359. From Stuck to Success: Proven Strategies for Breaking Through Barriers with Adam Alter

Welcome to episode 359 of the Brainy Business Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy. In today's episode, I'm excited to introduce you to Dr. Adam Alter, author of Anatomy of a Breakthrough. Ready?

Let's get started.

You are listening to the Brainy Business Podcast where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain free friendly. Now here's your host, Melina Palmer.

Hello.

Hello everyone.

My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast. In today's conversation, I'm joined by Dr. Adam Alter. Adam is 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 the New York Times best selling author of two books, Irresistible, which came out in 2017, which considers why so many people today are addicted to so many behaviors, from incessant smartphone and Internet use to video game playing and online shopping. He also wrote Drunk tank Pink in 2013, which investigates how hidden forces in the world around us shape our thoughts, feelings and behavior. Adam has also written for the New York Times, the New Yorker, Washington Post, Atlantic, Wired, Slate, Huffington Post, and Popular Science, among other publications. He has shared his ideas on NPR's FRESH AIR, the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, and with dozens of companies including Google, Microsoft, Anheuser Busch, Prudential and Fidelity, and with several design and ad agencies around the world. Adam's academic research focuses on judgment and decision making and social psychology, with a particular interest in the sometimes surprising effects of subtle cues in the environment on human cognition and behavior. His research has been published widely in academic journals and featured in dozens of tv, radio and print outlets around the world. Today we are talking about his newest book, which is called the Anatomy of a Breakthrough.

We also talk a bit about Irresistible.

It's such a fascinating conversation. I'm so excited for you to be.

Able to hear all about it really quickly.

Before we get into it, I do want to make sure you know there are links in the show notes for everything, including related past episodes, links to articles and books including Anatomy of a Breakthrough and Adam's other book, Irresistible, as well as a full timestamp summary of the episode and more. It's all within the app you're listening to and at the brainy business.com 359. Now let's jump right in. Dr. Adam Alter, welcome to the Brainy Business Podcast.

Thank you for having me, Melanie.

Oh Yes.

I'm so excited. I have loved your book. It's been so fun to read and I can't wait to talk about all the things. There are definitely books where I get excited and I have just the longest list of stuff to talk about. So I know we won't get to all of it. But before we jump in on the book, can you let everyone who doesn't yet know you know a little bit about your work and background and all that?

Sure, yeah. I'm a professor of marketing and psychology at New York University Stern School of Business, and I have an affiliated appointment in the psychology department. And my background is in behavioral science, behavioral decision making, consumer behavior. I'm broadly interested in how we spend our time and money and other resources and, and in whether we can spend those resources in a way that fosters wellbeing, happiness, meaning all the kinds of things that we care about. And so a lot of my work, and especially my writing is about where we go wrong and how we can fix it.

Can you share a bit of the behavioral science and decision making stuff like. Yes, we will get to the book. Amazing stuff there. And knowing the audience and the focus of the show. Do you have anything you can share from your work there, like what you.

Focus on or anything?

Yeah, I. I broadly interested in where things go wrong. So I'm interested in where we make predictable, systematic errors, where weird influences, weird forces beyond our control seem to have an effect on how we think and feel and behave and decide and spend and so on. So I have work going back even 20 years looking at, for example, the fact that when people invest, they are swayed by the name of a stock rather than the fundamentals of the stock. And so when a stock first appears on the market following its ipo, the stock is more likely to get a big bounce if it's has a name that's easy to pronounce or has a ticket code that's pronounceable. So even things like that, subtle effects that shouldn't have any subtle factors that shouldn't have a big effect on how we behave that tend to have this outsized effect. And my first book was really a sort of compendium of all those effects. And a lot of the research I had done on that topic. And then since then, I've really focused quite a lot on what I think of as the kind of big prevailing factors that shape our welfare. And one of the big ones over the last couple of decades, I guess, is how much time and energy we spend pouring into screens and paying Attention to screens. And so I've done quite a lot of work on social media platforms and other screen based platforms and how much of an effect they have on our welfare and whether we should be spending our lives, well, quite so much of our lives in that way, or whether we should perhaps be doing other things with our lives. So that's a big interest over the last few years. And then the most recent book is really, as we'll talk about, is about how we get not just unstuck from our screens, but how we get unstuck much more broadly, since most of us most of the time feel stuck in at least one respect.

Yeah, well, and I think it feels like the obvious thing on the screen question is like, is it good for us to be in a screen all the time? Feels like we already know the answer.

Like, but even that's a big shift. Actually it's interesting because when I first wrote the book, that wasn't the case. Like, a lot of people thought that tech was just good and someone who was writing a book about the problems with tech was just kind of curmudgeonly and grumpy and a technophobe. And people don't say that anymore. You know, we've shifted a lot from where we were back then, I think, for the good. And so that's been an interesting shift and it's changed the way I frame a lot of the conversations about the book. I don't have to spend half an hour convincing people of the problem anymore. They're on board. And so it really ends up being a question of whether we can do better as human beings, whether we can live better lives. Having understood that fact.

Yeah. Is there any sort of a rule or important factor that we could be sharing with the audience now as we think about our approach to screen time and things? For those of us who, you know, work on screens all day and then take breaks on screens, you know. Any sort of tips?

Yeah, I think the, the most obvious one is it's an analog solution to the digital problem, which is to say that we know that things in physical space that are close by have an outsized effect on our psychological experience of the world. So. So if you surround yourself with certain kinds of people or certain things that are either good for you or bad for you, that's going to have a really big effect on the way you live. And that's true for our experience of screens as well. So if you are trying to distance yourself from your phone, the single best thing you can do is to spend at Least part of the day where your phone is not within reach, it's in a different room. It's in one of those cookie jars that locks itself for two hours, whatever it might be. Maybe spend dinner far away from your phone. Because when a phone is nearby, and many of us say that 24 hours a day, we can reach our phones without moving our feet. When a phone is nearby, it's tempting to pick it up. And if nothing else, even the act of resisting it ends up taking part of your mental attention and energy. So I think cultivating an environment where you have, at least for part of the day, no access to screens is really, really valuable. And I think that's a really easy solution, too. You cultivate that habit where at dinner time, meal times, maybe the first hour of the day, the last hour before bed, my phone is going to be in a different room. You'll see. Even that really fairly modest change can have big effects.

I love it. Yeah. And it is the. As we're talking and I'm really, like, thinking in the, like, so I've got my computer, obviously, because I need it to be talking to you. And I'm like, sitting with my phone right here next to me, but it's like, I'm not going to do anything with it. But I've got also my iPad that I'm taking notes on, like, while we're talking, you know. Oh, gosh, it's all the things.

And I've got my watch, right.

My Apple watch of. So I know screens everywhere. So I don't know. But now it's the same thing, though. Like we say, like, I, you know, I can't not put on my. My watch. What if I don't record a step? What would I ever do?

It's the worst thing when you go for a walk or something like that and you're like, oh, I left my watch. I don't have my watch. So am I really going for a walk if the watch isn't on? Like, is it. Is it a walk? Yeah, it's like the tree that falls in the forest, no one's there to see it. My watch needs to be there to record my life. Otherwise, did I really live?

For sure. Yeah. And if I. Or you know, a phone in your pocket to get the steps as you go or whatever that is. Yeah. It doesn't count if. If Apple doesn't know it happened, which is a little bit of a terrifying thought.

I did a crazy thing the other day. I. I don't know if I should use the Word crazy. So the non technical form of crazy where I was going for a run and my watch, I thought, had found the satellite and I started moving and I realized about five minutes in that my watch hadn't been recording. So I stopped and I started my run again, which is kind of silly. Like that run had happened. I had spent that time, I had expended the energy, but because my watch didn't capture it, as far as I was concerned, it hadn't happened. So I started again and I realized at the time how. How kind of ridiculous that was, but I wanted to capture it. It was. It was really important to me. And I think that's. That's how we are with a lot of devices now. We sort of outsource the business of actually living and the business of experience to these devices and if they don't capture the experience, it's in some way like the experience didn't happen.

Yeah. Yeah. It is interesting too when you think about, like, you know, if they don't remind you, you know, Facebook. All I do on Facebook now is like, see what happened six years ago on this day.

Exactly.

How would I have even known that I cared about that particular brand of salad dressing on this day? Or I said something funny that no one liked, you know, whatever.

Right, Exactly. Exactly.

Again, it didn't happen if we didn't talk about. About it. So. Well, thank you. I appreciate taking the kind of sidestep into that. I think it's definitely something that's important for all of us as we think about, like you said, reducing that cognitive load, being able to open up and do more, which really does tie in very much with what you talk about in the new book. Right. Having the space to become unstuck is something that, you know, it's hard if we're bogged down with all the things. So I have this episode set up to come out. We're talking, you know, much in advance.

Of this, but it's going to come.

Out right in January. Right. So, and I have it right around the time where everyone. It's like right around that quitter's day point, which I think they say is like the 19th of the. Of the month where most people have given up on their resolutions. So I was feeling like, like thinking about breakthroughs and not getting stuck in our habits and stuff. It felt like the right time for this episode. So. So you have that context now if you want to share a little bit about kind of, you know, overarching point of the new book and, you know, kind of what it's about.

Yeah, it's something I've been thinking about for a very long time, which is that the most interesting puzzles for me psychologically are the ones that we all struggle with but feel that we're alone in struggling with them. So there's a sort of barrier that separates each person from the next. And part of demystifying those experiences is to show that that barrier exists and that actually we're all in the same boat. And in this context, I'm talking specifically about the sense that when we are stuck, it feels very personal. It's a very lonely experience, but it's universal. And so I've spent years now asking lots and lots of people from all around the world for their experiences of stuckness. Are they stuck in some respect? Honestly, 95% or more of them say yes. And they say it really, really fast, that, yes, I am, and here is how I'm stuck. They're quite articulate about it, and it occupies a lot of their mental attention and their time and energy. They're willing to spend a lot of money to fix the problem. A lot. A large part of their resources. And what's interesting about it is that this goes back to the book on screens, is that we spend so much time surrounded by the polished veneer of everyone else's life. You know, like the they people generally share the end product. They share the stuff that's polished and manicured, the stuff that makes them look good. And it's sort of taboo to talk about being stuck. And so a big part of this book was an attempt to demystify that and to suggest that even the very most successful people in all sorts of spheres of life, when you peer beneath the surface, you'll find they were stuck too, or they even currently are stuck. You just don't know it. So I spend a lot of the beginning of the book making that case. And this is really something I've been thinking about, I would say, on and off for probably 25 years. It's a really long time. It goes back to even my early college days when I was very stuck as an undergrad. I had no idea what I wanted to do. I bounced around from one thing to the next and just couldn't figure it out. And I remember feeling profoundly stuck, and it was a new experience for me. And so this book is a sort of roadmap. It's the distillation of those 25 years of thought and a lot of research of my own original research, too, trying to find a roadmap. That could help people when they were stuck getting, getting unstuck. And so it's broken into these chunks or sections, each of which is like, do this, then do this, then do this, then do this and you'll be unstuck, hopefully. So that's how the book is structured.

Yeah.

Yes.

And I think everyone now is like, okay, the, the four part, like, and I'm unstuck. Sign me up. Right. So don't worry everyone. The link is in the show notes for you to get your copy of the book. Do you want to go ahead and just jump right in? Like I said, I, I often when I'm interviewing people, I'll be like, I love this piece of the book and this was interesting. I jump around. But like you said, this is one where it's like 1, 2, 3, 4. So I think we just let you go.

Yeah, sure. I can tell you what the four sections are and then you can, we can pick little, you know, bits of those sections that sound interesting. But I've structured it as, as four sections each with three chapters. And I like, each of them starts with H, the letter H. So I call them the four H's. The first one is help. And it's really, that's the demystification section. And so I start by, by talking about some of the most successful actors, artists, scientists, business people, people in all walks of life. And then talk about the fact that we assume, and many people assume that they are successful without any question and without having had major hardships. And when you go beneath the surface, you find they do have hardships. The anecdote that I begin with is Brie Larson, the actress who has won an Academy Award for best Actress for her part in the movie the Room or Room. And she's also played the role of Captain Marvel, which earned her colossal financial success. So the two main metrics that we measure actors by critical success and commercial success. She can check both of those boxes. But she posted a video and two part video on YouTube about her struggles, which is unusual. Most successful people don't do that. But she did much to her credit. And one of the things she says in the course of these videos is she lists all the auditions she didn't get or the roles she didn't get. And then she says, by my reckoning, between 98 and 99% of the time I fail. In other words, she's stuck 98 to 99% of the time. We don't see that or focus on that, but that's her experience of her own. Universe, her own world, even though she's as successful as you can be in her sphere. And so that's. That's a big part of that. First section on. On demystification, help trying to figure out, what is it to be stuck? How common is it, and when does it tend to happen? Is it universal? And so on. Second section, heart, is the idea that we need to deal with the emotional components of being stuck first, that a lot of people bypass that and jump right to action. But I think, as with most psychological experiences, there's an adaptive way to deal with what is a threatening psychological state. And so I talk a lot about slowing down, turning down the kind of temperature of the moment when you feel stuck, because it is a really uncomfortable experience for people. Besides, being lonely, it just feels really threatening to the self. It's frustrating. It frustrates your goals in a very direct way. So there's a lot of kind of coping that has to happen there. Then once you deal with that, you move on to head, which is strategy. So the cognitive strategies we can use. How do we find good ideas? How do you find original ways of dealing with stuckness? Are there kind of systematic ways of sanding down friction points that pop up in our lives? There's a process that I describe as a friction audit that we can use to do that. Are there other people we should have around us who can help us get unstuck? You know, we're not an isolated species. We. We tend to be very social, and so paying attention to other people is really important when you're getting unstuck. And then the last part of the book is titled Habit, and that's about the actions or the behaviors that get us unstuck. What are the things we can do? Because obviously, no matter how much strategizing and thinking and emotional coping you're doing, until you act, you're not going to get unstuck. So you do have to end there. And that section is about how should we act? We know we need to do something, but what should those actions look like? And that's the book.

So good, so good, so good. And I'm sure everybody. It just comes together in such a good way. And there's so much that everyone that listens to the show is already, I think, is like, piecing some pieces together. I want to talk a little bit, I think, about this, like, kind of allowing for the space and to be stuck, I guess, and this. So what's in my head is I really enjoyed where you're talking about Einstein, because Like, who doesn't love Einstein anyway? And, you know, I am a person too. Like, in my Einstein ness, I guess. Like, I'm all about a nap, right? And like, taking a break and where, you know, it's talking about, like, understanding the kind of ebb and flow and that we all. We get stuck. It will happen. Like you were talking about the, you know, 95. And it feels like the other 5% are just not thinking about the right stuff. Right, right.

I agree.

Like, you, you, you are stuck somewhere and you're ignoring it, and that's all right. But, like, we all know we're stuck. We get stuck. It happens. But with that, you. You know, for me, when I'm writing, like, working on a book or working on big stuff for, for the business or whatever, I end up getting, like, I rent a house or I go somewhere and by myself. And I have the most supportive husband in the world who's kind to stay home with kiddos and manage everything while I'm gone for days or weeks. And being able to just, like, exist with it and be able to get up when I want to get up and to like, I bring random projects. I build Lego or whatever while I'm there. So I'm not like. So actually, like, this, like, LEGO Orchid is something I built while working on the third book or the second book and, like, being able to just like, get kind of out of my own way and then I am able to write and then I take a break again. Right. And I can just sort of exist with the world. And I've. I've said it in that, like, when I'm in these states, when I can just, like, live in it, it's like the book almost becomes tangible. Like, I can feel and, like, experience it in a very different way where I can like, pick up a piece and move it around when it's just like, me and whatever I'm working on. And it's like a thing that I think most people don't get a chance, give themselves a chance to get into. And so, you know, kind of reading about Einstein approach, like, all right, I feel, you know, okay about that, but it works for me. But anyway, that was what I was thinking about. That doesn't have a question. I just kind of talked for a while, so.

No, no, you're right. I mean, this is. This was fascinating to me as well. I sort of imagined that people like. So the two people that I focus on are Einstein and Newton. And when you ask people who are the most important intellectual minds of the last 500 years. Those two come up very often. They're two among a small set of people who almost everyone thinks about. So my thought was that those kinds of people, like when you think about how progress happens for them, it must have been, you know, consistency. Like I imagine them applying themselves, being motivated, being self directed, being at the 99th percentile in just getting stuff done. And that's just not true of either of them. In fact, when, when Newton was young, his father said he's going to amount to nothing. He spends huge chunks of the day just lying around doing nothing. And then when Newton was old enough to articulate his process, he basically said, look, being thoughtful is exhausting. I've got to be on, but then I've got to be off for a long time. And Einstein was the same. Einstein would lie on his bed looking at the ceiling for hours, blank headed, nothing going on inside his head. The idea that any time of the day Einstein's head Wasn't working at 100% is surprising to people. And so I think there's, there's this sense that, that we're all sort of striving for a kind of consistency of application, that to be successful is to just like keep going. You know, you just, you don't have an off switch and there are people who are like that. But I think there are a lot of models that are different and even the very most successful people, many of them have that off switch and they're very good at saying it's an on time now and I'm going to be really on and then I'm going to be extremely off. And I think there's value in that and it's really liberating for the rest of us who, who find that being on a lot of the time is exhausting and we need long stretches to build Legos and to build orchids and to build whatever else we want to build and just to, to veg. I think there's a tremendous amount of space for that in our lives and you can still be incredibly productive and successful when you do that.

Yeah, and that's like finding the, the time that like, I know if I try to force myself to work on something right now, it's not going to be great. I, so I'm going to go for a walk or I'm going to clean a thing or I'm going to build a Lego or do whatever it is that I'm, you know, I have to work on. I have lots of miscellaneous art projects or even just, you know, spending Time on the kids and focusing. I was thinking, of course, a lot of Near Ayal and his work on Indistractable, you know, just while we're talking and same of, you know, being on the thing you're working on, when you're working on the thing and having the. That sort of space and knowing if it's whether you hit a wall and like, okay, I can't think about this anymore. I'm not going to make any more progress today. Like, I'm out. And when you stop, it's easy. Time to get unstuck. But we've all heard that sort of advice, right? And easier said than done. What else can people be doing, you know, to try to get unstuck? And I guess what defines being stuck?

Maybe you start there.

Yeah. So I think of stuckness, at least in the context of this book, as it's. First of all, it's protracted. So I'm not interested in like momentary minute to minute frustrations which are also universal and incredibly common. We all experience those every day. They're not uninteresting to me, but they're not the focus of the book. So I'm talking about the kinds of stuckness that lasts weeks, months, years, sometimes an entire lifetime. I talk about cases of creative or writer's block that last 50 years, sometimes an entire lifetime. So that's what I'm focusing on. But I'm also not focusing on the kinds of stuckness that are externally imposed where there's just nothing you can do and there are times where you're stuck and there's just nothing you can do. Like, I may want to buy a Ferrari right now, but I don't have the money and I'm stuck, stuck. And that's just how that is. Or I might want to travel to somewhere and there's a pandemic and I can't travel there. Well, that's just how it is. That's unfortunate, but psychologically to me, it's not that interesting as a sort of puzzle. How do we get. Get through that? What I'm interested in is the vast majority of cases of stuckness where it's within our power to make some progress to. To move forward. And so it's protracted and it's also something that's capable of, of being worked on and of being massaged in the right direction. Not everything is like that, but a lot of the forms of stuckness that we encounter in our lives are like that. And so that's what I think of when I think of Stuckness.

Yeah, those big things where we get, we get stuck there. And I think generally, would it be something that's classified as being important or not necessarily like, or at least it feels important to us to get unstuck where it keeps you. Like, it's, it's, for lack of a better word. Right. It's like sticking with you that you're unstuck. Right. It's like blocking other things.

Yeah, it's got, it's, there's a subjective element to it. And I think the best way to explain that is I was talking to a friend of mine whose dad was a math professor and he spent 30 years working on the same math puzzle or problem, some conjecture that no one had solved. And at the end of that 30 year period, he looked back and he said, you know, objectively speaking, I haven't made much movement, much progress. But day to day, he never for a minute felt stuck. He always felt that despite not making objective progress, he was happy, engaged, invigorated, enjoyed every day, every minute of it, felt it was a life worth well lived and worth living. And so that's a case where what matters is not the objective progress, it's how he felt about it. And I think on the flip side, there are some people who are making objective progress but still feel in a, in a global sense like they're stuck. Like, why am I doing this? It has no meaning, it has no purpose. I don't, I don't really know why I'm applying myself to this thing. And so I think a lot of it is, is this subjective sense of whether you feel like this is either, you can use the word important or whether it's something that feels like it's really plaguing you and getting you down. And if it's not, even if you're not making forward moving progress and it's not hampering your life in other ways, I think it's fine. It's not being stuck, it's just you're not moving, right?

Yeah, not, not everything needs to be solved, resolved, move forward, whatever. Right. That's in the episode in the Dunning Kruger effect. You know, I talk about where it's like, you know, you realize that you don't know enough about the thing and your confidence tanks and you can either decide at that moment, okay, I'm going to invest and I'm like going to work on it and I'm going to move on that, or you look at it and go, I'm never going to be an expert in that Thing and like I'm, I'm out, right?

Yeah, exactly.

And I think you have an example of someone in the book of the, you know, the people that say no more often, you know, you're most successful because you say no to a lot of things.

Yeah. I talk about the exploration exploitation distinction and I think there are essentially two modes. There's a sort of yes default and a no default. When you, when opportunities come your way and when you're exploring, when you're trying new things, maybe when you're in college and I don't know what my career is going to be like, I don't know what kinds of friends I'm going to have. I'm still finding myself. You can only pursue the paths that you try out, that you test, that you explore. And so in those moments and for those periods of time, the default response when opportunities come along should be yes. So I give this little lecture to freshmen some years and I always say to them, you know, this four year period more than anything should be a chance to, to create as wide a funnel as you possibly can for capturing experiences and options and ways of living. Try them all out. Say yes to them. You might be tired, Your default might be, I've got a midterm or whatever, say yes. You know, One of those, one out of every 100 might change your life, but you don't know which one it'll be. And then there are people who are also just as good at saying no, which is to say that once they know what they're trying to do, they become single, focused, one track. Everything is about this thing that's really important to me. Everything else is noise, is chatter in the background. And the best thing I can do is to focus on this one thing, make as much progress as possible. And that's when you shift from an exploration mindset to an exploitation mindset. These are terms from evolutionary biology. And I think knowing when to be in the yes versus the no mindset is really, really important. And some people are really good at saying no. It's, it's the best way to make sure that you don't get stuck on things that just don't matter.

Yeah, I feel like the bulk of us are not so great at saying no. So I'm linking to episodes from Vanessa, Patrick and Zoe Chance who have talked about, you know, saying no. And that's where I think, you know, Zoe talks about how she has her students do the 24 hours of no Challenge, you know, so I think it'd be interesting if you have the students like, okay, you should do like a month of, you know, Adam's gonna have you say yes to all the things and like, spread the net. And I was like, no. Yeah, say no to.

Yeah, exactly.

We need both. Right. Both important skills. But that's, you know, when I started doing consulting full time, I had my first year I called my year of yes. It was like every project that comes along, everyone's scraps, like, whatever the rate, whatever the thing, like, just gonna do it all. Like going to try all the things, see how it goes. And then by the end we're able to be like, this sucks. I never want to do that again. Didn't get paid enough for that thing. Like, whatever. And like, I actually really love doing this. You know, then it helps to then say no to things because you've actually.

Done it and you only know that it's a thing you want to say no to once you've done it right. You have to have that experience. The experience is really valuable for showing you what you do want.

Yeah, yeah. One of the. While you're talking, I was reminded of one of the things. I made lots of notes, like I said, and I know we won't get to all of them, but I really think the piece, you know, we're talking about fear and overcoming our own fears and how just that can we hold ourselves back so often? I think this was from the heart section of the book. And you talk about the. The woman who challenged herself with her, you know, hundred days of facing her fears. Can you share a little bit about this story and why it matters?

Yeah. So this is one of the things I think about fears is that not only is the specific fear overwhelming and feels like a source of stuckness, but the sense that I'm the kind of person who is toppled by fears is a sort of higher order sense of stuckness. Like my. I would be a better person if I were not afraid, globally speaking. And that's, I think, what animated this woman, that she was in this position where she was like, I'm anxious or. Or fearful of so many different things. I want to show myself that I. Even if I'm still going to have fears, they're going to pop up from time to time. I want to show myself that I can at the very least grapple with many of them and that I'm the kind of person who doesn't not do things that are valuable because I'm scared. And so what she did was she did a hundred different challenges, things that she was afraid of everything from eating oysters, which at the end of it, she was like, I'm never eating another oyster. I've now learned that that's not just a fear, that's an aversion to giving talks in public. She gave a TEDX talk. She, she just did this whole raft of things. Everything from physical challenges like bungee jumping to learning to fly to, you know, intellectual challenges, all sorts of different things that scared her. Driving alone in Miami at night for some reason was really scary for her. And so she did that. She tried small things and big things. Some of them were colossal. Some of them everyone's afraid of, some most people are not afraid of. And at the end of it, she, some of them, she was like, I'm still afraid of them and I never want to do them again. But globally speaking, she felt she got unstuck as a human being because she realized that fears, some of them are valuable, some of them stick around. But very broadly speaking, she's not the kind of person who will be driven or guided in her life as she makes progress by fear, by the global concept of fear. And for her that was really freeing and I thought, very interesting. Her name is Michelle Polar or P O L E R. Perfect.

I'll find the, the TEDx and I will link to it. I'm sure it's, you know, for everybody. We'll put it in the show notes. I think this really builds on, you know, the, like you were saying earlier, the, you know, okay, so we understand everyone gets stuck. Okay, fine, I accept this. Right. And then you say, so what do I do about it? Like, I'm ready to take the action. We get, you know, head jumps in and is ready to go right away. And we want to just skip over heart, you know, especially brainy business. Right, I get it. But even if you start taking actions and you're. Or you jump straight into the habits, right? Probably, probably. People jump over.

They do, they do. It's right to habits.

Yeah. So do you want to make a case for, for why we shouldn't do that? I obviously, I think we get. So you get stuck if you're not thinking about the core problem. Of course the habit change isn't going to work, but I'll let you share a little bit about that.

Yeah. So the minute you start acting, you pour your energy and attention and resources in a particular direction. And you can't pour your energy, attention and resources in every direction. So by acting, you are opting out of certain paths, which is not true until you act right. As you're sort of surveying the territory or coping with the emotional experience of being stuck, you still have the chance to make decisions and strategic decisions, but once you start acting, it's harder to do that. So that period is really for figuring out where am I, best place to pour my resources to make progress. And if you just jump right to action, it's very, very hard to know that you don't really address that question. The other thing that happens when you stop and slow down and kind of take stock and deal with the emotional experience is you, you learn to develop strategies that are very adaptive. And one of my favorite examples of this is, is the soccer player Lionel Messi, who is arguably, you know, the greatest player playing today. I think he is. He was famously anxious as a young player. And some of his coaches and even great Argentinian players, he's from Argentina, said things like, he's never going to amount to much because he's so anxious. He's never going to be a leader. They said some really disparaging things about him. And one of his coaches at one point said, look, he has all the technical skills. He's an incredibly skilled technical player. What we have to do is try to figure out a way for him to get over this, this fear that he has. And so what they started to do was they, one of his coaches said to him, why don't you spend the first few minutes of every game just not really playing as everyone else starts playing around, you just try to take in the scenery, watch everyone else playing, figure out whether there might be some strategic advantages to watching them. Maybe you realize, hey, everyone else is playing. But I've noticed that these two players are connecting really well. These two look like they might be injured. You sort of get a sort of bird's eye view of what's going on on the field where everyone else is already running around like headless chickens. And he did that and he developed a strategic advantage. It made him a better strategic player, but also it calmed him down and made him more effective for the remaining 85 plus minutes of the game. And so now he still uses this approach. He walks around essentially for the first three or four minutes of the game. And if you trace the paths of every player on the field, the others are running around covering ground. He barely moves from that center circle on the, on the field. And to me, the idea that the greatest soccer player of the day isn't really playing the match until five minutes in is a total like, mind blowing idea. But that's a case for Slowing down in the face of anxiety and allowing that period to wash over you, getting used to the idea that you're in this anxiety provoking situation and then moving forward from there.

Definitely. I know that in the, where you talk about, like you said, the friction audit and like, I think we do kind of similar work definitely. And like where I work with teams on questions, brainstorming and like, it's really easy to get the right answer to the wrong question and we jump way too quick into solving a problem that's potentially the wrong one, you know. So instead taking that time where we step back and be like, is this real? Like, why do we feel that way? What if it was this, you know, being the, being okay with being the one to ask the dumb questions, for one thing and know that, yeah, there are no dumb questions. But just taking that time to be more thoughtful and to prepare up front. It's always going to be and you know, always, but always a good investment to spend some time asking questions, taking the step back, you know, if we think about, like, if this was something tangible, if we like pick it up and look under it, if we, you know, get all these different angles. And so I, I really liked that example from Messi as well. Because I mean, like you say that's not how you play, right? That's where everybody be, like, that's not how the game is played. You're in it, it's just 90 minutes and you're like pushing. And that's what, that's what tape is for. Right? That's why we watch the tape, you know, early. But to say, you know, in the moment, the player, like you said, might be a little bit injured or there's something that we don't know from last week's tape or from a month ago. Right. So, yeah, I think it's just such an important thing for people. Do you have any advice for now? All those who are saying, like, okay, I hear you, but how do I possibly do that? Like, how do you start pausing more or reflecting?

Yeah, it's, it's interesting. Like part of it is getting, is getting comfortable with just the not so nice parts of being stuck and being used to it and dealing with it. And there's this term I talk about radical acceptance. Just accepting that it can be kind of hard that you might be in a situation that you don't want to be in, but the way you cope with that is by inhabiting it and not trying to fight it and not trying to move past it and bypassing it and Going right to action. So part of it is a kind of Zen approach to it, which I talk about. It's a little more complicated than that. A lot of it is also about sort of reframing that threatening experience as a challenge and as a step in a journey that is moving in a particular direction, where if today doesn't go quite the way I planned, it's might feel very threatening, but it's not the end of the world, and that's okay. And things are still going to be okay later on. And most decisions we make, the vast majority, are revocable or remediable. We can fix them. If things don't go the way we hope today, that's not the end of the world. And it's useful to look back and audit our lives and to say, hey, look, there were things that didn't go well in the past. Have they altered my life in a way that's absolutely horrific? Probably most of them, the answer is no. And when you get comfortable with that, you get comfortable taking slightly bigger risks, being slightly bolder about the things you do decide to do. And also, just as Michelle Pola did, you start to feel that you can make that you have a better sense of who you are and the kinds of things you can do to move forward without just being driven by that sort of constant fear that things aren't going to go the way you'd like. And so I think that a big part of it is this emotional grappling with that feeling of being stuck, the unpleasantness of it.

Yeah, definitely. I think the one other piece of advice, and knowing there's so much great stuff in the book, so everyone will want to get the anatomy of a.

Breakthrough, which, again, linked in the show.

Notes, but, you know, there's that side of, you know, being more thoughtful, pausing, reflecting, pushing through the fear sort of deal. But then also, and I think it was an example from Phil Mickelson of where if we know that, you know, you know, you have to be performing for those 18 holes, but if you focus on 18, that anchor is really not going to. To serve you well. So you want to kind of extend and like you say, he, like, forces himself to do more so that 18, like, if you go out and you could do 36 holes, then when you have to perform under pressure, 18 is a lot, you know, easier to deal with.

Yeah. The thing about golf is there's an asymmetry where even a hole in one on, say, a par three or a par four, you gain a couple of strokes and that's great, but the cost of performing really poorly on a hole could be 5, 6, 7, 10, 20 strokes. I mean you could just hit the ball forever and never get it in the hole. So there's an asymmetry there. And Mickelson talks about over training and he's not the only one. A lot of golfers do this and a lot of athletes do it generally where if the problem with, with golf is that a lapse in concentration punishes you heavily. Instead of training to play 72 shots over 18 holes, what you should train yourself to do is go out and play 54 holes, play three rounds, and if you can concentrate for 54 holes, 200 plus strokes, then you should have no trouble doing it for 18 holes and 72 strokes. And so that's, that's sort of the idea that, that drives Mickelson and other golfers when they do this sort of thing like where the rest of us will go and play 18 holes and spend that four hours playing. They'll go out and say, I'm going to wake up when the, it's still dark. I'm going to start playing when the sun's rising and I'm going to stop playing when the sun's setting. And in the course of that I'll play three or four rounds. He says as a result of that, it's become trivial to play 18 holes. His concentration is, is locked in. And so that over training method is extremely useful. It doesn't always work because it can leave you a little bit depleted. But as a, as a general method for training ourselves to focus and concentrate, it's very, very effective.

Definitely. And that's like, I know when my oldest son was playing soccer and they started playing with, you know, football, I guess as we. But they're playing with a medicine ball, like a really heavily weighted ball that when you go to kick it. And I remember the first time because they were playing on indoor and they, you know, get in and you go to kick it and it's like it goes barely anywhere, right? But as you have to gain the strength to be able to move that ball. When you play with a regular ball, it's super easy or where people put, you know, a weight at the end of a baseball bat or, you know, whatever that is, that when you're actually then going to swing it, you have more power. So it's the, you know, same kind of concept of. But if you are just focusing on the thing, it'll be really hard to hit it. So you want to, you know, practice beyond it, I think is just really solid advice.

Right. I agree.

Perfect. Well, for everyone, as I've said, who's so excited now to get your book books and to learn more about you and your work and to connect, you know, what's their best path to do.

So. Yeah, so probably LinkedIn and Twitter X whatever, whatever people are calling it when they listen to this episode. That thing, that thing, that platform, those are the two places that if I, if I ever post stuff, that's where I'll be posting. And then I have a homepage, a professional homepage that you can find that has access to my work at nyu, but also some of my work outside of nyu, my writing in non academic publications, videos, interviews, things like that. So those are probably the best places to look wonderful.

Well, we will of course link to that and the books in the show notes. And so thanks again Adam for joining me on the show and I hope everyone has a very unsticky rest of the day week life.

Agreed. Thanks Molina. I really appreciate it.

Thank you again to Dr. Adam Alter for joining me on the show today. What got your brain buzzing in today's conversation? For me, I really enjoyed this book and our chat and finding out about new stories and research that anyone can use to get unstuck. As we talked about in the episode, we all get stuck all the time, even if we don't talk about it. Most people are probably stuck on multiple things right now, especially if you're a perfectionist or have had those tendencies. It can be hard to move forward sometimes. And as you've heard me say on the show before, perfectionism is really a form of procrastination most of the time. And it's often rooted in fear. Fear of rejection, fear of failure, fear of success. These are all really closely related to. I've linked to lots of past episodes in the show notes for you, including the one on bike shedding, which I also call productive procrastination, and on improving your mindset, specifically with overcoming imposter syndrome. It's definitely a way many of us end up getting and staying stuck facing fears, taking a step back to look at the bigger picture, understanding that you aren't alone. These are just some of the key steps to getting unstuck and, and having those big breakthroughs. There are so many great insights and stories we didn't have time to talk about today. I really love the section where Adam talked about the optimal failure rate, which is, in case you're wondering, 15.87%. So as he says, if you're not failing every fifth or sixth try, you aren't failing enough or are failing too much. This may sound scary, I get it, especially like I said for the perfectionists out there. But it's so interesting and helpful to have a stat like this that can help you to see that failing is actually good. Sometimes you just want to be able to gauge it and you know, every fifth or sixth time, then that's a lot more often than many of us are probably failing.

So good to think about.

There is so much great stuff in this book. I know you're going to love it. So of course there is a link for you to get yours as well as Adam's other book, Irresistible and other related books and to check out past episodes and get a full time stamp summary of this conversation and more. All waiting for you in the show.

Notes and those are found within the.

App you're listening to and at the brainy business.com 359 and thank you again to Dr. Adam Alter for joining me on the show today. It was a delight to chat with and learn from you. Join me Tuesday for another Brainy episode of the Brainy Business Podcast.

It's going to be a lot of fun.

You won't want to miss it.

Until then, thanks again for listening and.

Learning with me, and remember to be thoughtful.

Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business Podcast. Molina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help business be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness.com.