a certain amount of weight putting on a certain

00:04:49.680 amount of muscle that will stop working and it depends on the person that there are some individual

00:04:55.000 differences but within six to 18 months most people find that a regime that was working really

00:05:02.380 well for them stops working it stops having a beneficial effect now humans like things that

00:05:06.860 have worked in the past they keep doing them until they absolutely can't do them any longer

00:05:10.640 and so between this this goal gradient this midpoint lull and the fact that everything stops working and

00:05:16.900 stops being effective in time we really need to be nimble and to figure out ways to head off these

00:05:23.160 instances of stuckness before they become major issues so what are some things you can do to

00:05:27.560 mitigate the goal gradient effect and the plateau effect so with the goal gradient effect the best

00:05:32.380 thing you can do is to shrink the middle think about writing a book if it's you know i want to write

00:05:36.100 a hundred thousand words the day you start writing you might have a head of steam you might be doing

00:05:40.660 fine but there'll be a point and when you listen to writers they'll talk about this and this

00:05:44.480 explains a lot of writer's block there'll be a point very soon thereafter that you say you know

00:05:49.420 this is hard i'm struggling and the idea of a hundred thousand words is just completely overwhelming

00:05:54.120 when you've written say five hundred or a thousand or fifteen hundred so the best thing you can do is

00:05:59.300 to shrink the goal is to bracket it narrowly as they say it's about bracketing the goal in a new way

00:06:04.940 and so one thing you can do is you can break that hundred thousand words into a hundred instances of a thousand

00:06:10.400 words each and if there's something you like to do that's a small reward you can do that each time you

00:06:15.940 hit a new mark of a thousand words now the benefit of doing that is that you've shrunk the middle and

00:06:23.380 so when you shrink the middle or eliminate it all together you don't have that same lull because

00:06:27.460 you've reframed the way you think of the goal and this turns out to be very very effective for writers

00:06:31.620 for the plateau effect you know the solution is written into the problem the problem is you keep doing

00:06:37.360 the same thing it stops working the solution is to change things if you're running a race or training

00:06:42.420 for a marathon or training for an iron man or trying to whatever it might be you hit a plateau

00:06:49.420 because you're learning a language is the same thing you just need more than one technique you

00:06:54.200 can't use the same training program all the time or the same approach to learning all the time and

00:06:59.260 there's just so much evidence of that across so many domains so whenever you do anything be prepared

00:07:04.260 that within a few months there's a good chance you're going to need to do something new so be

00:07:07.820 on the hunt for another alternative and we'll talk about ways to hunt for new alternatives when we talk

00:07:12.660 about this idea of explore versus exploit here in a bit so you have a chapter about keeping going when

00:07:18.580 you hit that lull or that feeling of stuckness and you use the band the 80s synth band aha who wrote

00:07:26.600 you know take on me what can they teach us about not quitting when we hit a wall yeah i love these stories

00:07:32.980 of colossal successes and you go back and you find out that hey this thing that looks polished and

00:07:38.580 beautiful and worked exactly the way it should work when you look back it turns out it didn't always

00:07:43.860 look that way it was much more complicated and the song take on me by aha is one of the biggest selling

00:07:49.560 songs of the 80s and in fact of all time but it had several versions and iterations that came before it

00:07:56.320 and when the band was writing about what it was like to create this song they talked about how

00:08:00.220 for several years they couldn't get financial backing once they got financial backing the

00:08:05.000 version of the song they created was just a little bit rusty it didn't have quite the same

00:08:09.140 bounce that it ended up having in its final iteration they tried floating and releasing the song several

00:08:14.940 times and it just didn't take off commercially it took three or four bites at the cherry and

00:08:19.580 eventually the american arm of their recording agency said hey we got to make a great video for this and

00:08:24.540 if you know the song and you know the video it's this classic 80s video that people will watch

00:08:29.020 you know i think it's been viewed billions of times now on youtube that video launched the song

00:08:35.740 and launched the band and made the song and without that without that perseverance across a period of

00:08:41.400 many years that song wouldn't have succeeded the way it did and there are so many cultural products

00:08:46.120 like that where what you see at the end is this end product that looks like it just sort of arrived

00:08:50.780 fully formed but that's not where it began there were instances of stuckness that came before it over and

00:08:55.840 over again and you had this idea to talk about why it's important to keep going even when things

00:09:00.520 seem like it's not going anywhere and one of these ideas the serial order effect what is that

00:09:05.300 yeah so this is based on the idea of the creative cliff and what happens with the serial order effect is

00:09:11.820 some pieces of information are really accessible they come to you really fast especially the first

00:09:17.300 pieces of information and so imagine that i say to you try to come up with as many creative uses as you

00:09:22.020 can for a paper clip and what happens is early on what's top of mind tumbles out it feels like it's

00:09:29.540 really easy you can start thinking of some ideas that just come to your mind without much trouble

00:09:33.820 and eventually what happens is you hit a wall that as you get deeper into the list and into some ideas

00:09:40.360 that are perhaps a little bit further afield it starts to feel hard and humans interpret that sort of

00:09:46.280 mental difficulty that comes with struggling through a problem like that as

00:09:49.900 we're on the verge of failure we're not doing a very good job but it turns out that in in the world

00:09:54.440 of creativity the good stuff happens once it starts getting hard because the easy stuff everyone can

00:10:00.220 do there's nothing interesting about what comes easily to you because it probably comes easily

00:10:04.100 to everyone else as well and so this the big idea is that you've really got to persevere that those

00:10:09.880 ideas that come later on are often the best ideas even though we sort of perceive them as being less

00:10:15.740 good because they come to us with a bit more difficulty and trial gotcha so the creative

00:10:20.380 cliff is this idea it's an illusion that our best ideas come early and then after that they're not any

00:10:26.240 good but it's actually the opposite usually the better ideas come after that wall yeah sorry yeah

00:10:30.960 that's exactly right so if you ask people uh you know imagine that i'm going to ask you to try to

00:10:36.460 come up with ideas and you you're going to do 10 ideas now and then we'll do a second session of 10 ideas

00:10:41.320 after that when do you think your best ideas will come and almost everyone says my best ideas will

00:10:46.160 come first and then the ideas you know ideas 11 to 20 later on are not going to be as good it's going

00:10:51.820 to be harder and it's just probably going to be a bit stale by that point but when you actually look

00:10:56.640 that's an illusion that we all have or most of us have the good stuff comes at the end and that's the

00:11:02.740 creative cliff illusion we think our creativity is going to fall off a cliff but actually it skyrockets

00:11:07.940 it takes off and so as things get hard interesting ideas tend to tumble out if you persevere it's a

00:11:13.960 mistake to quit at that point so the idea to mitigate that is just to keep when it feels hard just you

00:11:18.940 got to keep going it's not working until it feels hard basically so that's your signal that you're

00:11:24.380 doing something right and that doesn't mean go on forever right there is a cottage industry of books

00:11:29.260 now that say you should quit we don't quit often enough and i think that's true i think there are many

00:11:34.000 times when you need to quit but if you're in a concerted period of trying to come up with creative

00:11:38.900 ideas or solutions do not think that because it gets hard you failed or that you should stop that's

00:11:44.800 the moment when you really got to dig in and keep going for a bit longer and i love this idea of the

00:11:48.960 creative cliff because i'm in middle age now i've turned 40 and there's this popular idea that people

00:11:53.920 have that if you don't if you're not a success in your 20s or 30s you're pretty much it's it's over for

00:11:59.280 you but no actually as you get older if you keep pushing beyond and keep producing you can't have

00:12:05.280 still be prolific even in your 40s 50s 60s exactly yeah and actually you know what we focus on in the

00:12:12.760 media in uh podcasts in popular culture in general is these cases of precocious talent we're very

00:12:19.140 fascinated by people in their teens and 20s who come up with brilliant ideas make huge amounts of

00:12:23.980 money are very successful and and young prodigies talents like that precocious talents are fascinating

00:12:29.780 but they're also incredibly unusual when you look at the the people who start the most successful

00:12:34.940 businesses in the world they are on average between 40 and 50 years old and there's a good reason for

00:12:41.040 that it's not surprising it's only surprising against the backdrop of assuming that you have to be

00:12:45.760 incredibly young to be a successful entrepreneur but by 40 or 50 you've lived a bit you've got a little

00:12:50.740 bit more experience you know what works and doesn't and you've refined your ideas and talents

00:12:54.760 and yeah using that same creative cliff idea across the longer period of decades things have started to

00:13:01.400 perhaps get hard maybe your first ideas in your 20s and 30s weren't perfect but they came easily and then

00:13:06.740 things might have got a little bit harder in your 30s 40s 50s but that's when they get good and

00:13:11.740 interesting and when you use that experience to great effect and you also talk about the impact of luck

00:13:17.080 in creative endeavors or in work endeavors some businesses some professions some things are more

00:13:23.240 prone to luck and that can be demoralizing right you put out good stuff and then nothing happens

00:13:28.980 but you have to keep going because maybe the next one that will be the thing that that catapults you to

00:13:35.240 success like every time you do something it's like it's like buying a lottery ticket in a sense

00:13:39.120 yeah exactly you know you sort of see luck as this kind of mystical thing and it it robs you of a sense of

00:13:46.020 control but the way to really think about luck is that it just is the thing that emerges after

00:13:51.500 enough time it may come soon it may come later but if you have enough attempts at whatever it is that

00:13:56.320 you're doing or you do it for long enough you can manufacture luck it's it's a little unpredictable but

00:14:01.500 regardless of which career you in regardless of how much luck is attached to that particular career

00:14:06.180 by continuing on by pushing through you do tend to stumble on it eventually so in the second half of

00:14:12.480 the book you talk about how to deal with the depression and angst that can come with getting stuck

00:14:18.980 and one strategy is radical acceptance what is that yeah radical acceptance it's this idea from eastern

00:14:25.860 philosophy from buddhism that things kind of suck sometimes things get hard and you basically got to

00:14:33.440 take a couple of deep breaths and accept that that's the way they are and it's more complicated than that

00:14:38.080 it there's quite a lot written about it and how it works but the basic idea is the first thing you need

00:14:44.280 to do is just take a pause and kind of accept where you are before you start making strategies to change

00:14:49.540 and there are sort of versions of this in the book that i talk about that are much more down to earth

00:14:54.000 than this this philosophy which is a little bit abstract but when you look at how some of the most

00:14:59.300 talented people in their fields respond to being stuck a lot of them paradoxically do less

00:15:05.400 they slow down they do the kind of zen thing which is to say they don't do anything at least initially

00:15:11.980 and that's that turns out to be a tremendously beneficial way of at least initially coping with

00:15:17.700 with stuckness i talk about leonel messi and andre agassi and the jazz pianist herbie hancock there are a

00:15:24.040 whole lot of examples in the book of these people who learn to do less to get more out of themselves

00:15:28.400 well yeah i think this idea of radical acceptance i think people confuse it with

00:15:32.360 having to like they they confuse acceptance with putting a value judgment on it so just because you

00:15:38.800 accept something doesn't mean you think it's good you're accepting the fact that you're in a crappy

00:15:43.300 situation the same way you'd accept the fact that the sky is blue yeah exactly and in a lot of the

00:15:49.160 cases that i'm focusing on in the book you can accept that things are the way they are right now

00:15:53.760 without having to accept that they'll always be like this and so you accept it you say it sucks that

00:15:58.340 i'm in this position i'm going to have to do something to get out of it and very often there

00:16:02.300 is something you can do but it's okay to take a moment to just say hey this is this is kind of

00:16:06.700 painful this is not working the way i'd like it to work some change has been visited upon me in a way

00:16:11.660 that i didn't anticipate or invite and now i have to figure out what to do next but it's okay to take a

00:16:17.620 minute to strategize slow things down turn down the temperature and that's what these geniuses from

00:16:23.040 you know einstein did this mozart did this claude monet did this they all would spend long periods

00:16:28.740 of time just kind of mired in what the situation was before they tackled it before they came up with

00:16:35.760 a strategy to move forward and as you said once they do the acceptance one of the things they do is

00:16:40.060 they take their foot off the gas and they might even start relaxing their definition of success

00:16:45.680 and it's interesting because you think when you're you're stuck you want to push harder

00:16:50.100 and that could be that maybe you need to do that in some situations but oftentimes if you just take

00:16:54.740 your foot off the gas that might help you get unstuck it's like i mean the same thing when you're

00:16:58.060 trying to get a car unstuck right you want to kind of rock it back and forth so you're gonna push on

00:17:02.400 the gas take it off let it rock push on the gas and it'll get you unstuck yeah i mean that's exactly

00:17:08.100 right and i the way i think about it is there's a very big difference between being physically stuck

00:17:13.460 and being stuck metaphorically or emotionally or psychologically the way i'm interested in this

00:17:19.800 book you know there are all these cases of hysterical strength where you read someone you know lifted a

00:17:25.640 car off another person or something like that humans are really well designed for instances of being

00:17:31.100 physically entrapped we have a lot of mechanisms we have a rush of adrenaline all of that sort of helps

00:17:37.300 us get unstuck physically but the same just hurts you when you're trying to get unstuck mentally because

00:17:43.580 what you really got to do is as you said turn down the temperature slow things down your first instinct

00:17:49.880 to just do anything to get unstuck in that case is just unhelpful so i think that's a that's a really

00:17:55.500 important insight that the first thing you've got to do as you say is turn down the temperature yeah

00:17:59.340 and you mentioned messi he does this in his he's the greatest soccer player ever but he's got

00:18:02.620 really bad nerves or anxiety before a game and the way he counters that you go into detail about it

00:18:08.880 but basically he just says i'm going to take my time before i get going in a game he'll spend the

00:18:13.340 first couple minutes of a game just kind of walking around near the sideline not not being part of the

00:18:17.060 action it's totally fascinating yeah i agree with you i think he's the greatest player today maybe of all

00:18:22.380 time and i was very very surprised to learn this that he is he's among the most anxious soccer

00:18:28.480 players on the field and in fact in his early days his coaches said i don't know that this guy is

00:18:34.120 going to make it because he's got talent but he doesn't have the temperament for the game and so

00:18:38.040 messi had to figure out a way to get unstuck he would start games and sometimes he'd be physically

00:18:42.740 sick he just really couldn't play at the beginning of those games and sometimes he would be debilitated

00:18:47.080 they'd have to take him off the field so that's exactly right what he does now is he spends the first

00:18:52.780 roughly three or four minutes of the game ambling around the center circle of the field he doesn't

00:18:58.000 really move around much if you plot the movement of all the other players they're darting around the

00:19:02.080 field trying to get into the game and he's barely moving he walks and he's doing that for two reasons

00:19:06.980 one of them is because it helps him calm his nerves gives him a few minutes to kind of get into the game

00:19:11.700 so he's more effective for the remaining you know 85 plus minutes but the other thing it does is it makes

00:19:17.620 him incredibly good as a strategic perceiver of the game because he spends those few minutes saying oh i see

00:19:24.500 there's an injury over there that play is limping these two players are not working particularly

00:19:28.600 well together i can exploit that later on on his own team he'll see who's playing well who's doing

00:19:33.780 something strange and so what he does is he kind of compiles this idiosyncratic list of features of

00:19:40.080 that particular game that he can then bank away and use for the remaining time in the game and so it

00:19:45.220 makes him just unbelievably effective for the rest of the game now he's never scored a goal in the first

00:19:50.300 two minutes of a soccer match but he scored in every minute from minute three on which shows you

00:19:54.820 that he really isn't playing the game until that third minute so another thing we need to learn how

00:19:59.660 to do when we get stuck is learning how to fail well because oftentimes we get stuck because we've had

00:20:05.380 some sort of failure right we didn't achieve a goal or something like that had happened so we kind of

00:20:09.580 were stuck in this little plateau mode trying to figure out what to do so what can we do to fail

00:20:14.600 better because failing doesn't feel great no it doesn't feel great the first thing to do is to

00:20:19.540 recognize that there is an optimal failure rate in general there are some studies that have tried to

00:20:25.360 look at this how do you maximize growth and how do you minimize getting stuck and what you find is that

00:20:31.240 about roughly one in six to one in four occasions when you're practicing or trying something or learning

00:20:37.080 something new you should be failing if you fail much less than that you're not going to grow you're just

00:20:43.060 going to be doing the same thing over and over and again like hitting your head against the wall

00:20:46.340 if you fail much more than that you're going to become demotivated and that means that whatever

00:20:51.940 you've put in front of yourself is a little bit too advanced for the level that you're at right now

00:20:56.300 and so that's the first thing failing well involves first of all failing at all you've got to fail

00:21:00.800 the right amount roughly and to temper the practice sessions and the learning experiences so that

00:21:06.520 you're failing roughly the right amount the second thing is to basically over train is one thing you

00:21:12.180 can do that's very effective there are a lot of athletes who do this but to inoculate yourself

00:21:17.120 against the hardship that will come when the real experience arrives so you know there are golfers who

00:21:22.960 will play three rounds of golf on a practice day so that when they have to play a single round of

00:21:27.980 golf they are deeply focused for that 72 plus or minus shots and so if you're hitting 300 or 250 shots

00:21:35.040 in a day and you can focus for all of those it's obviously going to be easier to focus for 70 shots

00:21:39.220 and so over training is a great thing you can do and then the last thing i would say about failing

00:21:43.760 well is you want to make sure that as you fail and you don't quite reach your goals the gap is getting

00:21:48.340 smaller across time so you're you're learning to the point where you're converging on the goal even if

00:21:53.620 you haven't quite got there yet and honestly if you're not and you're not happy with that and it

00:21:58.600 looks like over time you're diverging from the goal you're moving further away from it you're not

00:22:02.460 getting closer maybe it's time to try something else well it's interesting this idea of you need to fail in

00:22:08.580 to succeed and failure closes the gap to your goal this reminds me did you watch that video of

00:22:13.840 yannis the basketball player from the milwaukee bucks yeah i thought it was fantastic yeah he has

00:22:18.820 that same sort of he's had this great response to a reporter who asked him you know is the season of

00:22:23.080 failure because the bucks you know they lost to the miami heat and he was his response was awesome

00:22:28.440 he just said you asked me this question last year it's a dumb question he said look every time i fail

00:22:34.400 it's a step towards success he says michael jordan played 15 seasons he won six championships

00:22:39.220 he says were the other nine years of failure he's like no those those failures led to those successes

00:22:44.220 so i think that's a great way to think about failures are steps to success yeah i i agree and i i thought

00:22:49.940 you've captured the best parts of the video that where he talks about jordan's 15 year career and

00:22:54.280 says nine were nine of the years failure i think one of the things that highlights as well

00:22:58.380 is that we see failure as a kind of binary or failure success as a kind of binary you're either

00:23:04.480 failing or you're succeeding and the idea that you can break down a career and say well fail fail fail

00:23:10.040 success fail fail fail success the way this reporter was trying to do with yannis telling him that because

00:23:15.140 he hadn't won a championship that year it was a failure is just it's first of all it's deeply

00:23:20.080 unproductive it doesn't help it doesn't make your life better it doesn't help you progress or persevere

00:23:24.520 failure but also it's it's just misguided it's the world doesn't operate on that particular binary

00:23:29.320 because failures lead to the next thing and the next thing is often better than what came before

00:23:33.580 precisely because there was this what that reporter would call failure we're going to take a quick

00:23:39.080 break for your words from our sponsors and now back to the show all right so we've dealt with the

00:23:48.420 emotional aspect of being stuck so reframe how you think about failure take your foot off the gas

00:23:53.400 practice radical acceptance the next part is to start coming up with a plan to get unstuck

00:23:57.980 and one of these things you suggest doing is called a friction audit what is that and how can it help us

00:24:03.180 get unstuck yeah so this started i do a fair amount of business consulting and consulting for charities and

00:24:08.780 non-profit organizations and you know the big question a lot of these organizations have is how can

00:24:14.200 we spend less money to make more of an impact or how can we spend less money to do better sales or

00:24:20.780 whatever it is they want and so the technique that i've found with a great return on investment is

00:24:26.000 known as a friction audit and so what you do is if you think about a company that's making a product

00:24:30.260 you essentially have two ways to improve your bottom line one way is to make the product better

00:24:36.040 and that's expensive you know sweeten the deal make the carrot more attractive get people in the door

00:24:41.380 get more people in the door have them stay for longer you can do that as a business but it's not cheap

00:24:46.320 it's hard you're going to have competitors and you know so that's not the road to go the road to go

00:24:50.980 is to say one of the reasons we're not doing more or doing better is because there are friction points

00:24:56.300 people are getting stuck in interacting with our company or in the process of completing a sale or

00:25:00.860 whatever it might be so the best thing we can do is to remove some friction so the friction audit is

00:25:06.380 this process that i originally used in this business context where you say where is the friction how can we

00:25:12.180 intervene on it how can we sand it down so we remove it or or at least make it a little bit

00:25:16.340 less friction filled and then let's confirm that it's actually done some good an example of this is

00:25:21.740 i worked with a whole lot of shopping malls they found that a lot of parents were coming and shopping

00:25:25.720 and abandoning their carts without buying they figured out it was because one of the kids they came

00:25:30.380 with had a tantrum and they had to leave so you put in these very inexpensive little play

00:25:35.040 playgrounds and gyms and things jungle gyms they cost a few thousand dollars to install and over the course of a

00:25:40.620 year you save a hundred thousand dollars of lost sales and so that small investment massive return

00:25:46.480 but this works in our lives as well you know you can run a friction audit i talk about this process in

00:25:51.400 the book you can run that process on any aspect of your life relationships work creativity athletics

00:25:59.520 it doesn't really matter what it is it applies there as well i mean i imagine you could do this if you're

00:26:04.300 trying to lose weight kind of look at your life okay what is causing me to maintain the weight that i'm at

00:26:09.880 and preventing me from putting into action my intentions right so it could be well the friction

00:26:15.740 point you actually you can actually do this you can actually increase friction right if it's too easy

00:26:20.040 to get to food that's not good for you the friction audit would say well i can make this harder by just

00:26:25.480 not even buying the stuff and putting in my house yeah exactly my last book on phones and screens and how

00:26:31.160 much time we spend on them was about largely this idea that it is just too easy to start using these

00:26:37.800 products and so they end up sucking up a huge amount of our lives just as you might say i won't

00:26:42.900 buy chocolate because i don't want to eat chocolate you know if you keep your phone far away from you

00:26:46.840 you create friction you're much less likely to use your phone and so this it's an important general

00:26:51.720 insight about humans that the things that are close to us or that are easy to access are the things we

00:26:56.160 spend more time interacting with and doing the things that are much further away tend to have a smaller

00:27:01.520 impact on our lives and so you've got to sort of design your the world around you the way you design

00:27:07.760 any other thing the way an architect would design a building or a city you've got to do that for your

00:27:13.140 own world and so keep things around you that you want to have around that'll do good things for you and

00:27:18.000 the things that you don't want to keep around you because you think they're going to make your life

00:27:21.020 worse off make sure that they're nowhere near you in physical space so you also suggest when you're in

00:27:26.820 that stuck place in life or in work is try copying others to help you get unstuck how can that help you

00:27:34.280 get unstuck yeah it's funny that um you know we privilege this idea of radical originality one of the

00:27:41.520 things i teach my mba students we talk about innovations and we look at all the greatest products

00:27:46.720 of the last 50 years we talk about them and i ask my students tell me a product that's truly radically

00:27:51.540 original that had no no predecessor there was it wasn't built on the ideas of someone else and it's

00:27:57.940 very very very difficult to do that with products and it's just as difficult to do that with things

00:28:03.540 like films or music or art and the problem with privileging and putting on a pedestal radical originality

00:28:11.140 is that it sets this unrealistic bar and so i talk about the idea that a better way to go is to

00:28:16.340 recombine old ideas and actually almost every instance of something that seems from the outside

00:28:21.800 like it's new and radically different is just a new way of thinking of two things or meshing two or

00:28:27.560 more things together i talk a little bit about for example dave grohl bob dylan these musicians who

00:28:34.300 when people talk about them they say you know they're doing something that's pretty new and pretty different

00:28:38.460 and even other musicians say about bob dylan in particular you know he was a genuinely original voice

00:28:43.440 of the 20th century but when you go back and you look at where his origins began he was combining

00:28:50.240 folk he was combining rock at the time pop he was combining blues he put it all together in a new way

00:28:57.560 but the building blocks of all of that were not themselves new and i think that's it's an important

00:29:02.540 insight because it makes the process of coming up with good ideas with good products with good whatever

00:29:07.220 things you're trying to create much more tractable it means you're much more likely to succeed

00:29:11.620 when i read this idea of copying others it made me think of the idea of woodshedding do you know

00:29:16.560 about this idea no i don't so woodshedding comes from jazz you're supposed to go to the woodshed

00:29:21.680 where it's kind of far away and no one can hear you in practice and the idea is you practice where

00:29:26.780 no one can hear you so that you could come back later and then show off what you've learned and i

00:29:32.460 think woodshedding you can copy the work of others in woodshed at the same time right like you want

00:29:37.700 to do this in private you wouldn't want to copy someone out in the public blatantly because that's

00:29:42.080 just that's just copying that's like plagiarism but what you can do is you can take the work of others

00:29:47.420 and practice with it privately mess remix it try things and then once you got something new then

00:29:53.380 you can bring it out 100 yeah so no one would say that dylan isn't doing something that's on some

00:29:59.660 level different i just think that the idea that these things that seem new are kind of mystical and

00:30:05.680 just appear out of nowhere that's the nonsense right so i'm sure dylan did something like

00:30:10.100 woodshedding he took these ideas that he liked and maybe didn't even do it explicitly but they

00:30:14.720 were infused in his music and so he went and he practiced and he he created the you know the style

00:30:20.620 that became bob dylan's style but that doesn't mean that what he was doing was plagiarism or that it

00:30:26.600 wasn't on some level new and different it just means that all that other stuff seeped into it it was

00:30:32.840 like a sort of tea that had been made with all the the ideas that had come before but you need

00:30:38.040 time for it to steep and that's that process of woodshedding or practicing or honing or whatever

00:30:42.640 you want to call it so i know yeah i know what's the guy's name who wrote fear and loathing in las

00:30:47.520 vegas oh hunter s thompson yeah he supposedly typed out he was the great gatsby because he just wanted he

00:30:55.600 wanted to see what it felt like to write a great novel who knows if that did anything but maybe it did

00:31:00.660 but i i also you know austin cleon has that idea of steal like an artist yeah all artists are just

00:31:05.500 copying each other but they're it's not blatant like word you know exact copy like you said you

00:31:10.460 just kind of you work with the the previous people's stuff until it seeps into what you do

00:31:14.320 and then you come out with something original that's that's how creativity works you also have

00:31:18.800 this chapter about when you're stuck about understanding the idea or the difference between

00:31:23.240 exploring and exploiting and i really like this chapter so what's the difference between exploring and

00:31:28.300 exploiting yeah this goes back to evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology that you you

00:31:34.040 basically have essentially two ways to look for something new and fruitful and valuable let's say

00:31:40.440 you're hunting and gathering you're looking for fruit or food or whatever you're doing and you're

00:31:44.340 roaming the savannah it's thousands of years ago you can roam far and wide you know you can cover a lot

00:31:51.300 of terrain very shallowly or you can find an area that seems like it might be fruitful and really dig

00:31:56.680 deeply into that area but then you're going to be leaving a lot of the other pastures without your

00:32:01.240 attention and so you might be missing something and that's really how we are as we navigate the world

00:32:05.380 as we figure out the best way forward and so there's a lot of research on these two exploring is

00:32:10.420 basically a moment where you say yes to to opportunities or options so if you think about i for me it was like

00:32:17.000 the early days of college i didn't know exactly what i wanted to do so anytime an opportunity came along i was

00:32:21.660 like yes i will try that see what that's like figure out if that particular career path might work for me

00:32:27.600 i might meet a person who's interesting and shows me a new way of doing something i'll just say yes to

00:32:33.000 any invitation that comes my way that's exploring it's being open to different approaches jackson

00:32:38.800 pollock the painter for example before he was doing his drip paintings that he became very famous for was

00:32:43.380 trying five or six different techniques peter jackson the director of lord of the rings films and the

00:32:48.160 hobbit before he was this kind of giant fantasy epic film director and producer he was doing

00:32:55.400 a hundred other things he wrote horror films he wrote all sorts of other films and so you've got

00:32:59.980 to kind of dance around and figure out what works best but if you do that forever you're never going

00:33:04.060 to get anywhere so once you're done exploring you basically have to call it and say okay i've been

00:33:08.780 exploring for a while of the five things i explored this one looks like it's the most fruitful

00:33:14.320 and so what i'm going to do moving forward is say yes only to that thing i'm going to put all my

00:33:19.080 time and attention and money towards that thing and say no to everything else i'm going to become

00:33:24.180 singularly focused on that thing and make the most of it and that's when you see jackson pollock with

00:33:30.320 his drip paintings and you see peter jackson with his fantasy epics you just can't get there if you

00:33:37.540 don't first explore and you can't succeed if you don't after exploring exploit go really deep and make

00:33:42.920 the most of what you've got and so when you look at careers you look for the period of careers where

00:33:47.460 you find a hot streak like the best period in someone's career it's almost always after they

00:33:53.120 have explored and then exploited and sometimes multiple times between the two explore then exploit

00:33:58.320 explore then exploit and that's when those hot streaks come up i think this is great advice for

00:34:02.960 people again going back on middle age if you feel like you've reached a point in middle age where you

00:34:07.180 feel stuck you probably had a period in your 30s maybe through your 40s where you were exploiting

00:34:13.440 like you did all this exploration in your 20s you went to college try different classes try different

00:34:18.180 careers you moved to new cities made new friends and then you slowly found here this is what's working

00:34:24.000 for me i'm gonna just i'm gonna exploit this and you probably stopped exploring you might reach a point

00:34:30.140 where like i'm feeling stuck i'm feeling stagnant and that's where you have to sort of purposely and

00:34:34.720 intentionally shift into exploration mode and that can be hard because you're probably comfortable

00:34:40.140 and there's going to be an inertia not to say yes to things or try new things but that's what you got

00:34:45.540 to do yeah you're right there is an element of difficulty here right whenever you're doing something

00:34:50.540 that you've been doing for a while and therefore by definition perhaps you've reached a plateau

00:34:54.980 it's very comfortable at that point part of the plateau is this signal that you are doing something

00:35:00.360 that no longer taxes you and so you're not improving and there's in some cases nothing

00:35:05.040 wrong with that but there are these famous cases of people who said i was overwhelmed with the job i

00:35:09.180 was doing so every day i wore the same clothes you know i had 10 of the same suit or you know steve jobs

00:35:14.520 in his black turtleneck barack obama in the same suits every day that's that's an attempt to kind of

00:35:20.180 minimize the mental load and so there's value in that in just doing things the same way all the time

00:35:25.300 but as you say you have to reach a point where you say i'm going to pivot back to exploring you've

00:35:29.840 got to range far and wide again how have you done this in your own career i mean you've had a long

00:35:33.880 career and varied career how have you kind of gotten over that inertia to not explore when you

00:35:39.840 needed to explore yeah i mean for me this started really early i was at university in australia i was

00:35:46.140 studying actuarial science which is this sort of high level financial math course and i knew i didn't like

00:35:52.320 it and i was on a fellowship and one day the person running the fellowship came in and said

00:35:56.220 if you keep doing this for another week you're gonna thereafter if you ever quit have to pay back

00:36:01.600 the money and that was the signal i needed so i quit i said look this isn't working for me

00:36:05.660 but i had no idea what to do next i felt you know profoundly stuck i was obviously spending a fair

00:36:12.160 amount of money being at the university amassing a fair amount of debt and i wanted to figure out what

00:36:17.460 was next but i had no idea where to go so what i did was i spent six months going to every possible

00:36:23.560 first level class that i could i went to english classes math classes chemistry classes engineering

00:36:29.620 classes psychology classes law classes you name it i i went and sat in and try to get a taste of it

00:36:35.680 and that was my period of exploration and from that i realized that i liked psychology and i liked law

00:36:41.880 and those are the two degrees i did as an undergrad psychology and law and then ended up doing what i do now

00:36:47.300 which is sort of in the beginning it was a combination of the two and then i pursued psychology

00:36:51.620 more heavily and then ultimately ended up in a business school as a marketing professor but that's

00:36:56.580 all i i couldn't have done that without that six month period of exploration i needed to do that

00:37:01.020 before i exploited the degrees and the courses that made the most sense to me well i was thinking as

00:37:05.300 you were saying that another reason why going back into explore mode could be hard is because it makes

00:37:10.060 you feel dumb right so you have to be a beginner again like you went to those introductory college

00:37:13.640 classes and it doesn't feel good to be a beginner you're thinking well i'm in i've mastered some

00:37:18.320 things why am i not sticking to that but now you got to feel how bad it feels sometimes to be a

00:37:23.400 complete noob at something oh absolutely it's it's not easy on a certain level it's uh you got to

00:37:28.620 swallow your pride but also you can think about this there are two ways to live in any moment you're

00:37:33.200 either stagnant or you're growing and one way to grow is to be a beginner beginners grow really fast

00:37:38.500 much more rapidly than experts grow and so to go from being a beginner to being someone who's

00:37:43.280 moderately proficient at something or lots of things that is a true form of growth that i think

00:37:48.020 a lot of us don't experience and don't cultivate there is massive benefit in that i will say that

00:37:52.720 period of exploration where i didn't end up becoming an english major or a chemistry major or a math major

00:37:58.440 i still learned quite a lot about those areas and i think that was important for me as well that period

00:38:04.560 of gathering little bits of information about 25 different disciplines had a massive amount of

00:38:09.960 value that i didn't foresee so it's not like this is all going to waste when you're exploring it's all

00:38:15.260 becoming a part of who you are and and david epstein wrote the book range about exactly that idea that

00:38:21.720 in the course of ultimately flourishing you've got to kind of spend some time just dancing around

00:38:27.120 different areas and figuring out if they're worthwhile for you and that will have a beneficial effect for

00:38:32.280 whatever it is you ultimately specialize in later on yeah no failures just steps to success that's it

00:38:37.580 how do you know if you're in the explore mode how do you know we need to shift to exploit mode

00:38:42.360 yeah so there are a few ways to do this one is to just say i am going to give myself a certain amount

00:38:48.840 of time so in the example i gave you when i was jumping around from different course to course in college

00:38:54.120 i knew that the semester was going to end at a certain date so i used that as my guide

00:38:58.700 and then i would have to sign up for a new program and that's what i did so i had a very clear six

00:39:04.160 month period to do that if you have objective metrics to pay attention to you know if you're

00:39:09.180 doing something that gives you numerical feedback you can use that feedback like for example you might

00:39:15.480 say i'm going to try these five different techniques let's say you're you're trying to work

00:39:20.400 out which i don't know technique of of art is the one that you want to pursue if you're an artist

00:39:26.000 something like that you could say to yourself i'm going to create five artworks in each style

00:39:31.980 and then once i've done that i'll have my 25 artworks five styles times five works and then

00:39:37.040 i'm going to decide which one to exploit so you you can use different decision rules to decide

00:39:42.800 i think also it's important to pay attention to what it feels like to be in this process because you

00:39:47.600 can get to the point where exploring gets stale where you start feeling like i i don't want to be

00:39:53.200 doing this anymore i'm ready to really focus on something and i know that happens with me with

00:39:57.360 books between books i will this is my third book now between books i'll i'll say i'm interested in

00:40:03.700 10 different things but i don't know when i'm ready to start actually making one of them a book

00:40:07.660 so i will spend a certain amount of time until i you know that the ideas become from 10 to 9 to 8 to

00:40:13.320 7 and then i'll be left with a few that look like good candidates and eventually i'll hit a wall and

00:40:18.080 just say i can't keep noodling about with this i've got to really make make a go of it and that's when

00:40:22.840 i'll write the proposal and work on the book so we've talked about how to deal with being stuck by

00:40:28.020 changing how we think about being stuck changing about how we think about failure thinking of ways

00:40:32.460 we can get unstuck but then eventually you got to start taking action so what role does action take

00:40:37.660 in helping us get unstuck yeah i so it's funny the last chapter in the book is titled action above all

00:40:44.160 and that's because all of the discussions about emotions slowing things down strategies and so on

00:40:50.620 none of that would matter for getting unstuck if you didn't do something you know all of that is

00:40:55.280 in the service of action and action is really the main thing that we're focusing on here so action is

00:41:00.860 critically important for getting unstuck because it's the thing that actually unsticks you and that's

00:41:05.100 true in a sort of very obvious sense that you can't get unstuck if you're not moving if you're static

00:41:09.800 but it's also true in a more profound sense which is that when you do something when you act even if the

00:41:16.580 action itself is not dramatically productive even if it doesn't produce something that you can then

00:41:21.380 use for the rest of time the mere fact that you're acting lubricates the wheels and gets you moving

00:41:27.060 forward there's this great example of this that i love jeff tweedy the front man of wilco who writes

00:41:33.440 music for the band wilco but also is a writer he writes books he's talked a lot about his creative

00:41:38.600 process and he talks about the fact that you know he wakes up a lot of days he's been doing this a long

00:41:43.220 time for decades and he'll wake up on a lot of days and say i don't feel like being creative today

00:41:48.500 nothing's going to happen and so what he does is he he says to himself you know what i'm going to do

00:41:53.920 i'm going to spend say half an hour in the morning pouring out all the bad ideas you know like sort of

00:41:59.020 extracting them from my brain putting them on the page and then that will make way for the good stuff

00:42:04.040 and so what he does is he says to himself what's the worst sentence i could write right now

00:42:08.240 or what's the worst you know bit of music i could compose and he does that sometimes it's better than

00:42:14.460 he thinks and it's valuable but a lot of the time it's not it's not actually useful but it's it by

00:42:19.340 definition by doing that lowering the bar all the way down to the ground you're still acting and so

00:42:24.800 you show yourself something about your capacity to act rather than sitting around a navel gazing you're

00:42:30.200 doing something and that there's value in that yeah i like that idea that quantity and quality are

00:42:34.780 related because the more stuff you put out you increase the chances of you actually having a

00:42:40.300 home run i mean the same thing with baseball right i think what everyone famously says babe ruth you

00:42:44.100 know home run king but he had like the most strikeouts he struck out a ton of times uh but

00:42:48.240 he's taking action the same same idea that applies to any other domain in life exactly and then also you

00:42:53.720 talk about besides taking action on the thing that you're wanting to get unstuck in you also talk about

00:42:58.460 just physically moving can help you get unstuck like actually getting up and moving your body can help

00:43:03.080 you get unstuck from whatever it is you're stuck in yeah there's a lot of research on the value of

00:43:09.380 walking of moving and so if you're trying to think of something and you're sitting on your seat at your

00:43:14.500 desk and it's not working walk outside if it's nice out get on a treadmill if it's not move your body

00:43:21.160 pace around it tends to sort of grease the wheels a little bit and get things moving again if you are an

00:43:26.880 athlete do whatever it is that you like doing there's this amazing set of videos of paul simon

00:43:32.100 who obviously not an athlete but a great musician and paul simon was notoriously shy

00:43:38.340 but he was he was on a number of talk shows in the 70s and 80s one of them was the dick cavett show

00:43:43.740 and he would get onto the show and cavett would ask him questions and he would just absolutely

00:43:47.380 struggle to respond and it was clear that he wasn't comfortable being there he would even make

00:43:52.100 comments about the microphone and its position he just felt really uncomfortable but cavett very wisely

00:43:57.300 said to him why don't you pick up your guitar and show us how you wrote you know bridge over troubled

00:44:01.300 water or something like that and um simon did that and the minute he started strumming he was charming

00:44:07.380 and relaxed and things came to him much more easily so if there's something you do whether it's lifting

00:44:13.620 weights going for a run riding on a bike it doesn't matter rowing whatever it is that movement seems to be

00:44:20.580 it gets you to a comfortable place mentally as well and and seems to lubricate uh whatever gears need to

00:44:27.560 be turning in your head to unstick you yeah getting into your body gets you out of your head sometimes

00:44:31.880 which can be useful well adam this has been a great conversation where can people go to learn

00:44:35.640 more about the book in your work yeah so i i'm on twitter and linkedin and my main channels that's where

00:44:41.160 i post information i've been posting about the book a fair amount there so there's quite a lot of

00:44:45.080 information there i also have a website adam alter author that is basically a compilation of all the

00:44:52.760 press material and other things that have been written about the book or that i've written about

00:44:56.280 the book and those are probably the two places but uh yeah i the book is available online it's

00:45:02.440 available in bookstores and will be available from may 16. fantastic well adam alter thanks for

00:45:06.920 his time it's been a pleasure thanks so much for having me brett my guest is adam alter he's the author

00:45:12.440 of the book anatomy of a breakthrough it's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere you can find

00:45:16.840 more information about his work at his website adamalterauthor.com also check out our show notes

00:45:21.480 at aom.is slash unstuck we find links to resources we delve deeper into this topic

00:45:33.560 well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast make sure to check out our website at

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00:46:13.000 put what you've heard into action

The Art of Manliness - July 31, 2025

The Art and Science of Getting Unstuck

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