The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Anatomy of a Breakthrough: How to Get Unstuck When It Matters Most by Adam Alter

Episode Date: May 6, 2023

Anatomy of a Breakthrough: How to Get Unstuck When It Matters Most by Adam Alter https://amzn.to/3M0RDlW A groundbreaking guide to breaking free from the thoughts, habits, jobs, relationships, and even business models that prevent us from achieving our full potential. Almost everyone feels stuck in some way. Whether you’re muddling through a midlife crisis, wrestling writer’s block, trapped in a thankless job, or trying to remedy a fraying friendship, the resulting emotion is usually a mix of anxiety, uncertainty, fear, anger, and numbness. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Anatomy of a Breakthrough is the roadmap we all need to escape our inertia and flourish in the face of friction. Adam Alter has spent the past two decades studying how people become stuck and how they free themselves to thrive. Here he reveals the formula he and other researchers have uncovered. The solution rests on a process that he calls a friction audit—a systematic procedure that uncovers why a person or organization is stuck, and then suggests a path to progress. The friction audit states that people and organizations get unstuck when they overcome three sources of friction: HEART (unhelpful emotions); HEAD (unhelpful patterns of thought); and HABIT (unhelpful behaviors). Despite the ubiquity of friction, there are many great “unstickers” hidden in plain sight among us and Alter shines a light on some exceptional stories to share their valuable lessons with us. He tells us about the sub-elite swimmer who unstuck himself twice to win two Olympic gold medals, the actor who faced countless rejections before gaining worldwide fame, the renowned painter who became paralyzed and had to relearn to paint with a brush strapped to his wrist, and Alter’s own story of getting unstuck from a college degree that made him deeply unhappy. Artfully weaving together scientific studies, anecdotes, and interviews, Alter teaches us that getting stuck is a feature rather than a glitch on the road to thriving, but with the right tweaks and corrections we can reach even our loftiest targets.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. Welcome to the big circus tent in the sky, the big knowledge brain in the sky. That's what the Chris Foss Show is. It's a giant, almost artificial intelligence brain, because I have none.

I skipped going to elementary school. We've all been there, right? But it's a giant brain in the podcast sky. And what you do every day, as my wonderful, loyal audience of 14 years, is you come on and you tap into that brain and it downloads into your brain and your brain starts to expand bigger and bigger and everybody knows that when you have a lot of knowledge, you're sexier.

So there you go. That's how I sell that. You know, you got to sell the sex. But you know, you want to be smarter because then when you talk to people, they go, that guy is smart. You know, not like what George Carlin used to do. Like that guy is talk to people, they go, that guy is smart. Not like what George Carlin used to do.

That guy is full of shit, if you remember him. Anyway, I can't do George Carlin's impression, but he was an intelligent man. Anyway, guys, refer to the show to your family, friends, and relatives because the beautiful part about it is if you're intelligent and they're intelligent, then everybody's smarter and the world works better. Otherwise, you walk around going, that person is full of shit, as George Cullen would say. Anyway, guys, we just launched a new AI, automated intelligence, or not automated intelligence, artificial intelligence. Clearly, I have none. And the podcast is found at AICrisVoss.com. It's called AI Podcast with Chris Voss.

We just launched that. It's one of the verticals. You'll find some of the copies of some of the discussions we have here on the big show over there. And then there's also Chris Voss Leadership, which is part of the Chris Voss Leadership Institute. It's also launched. You can go find that podcast. Go to goodreads.com for just Chris Voss. YouTube.com for just Chris Voss. LinkedIn for such Chris Voss. But an amazing mind on the show. I was excited to have him on because he's written many, many books and very insightful as well. So you're going to learn a lot today, especially from maybe a business aspect. He is the author of the newest book. This is coming out May 16th, 2023.

If you're listening to this now, you can get the preorder on it. Adam Alter is on the show with us today. His new book is called Anatomy of a Breakthrough, How to Get Unstuck When It Matters Most. He's going to be on the show talking to us about it. He is a professor of marketing and psychology and the Stansky Teaching Excellence Faculty Fellow at New York University's Stern School of Business with an affiliated professorship in social psychology at NYU's psychology department. In 2020, he was voted

Professor of the Year. Congratulations by the faculty and student body at NYU's Stern Business School and was among the poets and is that quants? Quants. Poets and quants. I learned a new word today. 40 of the best professors under 40 in 2017. Are you still under 40? I'm not. I scraped under the wire in 2017.

Yeah, you're going to have to be the best professor between 40 and 50 now. You've got to work on that. Alter is the New York Times bestselling author of two books, Drunk Tank Pink, which I think was about me, and Irresistible. Welcome to the show, Adam. How are you? Well, thanks. Thanks for having me, Chris. There you go. And Drunk Tank Pink was not about me, folks.

That's a joke. You know that. Adam, give us your.com so we can find you on the interwebs, please. Adam Alter Author. That's it. Easy. There you go.

Yep. Very easy. And is it.com? It's.com. There we go. Easy. There you go. Yep. Very easy. And is it.com? It's.com. There we go. Want to make sure we get that. Some people have like a.me and.show. We have a.show too.

So there's that. Yeah. So how many books have you written? There's quite a few that I found for you. Three. There you go. And your earlier book, the one about behavior and technology and all the stuff we go through, really interesting.

I'd love to have you come back to feature that book if you ever want to. But in the meantime, what motivated you to write this book? A few things. One was the pandemic. So this book is about getting unstuck and finding breakthroughs. And I think collectively we were all stuck for a couple of years there. We had no choice. Yeah, pretty much.

Stuck at home. Yeah, exactly. Stuck at home. Physically stuck. But also in a lot of ways,. We had no choice. Yeah, pretty much. Stuck at home. Yeah, exactly. Stuck at home, physically stuck, but also in a lot of ways, I think we're intellectually stuck. We had to pivot and find new directions. A lot of us with businesses and consulting gigs and no matter what you were doing, something changed in 2020.

And so that was an interesting time. It's also just something I've been researching for the last 20 years or so, this idea of how do you get unstuck on the path to breakthroughs? It's just a pet area of interest of mine. Yeah. And you talk about midlife crisis, wrestling writers block. I've had that. Trapped in thankless jobs. I've had plenty of those. Relationships as well, fraying, resulting emotions and some of the anxiety, fear and anger that we usually deal with this. And so you talk about, is that the term I guess you mean when you get

unstuck? Yeah. So, you know, getting stuck, I think of it as, I'm really interested in kinds of stuckness that are in your control. So where you can do something to get unstuck. In the pandemic, we couldn't travel because that was just the way the world was. And that's not interesting to me. What's interesting is all the kinds of stuckness that are within our control. And particularly the ones that are, you know, we're entrenched for months or years or even decades where we really feel trapped for a long period of time. And it turns out that's pretty common. So that's what I'm focusing on. One time I put up one of those flypaper scroll rolls that, you know, the flies stick to. And I got stuck to that.

Do you cover any of that in the book? I'm just kidding. So you talk about in the book something called the friction audit. Tell us about that and how you break that down. Yeah, the friction audit is a process of finding friction points wherever something is hard or difficult or difficult to make your way through. And you sand down the friction so that it becomes smoother. And the original place I started using this was in a lot of my business consulting work. For example, shopping malls that I was working with, they found that a lot of people would go to the shopping mall and they'd abandon their carts, their physical carts with stuff inside the carts without paying.

They figured out that a lot of these people were shopping with their kids. Their kids freaked out and they had to go home. And so we talked about that as a friction point. Like, what is it about the shopping experience? Obviously, kids, when they hit their limit, they hit their limit. As a parent, you don't want a screaming kid. So what we started to do was to put small playgrounds inside these shopping malls. It's not a very expensive thing to have to build but it ended up saving you know hundreds of thousands or more dollars in big malls every year because

people didn't abandon their shopping carts so that's an example of a friction audit where the return on investment for a very small modest change uh is is high so that's and you can do that in your everyday life as well it doesn't just have to be about. Did you guys ever consider just banning kids? I'm kidding people. We do the jokes. No, but like McDonald's does that. And it's very effective. You know, the McDonald's thing, it gets people stay there.

Probably gets more buy time or more in the more time. It's kind of like a casino. And when you're in a mall, the more time you're there, the more money you're going to spend. Right. Exactly. That's the idea. Yeah. And there's four, from what I understand, there's four axioms to this audit. Give us some in-depth to that. Yeah. So each of them starts with an H. There are three chapters in each section. So it's a 12-chapter book. And I start with help, which is a section on demystifying

what it is to be stuck. I talk about this survey I've been running for a few years now on thousands of people around the world. They are all in some way stuck. They feel very lonely in their stuckness. It's a bit of an overwhelming experience, but it turns out to be universal. I think most people are in at least one area of their lives. So that's help, which is trying to explain why and when we get stuck. The next section is on dealing with the emotional consequences. That's heart. So how do you deal with that feeling, which is aversive, which is where you want to be somewhere that you're not right now. And if you can't really overcome that, it's very hard to be

strategic and to behave in ways that make sense for getting unstuck. So that's the first thing, is figuring out the emotional response. And then the next thing is to figure out some strategies, some cognitive strategies, ways of thinking about the problem. That's head, the section that sort of deals with the brain and how we can think our way through these processes. And then the last section, which I think is probably the most important, is habit, which is about the actions we can take to get unstuck. And so that's the framework for the book and for the friction audit process that the book describes. And this sounds like a great step process because we all go through times of frustration, anxiety, fear, anger.

I mean, that's just me on any Friday. But, you know, you basically give them a blueprint on how to process this. You know, I studied a lot of Stoicism, Marcus Aurelius and stuff. And part of that is, you know, managing, you know, how you feel from a logical reason standpoint. And by doing that empowers you because it's how you manage that perception. And then what you do with it is really important. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think there's a lot of overlap in that section on heart, on emotions with some of the ideas in Stoicism and becoming steeled against whatever hardship might come your way and learning how to manage yourself out of that initial response, which is always negative, right?

I mean, it doesn't feel good to be stuck for things to shift under you. A lot of those changes are unwanted. And so you've got to figure out a way to deal with them. Yeah. They say, do you agree with the thing? You know, they say sometimes that it's not really what happens to us. It's our perception of what happens to us. Like I remember Tony Robbins used to have this thing years, you know, decades ago that I learned from. And he's like, you know, two people can go to the same party. And one person can see like a really fun party and everybody's having a good time and they can leave going down. Party was awesome. And another person just go see all the dark parts about the party. People weren't talking to each

other. Uh, people weren't having fun and they, and what they focus on is kind of what they get. Uh, is that maybe sometimes the, the, with your, uh, four step in our journey algorithm to, to change that perception so that you can at least get through what you're stuck on? Yeah, absolutely. There's a lot of research on the difference between challenge and threat, for example. So we experience a lot of change as threatening, and that makes us less capable of dealing with it. And there's a small mindset shift in just the way you describe changes that threat into a challenge. And challenges are kind of engaging.

We can overcome them. We can battle them. We recognize that failure is not the end of the world. You can fail better each time and get closer to the mark in most domains of life. So, yeah, that's a big part of it. And also just generally slowing things down, recognizing that just because you're stuck, you're going to want to flail because that's our natural response. But actually, flailing is the worst thing you can do. And the best thing you can do is to do what a lot of titans of business and musicians and athletes do, which is slow everything down. The best example of this that I can think of right now is Lionel

Messi, the soccer player, who I think is the best player alive today and possibly the greatest player of all time. He spends the first five minutes of every game he plays basically walking around, just looking at who is doing what, figuring out the lay of the land, and that makes him more effective for the remainder of the game. And that's partly to deal with his own anxiety as the game begins, but also to develop strategic edges above everyone else. And it's been very successful for him.

So he sacrifices the couple of minutes at the beginning for the remaining 88 plus minutes of the game. And it's a great strategy, I think, in other domains as well. I love the slowing everything down concept. And then, of course, I think what you're doing too. Well, let me finish this thought. You know, the slowing everything down is really important and getting familiar

and relaxing. We use that term a lot in our gaming. I have a crew I run with that does Modern Warfare 2 gaming, and there's a lot of strategy to it, and that's what I love about it. It's kind of like it's active, it's real-life chess, basically.

And there are times where we're in the heat of a battle and and this battle can be transposed just about anything you're doing in life whether you're in the heat of battle of life or job or work or home or whatever uh fighting with your kid over uh i don't know they won't go to bed if you're in the heat of the battle you know that's slowing everything down and realizing that the emotions are really overcoming the logic and reason part of you. And you're not making good decisions.

You're making irrational, emotional decisions. Realizing that and we'll pull back and be, hey, we need to slow down. Let's all stop for a second, take a breath. Nothing's going to happen if we just take a step back and let's slow down, let's process. And that seems to be a big thing. You mentioned walking through the court and all that sort of stuff to see how it goes. Sometimes when I have a guest on, I'll watch videos on the side computer of them playing where I'm listening to a guest on maybe another podcast or a news interview. And a lot of times what I'll do is I'll do that beforehand so that when the

guest comes on, I kind of already feel like I've been talking to them for a while. And there's kind of a congruency that's already, that just kicks in that I just feel really comfortable. And, and that really works for me. And it's in, in probably in a way it slows it down, but I think what's really great about your book is you're helping people determine, hey, whoa, I'm having some feelings here. I need to address what this is and be able to take it from a logical aspect. Yeah. Yeah. I love that idea of actually watching someone ahead of time.

And a lot of what getting unstuck is sort of getting the ball rolling. And I think watching a guest before does that it kind of gets you halfway into the mindset of actually running the interview and so anything you can do to smooth the the gap between not doing anything and doing something is a tremendous way to to remain unstuck and to make progress in general yeah and and just the recognizing what is Recognizing the problem is half the solving of the problem. And being able to go, hey, I'm stuck. I got writer's block.

Or sometimes being stuck is a longer time, like you mentioned, trapped in a thankless job. Give us some tips on maybe how you navigate that because it's not something you immediately fix. It's not something you immediately fix. A lot of what it is is taking small steps and figuring out what the alternatives are. So I talk about the experimental mindset in this book, and that's basically becoming a kid. If you spend time with kids, little kids, they'll tell you that they don't understand something 10 times before they get to the point where they're satisfied. And adults don't do that. There's a point between childhood and adulthood where we stop being curious and stop asking questions.

And kids will question everything. You know, nothing makes sense to them until they're fully satisfied. And the same is true about something like figuring out what the best career is. I think adults just stop too soon. We don't experiment enough. When I was in college, I wasn't sure what to study. And so I actually, I left one degree behind and was trying to figure out what to do afterwards. I spent six months going to introductory lectures on every single

topic I could find, experimenting, basically saying, is this the thing for me? Is this the thing for me? And eventually landed on what I'm doing today. But it took, you know, 50 failures before I figured out what I wanted to do. And so the first step is figuring out what the landscape looks like and then looking at every option and figuring out which one's best. Yeah. because changing the perception of that is, you know, there were probably things you learned on those experiences that you will probably use in the future. I remember Steve Jobs had that great famous, it's been played a million times everywhere,

the famous commencement address at a college where he talks about how he was failing in college and really didn't care, he kind of gave up, but he loved his topography class, and he was just fascinated by it. And it turns out that was one of the key aspects of a tool that he never thought he would use in business to making the Mac great. And so, you know, life is a journey where you collect stories, you collect lessons, you collect stuff,

and sometimes you never know where you use it. But sometimes when you use it, it ends up being the most profitable, whether it's financially or most profitable intrinsically to the value of your life, that you go, damn, I'm glad I learned that. Yeah, absolutely. Maybe that's the way we should approach life more. We should look at failure as more like, well, you learned something, right? Yeah, and actually it's very hard in the moment to know what this is doing for you.

Anything you're doing, the question is, especially with failures, you might have a benchmark that you're trying to reach. And if you don't reach it, it turns out a lot of those failures are serendipitous. They bring us to a good place, and you don't even realize that at the time so um i think that's right i think there's there's a lot of value in not not succeeding in whatever the typical sense is just as i use the word failure to describe going to these classes that were not ultimately useful but i learned a lot about what i wasn't interested in so that i could make time for what i was yeah I use the same thing when I'm dating. Like if, if someone says, no, I'm not interested. Uh, great. I go, okay. I'm, I'm one no closer to a yes. I'm one no closer to finding someone that, that, uh, will like me, uh, which is probably impossible at this point,

but the same, the same, you know, in that aspect is what I learned in sales. Uh, what, if, if you're one more, no, you're one more closer, uh, to a yes. And so you're just, you're just basically, you know, a process of elimination. And so, yeah, you know, there's an old story with, uh, uh, and I think Tom Peters told the story, but, uh, maybe it was Tony Robbins, but an IBM executive lost like, I can't remember what it was like 10 million or $25 million on some big deal. I may have the number wrong. And he walked into, I think it was Tom Watson, uh, one of the old CEOs of IBM. And he says, he was a vice president and he goes, Hey, I'm going to tender my resignation. I just lost the company $25 million or something. And the CEO said to him,

I'm sorry, I'm not going to accept it. We just spent $25 million teaching you a lesson, and we just educated you. We're not going to fire you because we're not wasting our investment. So, yeah, you're staying with the company. And that sort of mindset is really interesting. That's about what education costs in the United States these days. So 25 mil sounds about right. Yeah, that's just one college education. And that's just getting the basic

degree. What are some other things you want to tease out about the book that we haven't touched on? I think one thing that's interesting for me is this question of who you should collect around you for advice and ideas. And I think what a lot of us do instinctively is we have people around us with similar backgrounds, ideas, similar training, especially in the workplace, but not even just in the workplace. And so we end up spending a lot of time with redundancy in our ideas. So we overlap a lot with other people. And so what that means is you magnify your strengths, but you also magnify your weaknesses, which can get you stuck.

So the best teams have three kinds of people in them. The person who constructs the team will find some people who agree and who see the world the same way, because that's good for harmony. But they'll also find people who are known as non-redundant. So that basically means, like a lot of the hedge funds do this, they'll go and send scouts to universities, and they'll say, who's the smartest kid in the Russian literature class? Who's the smartest kid in French literature? Who's the smartest kid in organic chemistry? Who's the smartest mathematician? We're going to pluck all of these people who have completely non-overlapping backgrounds and knowledge, but they're all very talented. And so that's very useful. And that's

true for your personal life too. You should have people around you who are different from you, who can give you advice. And then there are even going one step further, you know, Pixar does this when they put together a team, they will find people who they call black sheep, who aren't just non redundant, but actively go against the grain. And some of their Academy Awards came from films where there was someone brought in as the black sheep to say, you're also focused on animation and the beauty of the picture. What about the storytelling? Let me tell you, we got to spend 10 times more time and money on the storytelling because we're going to lose people. They're not going to care that the water looks like water and the fur looks like fur on the monsters if we can't grip them with the

story. And so they bring in these people who are black sheep. So you need those people who are harmonious. You need the people who are non-redundant, who are just different from everyone. And then you need some people who are actively kind of pushing back and that's how you construct i think a good advice network yeah anytime i'm asking for advice i'm usually looking for the contrarians or people that will tell me i'm wrong and and i like those people sometimes uh like sheep they better have a good argument though and like you said they they are those those uh those those companies pool the smartest people, so you better have a good smart thing to come at me with. But I hate it when I just get all the people who are like,

yeah, you're right, Chris. Yeah, you're right, Chris. And it's like, well, I'm narcissistic, so I know I'm right anyway. I want to hear the other side. That's what I'm actively searching for. A long time ago, I think I covered this in my book, a lesson that I learned from one of my old CEOs back in the day. We had this one guy on the board who was just, everything was always wrong. Like, you know, he was the guy that whatever the idea was, he was against it. And, you know, he was negative Nancy, basically, in the room.

And I went to my CEO and I said, I said, dude, do we, what the hell is with that guy? Why didn't you just kick him out? He goes, Chris, last thing you ever want to do as a CEO is be surrounded by yes men. He goes,

now that guy just kind of, and he wasn't one of those brilliant people you talked about, but he goes, he goes, when that guy's right, that guy, that's the negative Nancy. When he's right, when he's on and all of us are playing yes men and that guy's right, that guy that's the negative Nancy, when he's right, when he's on,

and all of us are playing yes man, and that guy is right, he's going to save me millions of dollars. Yeah. And you need that guy. And you don't have to listen to him all the time, but when he's on it, he's got it right. And that can make a difference in the life or death of a business. Yeah, I think that's right. I think these people who are always naysaying, they're tricky like that because you've got to figure out, is this the time when they're right or is this another time when they're wrong? That's the tricky part.

But what you've got to find is people who are well calibrated, who are in a particular area, they are contrarian. And so you know they're going to come up with something that's a little bit different in this particular area and that's going to be useful because they are different in that way and you can trust that difference. I think these people who are just naysayers for the sake of it they're complicated sometimes they can be hidden geniuses but you've got to you've got to know them well enough to be able to wade through the nonsense that's good advice or they're just professional

trolls we see that a lot in my youtube channel um but no it's i love it when someone will correct me and uh and they'll present an intelligent argument and i'll be like well shit i'm wrong okay all right i'll adjust my trajectory um because i that's the reason i share a lot of ideas is because i'm looking for somebody to go and uh chris you should you know go from this but it's interesting how what you put in the book you know that perception is everything. Yeah, I think so. Yeah.

And it makes all the difference. What else haven't we touched on in the book? Because it's a great book on how you should approach this and, of course, identifying the problem. And then I think, you know, there's an empowerment, right? There's an empowerment they have with your model to use those four things to feel empowered and then that way you don't feel so frustrated and get lost in the feelings yeah well i'll just throw a few things into the mix um i think one really useful thing that i found is there's a there's a difference uh between exploring and exploiting so these are evolutionary terms that describe how animals would roam the savannah

you know whether they're humans or other animals and the the exploration phase is where you have this kind of very broad net you say yes to everything you know opportunities come up think about like i remember this as a freshman in college i'd say yes to everything people would be like do you want to try this club do you want to do this thing do you want to do that thing it didn't really matter what it was. I would just say yes to everything. And I found that extremely rewarding. And so that's that exploration phase.

And then there's the exploitation phase. Once you figure out what works for you is you really drill into the thing that works for you. You make the most of that particular thing and you get narrow and you only say yes to the things that are specifically about that. You say no to everything else. And that's an extremely valuable general approach. And they found that in careers across the course of careers of artists, film writers, musicians, just pretty much, and business people as well, that your greatest hits will come after a period of exploration where you have a cast, a wide net, followed by really drilling into that one thing that makes the most sense to you. And that process of going broad,

then narrow, and finding exactly what you like and exploiting it as much as possible seems to be a very valuable way in general of uh of turning up big hits in a career and periods known as hot streaks so i think that's a valuable thing that's a good way to get unstuck in general yeah in in changing our mindset to you know how we think about problems and failures and everything else uh you know i just i've been reading uh ryan holiday's book the obstacles the way which is based on stoicism. And, you know, how we approach our problems makes all that difference in how we view them. And, you know, some people, you know, I remember growing up as a kid, and I probably still do it today. You know, something happens, you're like, oh, God, oh, this again, oh, another problem.

Oh, God, I got to fix this mess. And a lot of times the privilege of being able to fix that mess you know like as an entrepreneur i would have to go oh god this problem again oh god this customer has this problem and you're like you know it's kind of a privilege actually for me to have it i remember my employees would come to me and they'd start making 10 or 20 grand a year and realize that taxes are quite expensive at that level and and i'd be like i'd be like you have to understand you don't have a new problem you have a privilege because of what you're earning now and you're you are having to pay more taxes but you're still earning more right you know they'd be like i need to figure out how

to lower my taxes well there's ways to do that. But technically, you're in a privileged position. Don't kick it. If you quit your job to lower your taxes, it's probably dumb. But there are some people that did. And so this is really important, I think, in the thing of it. Anything more you want to tease out on at autonomy of a breakthrough anatomy of a breakthrough i'm sorry no no that's fine yeah i guess the one last thing i'll say is um you know all of this all the strategizing is in the service

of acting in some particular way and so by far the most important thing is to actually take action you talked about starting some interviews by having a video of the guest playing so you feel like you're sort of into the interview before it even begins. That's a form of pre-action that gets you to the point where you're ready to go. And I think that's incredibly valuable in general. And there's a lot of great examples of this. There's Jeff Tweedy, the front man from the band Wilco, who's also a writer, talks about this idea of waking up in the morning and feeling like, you know, I've been writing songs for decades. I've got nothing left. There's no more creativity to come out. And he feels,

felt like he hit a wall. And he talks about this idea that buried underneath all the bad ideas of the good ideas, you've kind of got to pour out the bad ones to make way for the good ones, almost like it's a liquid. And so what he does is he will say to himself all right i'm let's say he's writing a song he'll say i'm going to write the very i'm going to spend half an hour writing the worst song i can imagine lower the bar so it's at the floor and anything that's in my head i'm going to just pour out i'm going to make it boring and trite and the melody is going to suck and it's going to be terrible but what that does is it's because he's acting he's by definition not stuck in those moments and it propels him forward so he spends half an hour

being you know writing this bad stuff that sometimes turns out better than he expects to make way for the rest of his writing period being successful and it works because so much of being stuck is that difference between not doing anything and doing something and so doing anything even lowering the bar so your your threshold for what is a good enough action is very low is an extremely way extremely effective way forward and tell me if this is a good analogy because i love that when i when i was writing my book uh sometimes i would get stuck uh and and so i would just start writing whatever like i just start typing stuff sometimes it'd be really stupid like uh all work and no play makes jack a dull boy you know that's sort of insanity

um which is where i was at in the editing part um but uh we've all been there right um and so uh but just just you know like you say just writing stuff and it's almost the one thing even if you get done looking at it you're like this is complete and utter shit um there's a part of writing and and mental acuity and a lot of these different things is almost like a leg or a ligament where you have to stretch it. You have to keep using it. It's like a muscle. Comedy's the same way where if I don't stay on a funny streak, I kind of feel disconnected and I lose it and I have trouble getting back on the horse.

And so it's almost like a ligament in your brain where you have to keep exercising that and keep functioning it. And just by keeping the gears moving or oiled, you find your way back on the track. Yeah. And the last section of the book where I talk about action is called Habit, precisely because it's about finding that place where every day you have a practice. And I think, again, that draws on this idea from ancient philosophy of getting into a sort of rhythm that then propels you forward in action. Because if you have to make new decisions every day,

like today I'm going to do some work and it's going to be this kind of work, that's going to overwhelm you. You want to free up as many of your resources as you can to produce the right product. And you do that by not having to make a fresh decision every day. You've already made that decision. This is my habit.

This is what I'm going to do. And it's the same kind of process that absolves you of having to make fresh decisions every time. Ah, and see, that's really important because I think where people get caught up with procrastination, like, you know, I pretty much intermittent fast all day, but recently I've had to really do some long-term 20-hour, 24-hour fasting to really break through insulin resistance. And I don't want to do it. It's a pain in the ass, but I didn't take care of my health early on, so now we have to play this catch-up game. And if you think about, oh God, today's the day we got to do this, and then you start building resistance to it, where if you just have the

habit of doing it every day, like I don't think about the intermittent fasting I do every day. I just do it. And I've gotten in the habit where I'm really good at just doing it. And I'll cheat a little bit or break off or eat a piece of cheese. Cheese. Squirrel. ADHD. But I think what you've mentioned there, the habit thing is really

important. You know, even if I'm, you know, not writing about business, I'll write some stupid shit about something else I'm passionate about. And just keeping that ligament, if you will, that mental ligament, I don't even know if ligament's the right word, but keeping that going, I think it's important. Yeah, 100%. I totally agree. And it's sort of the reason why the last thing in the book is, I basically have a list drawn from the rest of the book, 100 Ways to Get Unstuck. And it's just this series of algorithms that you can apply to your life and you can use over and over again so that it becomes, getting unstuck becomes a matter of just following the script. And that simplifies the whole process pretty dramatically, which was what the whole intention

with the book was, you know, humans constantly stuck, shouldn't have to rebuild the whole situation from scratch every time they're trying to get unstuck. And that's the theory. And people can wallow in being stuck for years. I mean, decades, maybe a whole lifetime. Some people probably explains my life. Your book from 2017, Irresistible, the rise of addictive technology and business of keeping us hooked. Have you thought about updating that for TikTok? Because that thing is that thing is crack. Yeah, I mean, I started writing that book in 2013, 14. So a decade ago, which was a long time ago. This is before a lot of people were talking

about the subject. And so a lot of the apps that people are using today, the platforms they're using didn't exist yet or were small fry at the time. So, you know, it's an interesting question. If the publisher invited me to update it, I might consider it. I am sort of moving on with other things now. I still talk a lot about the book, but now I have the new one coming out. But you're right. I mean, it's the problem that I was discussing and identifying at the time is only more acute now. I mean, TikTok is like crack. You get to do the pat on the back there. I called it.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's funny because when I first came out with this, you know, I started telling people, hey, I've got this book. It's about the problems with screen time. And at the beginning, people were like, what are you talking about? There's no, this is great stuff. This is just pure entertainment. There's nothing wrong with it.

And then slowly we sort of culturally came around to the idea that it was a problem. Made my life much easier. I didn't have to convince people of that. And then I could talk about solutions. But, yeah, it's been a hell of a 10 years yeah i mean i i've been into social media since uh it started and with twitter and etc etc and you know i'm aware of a little bit of addiction of course i run a businesses on it but but that tiktok that it's a whole new level of shit right there man like i can i can go four hours on that thing yeah i can wake up i can go i'm just gonna flip a few before i go to bed and i can wake up in this or i can see the sun up and then go fuck

uh very very effective yeah it's very effective it still is it's one of my favorite things anyway uh anything more you want to tease out adam before you go on the show or go out on the show or give us your.coms? No, I don't think so. So Adam alter author.com is the email address. I'm on Twitter and LinkedIn. They are the two places where I tend to post more often.

And yeah, I really appreciate the chat. It's been fun. There you go. Thank you very much, Adam, for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. Thanks, Chris. Thanks. There you go. Thank you very much, Adam, for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. Thanks, Chris.

Thanks for having me. There you go. Order it up, folks, wherever fine books are sold. Anatomy of a Breakthrough. How to Get Unstuck When It Matters Most. Available May 16th, 2023. So you can pre-order it now and be the first one in your book club to see or read it.

Check out all of our sites across social media to further show your family, friends, and relatives. We certainly appreciate it. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.