The One You Feed - How to Get Unstuck with Adam Alter

Episode Date: August 18, 2023

In this episode, Adam Alter shares valuable strategies for learning how to become unstuck and break through common barriers in life. He emphasizes the importance of seeking new perspectives and thinking differently to break through mental and emotional blocks. He also highlights the connection between physical movement and creative inspiration, explaining how it stimulates the brain and unlocks fresh ideas. In this episode, you’ll be able to: Discover powerful strategies to unblock personal growth hurdles and pave a clear path toward your goals Uncover the surprising relationship between physical movement and creativity Recognize the unspoken value of failure and how it can lead to unforeseen successes Immerse in the importance of broadening your horizon and embracing new perspectives to clear mental roadblocks Learn how and why exploration and exploitation for fostering both personal and professional growth To learn more, click here!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

More often, people quit too soon, so they stop things too soon. That doesn't mean you shouldn't say, all right, I'm done with this thing, I should move on, and it's great to try new things, but I think our tendency is to say, this got hard and I'm just going to abandon it. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized

the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Thank you. how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden.

And together, our mission on the Really No Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Adam Alter, a professor of marketing at New

York University's Stern School of Business and the Robert Stansky Teaching Excellence Faculty Fellow with an affiliated appointment in the New York University Psychology Department. Adam is a New York Times bestselling author, and he's also written for the New York Times, New Yorker, Washington Post, Atlantic, Wired, and many others. He's also shared his ideas on NPR's Fresh Air at the Con Leon Festival of Creativity and with dozens of companies. Adam's academic research focuses on judgment and decision-making in social psychology, with a particular interest in the sometimes surprising effects of subtle clues in the environment on human cognition

and behavior. Today, Eric, Ginny, and Adam discuss his book, The Anatomy of a Breakthrough, How to Get Unstuck When It Matters Most. Hi, Adam. Welcome to the show. Thanks very much for having me. I'm happy to have you on. We're going to be discussing your book, Anatomy of a Breakthrough, how to get unstuck when it matters the most. But before we get into that, we'll start like we always do with the parable. And to read the parable is my co-host, Ginny, who is here. Yes. Hello, everybody. Hi, Adam. Hi, Ginny. So the parable goes like this. There's a grandparent talking with their grandchild.

And they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us who are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And one is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second, looks up at their grandparent and says, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd love to know how that parable applies to you and your life and in the work you do. So I think all of my work, all of my research work, at least, has been an attempt to understand those two competing forces and the fact that they drive us in opposite directions. And a lot of that, it turns out, is I think out of our control.

And so then the question is how do we manage whatever has guided us in either the right direction or the wrong direction? And so all of my books, a lot of my research is about how we spend our time, money, and other resources to maximize our own welfare and the welfare of people around us. So it's really a matter of feeding the right wolf is the way that I think a lot of my research has been geared. Yeah.

So I think that this idea of competing forces getting pulled one direction or the other is the primary challenge. But there's often after that or maybe embedded in that the challenge of being stuck. It's what the new book is about. It's about places where we get stuck. And I was wondering if first you could describe to us what the new book is about. It's about places where we get stuck. And I was wondering if first you could describe to us what that word means to you. When you say stuck, what are you referring to? Yeah, I think there are, broadly speaking, two kinds of stuck. One stuck is there's a pandemic and I can't get to where I want to get to. You know, a few years

ago, that was an issue for a lot of us. And there's not much you can do about that. There are quarantine laws that prevent you from leaving a certain area and you're stuck. That's not all that interesting to me. I think that happens from time to time. There are constraints, financial, political, whatever. But what's interesting to me is that the vast majority of stuckness, when we feel like we can't move forward, is actually within our control. And so I've spent a lot of time trying to devise a sort of manual or set of rules that you can apply to lots of situations where we as individuals might feel stuck. And then you can sort of unpack those rules and then apply them to whatever this particular

instance of stuckness is. And it's very broad. It can be financial stuckness. It can be stuck trying to find a creative idea and you can't get there. It could be that you're stuck at work, stuck in relationships. There are just tons of different contexts where it comes up. I ran a survey with thousands of people around the world and said, can you think of an instance or an area of your life in which you're stuck? Everyone could. It took them an average of 10 seconds to do it. They all said, this makes me feel terrible. It consumes me. I really want to work it out.

And the breadth and diversity of responses was incredible. So it's a very broad concept. Yeah, it's really broad. And it's really painful and difficult when you're there. I mean, it is a sense of wanting to move forward, but doubting yourself and doubting that you have what it takes or doubting that you can. You know, it feels overwhelming. It feels like an invisible wall and you just don't know how to break through. Yeah, I think it's very overwhelming. And what's really interesting about stuckness is I've been fascinated with the difference between being physically stuck and being psychologically stuck. And I focus on the psychological side. Humans are really well designed to be physically stuck. We do all sorts of things that are very adaptive. We develop huge amounts of strength, your adrenaline pumps, you do all sorts of things

that get you unstuck pretty fast most of the time. There are these stories in the news every now and again of someone who lifts a car to free themselves physically. The problem is all of those instincts that are great in that context do exactly the opposite when you're psychologically stuck. They get you into a kind of tizzy and then you can't think rationally. You are just overwhelmed with emotion and it's very, very hard to make steps forward. So really figuring out the emotional part is the first part of moving past that sense of being completely overwhelmed. Yeah. One of the things I think is so powerful in your book is that the point that you start

off with, which is that like, not only the first rule is, is that you will get stuck. This is an inevitability and it's universal. You know, you talk about how the first step is to accept, you know, the fact that you're stuck. And I think just naming that and normalizing it is powerful because at least for me, when I'm stuck, the first thing I do is make it mean something. And I make it mean that I can't do this, right? I make it mean that I don't have what it takes. I make it mean that, you know, I'm sort of faded to this place for the rest of my life and forward motion is just not in the cards, you know? So, I think that's really powerful.

In fact, as a side note, you talk about acceptance. And in your book, you talk about Tara Brock. She's a teacher that I have learned so much from. She's amazing. She's amazing. She was the teacher I turned to actually almost daily in the most difficult years caring for my mom with Alzheimer's. The wisdom she shares and specifically around acceptance is transformational. Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, I think one of the really interesting things about Tara Brach's work is the marriage of the East and West. And I've done a lot of

research into how the East and the West or people in those cultural areas think about different topics. And one of them is how we think about being stuck. So in the West, if you ask people in the US, in Australia, in Britain, in Canada, in New Zealand, you ask them, say, we've had three sunny days in a row, what's going to happen tomorrow? And they say, oh, it's going to be sunny again. We're in a sunny patch. Or you say, you know, the economy's not doing so well, what's going to happen tomorrow? They say, oh yeah, we're in a rough patch. But if you ask people in the East, China, South Korea, Japan, the same question, you say,

it's been sunny for three days. They say, well, tomorrow it's probably going to rain, or it's been rainy for three days. It's probably going to be sunny tomorrow. They are very open to the idea that things are going to shift constantly. It's part of Taoism, the yin yang, that sense of balance from day to night, the seasons shift. We find that sort of hard to grapple with in the West. And I think that makes us really poorly positioned for being stuck because it feels like things should have kept going the way they were going, whatever that meant. You know, if things were going smoothly, they should keep doing that.

But that's, as you say, not the way the world works. And so being prepared for it is, I think, the first step in managing it. That's fascinating. I did not realize there was a difference, Eastern culture versus Western. I mean, the other thing I know I do is every time I'm feeling blue or, you know, grumpy, depressed, whatever, it's like, oh, I'm always going to feel this way. Right. Exactly. It feels like it's going to last forever. And it's a big part of the way we think in the West in particular. There's a lot to go into there, but I think I'll keep us moving because that could be a deep rabbit hole, but I'm fascinated by it. And I'm fascinated particularly

that you yourself have done some of that research because I hear about those type of cultural differences a lot. And then I'm always sort of like, I don't want to assume that that's necessarily true in all cases. But it's interesting that you've done that research fairly recently, I assume. Yeah, that was some of my research as a grad student, and I've kept up with it. So this was probably 15 years ago, and it's still been bubbling along. And I think it inspired a lot of what made this book interesting to me. So it's been there for a while. Do you think that as many of the Eastern countries are, by many accounts, becoming more westernized, that that is shifting? And I know I'm asking an opinion here. Or do you think that's deeply embedded enough culturally that even though

they may be coming more westernized in certain ways, that some of those philosophical underpinnings are strong enough to withstand that? I think it's a bit of both. I think that there are some deep philosophical ideas that aren't shifting all that much that will continue. The idea of collectivism in the East versus individualism in the West is a really big one. And that seems to still be quite a big difference between the cultures. But you're right, you know, as you introduce more Western ideas to the East, things shift a little bit. And that's actually what a lot of my research was about in those early days. It was about the shifting nature of cultural ideas

and whether there might be a coming together of those disparate cultures that they're starting to look a little bit more like each other. And that's what I found. Well, and we can see it in the West, right? I mean, with the huge amount of people who've turned to meditation and mindfulness and all that, right? Those are ideas that are pretty well imported and have really seeped into our Western culture in a pretty deep way. I think they could go a lot further and it would still be beneficial, but compared to 15 or 20 years ago,

it's radically different. Yeah, I agree. And I think a big part of what's pushing us in this direction where we aren't maybe great at dealing with change is the rise of science and advanced medicine. Because what that's doing is it's showing us that we have the ability to overcome certain things that maybe historically we felt were beyond our control. So the fact that there are incredible scientific and medical advances tells us something about our dominion over the world. And I think that gives us this sort of sense that we have a command that perhaps we don't really have more broadly. And so we overgeneralize that. And when we get personally stuck, we're sort of blindsided by it. Yep. One of the ideas that goes into this sense that everybody gets stuck is, as Jenny was sort of saying, it's really helpful to know, because then it's not my own personal failing. And the corollary to that, that you talk about that I really like is that

when we struggle, we just see how hard it is for us. And we look at other people, and we think, well, it's not so hard for them. You know, we were talking about this in regards to writing a book, right before before we started talking. And it's like, well, when you're in the middle of struggling with the writing, you think, I'm not any good at this. And then you pick up a book right before before we started talking and it's like well when you're in the middle of struggling with the writing you think oh god i'm not any good at this and then you pick up a book and read somebody who is good and you're like it just must come easy to them yeah because we don't see their struggle yeah exactly it's one of the things i found in the survey that i ran that everyone says they're stuck but they think no one else is stuck and i think it's because what we see in the world is the finished product whether it's on social media platforms where everything is curated, whether it's the finished book rather than all the drafts that went into it.

You know, a book can be 25, 30, 40, 50 years of work. And what you end up getting is the perfected final polished version. And I actually begin the book by talking about the actress Brie Larson, who was unusually transparent about this. She released a two-part video on YouTube basically saying, I'm going to tell you all the auditions that didn't work out, all of the casting calls that didn't work out. And that's really disarming because I think we spend so much time imagining that someone who wins an Academy Award for best actress had it smooth all the way through. And that's overwhelming if you see too many of those

exemplars over time. And so it's really nice to know that that's not the case. if you see too many of those exemplars over time. And so it's really nice to know that that's not the case. Yep. And I think this idea, back to what we're talking about around where in the West we think things are a little bit more permanent, right? It's kind of the opposite of what Carol Dweck famously coined, the growth mindset, right?

Which is this sense like if I'm not good at something, then I'm just not good at it. And that's it. Whereas, Ginny, you were referencing this and what we're talking about in general is to get unstuck, I would assume part of it is the belief that I can get unstuck, that I can make progress. It's a huge part of it. I spend a huge chunk of the beginning of the book talking about exactly this, that the first step in getting unstuck is understanding what it is, what it means to be stuck and grappling with the emotional consequence of feeling stuck. And I think having a growth mindset, believing you can

change, things will shift, you can improve, you can learn skills, you can apply skills is a huge part in ultimately getting unstuck. And so this isn't just a book that says, you know, here are 10 strategies. It's also a book that says, let's kind of marinate and being stuck and accept that this is the way the world is. It's going to happen again. You may as well accept it. And once you accept it, you're that much closer to getting through it. When you say accept it, just to double click on that for a second, and you mean not to say you like it, not to say that you embrace it and hope

that it's the case forever. You just mean to potentially, I'm assuming, like stop sort of fighting the fact that it's there. Exactly. I mean, to accept that it's occurred rather than denying it. Yeah. Because I think that's our first instinct a lot of the time is to kind of push it off, ignore it, don't grapple with it. You have to do something to get past it.

And so you don't want to accept that it's here permanently. But by accepting it exists, you start to marshal resources that can help you tackle it. And I think that's a really important step that a lot of people struggle with. Yeah, like this is my reality. So now what can I do? I mean, you talk about focusing on what are the parts that are out of my control? And then what are the parts that are in my control

that I can affect? Exactly. So the rest of your book goes into so many really helpful, practical, applicable strategies, and not even just things you can do, but just mindset shifts, or once you learn this concept, you realize that it exists, so you can sort of kind of tackle it. So specifically, like if we transition into the first section of your book entitled Help.

Sure. Yeah. The first concept that you present that I thought was really transformational was this idea of getting rid of the middle. Yeah. So can you talk a little bit about maybe the research that was done, even in rats in the mazes, what was observed and then what that might tell us about how we can apply it in our lives? Yeah. So a lot of the things we try to do have a long arc. In other words, they're big things that we're trying to do, especially the most important things in our lives. They involve sometimes weeks, months, years of action.

And a lot of the research shows that when you first start They involve sometimes weeks, months, years of action. And a lot of the research shows that when you first start something big like that, whether it's a career or a task you're trying to achieve a certain goal in, you are energized at the beginning. And then when you can see the finish line, you're energized again. But there's this very big middle part, the middle lull. And it's true with rats in mazes. It's true with humans when they're trying pretty much anything. If you're painting a big artwork and you are stuck in the middle, there will be a lull. If you're trying to raise money for a charity, there will be a lull in the middle and people won't donate as much. It just has 100,000 different applications.

And in every case, it's the sense that you aren't still getting that same wind behind your sails and you're also, you can't see the finish line and so you're stuck in the middle. That's the term that's used. Actually, one of the best papers on the topic is called stuck in the middle. And so the best thing you can do, I think, is to do what psychologists call bracketing, which is where you re-bracket a big experience into smaller chunks. So you adopt narrower brackets. So if you think about the example of raising money for a charity, let's say it's, you want to raise a million dollars for a hospital, you could break that down into a hundred smaller $10,000 chunks and then you don't have middles because each little chunk is so small that you eradicate the middle from each one.

And so there are lots of examples of this kind of narrow bracketing where you take a big experience, a big goal, you break it down into a smaller one. And that effectively eliminates the middle by giving yourself these little sub rewards all the way along. Yeah, you get started, and then immediately, you can also see the end. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. In that same idea, you talk a lot about the idea of plateaus. Yeah. Can you share a little bit about what you mean by that and some of the solutions?

Yeah. So in human endeavors, when we try to learn things, there's a huge amount of evidence, no matter what you're trying to learn, that we hit a plateau at a certain point. So what usually happens is you develop a strategy that gets you a certain way to where you want to be. If you're learning a language, for example, you want to become as close to fluent as possible. You start doing that thing and you start doing whatever it is that's been working for you. You will hit a plateau and you'll need to change things. If you work out at a gym and you try to train your muscles or you're a runner and you're trying to get fit, you will reach a plateau where you have to change things up. And so this idea of the plateau, there's a great book called The

Plateau Effect, which basically suggests that no matter what you're trying to achieve as you grow and move towards that goal, things will reach a point where whatever you've been doing in the past no longer works as effectively and you have to switch things. It's again, this idea that there's constant change and change can lead you to feel stuck. And so you've got to be open to the idea

that whatever has worked in the past may need a little bit of shifting in the future. Yeah, it's kind of mind boggling, isn't it? Like it worked then, I don't understand. Exactly. Why doesn't it work now? Yeah. Yeah, I think kind of mind boggling, isn't it? Like it worked then. I don't understand. Exactly. Why doesn't it work now? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think this is a really important point. If we turn and we apply it to spiritual development or even psychological development, right? Because what I know is that a lot of people over the years have done a lot of different

things. And people often frame that as a failure. They often say like, well, I started doing this thing and I thought it was the answer, but then it really wasn't. And then I did this thing and I thought it was the answer and then it really wasn't, as if there's a permanent answer. It's a really good point. Right? And so if we see that as a very natural, like, okay, I went here and I learned what I had to learn from this approach, this person, this place, this community. And then it just didn't feel like there was more there for me. So then I moved on. And that's not bad.

It's actually skillful. Now, what I think is really interesting, though, if we think about something like spiritual development there are periods where there are plateaus and oftentimes the encouragement is stay with this thing right you know i had this in my zen practice where i would hit these points where i had a spiritual director at the time and i talked with him about i was like i don't know whether i'm in a natural fallow period or a natural dry period and I need to just walk through, or if I should trust this thing that's calling me to do something else. Right. That takes a lot of discernment.

Yeah, I think it does. And I think this idea, it's a sort of cultural idea that we have that there is a solution to problems, whereas I think in truth, on day one, maybe for the first three hours of the day, there's a solution. And by the fourth hour of the day, there's a completely different solution. And so the switch from one to another is a competency rather than a failing to suggest that the first solution that worked for those three hours wasn't the ultimate one. So you can be open to the idea that across time, whether it's across days or weeks or months or even hours, different things are going to work at different times. And that's totally fine. But you're right. There is also this sense that if you jump around too much,

you never know if perhaps you should have pushed a little further. And that's one thing I saw a lot in doing the research for this book, that more often people quit too soon. So they stop things too soon. That doesn't mean you shouldn't say, all right, I'm done with this thing. I should move on. And it's great to try new things. But I think our tendency is to say, all right, I'm done with this thing. I should move on. And it's great to try new things. But I think our tendency is to say this got hard and I'm just going to abandon it. What was it that determined in that research that caused you to conclude they quit too soon? Is there anything about that research and that conclusion that can help us decide whether we're quitting too soon?

Yeah, I think one of the most useful guides is, you know, the theory of quitting too soon is based on the idea that you're not reaching a certain bar that you want to reach. There's some metric for saying I'm doing well and things are going fine. And so what you want to try to do is if you fail repeatedly, which is fine, I don't even know if fail is the right term, but you don't quite reach that mark repeatedly and you don't feel like you are where you want to be, that gap should get smaller over time. So if you are a creative mind and you're trying to come up with like a perfect book idea or you're painting or you are a filmmaker or whatever it is, you know that when you're producing things, they might not be exactly where you want them to be, but you usually have a sense of how close you are to the mark, especially as you've done these things for a while. That might be true in meditation,

in mindfulness, in Zen practice as well. You know where you want to be and you know the gap between where you are and where you want to be. If that gap gets smaller over time across a reasonable time period, that means you're getting closer and there's value in continuing. But when you start to see a divergence where the gap starts to grow consistently larger, that's usually a time to invest your time elsewhere, at least exploring other options and opportunities. So I think that's been really helpful. And there's some really interesting research tracking the careers of filmmakers, artists, writers who have a huge success. And the question is what came before that huge success? And that's what you see. It's usually the narrowing between where I am and where I need to be for that success to emerge.

And so it's good to kind of constantly do this little audit where you say to yourself, am I getting closer to the mark even if I'm not quite there yet? Something that I think is interesting to also reflect on, back to this idea of the plateau effect, is how things are constantly changing and just to remember that and then contrast that with our brain's natural tendency to sort of set it and forget it. Like we name something and then we don't really see it anymore, right? The idea of like, once you call a bird a bird, you don't see it anymore. Or like, you know, our brains can't constantly be looking for how things are changing. I mean, it's got a lot going on up there. The resources need to be allocated

to keep us surviving. But like, you know, we do need to pause periodically and say like, what has changed? What has changed? Because something has. And so now what's needed? Yeah, I did this research with a colleague of mine, Hal Hirschfield at UCLA. And we were really interested in understanding when people do this thing where they zoom back and say, what's going on in my life? Because we don't do that often. You know, you're often nose to the grindstone, you're either exhausted or overworked, and you've got too much going on. It's hard to do that. But what we found was that when people's ages end in a nine, when you're 29, 39, 49, 59,

it's a reminder that time is passing because you're about to reach a new decade just by an accident of the way we count with the base 10 system. And so what we found was that these years, there are these surveys that ask hundreds of thousands of people around the world, how much do you question whether your life is meaningful? And we found that at these nine ending ages, there's a big, big bump in that number. And also that they do all sorts of things. They sign up for marathons. You see some really good things like signing up for marathons and getting fit and all of

that. And you also see some less good things like you see a rise in extramarital affairs. And so what you have is this sort of extraneous cue, this external cue that says, hey, it's time to think about your life, which forces us to make these really big decisions. Some of them good, some of them less good. But you don't need to wait for your age to end in a nine to do that. It's just that that reminds you of the passage of time. So I think it's useful to build in these reminders. I actually have one in my calendar every year it pops up.

I pick a random day in the year and it says audit. It's kind of a scary word. It's my cue. It's like now is the time. I'm sure when that comes up, it just fills your heart with warmth. With a lot of warmth. Yeah. I could probably choose a better brand, better term for that. As a marketing professor, you'd think I would have done better than audit, but that pops up. I'm like, oh, it's time again. Let's take a day and zoom back and figure it out. Well, the good news then is I have six years before I have to reflect on my life at all. Exactly. No, yearly audit, yearly audit.

Oh, I thought I could just wait till my nine. Okay, all right. You can if you want to be passive. Along with the idea of plateaus, you know, that something that was working for us stops working, is the idea of the creative cliff. Can you share a little bit about that? Yeah, it's one of my favorite pieces of research from the last decade. I think it's totally fascinating and has so many applications. And it's this idea that when you ask people, when will your best ideas emerge? when will your best ideas emerge? Like if you're trying to do something creative or new,

say you're a comedian, you're writing jokes, or you're trying to come up with creative uses for a paperclip, it doesn't matter what it is. We're always doing creative things, trying to think of new ideas. People assume the best stuff will come first. So they assume that in the first five minutes of any attempt to come up with creative ideas, whatever's there, the good stuff will tumble out. It'll be easy to do. And as soon as it starts getting hard to think of new ideas, that's when things go south. It's no good. There's a cliff. My creativity is going to fall off a cliff. And in truth, what happens is the obvious stuff tumbles out first. And it feels easy because it's orthodox. Everyone has the same ideas. I say, think of a creative use for a paperclip and everyone has the same basic ideas.

We could turn it into an earring or something like that. And that feels easy and it comes out pretty fast, but it's when things start to get hard, there's an inflection point, that's when things get interesting. It's grappling with the hardness of that. It does get more difficult, but that heralds the more interesting divergent ideas that are more creative, more inventive. And there's a huge amount of research to show exactly that. You take comedians and you say, come up with some jokes. The first jokes come really easily, but they're not very good. The good stuff comes later on. And that's true for almost any creative pursuit. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden.

And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth.

Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us tonight. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir.

Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really. Yeah, Really. No Really.

Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. That's a really interesting idea, and I think a lot about it in relation to music. Yeah. idea and i think a lot about it in relation to music yeah and if you read about musicians who have created great pieces of music there tends to be a certain number of them who say like this just

arrived like it just showed up i mean keith richards talks about the riff for satisfaction like it was in his dream he woke up right you know will say, like, it just all kind of just showed up at once. And it feels like this remarkable, incredible experience. Right, yeah. And I think it does happen that way some of the time, right? The problem is you can't make it happen. No. And then you hear on the opposite end people like Leonard Cohen, you know, one of my favorite songwriters of all time, who will say, wrote a hundred verses for that song yeah he was the opposite extreme like he just was like i'm gonna keep at this

until i get it right you know and so that idea of writing a hundred verses and so i think with creativity it's interesting because that first kind does happen and i think we have those experiences which probably then leads us to think that's the way it always happens, or it should happen. And I think what your research is saying is that, yeah, but most of the time, it happens by sticking with it. Yeah, most of the time, for most of us, that's how it happens. It is the Leonard Cohen version of sitting and trying for sometimes days, hours, months, years, whatever it might be, and multiple iterations to get to the point where you're happy with something, that doesn't mean eureka effects don't happen. You know, they certainly do. And we're hit by a flash of insight. But I actually think a lot of those flashes of insight, it's a mistake to see them that way. It's just that we don't know where

they've come from. And they've come from the hours of work that you've done before. Yeah, that's so great. Because there's an idea in spiritual circles that has Yeah, that's so great because there's an idea in spiritual circles that has emerged around that awakening just happens. And that all this straining and struggling and meditating and putting all this time in, like, you don't really have to do that. The thing that I find so difficult about that idea is that the people who are saying that have put in years of meditating. They've done all those things. And so to say that it just arrived without all those preconditions being set is to kind of miss the point. It's sort of like Barry Bond saying, like, well, you don't have to do a lot of batting practice, right?

Like, just step up to the plate and hit it out of the park. But you wouldn't say that to a six-year-old. No. Right? They have to put in the batting practice. So I'm just applying it back to a different domain, but I think it rings true. Yeah. I think it's generally hard for us, especially when we've had some experience at something,

to understand what led us to where we are. You have either amnesia or you just don't have good access to whatever it was that formed you the way you are. And this is especially true as you get better at something. You don't really know how to unpack what got you to the point where you were better than you used to be. And so when you're explaining it to other people, there's this kind of knowledge gap where if someone says to me, like, how did you get good at X if there's something that

you're good at? It's very, very hard actually to explain that. It's tough. Unless it's a series of very concrete algorithmic steps where you're just unpacking it one at a time, it's a kind of mystical thing and it's very hard to know how to explain it. So I think that explains a lot of what seems like just a burst or a flash of insight in any context. Yeah. So the rest of your book is really wisely broken into the emotional terrain of being stuck, the mental terrain, and then the habits that we can engage in to really work with these different components.

So if we focus in on the heart section, as you guys are sitting here talking, I'm thinking about how interesting it is that like, as humans, it's through leaning into the pressure of the external forces that we get better. Like strength training, you're engaging with resistance and that makes you stronger. But emotionally, as it turns out, with resistance and that makes you stronger. But emotionally, as it turns out, right, actually, it's the opposite that can be the most productive. You talk about removing pressure from yourself and others as the first, you know, easy step to improving creativity and general performance. You highlight this or illustrate this rather through talking about Miles Davis. Yeah.

Would you share that story with us? Tell us a little more. Yeah, this is the story of Herbie Hancock, the great pianist, and he was playing in Miles Davis's band as he was auditioning. This was a long time ago. This is very early on in his career. He was a very young guy. He was in his late teens. And he was overwhelmed by the idea of playing for Miles, who was a giant. All the other musicians were giants. And they played a rehearsal one day at Miles' house. This was Herbie's audition. And Herbie Hancock tells the story of this now. And it's absolutely magnetic because what happened was Miles was known for being a perfectionist, for being extremely talented and for knowing exactly what he was aiming for with every piece.

And so all the other musicians, their role was to basically guess what Miles wanted and then to produce it for him. And so Herbie Hancock goes into this knowing that that's what he's trying to do. And Miles sits there through the beginning of the audition, which is going to last a few days. They're all jamming together. And he throws his trumpet down after a couple of numbers and then he goes upstairs and they don't see him for days. And Hancock thinks to himself, well, obviously I bombed it. He left the room. He's not even listening. He's not interested. But it also liberated him. It made him feel like, well, obviously I bombed it. He left the room. He's not even listening. He's not interested, but it also liberated him. It made him feel like, well, the stakes are much lower now. You know, I'm just jamming with a couple of the greatest musicians of the day. And he starts

having fun and he starts playing some things that maybe he didn't even expect to play in front of Miles. At the end of the third day, Miles comes down the stairs and says, you know, I've been listening in on the intercom for the last few days and I like what I'm hearing. And so this guy who is known for dialing up the pressure constantly also knew when to dial it back. And he knew that by giving someone who was young and unformed, but who was very talented, a little bit of extra emotional space, he was going to get the best from him. Now we can do that for ourselves as well, to a large extent. I think we often put so much pressure on ourselves because we see other talented people famously being hard on themselves in many contexts. It's almost always the wrong way to go if you're trying to get the best from yourself.

And so I'd spend a good few chapters talking about taking a pause, dialing down the emotional intensity, and how giving yourself a bit of breathing space emotionally is usually the best way to start getting unstuck. Yeah. It connects back to, in kind of a spiritual realm, like the idea of self-compassion. But that term doesn't connect for a lot of people, right? So I like this as another avenue in, which is to think about how you can lower the stakes on what's expected. I mean, so many of us, right, when we know we want or need to perform, we get really hard on ourselves.

Like, come on, you can do it. Thinking that that's actually going to help us produce our best work. Maybe it does once or twice. But as Erica said before, I like this term, it's sort of a dirty fuel. Like it burns. Yeah. You know, like over time that actually corrodes us and it keeps us stuck. It can keep us from performing at our best.

So one of the ideas you talk about is it's maybe a semantic thing, but it really works. And I'm going to take it a step further. You say, you can rise to a challenge where you might succumb to a threat. So if you can reframe things, you know, but I even need it to go lower. So like, for example, we ride the Peloton and Eric loves the like different, you know, 90 day challenge or 30 day challenge, or it's like everybody's got a challenge for something. And I'm like, I am not the least bit interested in joining your challenge. Yeah. Now, an experiment.

I'm all for it. Like, give me a 30 day experiment. And OK, like, let's see what we can do. I needed even a step down from there. There's a dialing down from challenge. There's threat, there's challenge, there's experiment. Because who knows what's going to happen. And that really takes the emotional intensity down. I like it. Yeah, that's threat, there's challenge, there's experiment. There's experiment. Because who knows what's going to happen. And that really takes the emotional intensity down.

I like it. Yeah, that's great. Yeah. Yeah. The threat is just so daunting, right? But challenge makes you feel like, let's see, because it brings curiosity in. Exactly. Yeah.

I talk a lot about experimenting in a later part of the book, but I think as a way of reframing that overwhelming sense that I have to achieve something, it's very valuable. And I think in general, we don't go very far imagining this, but we think about worst case scenarios, but we don't go far enough into that because usually things that don't quite work out, there's something on the other side of that and you can try again, you can try something different. And even recognizing that that's true usually takes the emotional intensity down to a point where you perform better in the moment. I'm going to go back to music for a second, because this question has been bouncing around

in my mind, and it may not be relevant. But we're talking about this idea that there's not a creative cliff, that you get better at something, the more you work on it, the longer you spend on it, right? And there's a domain in which I'm wondering how true that is. And it's rock and roll music. And the reason I'm wondering is that there are some examples. You've got Bob Dylan is probably the primary one who is creating what I would say is some of his best music at the age he is. But so many musicians, it's in their first couple years that they just nail it. And then it kind of fades. And I'm just curious what you think about that. Yeah, it's funny. I was investigating this idea

that we have hot streaks in our careers. Yes. And I talk about this in the book. And one of the things that I found most interesting about hot streaks is there is no recipe for when a hot streak will happen. There's no way to predict it. For some people, there are many hot streaks in our careers. Some people just have one. Most people have at least one. But when I look at the careers of musicians, there are people who have that hot streak during the January of their careers, some in the December, some it comes like seasons throughout their careers. And it's a little hard to predict. The biggest predictor of when you'll get a hot streak is to do two things in a particular order. And the first thing is to explore, is to experiment. It's to roam widely and say, hey, I haven't figured out exactly what works

best for me. And so I'm going to try like five, six, seven different things. And so you see musicians or artists trying all these different styles and approaches and different instruments and different ways of different time signatures and different crafts and approaches and so on. And then they say, hey, you know that this one of them, the third one I tried, I think I liked that. There was something that resonated there. Then you go as deep as you can into that thing. So the first period is scan as much territory as you can. The second is whatever worked best, go really deep on that thing. Just exploit it. That's actually the term they use. Exploit it as much as possible. And when you do that, explore, then exploit in that order, that's when the hot streak emerges. I love that I can almost always see like a three album period where I'm like, I don't know what

happened in those three records, but they had it like totally. And before that, I mean, sometimes it's their first record that they start that way. Sometimes it's their second or third record. And then, you know, the hot streak ends, but to your point, there can be others. And it seems like probably then what's happening is they are then moving into exploring again. I mean, exactly. You know, exploration happens. I mean, certainly that's been the case with many people who've had second acts, as we would say, you know, they explored and they came back and then were able to do something slightly differently really well. Yeah. There's something really liberating about this. And this is what I found over and

over again, that it's never too late. So a career that hasn't yet had a hot streak or someone who's still struggling as they move into middle and later adulthood, there are people who at the very end of their careers have this great, incredibly productive, incredibly self-fulfilling period. And so by just applying even at times where it feels like behind you, perhaps things haven't looked the way that you've wanted them to you could get there and you can get there and people do that's really important i think in our business um and i'm looking at jenny sort of as i say this a little bit but in our business there have been plenty of times where i've concluded like that's it like we've been doing this this long and we're about as far as we're gonna get and

you know like it's just anybody who wanted to listen to us would have been listening to us by now and, you know, or whatever it is. And I've been proven wrong again and again by saying, all right, let's just stay with it. You kept going. And then you're like, oh, look at that. Yeah. We may be jumping ahead a little bit by talking about this exploring, exploiting, but I wanted to ask one more thing about this because I really liked it, which was this idea of how do you know when you're in one mode or the other, which is the yes and no. Will you talk about that?

Yeah. So this makes me think about what it was like when I was a very young assistant professor. I just started as a professor and I was saying yes to everything, every opportunity that came by. I was like, I will try that. I will try that. I will try that. I will be up for 18 hours a day. I will say yes to everything. And that was great. And it showed me that I could write books and it showed me that I could consult and do other things that I perhaps hadn't imagined doing. But I was exhausted.

But that was a period of exploration. I had to say yes to everything to sort of sift through all the options and to get a sense of what worked. And then I reached a point where I was like, I don't think I want to keep doing that so furiously. What I want to do is figure out what works and then really do that. And to do that, you have to start saying no. So there are yes modes where you're saying yes to everything.

Opportunities arise, people want to hang out, everything's yes. That's exploring. And then the exploiting period is where you say, if it's about this and it's a yes, but almost everything else is a no. I've got to shut myself off from those other distractions as I make the very most of this thing that seemed to be best during the exploration and yes phase. Yeah, you go deep into that.

You go deep and say no to everything else. Yeah, it's a great way to think about that time frame. Yeah, I found it useful. Yeah. Another idea that comes up in this section of the book is the idea of an ideal success to failure ratio, right? And the idea that we should fail often has become something that's been more culturally accepted and talked about, even though I think it's still much harder for people to do than we might think given the cultural dialogue about it. But there's actually a ratio that tends to be beneficial for how often I should be succeeding versus how often I should be failing.

Yeah. So just a caveat, it really depends on the domain. But the basic idea is you should succeed more often than you fail. And it should be something like three quarters to even four fifths of the time you should be succeeding. What that basically means is if you're trying something and you're constantly failing over and over and over again, it's demotivating. You don't want to be in that situation. You want to challenge yourself occasionally, but you also want to be within a comfortable zone for much of the time.

That builds confidence. It also builds this liking for the thing you're doing because we like to succeed. So I was very lucky. I got to visit with a whole lot of Australian coaches of elite athletes, and I asked about 100 of them this question, how do you get the best from your athletes? Do you put them in a situation where they're challenged constantly and they're really struggling through things? Or do you give them tasks that are easy so that they can build confidence? And most of them said, most of the time, they have to be able to do the thing that you're giving them to do. But if you always do that, they'll never grow. And so you've got to pepper those experiences of capability with extensions and, you know, dialing up the difficulty just a bit. And so this research basically says that across contexts,

it's about 80% of the time roughly that you succeed. I've started sending a couple of text messages after each podcast listener with positive reminders about what's discussed and invitations to apply the wisdom to your life. It's free and listeners have told me that these texts really help to pull them out of autopilot and reconnect them with what's important. When you get a text from me during your day-to-day life, it's one more thing that helps you further bridge that gap between what you know and what you do. Positive messages when you need them, from me to you. So if you'd like to hear from me a few times a week via text, go to oneufeed.net slash text and sign up for free. It's... I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling

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Interesting, because that correlates very closely, idea-wise, to the research on flow. Yes, exactly. Meaning, right, like, we have to be kind of in a place where we are challenged, but not so challenged that we get discouraged and give up. But it's not so easy that we're bored, there is an optimal place of the difficulty level. And I think that's a really important idea that everybody can work with and play with is, you know, what is the difficulty level that I'm at? I'm a guitar player, and it took me a long time. Some people did this very well early on. Like my best friend Chris, who's the editor, he did this very early on. Like he knew how to bring the difficulty level to right where he needed it to be. And I was sort of the opposite, which was that if anything was slightly difficult, I just gave up.

Yeah. I didn't know how to turn the difficulty down. Like, if I couldn't play something, like almost immediately, I went, I can't play it. And I gave up. And there were some benefits in that I just learned to write my own music right away because I kind of had to so that was a benefit but I didn't progress much as a musician because I didn't know how to get that difficulty level right because it was always too hard and so I just didn't do it I think at the very beginning of anything if you're just learning something like an instrument I think there's going to be a higher failure rate because everything is hard

yeah you've got to be okay with that early on. I think this failure rate really describes what it's like to be entering a period of maturity or mastery, and you're trying to get better. So you're not a complete novice, whether it's an instrument or a new language or really anything that you're trying to get better at. So you have to be open to the idea that starting something new, like if I decide tomorrow that I want to learn the guitar, I'm going to fail more than 20% of the time. I'll fail all the time.

Yeah. And that's got to be okay, I think. Yeah. But you're right. You've got to very quickly get to the point where you say, I need to get something out of this. I need to enjoy it early on. Yep. So that I want to keep doing it.

So maybe it's just a matter of strumming mindlessly and maybe teaching yourself and composing your own music is the way to do it because then you set the difficulty. It certainly worked in that way. But what I learned, and it took time to learn it, is that like, no matter what you're trying to play, you can dial the difficulty level down and just go like, I'm going to work on playing these two notes and I'm going to work on playing them really slow. Okay, now that I can play them at that speed, can I play them a little? And I just didn't understand that for a long time. It seems kind of obvious. And I think that's one of the, in my case, the danger of being entirely self-taught and

never having had any lessons as I was never shown how to deconstruct it in that way. Yeah, I'm smiling because I remember in grad school, I had this classmate who lived in the next room over from me, and I just heard him playing over and over again. He had a bass guitar and he played the beginning to Smoke on the Water, but literally for a year, just over and over again. And I would say to him, dude, are you going to do something different? He was like, no, I'm happy. I like, I know what I'm doing. I'm getting better and better at this. I feel happy every time I play. But he would do it for hours. And I think there is a level where you want to build in that 20% failure rate. And he was content, and that's great.

But if you want to get better at something, obviously, you can't keep playing Smoke on the Water over and over. We have a version of that in our own household occasionally where I will be, like, working on a difficult piece. And after a while, Jenny will be like, can we do something else? Can you play something else? Not very often. She's pretty patient, but every once in a while, it gets to be too much. That's funny. All right. So if we move into the head section, so the mental terrain of getting unstuck, there's something you talk about, which I really connected with for a while, actually, I thought this might have been a failing of mine, a weakness of mine, or like, evidence that somehow I wasn't quite good enough. But so it's actually a difference that you and I have, you're gonna have to correct me here, if I don't sort of language this correctly for you.

But in general, you can sort of sit down at a computer and kind of do your work, like think your way into the thing you want to create, right? Like you're able to sort of solo it. Now, I'm not saying you never work with others, but you know, yeah. I have always known about myself that I need sort of other people to collaborate in order to create something. That it's the interaction with someone else, the exchange of ideas, the thing that they say that sparks something I thought or never saw before. And it's in that realm that I can kind of create something. I always thought that was a weakness, but it's actually,

pat myself on the back, a genius that I have. No, I'm kidding. But you say that working with new people can inspire creative unsticking for at least two reasons, right? So they bring fresh ideas is one of those reasons. Yeah. One of them is just that if you are different from someone else in any way, you have different content in your head and they will bring ideas that you just don't have. And so there's huge value in just talking to people who are as different as possible from you. That's the sort of theme in that chapter is that we often surround ourselves with people who are in some way like us, like we think the same way, we have the same attitudes and values and so on, and there's nothing wrong with doing that.

But if you're trying to get unstuck, you don't need more of yourself. Right. You need something new. And so speaking to someone who's different from you on some critical dimension is the way to do that. There are all these examples of very successful companies like Pixar creating these incredible films where on every team they will go out and hunt what they call a black sheep. Not hunt.

They'll bring someone in. That's probably the wrong term for talking about animals. They'll bring them in, then they will hunt them on the Pixar grounds. All right, let's roll that back. Pixar, we're just kidding. So there's a great example with Pixar and they will assemble a team and they'll always put a black sheep on the team. And the black sheep is someone who thinks differently from everyone else in some critical way. Like everyone thinks that animation is key.

This person is a storytelling maven. And they're like, no, let's just put the animation aside for a minute. It's all about the narrative. And they find that in all these different contexts, just having that different divergent voice is unbelievably valuable as an unlocking agent. There are even studies where they ask people in groups to solve puzzles, and they have this little AI, like a bot, that gives them solutions that come up on a screen. Like it'll say, why don't you try this? Why don't you think about that?

And there are two versions of the bot. There's the bot that kind of mirrors what everyone else is saying, but does a slightly better version of it. And that's okay. But then there's also the chaos bot. This is the black sheep bot that just kind of throws out random nonsense. And when they do that, these people are like, wow, I didn't think of that. And it unsticks them. That's great. It's so interesting. I've played with chat GPT. So I have with chat GPT, but with GPT itself. Yeah. And I don't know what the parameter is. Right. But there's a parameter that you can dial up and down for sort of what you're saying, like, just how crazy can this thing get? Exactly. Right. And

by its default, I mean, I think chat GPT is extraordinarily boring. I mean, it just says exactly what you will expect it to say 95% of the time. Like, it's just not very interesting. But when you go in and you start changing that setting and you start being like, and same thing with AI image generation. Yep. Right? If you basically turn up the chaos setting, things get really interesting really fast. Exactly. Not necessarily useful, but interesting and creative. Yeah, that's right.

I mean, I think the biggest and best use case for chat GPT and these other generative AI engines now is exactly for that. It's for unsticking. I think what they do better than anything is they are those divergent voices that you need, those black sheep. And so, you know, let's say I'm stuck. I'm trying to write the beginning to a chapter of a new book. Ask ChatGPT to give you like the first sentence. And it might be horrible, but at least it's not from your brain. It's from some other collective brain out in the world that it's scraped from the internet. And just asking it to give you three alternatives. Give me three alternative ways to begin a chapter on X.

And no, that's not what the book's going to look like, but it jostles you. It kind of shakes you up in a way that helps you get unstuck. And you used to have to go and consult with your three friends. And now you just ask the computer to do it for you. I think it's incredibly valuable to have that at our disposal. Yep. I think it is that sort of asking it for alternatives or different ideas, because I find its first few ideas are like really boring, like the most vanilla way of saying what I wanted to say is possible,

but you can prompt it to sort of get interesting. I've run my assignments actually through there, like what I give my students. And I say, here is the assignment, answer the assignment. And it is like the most C plus thing I've ever seen because it's totally, it's a pass. There's no doubt. But it is the most plain vanilla boring pass I've ever read. And I'm like, this had to have been written by something that's just scraping things together. Yep. I agree. It's very important.

C plus. That's a great way of putting it. That's a great way of putting it. Along that idea, you talk about learning to be your own therapist. And you say, question your own decisions the way a smart outsider might. Ask yourself complex questions more than once., answering with a different lens each time. This takes advantage of the so-called wisdom of the inner crowd. I love that idea.

Yeah. So there's this very famous idea that there's the wisdom of the crowd that if you ask 100 people to estimate the number of jelly beans in a jar. They're all going to bounce around. They'll have different ideas, but actually the average is pretty close to the right number. And that's because our errors in whichever direction tend to cancel each other out. And so you end up getting pretty close to the number. It turns out there's an internal version of this. So what you can do is you can say, you know, let's say you've got a relationship issue and you're trying to work out how to get through it. The first thing you say to yourself is what a

therapist would do is they would say, well, tell me what you're thinking. Like, where are you now? What's your default? What's your baseline? And so you come up with a solution and you say, well, let's imagine you're wrong. Like, what's the other side of you saying? There's a version of you that thinks something different. It may need to be peeled back. You've got to get through a few layers to get there. But the version of you that disagrees with that or thinks there's another option, what does that look like? All right, so now we've got these two ideas on the table. Maybe the dominant one is the first one. Maybe the other one's a little bit more outlandish. Let's have a conversation between those two. What are the best things of that second idea that you

could bring to improve the first? And so what you're essentially doing, just as these crowds do of lots of people, is you take all the different kind of opinions and ideas in your own head and you find this average that is theoretically better than all the kind of strings that make up the average. And it's been proven to be pretty effective. So you effectively interrogate yourself a degree or two past where you normally would for really important questions instead of just going with that first idea. And the results are often very promising. Yeah, I think that's really interesting. And I think it's part of the reason that having questions that we can ask ourselves, and I find it helpful to have actual questions like

that are, like you said, there was a question there, like, what's another idea here? But we can find these different questions that can help us interrogate our own thoughts. That sounds more harsh than, you know, like, but I need that prompting to know kind of where to look inside. Because when I look inside, I just see one thing. Yeah. With well crafted questions, I can sort of look different ways and pull different things out. Yeah, exactly. I think that's, that's key. And I think that's, that's a thread that runs through a lot of the research that I do. And the things that I think about is I don't necessarily want the answers, but I want to know what questions to ask. Totally.

You can't always know what the answer is going to be. And sometimes it's hard to access the answer, but you get a lot of the way there by knowing here are the next 10 best questions to ask. Yes. In fact, the back of the book is a hundred ways to get unstuck because I wanted to do something different from my other books, which was just to have a roadmap, a very concrete, here are 100 things you can do, check off the list, and make it very practical. And I think you're right. Having that very concrete set of steps, that algorithm for getting unstuck is really useful. Yep.

Yeah. So the last section, habit. Yes. The things that we can physically do. You start off this section talking about the power of curiosity. I really have come to believe that curiosity is like a superpower and it's one you can hone, you can grow, you can develop. It's certainly not a birthright, you know, but as humans, we do have an innate curiosity, I think, so we can cultivate it. But tell me about the role of curiosity here. Yeah, I'm fascinated by this. So on the one end of the curiosity spectrum,

you have kids. Kids ask questions about everything to the ends of the earth. Nothing makes sense until they've asked a hundred questions. On the other end, you have most adults. We take everything for granted, pretty much. There's an orthodoxy. We herd together. We do things the same way most of the time as other people do them. If you see something as a certain way, you assume there's a reason for that. That's what it is to be an adult. Then there are these really interesting people that I met in the course of researching with this book who are, they're known as experimentalists. And what they do is they effectively do what kids do.

And they're adults, but they say, why? Why are we taking this for granted? And some of them are tremendously successful for that reason, because they diverge from the crowd. One of my favorite examples is this Olympic swimmer, Dave Berkoff, who in the late 80s, early 90s, was a bit smaller than a lot of the other swimmers. He was not quite as tall as they were. He didn't have quite the same build, but he was very, very intellectual, very bright guy. And he sort of thought, well, how do I get an advantage here? Everyone's swimming the backstroke the same way. Is there

a way for me to do it differently? And he discovered that you go about almost twice as fast when you're fully submerged underwater. So he developed a technique that meant that he was underwater for longer than the other swimmers. It made him incredibly fast. He broke the world record. He won gold medals at the Olympics. And when other coaches from other countries, there's a very famous Australian coach who I remember from growing up, a very flamboyant guy, met Dave Berkoff. He was like, how did this guy break the world record? He doesn't look like all the other swimmers. He's a head shorter than them.

And it's all just curiosity. It's questions. It's pushing back against the orthodoxy and saying, does this really have to be this way? And it's an incredibly valuable rule. You don't have to be an Olympic swimmer. But in every area of life, it's very valuable to ask those questions. Yeah.

Yeah. The other thing you talk about in this section, which really resonated with me and Eric, is this idea of action above all. Yeah. It's the idea that sometimes the motivation or momentum or the forward motion comes after you take the first step. You know, you say, as soon as you act, even modestly, you're no longer stuck. That's true, no matter the context. And a kernel of action should be within reach, no matter the situation. Talk more about the power of just

getting started. Yeah, just doing anything. So Jeff Tweedy, the front man from Wilco, has this great description of what this is like for him. I love Jeff Tweedy, he front man from Wilco, has this great description of what this is like for him. I love Jeff Tweedy. He's amazing. He's incredible. And he's a writer and he's also, he writes music. So he does a couple of things that I really love. And I was always curious about how he did what he did. And then he gave an interview where he basically said that the first stuff in my head is terrible stuff. It's not good. It's not interesting. I've got to pour out the bad stuff. That's how he describes it. I get up in the morning and I pour out the nonsense and then what's left is the good stuff underneath that.

But you've got to pour the bad stuff out first. So what that means is where the rest of us are sitting there saying, I have to write the best first sentence for my chapter or I've got to write the perfect opening stanza to this particular song. He's saying, of course, that's not going to happen. All I have to do is do anything. Just do something. And then the ball is rolling. Things get moving. I feel a little bit more liquid. Interesting ideas

can come into play. This idea that doing A, small things, but B, even bad things. You can write badly, which is better than not writing at all. You can have a conversation not expertly, which is better than not having the conversation at all. So getting things started, I think is, even in small doses, an absolutely critical part of getting unstuck. Yeah. Lowering the sort of barrier to entry, right? So it's the idea of like perfectionism, getting that out of the way, getting the, you have to do this exactly this way or in the most excellent manner you can. Remove all of that and just get started. Give yourself a safe place to do that. What is it? Like the shitty first draft or whatever the term is that people use? You know, just get started.

Yeah. And you have to do the first draft. So get it out of the way and then you can get to the good stuff later on. Yeah. This is such a life philosophy for me. I talk on the show often. Maybe my most used phrase is sometimes you can't think your way into right action. You have to act your way into right thinking.

Totally agree. And I think this is for creative projects, but anything in general. I didn't make up that phrase or this phrase, but one that I absolutely love is depression hates a moving target. And as somebody who struggles with depression from time to time, I just find moving. And I don't necessarily mean like on a treadmill, although that's great. Exercise is really good, but just get outside, do something. Any movement tends to be good. And I think any movement tends to be good when we're stuck, whether it's mentally, emotionally. Yeah. There's this really fascinating research on this that shows that startups where people are forced to move, where they're forced to walk because of

where the startup is located, maybe it's in a walking city or something like that. They have better ideas. So by physically moving, you actually somehow liberate better ideas. Yeah, it's really interesting. Yeah, I've learned that about myself that like, I like to work different places. So like work from home one day, go to the library another day, go to a coffee shop another day. But like, there's something for me about moving from one place to the next. It just tends to help me not at least feel so stuck. It's another way to get over the plateau, right? If you feel that you've hit a plateau, just change things up. And so by constantly shifting things, whether it's a physical task or something like writing, changing the place where you're doing it makes a huge difference. I've heard some science behind this, that the movement in our body just stimulates our

brain in such a way that we're able to make connections or access filed away connections that we otherwise just didn't quite have all of our neurons firing to make happen. I mean, that's a very unscientific way to explain it. But I know that like when I'm on the Peloton in the morning and I'm listening to a podcast, I'm like grabbing my phone to write down these ideas. It's just firing like crazy, but it was just getting my body moving. Yeah. So I run and I've started running with a little piece of paper and a tiny little pencil because I find that happens all the time. And I'm on the middle of a run and I'm like, I'm going to forget this. And I always forget this. But it's true. How often do those great

ideas just pop up? It's when you're asleep, unfortunately. Totally. And when you are moving. Are moving. So I'm curious about something. Instead of saying, did you, I'm going to say, when you got stuck at some point writing this book. At some point. Okay, many points. Many points.

You can drill down here. Not to put you on the spot, but can you think of a time writing this book when you got stuck? And maybe give us an example of how you applied any of this knowledge to get yourself moving. Yeah, so I read this interview with Jeff Tweedy, and he talked about pouring out all the bad ideas. I can't tell you how many bad ideas I poured out to get to the version that you see because writing is hard. It's a very long-term process. It takes, in the case of this book, it was an 18-month process. And so there were many days where nothing came out or not very much came out or what came out wasn't great and I didn't use it, but that paved the way for the next day and

the day after. And sometimes you'll have these magical days where you'll write thousands of words. They tumble out exactly as you like. And the thing that I always do when that happens is I ask where that comes from, because I think it's hard to know. But if you're really thoughtful about it, sometimes you can see the origins of it in the failures of the days before. And so I look back at what I poured out yesterday and realize, oh, this is just like a 10 times better version of what I did yesterday. And had I not done that yesterday, I wouldn't have been able to get to where I am today. I think writing a book about being stuck and getting unstuck is great because you're constantly using the techniques that you're writing about in the course of writing the book. Yeah, I'll bet. I love how you use the good days to connect back to the days that feel tough so that when you're in them the next time, you can really remember that and see that as even though it doesn't look like immediate progress, it's still making progress. Because you want to feel like there's meaning to the failures too.

You want to feel like when things are difficult and when you're not pouring out thousands of great usable words, that there's a purpose for it. And I think that's so much of what our lives are about. It's even the hard moments, the moments that aren't going exactly to plan, you have to feel like there's some value to them. And telling that story and finding that narrative, I think, is a huge part of moving forward to the next step that hopefully is better. Marvelous. Well, I think that is a perfect note to wrap up on. Thank you so much. This has been such a great conversation. We really loved the book. And it's been a pleasure to sit here and talk with you. And with you. Thanks so much. Thank you so much. helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast.

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