Speaking of Psychology - How to get unstuck, with Adam Alter, PhD

Episode Date: June 14, 2023

Everyone gets stuck sometimes: in a creative pursuit that stalls, in a job or a relationship that isn’t working out, or even just at an exercise plateau. NYU psychologist Adam Alter, PhD, author of “Anatomy of a Breakthrough: How to Get Unstuck When It Matters Most,” talks about why getting stuck is such a universal experience, what you can do to get stuck less often, how you know when it’s time to quit versus push ahead, and the practical steps you can take to get past the mental or emotional hurdles that are keeping you stuck. For transcripts, links and more information, please visit the Speaking of Psychology Homepage. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All of us know the feeling of being stuck. Maybe you're stuck in a job that feels unfulfilling or in a relationship that's making you unhappy. Maybe you're stuck because you want to finish the novel you're working on or learn to speak another language or turn your hobby into a business, but you just can't seem to make it happen no matter how many attempts you try. So is getting stuck just an inevitable part of life, are there things you can do to set yourself up for getting stuck less often? often. How do you know when it's time to quit versus push ahead? And when you do feel stuck, what practical tips can you take to get past the mental, emotional, and other hurdles standing in your way? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills.

My guest today is Dr. Adam Alter, a professor of marketing at New York University Stern School of Business and an affiliate faculty member in the NYU Psychology Department. He is a social psychologist with a particular interest in how subtle cues in the environment can affect human cognition and behavior. He's the author of three books, including the New York Times bestseller, Irresistible, The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked, which is about the perils of technology addiction. More recently, he has been studying how people and organizations get stuck and how they can get unstuck. His newest book published in May is called Anatomy of a Breakthrough, How to Get Unstuck when it Matters Most. Dr. Alter has also

written for The New York Times, The New Yorker and The Washington Post, among other publications, and has consulted with dozens of companies and organizations around the world. Dr. Alter, thank you for joining me today. Thank you so much for having me, Kim. I gave a few examples of different kinds of stuck just a moment ago, being stuck in work in a relationship or in some kind of a creative endeavor. Now, when you think about being stuck, what's the common thread that ties all of these experiences together? I'm interested in particular kinds of stuckness. I'm especially interested in protracted or chronic stuckness. So these are occasions where people feel stuck for sometimes months, sometimes.

times years, sometimes even decades, or for sometimes, in some cases, their entire lives. So that's what I'm interested in. But I'm also specifically interested in cases where we have some agency. You know, during the early days of the pandemic in 2020, a lot of us couldn't travel. We couldn't do a lot of the things we wanted to do. We were therefore stuck. That wasn't as psychologically interesting to me as a case where we do we do, we do have the power to act. There is something we can do. There aren't government regulations preventing us from doing a certain thing we want to be able to do. And it turns out the vast majority of these occasions of stuckness where people feel they'd like to be in a different situation that often goes on for a long time, most of those cases

we do have some agency over. And so I'm very interested in this book and in general in my research in trying to figure out how we can get unstuck from those situations that tend to plague us for long periods of time. How common is it to feel stuck? I know you've done some surveys to study this. Does getting stuck happen to everyone, at least occasionally? Yes, absolutely. Does it happen more to some people than others? I haven't really looked at individual differences in how often people are stuck, but I've been very interested in how common stuckness is in general.

One of the surveys I've been running for several years now has looked at people around the world and asked them a simple question once I define what it is to be stuck, whether there's any area of their lives where they feel stuck. And what's fascinating to me is that the vast majority, I'd say over 90% of them within 10, 15 seconds, start typing a response. And so they're very quick to be able to draw to mind these occasions or instances or areas in which they feel stuck, which suggests that they're quite prominent, they're top of mind.

They're a big part of what it is to be alive. And so I think of stuckness as ubiquitous. You talk in the book about how people are more likely to get stuck in the middle of a project rather than at the beginning or at the end. Why is that? Yeah, this is some interesting research that looks at goal pursuit and the relationship between goal pursuit and motivation. And what it basically suggests is that at the beginning of a task, you're energized,

you're usually interested in what you're doing, you bring a lot of good resources to bear on the task. You can imagine any long task, any protracted goal where at the beginning, the fact that you're even starting it usually means that you have a little bit of wind behind your sales. And so that pushes you ahead. At the end of the task, as you can see the finish line, either metaphorical, or literally in some cases, you get another burst of energy because you're sort of drawn

almost magnetically to that finish line. But for protracted goals, I liken it a bit to sailing across the ocean between North America and Europe, that you're spending a huge period of time in the middle there between, say, New York and Southampton where you're unable to measure progress. If there is progress, and there may well be progress, it's very, very hard to get a sense of that progress because there are no real signposts or markers in the middle of the ocean. And often in long protracted goals, especially in the middle of those goals, you don't have the same sense of progress, and that can be demotivating. And so there tends to be this quite predictable lull in motivation during the middle part of long protracted goals. And that's not just true of humans.

It's true of lower order animals as well, but it's certainly very prominent in human behavior. So is one of the tricks to pace yourself? I mean, is that something that can help people not get stuck in the middle of something if they know that they're going to chunk the job down into discrete pieces. Yeah, so part of it is pacing yourself. There's a really interesting phenomenon known as teleo anticipation, which is literally the anticipation of the end. And so what we're supposed to do with protracted goals is to sort of work out either explicitly or implicitly at the beginning of that process, how much energy will I need in total and how should I best apportion that energy across the course of the goal. But that's a really difficult

problem and there's often a lot of uncertainty. So what you've described briefly there is another alternative, which is instead of just thinking of the goal as one big goal, you break it down or bracket it more narrowly into sub-goals. And the beauty of that is that instead of thinking of it as one long goal with a very big middle, if you make those chunks small enough, you sort of lose the middle, you eradicate the middle. And so then you have a start, you have a finish, you have a start, you have a finish, and you repeat that process. If you think about writing a book, for example, it's maybe 100,000 words, which is overwhelming. There's a big middle there. But if you think of it instead as, say, you know, 100 periods of writing a thousand words each, the middle in each of

those thousand word chunks is much smaller. And so you tend not to have such a pronounced lull. You also talk in the book about what you call the creative cliff. What do you mean by that term? Yeah, so it's actually, it's not the creative cliff so much as the creative cliff illusion. And it's an illusion that people have that we believe that we become less creative over time when we're trying to think of creative solutions to a problem. So an example of this might be something like there's a new soft drink company and you're working at a company and your job is to come up with good slogans for this new soft drink company. If I said to you, do you think your best ideas will come in the first 10 slogans you come up with

or in the next set of 10 between 11 and 20? And the vast majority of people say, well, the stuff that comes easily to me to, tends to come early. It's going to be harder as I go along. And I generally associate ease with skill, with fluency, with ability. And so just as with learning a language, the more fluent I am with the language, the easier it'll come to me. And so I assume the same about creativity. What turns out to be true, though, is the reverse, which is that it's when things start getting hard, that your ideas become more creative. Instead of there being a cliff over which your creativity tumbles, you sort of lift off, you lift off from the ground at the point where things start to get

hard. And so we have this sort of classic problem in human psychology is misinterpreting the signals around us to suggest that we should either quit or that we've already, our best is behind us. And in this case, explicitly the reverse is true, where we tend to do much better with creative tasks only after they start to become difficult. Is it also common for people to hit plateaus in life? And is a plateau the same as being stuck, or is it just a variant? Or are you just sort of cruising along at one steady level. Yeah, so a plateau is really where the returns that you're getting from a particular strategy stop arriving, or they shrink in size. So this might be, for example, there's a very famous example of this, looking at people who are sedentary and then they get

an exercise regime and then they're tracked for a seven-year period. What you find is that these people tend to make gains for the first 12 to 18 months, but almost universally the same thing that they've been doing that was really useful for 12 to 18 months becomes less useful beyond that. So they need to change what they're doing. The same is true for learning and for memory and memorization techniques that we see a similar situation happening when you're, for example, trying to learn a language that if you keep using the same strategy, it becomes less effective over time. And that's an example of plateau. So it could be that you hit a wall. That's one possibility. That's the sort of extreme version. But the alternative is that just the marginal gains you

get from further effort decline over time to the point where you're just not getting quite as much back, whereas formerly the same technique was really beneficial. So that's how I generally think of plateaus. They don't have to be that you stop making progress altogether, but you certainly slow down. Let's talk about some of the advice you offer in the book, because there's quite a lot there, and it's very good. One thing you advise is to talk to other people when you're feeling stuck, especially to people who are unlike yourself. Why is that helpful? Yeah, it's a tremendous resource that humans have that really other animals do not have. We have a tremendous social network to draw upon when we're stuck.

And if you speak to people who are like you, who have the same background, perhaps the same expertise, maybe they've trained the same way, maybe they grew up in the same place, maybe they have the same demographic characteristics, you'll find that they will magnify whatever you've been doing. So if you're doing something well, they will probably tell you to keep doing it or they'll help you keep doing it. But if you're stuck, by definition, you might get more entrenched in your stuckness by speaking to people who are like you because they'll magnify that stuckness. The best thing you can do is you can speak to people who are either different from you.

The technical term is non-redundant. In other words, there's no overlap. Or you can talk to people who actively push back on your ideas if you're open to that. And the value of that is, instead of having 10 overlapping minds, if you speak to 10 people who all see life a little bit differently, you're getting 10 independent sources of wisdom. And then your job really is just to comb through those 10 different sets of ideas and to figure out what works best for you. And so the idea there, as with much of what I talk about in the book, is that quality and quantity are strongly related. And so if you get more ideas, if you have more people sharing ideas that are distinct, you're more likely to find some good ones.

Another piece of advice that you offer, which seems to apply particularly to being stuck in a creative endeavor, is to take the pressure off yourself to come up with things that are entirely new and unique, and instead to think about recombining ideas. Can you talk about that? Yeah, this is one of the ideas that I came across. I love the arts in general, but I particularly love music. And I've always been really interested in this question that's now become a legal issue in a lot of cases, which is, are people stealing from others? Are artists stealing. their ideas, their songs, their melodies, their chords and so on from other artists who've written music in the past. And when you speak to experts, they'll tell you that almost never

does that happen. It's very rare for someone to say, I'm going to rip off this other artist because it's often transparent. It leads them to hot water. It's not a good idea professionally. And so I don't think that happens very often. But I think what does happen is we are constantly borrowing. You use the term recombining, which is a term that I use in the book. We're essentially taking two unoriginal ideas, but putting them together in a way that is original. We're recombining them in a way that's new. So I think true radical novelty is vanishingly rare in creative pursuits. But I think what's much more common and what is often a better thing to strive for,

a better aim to strive for is to say, I think what I want to do is find two things that have never been combined in a particular way and combine them in that way and see if that brings me value. What's really interesting to me is, as I was doing research for this book, I wanted to sort of figure out who is the closest to being radically original. And if we traced back far enough, could we find that their originality breaks down at a certain point? One of the examples that comes up very often for people is Bob Dylan. A lot of musicians say Dylan's a genuine, true, radical original. But if you look at Dylan's own words and you look at where his music comes from, even Dylan, as original as he is, was cobbling together a whole lot of different style. and he himself recognized that so much of his work was building on the folk tradition, for example.

And so you do this with art, you can do it with filmmaking. It's just very, very rare to find radical originality. And so recombining elements tends to be the better way to go. Did you find any radical originals? No, not really, to be honest. I think if you go back far enough, you do find the lineage of almost every idea in someone else's work. Who invented the wheel or fire? Yeah, I'm sure even before the invention of the wheel, there was someone pushing around something slightly oblong shaped.

Someone who invented the wheel saw that and said, hey, I've got an idea. They may have thought it was original, but it was just an iteration, an evolution rather than a revolution. What other phenomenon that you talk about in the book has to do with pivoting? And you tell some really great stories about people who are engaged in looking for, something. Your job is to, you know, maybe invent a drug and you never get there, but then suddenly you discover that something that you found was radically different, but marketable. Can you talk about some of those examples? Because I think the examples you have throughout the book are really rich and interesting. Thank you. Yeah. I think what happens a lot of the time, if you're looking

for something, if you're trying to make, say it's a clinical drug that you're making or you're searching for some form of originality or success, whether you're an entrepreneur or an artist, it doesn't really matter what you're doing, is you become very heavily invested in the thing that you're working on. You pour your heart and soul into it. And the golfer Sam Sneed, who is known for having the most beautiful swing of all time, describe the process of swinging the golf club as cradling a bird. You don't want to cradle it so lightly that it flies away, but if you cradle it with too much force, you end up crushing it. And that's kind of how I think the best, most nimble minds think about their ideas, that you don't want to be too flighty. You want to pursue the

idea as far as you can, but you need to be open to the possibility that you're wrong or that a slight tweak would improve your returns dramatically. And that's what I kept finding over and over again. A lot of the cases that come up in the history of science are chemists who are exploring new drugs. And there are so many examples of chemists who, for example, accidentally some of the drug they were working with got on their tongues and they tasted this substance and realized that A, it wasn't poisonous because they still were alive. And B, that it was really, really sweet and they didn't realize this. And so a lot of the artificial sweeteners that have then made companies, you know, billions of dollars

over the years, come from these kind of accidental discoveries. Now, a lot of people are not receptive to that kind of serendipity. But if you are, if you look for it, if you're always open to the idea, that you might be wrong. There are certain people who are just very good at capitalizing on seizing on these moments. And it's not just about chemistry. It's about art as well, and it's about business. And you see a lot of these cases of people pivoting in ways that ended up being very, very profitable for them. I want to talk for a moment about the idea of writers' block. I would imagine that all of our listeners have heard the term and maybe have experienced it, whether they were

in college and they had to write a term paper or maybe in their jobs to. today where you have an assignment to produce a big report. Is there really such a thing as writers block or is it just that people can't get started? And what are the techniques that can get you unstuck in that kind of a situation? Yeah, it's so funny because this is a term that I always took for granted. I assumed that it was a concept that was well recognized, that everyone agreed, yes, there was something called riders block or at least some version of it. But it's such a polarizing term because you speak to some writers and they say, oh, I have no idea what you're talking about. That's a ridiculous concept and I just sit down and I write. And they're very firm about that.

And then there are other writers who say, oh yeah, every day is riders block until it's not. And then you have writers who for a decade don't write anything. So it's a fascinating sort of, there's a lot of variance in how we experience it. One of the things I like best though is the attitude of Jeff Tweedy, who is the frontman, the songwriter, the singer for the band, the rock band Wilco, and also himself a writer. He writes a lot of books. and things like that. So he's a Renaissance man who his trade is really creativity. He has to wake up every day and be creative. And like any human being who's open and honest, he says, I don't wake up every day wanting to be creative. My best creative force is not brought to the work that I'm doing

every day. But he doesn't have the luxury, like a newspaper writer who needs to write a column, you don't always have the luxury of having writers' block. So what he has done that I think is really interesting is he thinks of his creative ideas as though what he has is essentially a body of water and the clean, crystal clear water is at the bottom of this body, but on top of it sits a layer of muck. And the good ideas are covered by this muck. And the muck is, you know, I'm tired, I can't get motivated and it's the sort of sense of writer's block.

And he talks about pouring out the bad ideas metaphorically. And the way he does that is he'll sit at his computer or he'll sit with a pad and paper or he might sit at his keyboard or his guitar, you know, thinking about how he's going to write a song. And he'll say to himself, the best thing I can do right now if I don't want to be stuck is to act. It doesn't really matter what the action looks like, but I need to act because then, you know, by definition, I'm not stuck. And so what he does is he says, in those moments for, say, 10 or 15 minutes at the beginning of the day, I'm going to lower my usually very high threshold for what's acceptable to the ground and say anything is good, anything is acceptable for the purposes of getting the ball rolling.

And so what he'll say to himself is something like, what's the worst musical phrase I could write right now? Or what's the worst passage that I could write? And the good news is if you've been doing this for long enough, it's very easy to do a bad job. But it turns out to be better than doing no job at all. And that's what he's found, that it really does seem to propel him forward. And then after he's done that for a bit, he gets into the groove. And so for him, there is essentially no writer's block once he uses that tactic. And that's how I often think of writer's block, that as long as you act,

even if the action is sideways, you'll get overriders block. It seems like one reason people get stuck these days, especially when they're trying to make a decision, is because there's so much information available at our fingertips right now. You give the example in the book of trying to decide what kind of car to get. What advice do you have for people when they get analysis, paralysis, because there's too much information to sift through? I think it's tempting to think of ourselves as a particular kind of decision maker. You know, like often we see our decision making as a sort of expression of wisdom.

You know, I make good decisions. I'm a good decision maker. I make the right decision. I think a better way to think about decision making is to think of every decision in terms of its gravity. And to ask yourself, is this a case where I need to be absolutely right? I need to make the very best decision, which is known as maximizing. I maximize the outcome, or is this a case where I can, the alternative is satisfying, where I basically say there's a hurdle, I need to get over that hurdle, and as long as I come up

against an option that's good enough, that's acceptable here. I don't need to find the perfect option. So there may be some areas of your life, for example, picking a partner or deciding whether they have children or deciding which house to buy or which town to live in or country to live in. Those are big decisions, and I think they warrant a lot of care and attention. And so you should, you should feel to some extent paralyzed by that decision and you should take a long time making it. But if you're standing at a wall of sodas at the supermarket and you're spending four hours trying to decide whether to go between Coke and Pepsi, that's a good case for satisfying. And I think most decisions we make during the day, even if there are hundreds of them,

99% of them probably fall in the satisfying camp. And there's a lot of research on satisfices versus maximizes, people who generally say good enough is good enough versus perfection is the only thing I'm looking for. If you hunt for perfection, you will be less happy, both with what you choose, but also in life in general. And so I think learning to distinguish these cases where it's essential to make the right decision from the ones where it doesn't actually matter that much is a really useful life philosophy. I hope that comes as a relief to some of our listeners.

Yeah. Since artificial intelligence is all over the news today's, I'd want to ask you if you've given any thought to how AI might help us get unstuck. And I'm thinking about a conversation I had with a colleague just the other day who had a work assignment where he had to synthesize a bunch of information and come up with recommendations. He didn't have a lot of time. He didn't see any immediate answer. So he turned to chat GPT, poured in the source information, and it spit out what he needed. So do you think generative AI is going to be another answer to getting unstuck? Yes, very much so. Unfortunately, as an educator, I'm now stuck because half of the assignments I've assigned

for the last 20 years are no longer viable. But my situation aside, I think it's a tremendous resource. And I think where it does its best work is, you know, we talked a little bit earlier about this idea of consulting others who are a bit different from you for advice and when you feel stuck. And I think chat GPT functions as essentially the collected wisdom of millions of different agents that are out there in the world because it's combing what's available on the internet. So generative AI for me is this great unsticking force that can be used as the kind of first step in the process, whatever the process might be. So I think that's usually where we get stuck. It's going from zero to one.

And an example of this is if I'm sitting and struggling to write the beginning sentence of a chapter or the beginning paragraph of a chapter and I'm writing a book, which is something I've done a few times now, and I've often been stuck at the beginning of a chapter, it's a difficult thing to do. One thing you can do, and I have done this with ChatGPT occasionally, is you can say to it, I'm writing a book chapter, this is what the chapter is about, you can give it a brief description. Tell me five different ways that you could write this chapter, you could begin the chapter. That doesn't mean you're plagiarizing, but what it's doing is it's getting you to think about some different options, the way you might, if you'd spoken to five of your best writer friends, and they said, well, here's what I would do. instantly, without having to check schedules and so on, you have this device or this platform that's telling you here are five different ways to do it. And the nice thing about chat GPT is if you say to it, you know, let's imagine that the last thing you said was wrong or let's improve on what you just did. It'll do that for you. And so you can push it and prod it in different directions.

So I find it a tremendous brainstorming partner for that early phase where you feel stuck and where you're trying to move from, you know, zero miles an hour to maybe 10 miles an hour. From 10 to 60, if that's what your goal is, you might have to do that on your own, but it gets you started. Let's talk for a moment about the role of fear in being stuck. Do people sometimes get stuck just because they're afraid of change or of the unknown? Yeah, so this survey that I've been running on people around the world, one of the questions I ask is tell me what it feels like as you think about being stuck. and it's not surprising, I think, that the emotions they feel are negative.

And fear comes up quite often. Anxiety comes up quite often. There's a real sense of isolation and loneliness, despite the fact that it seems near universal. It's often hidden from us that others are stuck as well. And I find one of the best ways to get over that fear of feeling stuck is to shine sunlight on this idea that being stuck is universal. And in fact, the beginning of the book, I spent quite a long time trying to

figure out whether there were some classic examples of tremendously successful people from the outside who once you look at the process that was hidden from the world, you find, turns out they were very, very afraid, very stuck, very uncomfortable until they weren't. And you find this with some of the biggest businesses in the world. I talk about Amazon and Airbnb. You find it with some of the most successful artists. I specifically focus at the beginning of the book on Brie Larson, the actress who won an Academy Award for Best Actress. And, you know, I, I, I, I'm yet to find someone who says, in all honesty, I was never stuck. It was always easy. It was plain sailing. It was not an issue for me at all. And so, yes, going back to your question,

I think fear is a very big factor that prevents people from moving forward. But so much of that comes from the sense that this is a sort of unique experience that I'm going through. And once you get past that, it usually feels, in my experience, quite liberating. And people do move forward. when a person's been stuck on something for a long time, how do they know when it's time to quit versus whether they should continue to try to push through? Is there some kind of a cost-benefit analysis that people could do in such cases? Yeah, it's a very interesting and important question. It's one of the big questions that comes up. In the book, I think I push quite firmly on the idea of persevering in general because I think a lot of the research suggests there's a lot of value

to persevering beyond the point where things get difficult. There are also some phenomenal books, including a book by Annie Duke called Quit, which is about the opposite. How do you know when to stop? And obviously, a wise assessment suggests that you can't always push forward and you can't always quit. You need to know how to distinguish the two. One of the useful pieces of advice that I've come across from people who seem to find

the middle ground quite well is they will describe a sense of convergence on a an endpoint that they desire. So if you're learning a language or a skill or you're trying to produce a creative idea or you have a business or you're trying out a career or you're trying a new major in college, whatever it might be, you'll probably run into some hardship. You can't quit at the first sign of hardship. That's what a lot of the research suggests. But if all you're doing is slogging through the process and you don't feel like you're converging on something promising, rewarding, that makes you feel good, that brings you the emotional returns you're looking for, then at some point you do need to quit.

And so one of the things you can do, sometimes there's an objective standard that helps you do this, but one thing you can do is to ask, am I getting closer to the goal over time, am I converging? Is the gap between my current skill level or my experience now and where I'd like to be shrinking or is it staying the same size or is it even getting larger? And once it starts getting larger and you feel like you're getting further and further from where you want to be, I think you start to make a good, case for quitting. But I think the idea of quitting as an empty idea doesn't make much sense.

For me, it's always, what are you quitting to? What happens next? And so in my experience, when I've moved through different processes and when I've decided not to do something, the best thing you can do is really to line up the next thing and wherever possible, especially if it's a professional or creative endeavor. Now, in addition to your academic work, you do a lot of consulting with companies. and organizations. I'm wondering if the advice you give them is similar to the advice that you give to individuals in terms of how to get unstuck.

It's broadly similar. In the book, I focus on individuals to a large extent, but I also talk about organizations and management and marketing problems specifically. A lot of the ideas, I think, are leadership-oriented. How do you put together a team? How do you put together a brain trust so that you maximize the chance of an organization unsticking. So there are some ideas that I think are germane to business decision making, maybe more than everyday life. But I always find, you know, I think one of the big skills that

we psychologists learn over time is that useful ideas have a lot of applications. And the best thing you can do is try to figure out where they apply. And often they apply more broadly than your instincts might suggest. And so I think a lot of the ideas, even, so here's an example, if I'm putting together a team and I'm trying to work out what sort of employees to put on that team, another question that you might ask, the individual version of that might be, I'm trying to put together a group of trusted people that I can turn to when I feel like I don't know how to move forward. And it turns out the same rules about composing that team at the workplace and in life, in general, hold. And so I think you can learn a tremendous amount from the business ideas and also

the business ideas, I think, gain a lot from just what it is to be an, individual human being navigating the world. Is there any other advice that we haven't discussed that you'd want to leave with our listeners today? I think one thing I'll say is we, in childhood, I have a five-year-old and a seven-year-old, and in childhood there's a lot of curiosity. We find the world a curious place. We ask a huge number of questions.

We're very rarely satisfied by the first, second or third answers we get. And so we push forward constantly and, you know, kids are never satisfied with the answers they get. At some point between being a child and being an adult that shifts, we start to assume that common wisdom is common wisdom for a reason. Adults don't question that much. You know, you see other people doing something. You assume it's the right way where a child might say, why is that? And it turns out there are some adults who are natural, I call them experimentalists. It's a sort of philosophy of questioning everything.

and wondering whether with the right experiment there might be a better way. Is there a better way for me to communicate with my loved ones? Is there a better way for me to work in the workplace? Is there a better way for me even narrowly to learn how to play a particular piano piece or paint a particular painting? It doesn't really matter the task. But one of the chapters I talk about these people who are chronic experimentalists and how, for some of them, it unlocks tremendous potential.

I talk about an Olympic swimmer who learned to be an Olympic swimmer at that level of proficiency by essentially saying, hey, the way everyone else is swimming the backstroke is not the best way. He pioneered a completely new technique. And there are other people in other domains too. So I think that's a really valuable approach to the world that keeps us, A, young, and B, makes us open, or keeps us open to the potential to do better in general. And I think it's one of the best ways to prevent yourself from getting stuck in the first place

is to always say, oh yeah, this is starting to feel a little bit sticky. it's not working the way I'd like. I think I need to consider alternatives. And that's, I think, a very useful piece of advice. And what's next for you? What else are you working on besides stuckness? Yeah, so I'm constantly working on a whole lot of ideas. In fact, I talk about this in the book, that I have this document that's called

research ideas and another document called book ideas. And what they essentially are is 20 years worth of interesting ideas that have either come to me that I've come across in the world, it would take me 100 lifetimes to actually pursue all of them. So at the moment, I'm very invested in the book and in the question of how we can get unstuck in lots of different contexts. But at some point, I'm sure I'll return to those documents and figure out what's next. Well, I want to thank you for joining me today, Dr. Alter. This has been really interesting.

Thanks so much for having me. Kim, I really enjoyed it. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at www. speakingof psychology.org or on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, YouTube, or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. And if you like what you've heard, please leave us a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speaking of psychology at APA.org. Speaking of psychology is produced by Lee Weinerman. Our sound editor is Chris Condyenne. Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills.