Good Life Project - How to Get Unstuck (a scientific take) | Adam Alter

Episode Date: May 18, 2023

We want to hear from YOU! Take our survey.Have you ever felt stuck in any part of your life? Trapped in a soul-sucking job, an unfulfilling relationship, a health, fitness or performance plateau, or a creative rut? What if there was a way to tap scientifically-validated principles to get unstuck, break free from the invisible forces holding you back and unleash your full potential? What if you could literally engineer breakthroughs? Turns out, you can.Adam Alter joins us to discuss his new book Anatomy of a Breakthrough: How to Get Unstuck When It Matters Most, which explores the often unavoidable experience of feeling stuck - whether it's a relationship, career, or health issue - and what we can do to turn stuckness into breakthrough. Adam shares strategies and mindset shifts to get unstuck and how simplifying and experimenting can ultimately help us make progress.Stuckness is an inevitable part of the human experience, especially for long-term goals that have a lull period in the middle. We become fixated on the end goal and overlook the journey.When stuck, people feel anxious, confused, isolated, and like their struggles are unique even though stuckness is universal. It leads to a flailing response that doesn't help.The first step is managing emotions by taking down the pressure and slowing down. Only then can you start to think strategically about how to move forward.Hitting plateaus is natural due to the plateau effect - constant methods become less effective over time. Anticipating plateaus and chunking large goals into smaller ones helps navigate through them.Failure is also inevitable but we have different cultural baggage around failure depending on the domain. The key is to reframe failure as learning rather than a stain on your character.Conducting a "friction audit" - identifying and removing obstacles - can reduce stuckness, especially if done periodically.Simplicity trumps complexity when stuck - focus on the 1-2 most important factors that will make the biggest difference now.Experimentation, exploration, and luck also play a role in breakthroughs. Being more exploratory increases serendipity.Surrounding yourself with different types of people, including those who challenge you, can enrich your life.You can find Adam at: Website | TwitterIf you LOVED this episode you’ll also love my January episode on the power of success scaffolding to achieve incredible visions.Check out our offerings & partners: My New Book SparkedMy New Podcast SPARKEDVisit Our Sponsor Page For a Complete List of Vanity URLs & Discount Codes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There are domains where you're not allowed to fail or when you do fail culturally, that's seen as a moral blemish. And that's very damaging, obviously, for all sorts of reasons, because failure does happen. It's inevitable. And if failing is such a moral stain in that domain, it means you're going to try less often. You're going to take fewer risks. You're going to grow more slowly, if at all.

You're going to stagnate. And you'll be stuck in the comfort of not ever having to try anything that requires that you potentially expose yourself to failure. And so it's just a different flavor of stuckness, but it's still being stuck. I think of always succeeding as a kind of stuckness too. It's not the way to live a life. It's the way to live a moment. It's nice to succeed in the moment, but a string of unbroken successes that involve no change, no pushing against boundaries.

It's not a good way to live. It's not a good way to live. It's not a good way to build meaning. So have you ever felt stuck in literally any part of your life, trapped in a soul-sucking job, an unfulfilling relationship, health, fitness, or performance plateau, or maybe a creative rut? Well, what if there was a way to tap scientifically validated principles to get unstuck, to break free from the invisible forces holding you back and really unleash your full potential? I mean, what if you could literally engineer breakthroughs? Well, it turns out you actually can once you understand many of the hidden dynamics that keep us stuck in the first place and how to move through them. And our guest today on our journey to getting unstuck is Adam Alter,

a professor at NYU's Stern School of Business, New York Times bestselling author, and a true expert in the realm of human behavior. Adam was voted professor of the year at NYU Stern School of Business and landed on the Poets and Quants 40 Best Professors Under 40 list. And his latest book is Anatomy of a Breakthrough, How to Get Unstuck When It Matters Most. And today we explore the really transformative insights and strategies that can help you break free from the thoughts and habits and circumstances

that keep you feeling stuck in pretty much any part of life and prevent you from reaching your full potential. And this isn't just about pop psychology. Adam shares a range of incredible research on how to go from stuck to in motion, along with tools like the friction audit and strategies like chunking the middle in order to really get you to your next big breakthrough. So excited to share this conversation. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X.

Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg.

You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. Adam, you and I have been in conversation, it feels like every five years or so. We touch down and you've got something new and big and interesting to offer the world. Adam, you and I have been in conversation, it feels like every five years or so we touched

down and like, you've got something new and big and interesting to offer the world. Not that you don't have new, interesting, cool things in the interview. But we sort of been in this conversation for a really long time from the early days. And your recent focus is on an experience that I think literally, I don't know anyone that gets to opt out of this experience, which is the feeling of being stuck. Relationships, work, health, whatever it may be. And ideas around what do we do in that moment? How do we turn stuckness into some sort of breakthrough where we feel like we're not

only unstuck, but actually like really we're certainly barreling into the next big fun thing. And I want to dive into that with you in a lot of different ways, but I feel like we need to sort of like start out with understanding what are we actually talking about when we're talking about the feeling of being stuck or stuckness? Yeah. So obviously there are a lot of ways to define the term. I'm not talking about momentary frustration. I don't mean I spent a couple of minutes just struggling to get through some issue or even a couple of hours. I'm talking about situations that frustrate people for it's often months, sometimes years, sometimes even decades. And I'm not talking about things that

are outside of our control. So March of 2020, we were all stuck in place and that was a government mandated situation. And there was nothing. If I wanted to be in Australia with my parents and my brother, that wasn't an option. And so I was physically stuck, but that's not psychologically interesting. That's just frustrating. And you have to kind of come to terms with that. What I'm more interested in is the situations and they turn out to be the, where you're frustrated, you're stuck, fixed in place, but there's something you can do. You can intervene on the situation. And I've spent about 20 years thinking about it on and off. And that's what this book is. It's a sort of roadmap for getting unstuck.

Yeah. And I would imagine during that 20-year window, you have found yourself stuck even thinking about the notion of stuckness many times over. It's like, you don't get to opt out just because you're the one asking the questions around it. The feeling beyond using the word stuck, and I think probably a lot of people hear that in their head and they're like, yeah, I've been there. What actually goes on inside of us? What's actually spinning? Is there a psychological, is there a neuroscientist, the physiological response? What's actually happening inside of us when we hit these sometimes seasons where it just feels like nothing is budging? Yeah. I've been running a survey on thousands of people now for many years asking them for their experiences of being stuck.

And so I say to them, this is what it means to be stuck, basically using the definition that I just gave you. Can you think of an instance or an area of your life in which you feel this way? And everyone, it's borderline universal, within 10 to 15 seconds starts typing something. So you can measure how long it takes them to respond. And then you can follow up with questions like, how do you feel about this? What are some emotions that you feel? You can give them a list of checkbox emotions. And it feels to them in general, as you might expect, frustrating. They have a lot of anxiety. So anxiety is the biggest thing. How am I going to break free of this thing that seems to be trapping me? And confused and a little uncertain about what to do next. But I think one of the most pervasive things I hear is that it feels very lonely.

And so they feel isolated and they feel apart from the rest of the world, which is ironic, right? Because everyone says, I feel stuck. They're not all the same kinds of stuckness, but it's a universal experience, which is how you open this. You said exactly that. And that's what I find. And yet it's an experience that feels isolating and makes people feel lonely. So it's this sort of cocktail of negative emotions. The other thing it does that's interesting is it makes people kind of flail. You know, like imagine you're physically trapped. I talk about this a little in the book, this idea that we confuse physical entrapment and mental entrapment for one another.

And so we're actually very well designed to deal with physical entrapment. You get the rush of blood. you get the rush of adrenaline, you read these stories of hysterical strength where someone lifts a car off someone else. That's obviously tremendously adaptive. But when you apply that same set of responses to a matter that requires strategy and a little bit of thought and slowing down and being a bit more mindful, we're still flailing, which is exactly the opposite of what we need. So a lot of what the initial response needs to be is to kind of calm things down the way you would an injury. And then you can start to be more thoughtful about the next steps. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. I mean, the notion that also that one of the common

feelings associated with it is loneliness. And I would imagine that was probably expressed in different language in different ways by different people, but that sort of universal feeling and knowing that it's clearly one of these things that almost nobody gets to opt out of, it's really counterintuitive. And I wonder if part of that loneliness also engenders a sense of shame, like, oh, I shouldn't be in this place because everybody else around me seems to be moving forward. They're not stuck. They don't have these issues. What's wrong with me? Yeah, I think that's right. I think part of the issue is that we live in a universe now where everyone shares the cream of the crop. They share the best

1% of their lives on social media platforms. You don't watch the thousands of hours that go into making artworks and films and songs and albums and businesses, what you see is the finished product. And so all of the headwinds that you're facing constantly, very apparent to you, but you don't see any of that in other people. That's hidden just by the way we live our lives. It's very, very hard to peer into people's lives and to see those headwinds. So what you end up seeing is what feels like this great asymmetry in your experience of the world and theirs, that somehow they're lucky, everyone else is getting by, and you're here stuck with all the sort of minor and often major frustrations that you're dealing with. And I think that's why it's such a lonely experience. There's a good psychological reason for it. And it's part

of what makes stuckness so stubborn. As you're describing that also, I wonder if you have looked at all at all, associations between trauma and stuckness. One of the common feelings that when I've talked to like Bessel van der Kolk and a number of others about trauma and what they've shared with me is that like one of the sort of common signals of trauma is that a person feels like they're just really having trouble moving on from the moment of the experience. And it could be decades later, but if it's not processed in some way or integrated, it's almost like you're trapped in this moment in time. You're stuck there

and you can never move forward from it. Yeah, absolutely. It's really interesting. One of the earliest pieces of research that got me onto the subject and made me interested in it was I was doing some cross-cultural research into how people around the world experience and anticipate change. And what I found is that people in the West, so people in the US, Canada, Australia, Britain, New Zealand, tend to be blindsided by change. They anticipate that a trend will continue. And one of the studies we gave them weather patterns, like five days of sun, said what's going to happen tomorrow. And people in the West tend to anticipate more sun. And if there's rain, they anticipate more rain. They kind of expect things to linger. And when change happens, they're a bit blindsided by it. People in the East, so we looked at East Asians from China,

Japan, Korea, South Korea, and you give them the same thing and they're like, oh no, no change is coming. There's balance, there's the yin yang, there's Taoism. You just sort of expect things to bounce between end points and extremes. And so when trauma happens, which it does, which we'll talk a little bit about that in a second, we in the West are sort of blindsided by it. It's like this sort of glitch in what's going on. It doesn't belong in our lives. It doesn't make sense, even if it is universal. People in the East, they're like, well, yeah, I knew this was coming and here it is. Now let's deal with it. And so they're sort of one step ahead of us in that sense.

Really interesting research. And I spoke to Bruce Feiler about this, who writes about these ideas. Yeah, lifequakes. Yeah, lifequakes. Phenomenal. Really interesting idea that he talks about the fact that roughly every 18 months, we experience a small shift in our lives that can entrench us, that can make us feel stuck. But roughly every decade and sometimes

more often, and sometimes there are two at once, you experience what he calls lifequakes. And these are major events. Sometimes they're positive. Sometimes you invite them in, but very often they're out of your control and very often they're negative. Illnesses, deaths, separations, divorces, things like that. And so, yeah, I think these traumas, these massive changes in our lives, these pivotal points are a huge part of why people feel stuck a lot of the time and they are universal. And as you described earlier, part of what I would imagine is going on is that we shift into sort of a different mode of processing where like our brain, the parts of our brains that come on board are different. And like when you're in a

state of hypervigilance or like all sorts of things that come from this feeling, as you described, if anxiety starts to drop in, you know, that's counter to the state that you need to be in to get out of the very problem that you're trying to grapple with. So it's almost like this weird reinforcement of keeping you stuck. And then the feelings that you layer onto it make it harder and harder to actually move away from that moment or that season. Yeah, it's self-perpetuating. That's part of the problem. And that's why to stop that cycle, the first thing you have to do is to deal with the emotional consequences of being stuck, whether it's loneliness or anxiety or that flailing, doing anything to just get unstuck.

There are some really interesting examples of this that I came across. One of my favorites is Miles Davis, the jazz giant, was very well known for being very hard on his musicians. There are these amazing films. Some of them are on YouTube where you see him on stage and he doesn't like what one of the touring musicians is doing. In the middle of the song, he'll basically pull them up and say, even though we're in front of this big audience, what you just did there was a disaster. Don't do that again. Sometimes he'll stalk off the stage. So he was notoriously hard on his musicians, his fellow musicians. But there's this great story that Herbie Hancock, the jazz pianist, talks about when he describes the way Miles was when he knew that he had to tone things

down a little bit. He was a great leader in this respect, that Hancock auditioned with Miles' band and it was a three-day long audition at Miles' house. And Hancock walks in and there are all these giants of jazz in the room and he's overwhelmed by the talent in there and how many incredible people there are. And he starts jamming with them. And in about five minutes, Miles is there for the beginning of it, but he takes his trumpet and he throws it on the sofa and he goes upstairs and they don't see him for the remaining three days. And Hancock talks about how at first he was really upset because he figured he'd bombed the audition, but then he just kind of relaxed, got into it, enjoyed the fact that he had these three days with these amazing musicians and he just jammed out and he played and he started relaxing

into it. At the end of the three days, Miles came down the stairs and he said to Hancock, I want you to join the band and I want you to start touring with us beginning next week. And Hancock tells this story, again, this is all on YouTube. You can find it easily. He tells the story of how surprised he was. And he said to Miles, I thought I bombed it. You went upstairs like five minutes after we started. And Miles basically said to him, I could tell my presence was not bringing anything good out of you. I was overwhelming to you as I am to a lot of people. And I wanted to give you some space. And so I listened in on the intercom for those entire three days. And I could hear you loosening up and I could tell as you loosened up that you were the right person for us. And so knowing when to turn the temperature down, whether you're a leader managing other people or whether you're just doing it for yourself is such a critical skill in getting unstuck. Yeah. I mean, it seems like so much of the process, I feel like a lot of times when we're stuck in different parts of our lives, the first thing that we think about

doing is we look externally, like what's the tool, what's the strategy, what's the process, like who do I need to hire? And not to say that those things can't all play a role in getting us to a better place, but a lot of what you were just sharing is there's an internal side to this that it's almost like Maslow's hierarchy, right? It's hard to sort of like, if you just go to the external or if you go to the top of Maslow's hierarchy without dealing with the bottom, the core stuff, the internal stuff, it's really hard to build anything sound to really get out of the place that you are

in a meaningful way without just boomeranging back to it. Yeah, 100%. I mean, I think when you're fixed in place, you don't want to be the first thing you say and you would probably express it this way is, what can I do? And do, even that action form of the word do, I think skips the two essential steps. One of them is how do you feel right now? Let's first figure that out. Let's be in this moment in a way that makes us productive moving forward. But then also

strategically, don't just do, let's figure out what you should be doing. What are some things you can put in place before you start acting to maximize the likelihood that that action will get you unstuck? These are always the things that I end up either writing books or articles about and finding really interesting are these puzzles where humans are kind of badly engineered for them. This is one case where being stuck is hard for us. It's not a thing that we're particularly good at. We're good at a lot of things, but this one, it's totally backward. It's like the first thing you want to do will only make it worse. And so that's where you need a roadmap. Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense.

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The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all

need a pilot? Flight Risk. One of the things you talk about, especially early on in your book, is this notion of inevitability around stuckness. And we kind of all said, you know, okay, so we all like we experienced this at some point. But looking at it as saying, okay, an inevitable part of my journey is I'm going to move through this experience probably many times over the course of my life, which made me curious. Why? Why is it actually so inevitable in the experience of so many people? Yeah, there are a few reasons, many actually, but one of the big ones is a lot of the things that matter the most to us happen over a long period of time, whether they're big goals. I was writing a book. You might have a business you're creating. Whatever you're doing, there'll be an extended

period of time where you're striving for something, some endpoint. And there's a lot of research to suggest that when we do that, there's a lull in the middle. So sometimes you start with a head of steam. As you can see the goal in sight, you tend to speed up, you devote more energy and attention to single-mindedly focusing on that end. But in the middle, that's tough. And we're often kind of unmoored, floating. I use this metaphor of sort of sailing between North America and Europe. There's a long period of time where you're in the middle of the ocean. Even if you're making progress, you don't have that sense. And that's demotivating. It's not giving you the feedback you want. So that's the one thing is that lull in the middle. And you see this with mice in mazes, you see it with humans, you see it with all sorts of other animals. The other big thing is that there's a very well-known phenomenon across

lots of areas of our lives known as the plateau effect. It basically suggests that if you keep doing the same thing, even if it was at one time effective, it will become less effective over time for all sorts of different reasons. And so there's amazing research looking at physical fitness, showing that if you take people who've never worked out at a gym, who are essentially sedentary, they're not doing much at all. You give them a nice plan that's well laid out for them. You let them do that and you track them for seven years. What you find is that for the first 18 months or so, most of them make tremendous gains. But then from 18 months to about two and a half years, there's that one year period where

it depends on the person. It varies a bit, but they hit a plateau and it no longer benefits them even nearly as much. And that's for all sorts of reasons. There are good physical reasons for that. Your body basically gets used to what you're doing and it stops responding in the same way. And this is true about learning languages as well. It's true about all sorts of skill acquisition. You have to change things. You have to mix things up. And so when you put together this lull in the middle, the stuck in the middle effect, you add in the fact

that you've got the plateau effect. That means that you've got to change strategies over time. And then the third thing is, there's a phenomenon known as teleo anticipation. And the idea with this is that you forecast the end of when you'll need to stop putting in energy. People often say, I was working and then I had a vacation. And the day I went on vacation, I got sick. It's like I was pouring everything into work, just looking forward to the day when work ended. And then my body just kind of collapsed. And that's teleo anticipation.

It's sort of apportioning your energy for a task. And you'll see these marathon runners sometimes they'll be at the end of a marathon and like they can see the finish line and they collapse completely exhausted because that's just a minor failure in teleo anticipation, but it's enough to topple the whole marathon for them. And we're constantly trying to do that. And it's really hard to do when you don't have an explicit endpoint or when you don't know exactly how much effort and energy to apportion to this moment versus the next moment versus the next. So there are a whole lot of reasons why we get stuck. And then of course, there's the life quakes idea that things are

constantly shifting under us. So there's a lot going on to make it hard for us to move forward. Yeah. I mean, the notion, it's interesting that we describe plateaus and I think we've all experienced like hitting plateaus in all different parts of our lives. And I hadn't earlier made the association with, oh, like hitting a plateau is actually, which is a natural part of what we're doing in the fitness world every 18 months or so. I'm sure there's probably fairly measurable cycles in all different domains of life where we could probably say, okay, we're a year into this. There's going to be a natural plateau,

which if we don't understand that this is an organic cycle that happens in all parts of life, and we should anticipate it and equip ourselves, expect it, and then equip ourselves to sort of navigate it. Then we just get there not realizing that this is actually just, this is natural. This was always coming. And having the tools to be able to move through it, we just feel like, oh, I've hit a wall. I'm stuck. And I don't know where to go from here. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's right. I think about a lot like insurance. Insurance is obviously something that you don't always need. You hope you don't need it, but there's a good chance at some point you will. And so you buy insurance.

And what it does is essentially it lightens your experience of today because you don't have to focus so much on the worst case scenario tomorrow. And I think of anticipating these things that will happen that will make us feel stuck in the same way, that once you've thought about them, you have at least not quite a plan in place, but you have some idea of what you'll do if a particular thing goes wrong, then you can live today a little bit more freely. And so I find it very liberating to even just that first step, just to say, you know, stuff's going to get hard at some point. Let's think a little bit about what that's going to mean. You don't need to dwell on it, but just be ready to anticipate it and to have at least that first step in place.

And I think that makes living today a little bit easier. Yeah. The whole notion of tele-anticipation also, I think is fascinating. It reminds me to a certain extent of years ago when Dan Gilbert came with Stumbling Happiness, one of the first books in what's now a giant happiness canon. And he talked about this phenomenon of effective forecasting, our ability to actually forecast how we think we'll feel at some future point, maybe decades from now. And apparently as human beings, we are horrible at that. We're absolutely terrible at it. Do you find a similar thing with tele-anticipation or do you feel like we're actually, it kind of depends on the situation or do you feel like we're actually, it kind of depends

on the situation or the domain. Sometimes we're really good at estimating what it'll take to get through a certain endpoint, and sometimes we're terrible at it. I think we're horrible at it. And I think the reason we're so bad at it, and this draws on Dan's work on stumbling on happiness and some of his other work, is that there's a gap between where you are now and where you'll be later on that's very hard to bridge psychologically. So if I think about, if I'm running, say I'm running 10 miles, which is a fairly long run, the way I feel for the first mile, I'm on top of the world. I feel phenomenal. And so because I feel so good at the first mile, it's almost impossible to imagine how I'm going to feel in that final 10th mile.

And so what I'm doing is I'm relying quite heavily on what it feels like to be running that first mile as a guide to how I'll feel later on. Or at least I'm not quite deducting enough of my energy when anticipating what it'll be like in the final mile. And that means I'm expending too much now. And so when you watch people at the beginning of marathons, especially when it's their first or second marathon, they're exuberant, they're jubilant, they high five people on the side of the course, you know, they're absolutely into it and they should be, but you know, that's going to come back to bite them later on. And they don't yet know that, but it will become apparent.

Once you see people running their 10th or 20th marathons, they're the ones who are single mindedly in the middle of the course, not focusing on anything else, particularly in those early days, because they know that's what you do in those first three miles makes or breaks the last three miles. And so I think it's extremely hard for us to go about that business. And it's not just physical things, but if I'm fatigued on the path to a particular goal, but I start out feeling pretty fresh, I think it's really hard for me to imagine what that fatigue is going to feel like. And so I apportion too few of my resources to that last stage. Yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, you combine that with a potential lack of awareness about the fact that plateaus

are going to be a natural part of this experience. And then as you described, everything has a middle. Yeah. And we love focusing on the beginning and the end. It's like, yes, I'm motivated. I'm here to do it. And then you visualize, like most people don't visualize the middle. They visualize the end. Like, let me just keep my mind there because like, that's what I have to be doing in order to actually get to that place. But that whole middle, which sometimes is going to be 90% of the journey, that's where the demons external and internal really can come down to. And we just don't pay as much attention to it. No, we don't. There's a lot you can do about it though. One of my favorite techniques is to

narrowly bracket a big goal. So if you think about say writing a book is a hundred thousand words. If you start on day one with the idea that your goal is to write a hundred thousand words, that's absolutely overwhelming. Now it's really, really difficult to get your head around the magnitude of that goal. And it will overwhelm you to the point of making it hard for you to move forward. But one thing you can do, and a lot of writers do this, is you narrowly bracket the goal into, say, 100 sub-goals of 1,000 words each. And there are lots of ways to do this.

It's an artificial process. It's just how you think about it. But you can actually give it a little bit of concreteness as well. So one thing you could do is you could say, every time I hit a new 1,000 word mark, as I write to 1,000, 2,000, 3,000, I'm going to give myself small rewards. And that could be different things for different people, just something that gives you a break from writing or whatever it is. And then when I hit the 10,000 mark and the 20,000 mark, I'm going to do a bigger reward. And then there'll be a sort of culminating reward at 100,000 words. And so by doing that, you're shrinking the goal. And so essentially you've eliminated the middle or made the middle

very, very small because the middle between zero and 100,000 is huge, but the middle between zero and a thousand, well, by the time I'm at the point of having written 300 words, I've only got 700 more. And then when I'm at 700, I only have 300 more to go. So the goal becomes much more manageable. And I think we can do that in a lot of areas of our lives, shrink artificially very large goals into smaller ones. I love that because you're effectively saying, let me take one giant middle and turn it into dozens or hundreds of tiny middles where each one of those feels relative. Like I can deal with this. Yeah. You know, and which is similar to the way I, when I'm working on a large scale,

if I'm working on a next book, I'll usually set, you know, a thousand to 2000 word a day writing goals. Right. And that's doable. Like that's, I can handle that. It might not be good writing, but I can get the words out. Exactly. It's interesting also, as you're describing this, I remember years ago reading an interview with Hemingway in the Paris Review, and they were talking about his writing process. And Hemingway also famously wrote Standing Up often. And they asked him, how do you not get stuck? That wasn't the exact language,

but effectively that's what the question was. And he said, he always ends every day, not at the end of a thought or when he feels like it's complete or at the end of a chapter, he starts the next thing. So he's like a couple of paragraphs or a couple of pages into the next chapter. And then he shuts down for the day. And he said that simple shift made it so that he would show up the next day. And knew, like he was already, you know, he had momentum. It really almost like it removed the process of stuckness or what so many describe in the writing space as writer's block is basically just, he made this simple tweet and completely re-engineered it.

It's brilliant. I actually didn't know it was Hemingway, but I've been using that technique since I first heard about it, which was maybe a book and a half ago. And it's phenomenally effective because getting stuck is essentially, you could reframe it as I can't get started because once you get started and the ball starts rolling down the hill, it's much easier. And so what that does, that little tweak, that little hack is that you don't begin the next day from scratch. You begin the next day with that wind behind your back already that you've created the day before. It's funny. There's an analog to this. My last book was about screens and technology and how we can't stop watching Netflix and using our phones and so on. One of the things I talked about, which was borrowed from this Hemingway idea,

is that when you give in to the structure of a show on Netflix or an extended TV show, you have a cliffhanger at the end of an episode that makes you want to watch the next one. So what's the key? The key is to either stop five minutes before the end of each episode and then start the next day you're watching from that point or to watch the first five minutes of the next one and then stop as soon as the cliffhanger is resolved. And you sort of short circuit the structuring that gets you to keep watching, watching, watching, which is the opposite of what we're talking about here. It's introducing friction to prevent you from rolling down that hill. Yeah. And as you're describing that, I'm thinking how many other places in life could I use? Because I actually,

literally, as soon as I heard that, or I read that in an interview, I switched my writing style. And that has made writing long form so exponentially easier. Agreed. So one of the things that you talk about also is this notion of, we tend to, when we have this feeling of being stuck, one of the responses is essentially paralysis. Like you just stop acting. And I think part of the feeling there is, I don't know what the appropriate next step is to get me out of this. And I don't even know if I take a step, is it actually moving me in the right direction or is it just digging me deeper into this?

Which then creates a spin cycle in our minds because now we start to like, that becomes this obsessive chatter. Like, what do I do? Which leads to just deepening paralysis. And you speak to the notion in various different ways, getting out of your head, like the importance of being in an action stance, almost regardless of whether the next step is appropriate or in the right direction or not. Yeah, exactly. Your standards might be too high, especially in those moments. Those are the

moments when if you're ever going to lower your standards a little bit, those are the ones to do it. Jeff Tweedy, the front man of Wilco, the band Wilco, who writes music, but also writes books, has talked a lot about this idea that when he's stuck, sometimes he'll wake up in the morning and he's been a creative for decades. And so the way he measures his success is, am I producing something usable as a song or as a part of a book? And he talks about how the best thing he has found for moving forward is to lower the threshold of acceptable output down to basically the floor. And so he'll do this thing where he says, all right, so for the first hour of this morning, I'm going to pour out all my bad ideas as though they're kind of liquid or gunk that are preventing the good stuff from coming

out. And so he says to himself, what's the worst sentence I could write right now? Why don't I try that? Or what's the worst bit of music I could compose? And so he knows that there's a good chance it's not going to be usable, although sometimes it's better than he imagines. But by lowering the barrier for action all the way as low as it can be to the point where you license yourself to create bad things, objectively bad in the sense that they're not what you want. You do effectively what Hemingway was doing by giving himself that next day's riding. You get the ball rolling down the hill and suddenly you're acting. You're not stuck anymore because you're making movement. Even if the movement is slightly sideways, it's not totally the direction you want to go. It gets you there eventually because it's lubricated the path. Yeah. I mean, I've always been a huge believer in just take any action.

Like once you're in motion, you can correct course. There is no course to correct until you're in motion. So even if you're headed in the exact opposite direction, if you're really paying, you're going to figure it out pretty quickly. But if you just sit there and try to think what is the right direction, you'll just sit there forever. It's like the action that gives you the data, understand what the answer to the problem is and what the next step is that's going to actually take you into a place of progress rather than just stasis. And yet we love to think that's key is that you don't get any feedback from noodling and strategizing and navel gazing. You don't know whether something's going to work. You don't know whether it's actually the opposite of what you should be doing. The only way you ever discover that is by doing. And so to get continued feedback and tweaking and refining, you can't do that by anything other than by acting. So there's great value there. I think it's important to say though, as well, we mentioned the importance of pausing, slowing down, taking down the pressure, taking down the temperature and focusing on the emotions first. I think these two ideas, although they might seem contradictory,

that you should just act, but you should also slow down. I think it's important at the beginning of the process when you're first stuck and you recognize that to take that beat, that pause. It's just that once you're ready to start acting, I think what often happens is we've done all this strategizing, we've dealt with the emotional consequences, and then we're like, well, now I'm supposed to do something, but my bar is up here. It's got to be perfect. I need something that's just a phenomenal solution. And that's where the mistake is. And that's where you should lower the threshold down to the ground. It doesn't mean you bypass strategy. It's just that at that point, you can move forward without having to do something that's perfect. Yeah. And this is one of the things that you invite people to explore, like the notion of

measuring what you're doing through a standard of excellence and not perfection. But I almost feel like what you're saying here is the first step isn't even excellence. It's adequacy. Yeah. Or even inadequacy is okay too with that Jeff Tweedy example that if you think of inadequacy as blocking the path to adequacy, that you've got to get it out of the way, then that's kind of useful because it allows you, it licenses you at least briefly to just get the bad stuff out and to act even if that action is not just not perfect, but it's not actually adequate. And that's the insight that I love about

that example from Tweety is that essentially what you do is you don't measure any action by standards at that point. When you're in that really desperate place, you are nonjudgmental about every single thing you create for a period of time. Now, that doesn't mean you do that forever because you'll never get anywhere, but it's a good first 30 minutes of the day or something like that when you feel really entrenched, it's a good way to go. Yeah. So much of it, I mean, what you keep reverting to a certain extent here also is the notion of how we set expectations. And I was flashing back to a conversation I had years ago with Bob Taylor, who's the founder of Taylor

Guitars and like one of the biggest handmade guitar builders in the world. We're sitting in his office. And at the end of the conversation, we were recording something. I turned the mic off and I revealed this sort of like secret fantasy that I'd had for years. I was like, Bob, you know, like for years I've wanted to just make a guitar, but you know, I can't find the right luthier and the time in my day and this and that. And what's the course I should take? And he looks at me, he just says, he's like, he's shaking his head. I'm like, what am I getting wrong here? He's like, make one bad guitar.

Yeah, there you go. He's like, get a cheap kit from the mail, follow the directions. He like basically know it's going to be awful and just do it. You know, he's like, that is the only way you're going to learn to make one less bad guitar after it. And then one less bad. And then one day, maybe one average one. He's like, you can't buy your way out of that process. And no one ever regrets those bad ones, right? You never move past it and then look back and say, I wish I hadn't bought that mail order guitar kit. It's part of the

narrative. It's part of the provenance of wherever the thing that you ultimately landed on came from. It's like kind of an important part of the process. And I think it's really enriching and it brings a lot of meaning to your life to have had the process that began with the less than perfect initial output. I think there's something kind of deflating about landing on perfection the first time you try anything. It very rarely happens. But the idea that you have to even try to do that, I think, is part of the problem. It's part of where the paralysis comes from.

So I think that's such great advice. And then also, there's sort of implicit in that, that it's not ideal in some sense, but you're going to settle. I'm going to settle for the mail order kit. But I actually think it's exactly where you should be in that moment. I think it's the best right thing to be doing in that moment. It's not just that, like, well, you can't make a perfect guitar now, so we'll just have to settle for this. I think that's like the first right step on that journey is to do exactly what Taylor suggested to

you. Yeah. It's interesting also because you use the word narrative, which perked me because so much of our life is like, you know, we're constantly telling stories about every experience in our life to try and make meaning of it. And as you described, the things where we try it once and somehow magically we're just like, boom, done, perfect. Like that was amazing. The story that we tell ourselves about, like how meaningful is that actually to us when that happens versus, oh, this is a thing where I was working towards it. I'm two years in, I get stuck. It's brutally hard. Somehow I figure out a way out of this chasm of darkness and I get in motion like stuck again. And then five times over and 10 years later, you finally arrive at this space or you create this thing or whatever it may be that truly does feel magical. That closes the gap between like what you believed you wanted to make and what you actually

were making. It's the fact that as much as we'd love to say, like, I just want to avoid all the obstacles. It is those moments along the way where we're brought to our knees and we figure out a way through that endows the entire journey with meaning at the end of the day and gives us a different story to tell. Yeah, absolutely. Imagine if all those movies, karate kid type movies and Rocky and all these movies of the progress of someone to a point where they were world champions or they were champions of whatever little area was important to them. No one's going to watch the movie where there's just instant perfection, where the first thing they do is success. There are no roadblocks along the way.

That's because there's no meaning in that. There's no meaning in stumbling on perfection, especially when it's hard to replicate, then it's just deflating. So I think it's a mistake to aim for that at least initially. And obviously, you refine your talents across time, and there's plenty of value to doing that. But yeah, I totally agree. That's where the meaning comes from. And that idea of the self as kind of a series of narratives is really compelling too. It's one of the most powerful social psychological theories I've read is that the theory of the

narrative self, it actually changed how I live my life in a really big way. So I read this probably 15 years ago, this idea that essentially when people talk about the self, it's a very philosophical idea, like what am I versus other people and who am I and how do I perceive myself? There's a lot of research into that, but the narrative self idea is that essentially you're the sum of the stories you tell about who you are, the sum of the memories you have. I bought this little book that's now four books. They're actually just next to me over there. It's every day at the end of the day, I'll write three or four lines about what the day was. And so at the end of every year, I go back and I reread 365 or 366 entries. But then from time to time when I feel really lost, I'll look at the book from eight years ago and I'll go to a random page and I'll say, where was I? Who was I? To try to get a sense

of whether there's development and it transports you instantly. Now, I could never remember what I did on March 3rd, 2012, but it's there in that book. And so it gives you a thickness to that self-narrative and gives you that sense of continuity. And I find it actually a very good unsticking agent. Yeah. Plus it lets you time travel a little bit. It does. It's kind of fun. Yeah.

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Part of what we've been talking about also here, without actually naming it it is, is failure or the experience that we have failed and that we, we have not met the thing or achieved the goal that we set before us yet. Sometimes we just feel like there's no yet at the end of that sentence and that we're really struggling along the way. And that is part of the feeling of stuckness is a feeling of like, I'm failing at this thing that really, like I really want to make happen in some meaningful way. And that could be a relationship, it could be a business, whatever. And there's cultural baggage around failure. But what I've also seen, I'm curious about this, and especially if there's research that you're aware of around

it, is that our cultural baggage around failure is very domain specific. Like in the startup world, there's very little baggage around failure. Like if you haven't actually bombed out a couple of times with ideas, some VCs, investors won't even give you money because they want you to have been through that cycle because they know that you learned through that cycle. But in other parts of life, it feels like failure is just failure and there's a stigma and a judgment for it. And it just, it sends us into this place of being like, this is not just this thing is a failure, but I'm a failure and I'm, I'm going to be stuck in this place forever. Yeah. There's a moral sort of aspect to failure.

And I think you're right that it's domain specific. So certain kinds of failure, I would almost say are lifted on a pedestal as, as rites of passage. And I think that's true in the VC and investing and generally in the entrepreneurial world. It's probably true of athletic pursuits as well. It's sort of seen as necessarily true that almost all athletes eventually will fail, and often it'll be early on, and then they get better and they learn how to train better. But you're right, there are domains where you're not allowed to fail or when you do fail culturally, that's seen as a moral blemish. And that's very damaging, obviously, for all sorts of reasons. Because failure does happen. It's inevitable. And if failing is such a moral stain in that domain, it means you're going to try less often. You're going to take fewer risks. You're going to grow more slowly, if at all, you're going to stagnate and you'll be stuck in the comfort of not ever having to try anything that requires that you potentially expose yourself to failure. And so it's just a different flavor of stuckness, but it's still being stuck. I think of always succeeding as a kind of stuckness too. I had this

really interesting conversation with a guy. He wouldn't tell me who it was, but he told me his friend was an actor. And it was one of the famous actors of the day. This was about 10 years ago. And I said, who's the actor? And he said, I can't tell you, but he's a friend of mine and he's often in New York City. And we'll sometimes we'll go out together. This guy will start conversations with people and being out and about and meeting girls was a thing for him at the time or having conversations with people in bars. It came so easily to this guy. And the friend said, that must be amazing. You go out, everyone wants to talk to you. Girls are throwing themselves at you. That sounds like exactly what I would want

for my life. And the actor, this guy who I've never got the identity of said to him, it's kind of my definition of hell is to be so consistently unchallenged in that domain and to always have exactly what you think you want. It's not the way to live a life. It's the way to live a moment. It's nice to succeed in the moment, but a string of unbroken successes that involve no change, no pushing against boundaries, this guy, and I've heard this from other people too, it's not a good way to live. It's not a good way to build meaning. And I mean, if we exist at least in part, you know, because we want to grow, we want to experience growth, it really cuts off the opportunity to grow. If you're sort of, you know, like the expert in the room every time and

whatever the thing is, it's like, this is kind of like just too easy. And like you said, it's counterintuitive. That would be like not the thing that everybody wants, but in fact, it's not. And it probably relates back to Mihaly Csiks me high as like research right where he's looking at all these people and the least happy time of their day was when they're literally just lazing around doing nothing when they would have thought or told you yeah that's the best part of the day that in fact we're just not wired for that um that is not how we flourish as human beings yeah it's very much about flow states and about finding the optimal rate of failure. And one of the things that I talked about in the book is this optimal rate of failure across lots of domains. People have said it's somewhere between one in six and one

in four attempts. So that means if you're learning a language, acquiring a new skill, trying anything, it doesn't matter what it is, but the optimal rate will vary a little bit depending on who you are, how sensitive you are to failure, the domain that you're in. But the key takeaway from that is that it's not zero. It is that roughly 16 to 25% of the time you should be failing. Otherwise, that's not the sweet spot. And I think that dovetails really nicely with Csikszentmihalyi's ideas about flow and optimal difficulty and not coasting along. Exactly that. Yeah.

We've talked a lot just about the experience of being stuck and some of the components of it and also a lot of the mindset that we wrap around it and some of the mindset things and tools that we can do to sort of get unstuck. One of the things that you also talk about is the notion of this feeling also comes with the feeling of friction, like I'm stuck in the mud. I just can't move. And you introduced this notion of something you call a friction audit, which I thought was really interesting. Yeah, I first started doing this in a business consulting context, working in particular with charities and nonprofits, but also now with some larger companies as well.

And the basic insight is that there are two ways to interact with people and to improve those interactions, whether it means that you are selling them a product or you want them to donate money to a cause. One thing you can do is sweeten the deal. So you make the carrot more attractive and you sort of lure them in. That could be making a better product. It could be advertising the product in a more effective way. There are all sorts of ways of doing that. Or you can say, I think the issue isn't the product. It's great. It's the way it should be, or at least it's good enough. The problem is that there's too much stuff, too much nonsense between the starting point and the point where people actually commit to this thing, whether it's donating money or buying the product. And so a friction audit basically says that the best

return on any investment you can get, and I found this, is to remove friction points, to systematically locate them and then sand them down. So it's a three-step process. You go through a journey, whatever it is, if it's a customer relationship journey or whatever it might be, you find the friction points first, you explore, then you intervene. So you say, okay, well, here we've got this list of friction points. How can we intervene on them? How can we shave them down or eliminate them altogether? And then the last part of that is confirmation, is confirming that you've done a good job. So having some metrics that can show you that, yes, this has improved things for you. And it works very well in the business world, but it works really well as well as just an

auditing tool for our own lives, for figuring out where is the stuff that is either the hardest, the least appealing, the stuff that makes me the most avoidant. So for a lot of people, I know, for example, the thing that they find most difficult is, say, travel in work. The fact that their work requires that they have to travel a lot away from their families. Is there a way to take that particular friction point and make it less filled with friction? And there are certainly ways to do that. Either you travel a little bit less if you can, but if you can't, how do you make the experience of travel feel less disconnecting and less distancing? So those are the kinds of things that I think are really valuable outcomes of this friction audit process. I'm curious about the timing of friction audit, because in theory, you would do this when

you're stuck because you have the greatest immediate access to the things that are actually causing the friction. But I'm reflecting on the work of Gabrielle Udenton and sort of like her whoop protocol, you know, like if you're really working towards a goal or an outcome, you know, wish, you know, outcome, obstacle obstacle plan. And so part of her methodology is effectively building what you're describing as a friction audit into the planning process before you even start. It's like, let me anticipate all the potential friction points that will come up and then pre-plan how I might move through them.

So I'm wondering if you have a take on the appropriate timing for this, like, is it more real and tangible and actionable if you actually do it when it happens in the moment? Or is there meaningful value to even just trying to imagine or anticipate or brainstorm all the potential friction points that might come up and pre-plan how you might move through those? Yeah. So I love that work that you referred to, that work by Ertingen.

And what she basically finds is that if you imagine success on the path to a goal, you're more likely to fail than if you imagine failing, because the act of imagining failure now means that you're better prepared to avoid it along the way, rather than just basking in, oh, it's going to be so wonderful when it all happens the way I plan. And that also works really well with a lot of the ideas about how you should get unstuck. And I think you're right about the friction audit, that it can be very valuable as an acute tool for treating immediate stuckness. But one of the things that I suggest, and I have this like one page sheet that I give every organization that I work with, or every person I work with, it's like a cheat sheet. Because one

of the things I say at the end of the interaction is, depending on the domain that you're in, you should be doing this every six to 12 months. And sometimes it's every two years. And so some of the big companies that I've worked with now have a two yearly friction order, where every two years, it's a cyclical thing. They'll come in and they'll say, all right, so two years ago, we did this. I've now gone through a couple of rounds with companies that I started working with before the pandemic. And so they've now had a few rounds, some in the midst of the pandemic, some as we're starting to come out of it. And they face very different friction points before, during, and after. And it's a very valuable thing to keep doing because you're more likely to head off stuckness

before it arrives. And when it does arrive, you've got some structures in place that make it shallower and more brief. Yeah, I love that. As you're describing that, the notion of just on a personal level, I'm thinking to myself, When it does arrive, you've got some structures in place that make it shallower and more brief. Yeah. I love that. As you're describing that, the notion of just on a personal level, I'm thinking to myself, kind of a cool experiment to run. What if I just committed to a seasonal friction on it? Let's look at relationships.

Let's look at health and wellbeing. Let's look at work. Pick the domains of life that really matter most to me. And then just on a quarterly basis, the first day of the first, whatever it is of the next quarter, just doing this audit across those major domains. I wonder if even doing that audit would pre-identify potential areas of stuckness before they even arrive and have you taking action to move past them and sort of like just keep the gears moving with fewer of those moments that bring you down. Yeah, absolutely. I think there's huge value in doing

that. And it's a little bit like preventive maintenance for engineering problems like airplanes. You don't want to take the plane out of the sky and ground it for weeks at a time. So you only do that for major, major, major maintenance every few years. That's known as type D maintenance. But before you get anywhere near type D, there's type A and B and C. And type A maintenance is like the daily maintenance you're doing with the plane where just between flights, there's a technician or a couple of engineers checking it out. And there's everything in between that type A and that type D. And so you could think of the friction audit as having these different components that are layered on top of each other, where maybe once a week you do a

little type A maintenance check. And you're like, is there anything that's like really shouting out to me, fix me immediately. And if not, then maybe every quarter you could do a type B or type C, where you say, all right, let's focus on some bigger things. Maybe once a year, it's whether it's on your birthday or whether it's some random day of the year, Labor Day, you can pick any day you like. You devote that full day, if you can, and plan ahead this way to a full type D maintenance check where you're really, really getting into the full friction audit of everything. When I take the 10,000-foot view or the 30,000-foot view, am I happy with where things are going?

Is the trajectory I'm taking the right one? And I think you're right. You could really eliminate some kinds of stuckness altogether. Obviously some, you won't be able to do that, but you'll probably be a better place to deal with them when they arrive. One of the things that you sort of explore along the way too, especially in the context of, okay, so I'm doing my friction audit. I'm starting to identify the stuck points. Now, when you start to move from there into an action stance, okay, so let's see if we can sort of like start to do our way out of this. We've got the mindset tools. We're sort of like doing the reframes. It's the notion of simplification. It's the notion of saying, you know, like rather than making this big complex thing or like a big giant plan with

a massive spreadsheet, and these are all the different actions. Like what is the simplest possible thing? And you speak to the importance of simplicity in getting out of this place in a way, which is almost counter, it's intuitive, but at the same time, a little counterintuitive. Yeah. That's we often think of complex processes as being necessarily complex and that they have all these moving parts and you can't grapple with them unless you accept all those parts, integrate them. And that takes a huge amount of energy and time, and it's not easy to do. And very often the best thing you can do is to strip away what's extraneous or what doesn't account for much of what's causing the trouble and to really focus all your time and attention on the one or two things that are most present and most prominent. And so if you're doing a friction audit, yes, you'll probably identify 15 different things that

on some level you'd like to change, but you've got to be single-minded. You've got to really focus on the thing that's going to make the most difference now. And I think being sequential about it, saying once this is out the way, I get to the next thing is a really good way to go. And I think we've been harmed in general by the myth of multitasking and that idea that we can bifurcate or split ourselves into two and sometimes even more than two selves and constantly be dealing and juggling with different things. I just don't think that's true. There's not a lot of good evidence for that. And so you've got to be a little bit more mindful about the order in which you tackle things. And that is a simplifying agent because

it means that you're not splintered into lots of different pieces when you're trying to manage some big sticking point. Yeah. And I've been so guilty of doing the exact opposite as much as one of my mantras for life is fewer things better. And I struggle so much with actually living that mantra. And I think sometimes when we're kind of cruising, when you're like a lot of different parts of life where they're okay, they're kind of cruising, when you're like a lot of different parts of life, they're okay. They're kind of like, you know, they're rolling along. We feel like, well, and you know, we're doing a little bit of this and a little bit of this and a little bit of this and things seem to be okay. And we don't realize actually how hard and damaging that sort of like multitasking across every domain of life process can be until one or two grind to a halt.

Yeah. And then the way to get out of that place is not to say, let me keep doing five different things. It's to basically just say like, this is the thing and I need to really narrow and simplify my energy into this one domain right now, or else everything is going to grind to a halt because everything is going to be like suffering from fragmentation and complexity. Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. I think so.

And I think it's partly about the number of things you're dealing with. And so you can simplify by dealing with fewer, but it's also partly about how you interpret each thing. And we are an intelligent species as species go. And so we tend to complexify things, if that's even a word. Well, instead of saying, how do I make this simpler? Our instinct is to bolt things onto it and to make it a little bit more Baroque and complex than it needs to be. There's this great book by Leidy Klotz called Subtract.

And it's about this idea. He had this amazing realization where he gave people these Lego structures that were a little bit unbalanced. And he would say to them, imagine you're an engineer and you have to fix these Lego structures that were a little bit unbalanced. And he would say to them, imagine you're an engineer and you have to fix these Lego structures. And each piece costs a certain amount. So really it's better to use fewer pieces. And he said, all right, now fix this structure that's a little unbalanced. What he found they would tend to do was to add more pieces. Their instinct was to add pieces to make it more stable, but there was a much simpler solution, which was just removing a couple of pieces that had unbalanced the structure. And he wrote this whole book about this idea that humans tend to

make things more complex rather than simplifying. And we get a tremendous amount of mileage from changing our frame and saying, all right, so what's the kernel here? What's the key thing that'll account for 80% of what's making this hard? And it's true about so many things. Like if you look at narrative, if you look at films, the structure of films, there's a finite number of different structures that are laid over on films, on the narrative of films or stories. And once you know that, if you're trying to craft your own story, that's tremendously helpful because you can deviate a little bit from one of those and make it your own. But even recognizing that there's a finite set is a

tremendously liberating idea. And I think that's true about a lot of creativity that we think of it as this mystical complex thing when often it's quite algorithmic. And in many ways, most of what goes on is quite simple. Yeah. I think we like to think of it as mystical and complex. I think we do. It keeps it in the domain of magic and we want to think of it that way. As you move into this action stance, you also speak to the critical role of experimentation and exploring and exploiting and doing this dance of action taking, holding things loosely as you go. You reference a process that I actually never heard of with the acronym UDA and UDA loop, which comes out of, I guess, military strategy. And the letters O-O-D-A represent observe, orient, decide, and act. Tell me about this methodology because I thought it was really

fascinating and I'm super inclined to just sort of like try this in a whole bunch of different domains of life right now. Yeah. So this comes from some literature on how to be a good fighter pilot in the Air Force. And it's about how to be quicker to make decisions and how to react to the changes around you, which can be entrenching. They can get you stuck. So this is written by one of the giants of fighter pilot strategy. And he basically explained his process for being quicker to react to the situations around himself as things shifted. And it was basically his way of experimenting with new ways of reacting and of taking in the information that had come in. So observe and orient was about taking in this information and then making a really rapid decision and acting on the basis of that. And so one of the things I love about the OODA loop is first of all, that there are two things I guess that I love about it. One is that it's an iterative process. You keep going round

and round. You're doing the same thing over and over again. So you're constantly reappraising the world around you. And once you get good at this and once it becomes a default for you, you're doing it constantly really rapidly. It's like the loop is really tight. The other thing I like about it is it's a smaller, narrower version of what this book is about, which is about exactly that. You've first taken the information, get yourself to a place where you're comfortable with it, you've accepted it. And then you're thinking about strategy, which is the observing part of it. And then the action part at the end is actually doing. So it makes a lot of sense to me as a general approach. But you mentioned experimentation and exploitation and exploration. This framework has been one of the guiding frameworks in how I

live my own life. And it's this idea that there are two very different ways to approach any situation where you're trying to make progress. And you can only do one at a time. You can either explore or you can exploit. And those terms come from evolutionary biology and from evolution, really. If you think about our evolutionary past, we were, say, hunting and gathering. You're going to look for berries and plants or something like that. When you're exploring, you look at the whole territory in front of you, the whole savannah or the plains, and you're very shallowly looking at all of it and saying, I don't know which area to focus my attention on. So I'm just going to kind of roam far and wide, but not go

very deep. But at some point you should identify, oh, there's that little pasture over there that looks really fruitful. I'm going to go over there. And then you spend all your time and attention exploiting that territory. And it turns out that when you do that in that order, you explore, you go broad, you say yes to everything, you try everything, you meet new people. And then for a while, you kind of hunker down and you say, well, now that I've done that, I've got a bit of direction. I'm going to really go deep on this thing. That's when hot periods, hot streaks in careers come about.

That's when we make a lot of progress personally. So there's a lot of research looking at careers and personal growth showing that if you first explore and then you exploit, that's the way forward. Yeah. Which sort of parallels what a lot of people describe as sort of like two phases of a creative process, the divergent and convergence. First go wide. And then at a certain point you need to actually sort of like narrow in and really refine what you're exploring. And it's sort of like a similar thing in terms of the process of getting unstuck. And there's probably a strong argument to say that a big part of the creative

process is going from a place of being stuck to being unstuck and like opening to new innovation, to creativity, to new ideas, which brings up the one other thing I wanted to ask you about, which is this notion of when you're in this place, you're doing all the work, you're doing the mindset shifts, like you're doing your friction audit, you're really thinking about it as an iterative process and chunking things down to smallify the middle and simplify. And at the end of the day, there's sometimes something else that plays into this, which is luck or serendipity. It's hard to not only break out of stuckness, but actually break through, like have it. I mean, this is, you know, your language, this is all about how to go to a place of like break, not just breaking out, but getting to a breakthrough place. Some of this we can control. Some of this, we can do all the things that we've been talking about, but what's the role of just fortune in the

process? It's big. Serendipity is a big factor. I saw this amazing talk by Michael Lewis years ago. He was speaking to the Princeton undergrads. This was when I was a grad student. He got up in front of this audience of students who are graduating and their parents and basically said, you're all here because of luck. And I want to make that strong case. And he himself had been a Princeton undergrad and graduated in 1987. So this was like, I don't know, 30 years later, almost 30 years later. And he was basically trying to say that we systematically underestimate the role that luck plays in almost every outcome in our lives, from where and when you happen to be born to career decisions and small blessings and small curses. And you only live one life.

You don't know what the other sliding door options might have been. But he talked about luck, and I found it very, very compelling. But one thing it got me interested in was this idea that serendipity is stumbling on a good outcome. But it turns out that a lot of the strategies in the book are about doing something immediate and concrete right now. But in the very abstract, broader sense, this particular thing is about how do you make yourself luckier in general? Like over time, how do you minimize across the lifespan, the likelihood of getting stuck in ways that are kind of bad fortune related? And how do you increase the chances of stumbling on good things? How do you make serendipity happen? And so I have a section in one of my chapters

about experimentation and being generally an exploratory person and doing things the way kids do. Kids have serendipitous moments all the time. It's partly because they know less because they're younger and haven't had as much experience, but it's partly that kids will ask a million questions about everything. They're constantly exploring and we lose that somewhere between childhood and adulthood. But the people who have what seems like good luck from the outside, they are doing the kid-like thing of always pushing back and saying, well, hang on, this is the orthodoxy. This is what the herd is doing. Is there a good reason why? And if there is, that's great. But if there isn't, let's think of alternatives. And that's where serendipity often comes from. Yeah. I think making space for that is just so important. And

also acknowledging it's part of the process. You can do all the planning and all the acting and anticipate everything you can possibly do. And still, sometimes you almost have to hold yourself open to these moments of serendipity or timing. It's just a certain amount of stuff that is outside of your control. But I'm a firm believer in the fact that the likelihood of us stumbling into a space of serendipity goes up when we're actually in motion rather than just sitting and thinking. Because at least we're out in the world. We're creating moments for the world to react to. And serendipity is about an interaction.

If there's no in-between, there's no luck. There's no fortune. There's no serendipity. Yeah, I once did this exercise that I found really helpful. Actually, I went back and looked at emails that I had received over a period of about 10 years. And I could find four emails in particular that had changed my life in a good way that I remember being at a crossroads with all of them saying, I don't know. I don't know if I'm going to move forward with this. One of them inspired my first book, which changed my career. One of them was an

invitation to do a different kind of consulting engagement that I'd never thought of before. But at the time, I was quite busy. And I thought, no, I don't want to do that. If I had said no to either of those, I'd be in a completely different place career-wise. And there were some other ones, some were personal and some were professional, but that exercise just showed me that the number of times you say yes, the more darts you throw at the board, the longer you play the game for, rather than just withdrawing, the more chance you'll have of these serendipities happening. And I think you're totally right that that's, it's such a critical part. And we think of it as kind of the sprinkling, the dust on top, the magic dust on top. But actually, when you look

back at your life, I think a lot of the major things that happen, and this is what Michael Lewis's point was in part, a lot of those really important major life outcomes that really shape your life often for the better are the result of what seemed like a trivial interaction. Or should I say yes to this invitation? Well, if I'm in this exploratory phase, the answer should almost always be yes. And so I think that's true. You've got to make space for it. Yeah. And at the end of the day, it's just a much more fun way to live your life with creating that space and a good place for us to come full circle as well, I think. So in this container of Good

Life Project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? I think one thing we didn't talk about that I love is the idea of surrounding yourself with three kinds of people. People who are a lot like you and make you feel good and reflect you. I think there's a lot of value in that. People who are totally different from you and non-redundant. They have non-overlapping experiences of the world. And then the third kind is people who actively push back. And you probably want most of the first kind, some of the second kind, maybe a few of the third kind. And I think that's the best way to live life is to have that three types of different people around you. Thank you.

Hey, before you leave, if you love this episode, safe bet you will also love my January episode on the power of what I call success scaffolding to achieve incredible visions. You'll find a link to that episode in the show notes. And of course, if you haven't already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app. And if you found this conversation interesting

or inspiring or valuable, and chances are you did since you're still listening here, would you do me a personal favor, a seven second favor and share it maybe on social or by text or by email, even just with one person, just copy the link from the app you're using and tell those, you know, those you love, those you want to help navigate this thing called life a little better. so we can all do it better together with more ease and more joy. Tell them to listen. Then even invite them to talk about what you've both discovered because when podcasts become conversations and conversations become action, that's how we all come alive together. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields signing off

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