3 Takeaways - What Einstein and Brie Larson Have in Common (#207)

Episode Date: July 23, 2024

What do Einstein, Mozart, Walt Disney, Brie Larson and many other talented and successful people have in common? The experience of being stuck — of being mired in a rut and struggling to accomplish. Here, NYU professor Adam Alter provides a detailed, actionable, and fascinating blueprint for how to get out of the rut. Be sure to listen and learn.“Colossal talents have experienced the same kinds of procrastination and productivity issues the rest of us do.”

what did you do to me now we're just after a little information what did you put in my head nothing wasn't already there but those aren't my memories yeah it's like a bad trip in there i'm not surprised you can't keep it straight i really did a number on you. Enough of your mind games. What do you want? That was Brie Larson in a scene from the 2019 blockbuster movie Captain Mar-Vell. Brie Larson's acting career is like a fairy tale. She was born in California, was homeschooled by her parents, and then had a precocious start in acting, appearing in brief TV roles before winning the highest award in acting, the Academy Award for Best Actress, as well as 70 or so other awards, including an Oscar, a Golden Globe Award,

a Primetime Emmy Award, and, and of course being selected for the title role in Mar-Vell's blockbuster movie, Captain Mar-Vell. Brie Larson is the embodiment of acting success. She has the awards, the fame, the money, the critical acclaim, and the list of credits. But her fairy tale success story is just that, a story. The problem with the story is that it ignores her two decades of frustration and disappointment and her thousands of failed auditions. It turns out that her path to success, as well as the path to success for many others, is very different from what we imagine. What does the path to success look like?

And what does it actually take to break through? Hi, everyone. I'm Lynn Thoman, and this is Three Takeaways. On Three Takeaways, I talk with some of the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, newsmakers, and scientists. Each episode ends with three key takeaways to help us understand the world and maybe even ourselves a little better. Today, I'm excited to be with NYU professor Adam Alter. Adam was fascinated by Brie Larson's story and studied what the path to success actually looks like and what it takes to break through. I'm excited to find out what he has learned.

His new book is Anatomy of a Breakthrough. Welcome Adam, and thanks so much for joining Three Takeaways today. Thanks for having me, Lynn. It is my pleasure. We are all familiar with amazing success stories, but the truth you found is very different from our image of successful people. Can you tell us about that? It's very clear to us that we face all sorts of hardships in our own lives and that we

face a lot of headwinds and that our own success has come often through a mix of luck and hard work. But it's much harder to perceive that in other people. And so one of the things I do is I start by talking about how opaque headwinds are and challenges are. And so as a result of that, unless you dig very deeply, it's hard to see that other people who are successful have faced a lot of challenges along the way. So it gives us this very skewed, asymmetric, biased portrait of what it means to be successful. We tend to believe that other people have a much easier time of it than we do. I talk about this, about athletes, about musicians, about actors, scientists, all sorts of people in different walks of life, that in general, it is very hard for us to see what they are struggling with.

So people as diverse as Albert Einstein or Mozart, they both struggled? Yeah, they didn't struggle all the time, but they had long periods where they struggled. And those are the periods that are invisible to us. We don't read that much about them. There are some really interesting stories of, for example, Einstein had long periods of time where he felt completely exhausted by his work and he would lie on his back on a bed looking up at the ceiling for sometimes hours at a time until he got unstuck. And he gave himself the license to do that, to just spend these long hours of time not doing very much. And obviously, the bursts of productivity he had were phenomenal and it was worth that time. But had he not given himself that time to relax and rest, he may not have been able to produce

the incredible works he did. And the same is true of Mozart as well. In fact, Mozart's dad, when he was young, wrote a series of letters to other people about his son, young Mozart, saying things like, I'm worried that he's not going to go anywhere. He doesn't seem like he's going to be a big success. He seems like he spends a little bit of time working, but then he needs a break. And he seems like he goes through these long periods of hardship. And we look back on these colossal talents and it's hard to believe that they experienced some of the same kinds of procrastination and productivity issues that the rest of us do, but they really are universal. I mean, you see that if you focus on the most successful

and most talented people, even those people experience these same issues. And why do you think that we recognize and see our own challenges much more than those that face other people? There are a few reasons for that. I think one of the reasons, and this is, I think, accentuated in modern times, is that we tend to share the very best moments of our lives with other people. That's partly cultural and it's partly just a technological fact that when you share information on say Instagram or on Facebook or on Snapchat or on TikTok, you're not sharing the mundane parts of your life. You're not sharing what it's like to be sitting in front of a computer for half an hour or half a day or half a month, not doing anything.

That's not interesting to people. And it's also not a very good representation of who you might think you are. So if you comb through social media platforms, all you see is the very best of everyone else's life. But that was, I think, true still in the era of Mozart and then more recently in the era of Einstein as well, that people just for cultural reasons don't share their deepest, darkest struggles. It's taboo, or it's just not a particularly flattering reflection of who they are. It's not what they want to show to the world. And so I think for cultural reasons, for technological reasons, it's just not something that we can perceive. It's also a fact that you feel there's something quite visceral about struggle. You can feel it.

It has effects on your body that are physiologic and psychological. And as a result, you have this really strong sense that you're struggling, but that struggle is invisible to the outside world. There's a kind of membrane around it. So although you can feel it in yourself, when you look at other people, it's very, very hard to perceive unless they're being vocal about it. So as a result, we kind of go through life looking at these other people who look like they're serenely making their way through the world, knowing that inside ourselves, we're going through certain

struggles. And so I think there's a real asymmetry there. And there's also an asymmetry in how we think about ourselves also. I love your example of Scrabble. Yeah, this is an example from a paper by a couple of social psychologists who wrote this fantastic paper about this asymmetry between headwinds and tailwinds and our understanding of what sorts of benefits other people have and the benefits we have versus the setbacks they have and the setbacks we have. And they basically argue that it's always so apparent to us when we face setbacks. And what seems clearer to us about other people is all the benefits they've had. We really focus on all the special advantages they seem to have that we don't. And one of the examples they use is what happens if you get

bad Scrabble tiles, that they sit on your tray and they don't move, they don't budge, and you ruminate over them and you think about them. And obviously, that's a very private experience. The whole point of Scrabble is you shouldn't know what other people are thinking about their tiles. But what you see in the other person as they play the game is a very neutral, generally not very intense, low-level state of just thinking, of thought. You don't realize there's a struggle going on there. And yet at the same time, when you have these bad tiles that sit on your tray for a long time, you spend a lot of time thinking about them and trying to figure out what to do about them. And that's, I think, generally a good portrait of the way we deal with hardships. We spend a

huge amount of time thinking about them, but we don't really see other people doing the same thing because that process is opaque. So Adam, what you found is that almost everyone encounters long periods of what you call stuckness or lack of making progress. Can you talk about some examples of strategies that people have used to overcome that? Yeah, sure. You're right. This does seem to be universal. So one thing I did was I ran a sort of long-term survey of people around the world asking them to share their experiences of stuckness. And what I found is that stuckness is very common. But to your point about strategies, people generally feel unmoored and unsure about how to strategically make their way through these periods of stuckness. But there are some,

and I talk about a lot of them, who through either just a kind of natural aptitude or through being experimental about the way they experience stuckness, they do manage to come through them. But I find that there are broadly speaking three different strategic limbs to getting unstuck, and that you really have to focus on them in this order. The first is to deal with the emotional consequences of being stuck, because we often kind of jump over that step and move right to strategy and behavior. But you really have to deal with the fact that being stuck is a really aversive experience. And until you can calm down and deal with the fact that you're stuck and accept where you are, it's very, very hard to make strategic progress. And so the best unstickers are very good at taking that time at liberating themselves,

giving themselves a moment to accept where they are and to figure out the emotional side of what it is to be stuck. The second set of strategies is really mental strategies, things that you can actually do, ways of thinking, thought patterns that seem to be helpful. And then the last thing, and I think the most important is what I call habit, which is the way we act or the way we should be acting when we're stuck. And that's really just about the kinds of actions we can take and when we should act to unstick ourselves.

So those are the broad categories of strategies. We all imagine that successful people are pretty much immediately successful. Can you tell the story about Walt Disney? We all think that he just created his iconic Mickey Mouse as an immediate inspiration. How did that work? Disney's like so many other entrepreneurs and giants of the business world that almost all of them throw hundreds of darts at the dartboard before they hit whatever bullseye they become famous for. And Disney's no different. He had a whole lot of different ventures, some of them in very different domains from what he ended up becoming successful in. And plenty of them were flops. Most of them failed. Some failed

spectacularly. And then he ended up creating this little character, this little steamboat mouse that became Mickey Mouse ultimately. That character was obviously very successful for him. And that's what launched his career as we know it today. But like so many others, you don't hear about that trail of failures that led up to whatever was the ultimate success. It's vanishingly rare to find someone who says, here's my first idea. And that idea turns them into a household name or a billionaire or whatever else you want to use as a metric of success in whatever domain you're in. It just does not work that way, even though a lot of us think of talent as being the product of a kind of almost God-given form of luck or endowment. There's very little evidence that that's true. One of my favorite stories is of

a swimmer who ended up being on the US Olympic team in the 1988 and 1992 Olympic Games. And his name is Dave Berkoff, and he swam the backstroke for the United States. But for a long time, he was just outside what would be considered elite status. He wasn't quite strong enough to make the U.S. team. And what he ended up discovering was that if he experimented, he tried different tweaks to his technique, he could swim a little bit faster. And so he worked with his coach at Harvard University, where he was at the time, to try to figure out how to swim a little bit faster. And one thing he noticed was that when his body was completelykoff blast off where he would push back off the wall and instead of emerging from the water very quickly he would spend 40 or even 45 meters and almost half of the 100 meter race underwater completely submerged as a result of that he broke the world record so not only did he become strong enough to swim on the u.s team he broke the world record and won a number of gold medals. And that all came on the back of experimentation. What I love about his story was that he was stuck in many respects. He was quite a lot smaller than a lot of the athletes who were

swimming the backstroke. They tended to have particular physiological properties that he didn't have, particularly long torsos, for example. And he didn't have that. But what he did have was this taste for experimentation. And that experimental mindset is often a big unsticker. And he found exactly that. And it made him a very successful swimmer. Another one that I quite like is one of the big questions we often have is who should we turn to for advice? Or if we're putting together a team, if you're a manager at a company, who should you put on your team? And often teams become quite homogeneous. We end up putting on a team people who are a lot like us, people who feel comfortable to us.

Maybe they have the same intellectual background. Maybe they're from the same place. Maybe they have similar demographic characteristics and so on. And that makes sense. That's what humans tend to do. It's not surprising that we do that, but often we do that to our detriment because what happens is when you're stuck, if everyone else has the same ideas, you only become further entrenched. One of the really good examples of how to do this well is what Brad Bird, an executive at Pixar, the animation company did. He found that because Pixar was so well-known for its animations, a lot of its teams, when they were making movies, became very, very fixated on perfecting, for example, the look of fur or hair or water.

And as a result of that, they stopped focusing on what was more important to the audience. And so he would bring on people who are known as the black sheep in the team. For example, a person who specialized in narrative and storytelling. And that person would be like a cat amongst the pigeons would come in and say, hang on, you're all focusing on the wrong things. No one's going to watch a movie because they like the lot of the Academy Award winning films at Pixar that ultimately made it the successful studio we know today came from that push for diversity and change and difference that comes from bringing black sheep into the mix. And so I think that's generally a very good recipe for unsticking. At one end, you could have 100% successes and at the other 100% failures. Neither one is optimal. What have you learned about failure? It's funny, I talk about it. It's a little bit tongue in cheek, but there's a paper that looks at the optimal failure rate across different

domains. So for example, you're learning a new skill athletically, or you're learning a new language or a new intellectual skill. It doesn't really matter what it is. And this paper argues that it's something absurd, like 15.87% is the optimal failure rate. I don't take that too seriously. I think it's almost silly to have two decimal points at the end of that failure rate. But I think the general point is interesting, which is that they alight on this number that's roughly one in five, one in six failures. I think there's something to the idea broadly that we need to build failure into what we're doing. That if you're succeeding every time, you're not growing at all and you're just doing more of the same thing. And there's some value to that, but I think you need to push a little

bit to the point where you're failing occasionally. But also this idea that you need to push yourself to the point of failure, maybe 50% of the time, that's also not true because you compromise on confidence and you don't grow if you fail too often either. It means you're overextending yourself. You're perhaps putting challenges before yourself that you should be facing down the line once you have more skill. I don't think there's an actual number that we should focus on, but in general, something like one in six, one in five, one in four times to fail seems about the right ratio. As a result, you need to succeed most of the time. Otherwise, you're probably pushing yourself too hard. What are the three takeaways that you would like to leave the audience with today? The first one I think is, you know, one thing that humans are very well designed for is getting physically unstuck. We get a rush of adrenaline. There's that fight or

flight response that's very well recognized. And as a result, you see all these interesting cases of, for example, hysterical strength where people pick up cars to free themselves physically. But we're just as bad as we are good at that, at dealing with emotional or mental stuckness because we flail in the same way. We sort of mistake intellectual stuckness for physical stuckness. And so the first thing you have to do is to pause, is to slow down, take the temperature down a little bit. And people often skip that step. They're so busy trying to find a way out that they don't do that. So paradoxically, the best way to move forward is at least initially to do nothing. The second idea is the surprising power of acting badly. And what I mean by badly is

not successfully. You cannot be stuck if you're moving, if you're acting. And so what a lot of really successful people do, particularly creatives who have to be creative day after day after day, which is an exhausting process, they will wake up in the morning and liberate themselves to act poorly. And what I mean by that is, for example, Jeff Tweedy, who is the front man of a rock band, Wilco, and also a writer, he will say to himself, what is the very worst sentence I could write right now? What is the worst musical phrase I could write? So he liberates himself to do that for 15 or 20 minutes. And as a result, the ball gets moving, it starts rolling. And then when he starts writing the things that he's really trying to write, the successful pieces, he has lubricated the engine and it starts moving forward quite

efficiently. So sometimes the best way to act well is to act badly first. And then the last thing that I think is really useful is to question absolutely everything. There are some adults who have an experimental philosophy where they basically say, why is this true? Why is this the orthodoxy? And if you do that enough times and you actually sort of empirically test the different alternatives, sometimes you come up with incredible outcomes. Adam, this has been wonderful. Thank you. Thank you.

Thanks for having me. Today's guest was NYU professor Adam Alter, author of Anatomy of a Breakthrough. If you enjoyed today's episode, you might also enjoy our other episode with Adam Alter. That episode is Irresistible, the rise of addictive technology and the business of keeping us hooked, which is episode 150. You might also enjoy our episode with John Cleese of Monty Python on creativity and how everyone can be more creative. That's episode 16. If you'd like to find our featured guests, as well as our episodes grouped by category, you can find them on our 3takeaways.com website, where you can also sign up for our weekly newsletter. If you'd like, you can also follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. And if you're enjoying the podcast, and I hope you are,

please review us in Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It really helps get the word out. You can also follow us on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and Facebook. Thanks for listening. I'm Lynn Toman, and this is Three Takeaways.