Interview with author Adam Alter - Nir And Far

Hey, everyone, this is Nir Eyal, and welcome to the near and Far Podcast. Today I am super excited to have my good friend and NYU professor Adam Alter back with us today. Adam has a new book. I'm such a big fan of Adam because even though we don't always agree on everything, what I really love about Adam is that. Is that he's so intelligent, he's so articulate, he does such interesting research, but yet he can translate that research for the general public, which is. Which is, I think, something that not every academic can do. So, Adam, welcome back to the show. It's such an honor to have you back.

Thanks. It's good to be back. That's. That's a very kind introduction. I feel the same way. It's always fun to chat.

Absolutely. So, Adam, you've got a new book. It's called Anatomy of a Breakthrough. And so, yeah, let's dive in. So what was the inspiration for this book?

Yeah, so the inspiration goes back a long way, actually. Actually, before I even started thinking about my previous book, I was thinking about this one. I did some research about 20 years ago, trying to understand how people in different parts of the world perceive and expect change or they don't expect change. And what I found is there were big general cultural differences. So if you ask people in. In particular in parts of East Asia, you know, it's been sunny for five days, or it's been rainy for five days, or the stock market's been doing badly, or the stock market's been doing well, what. What's going to happen tomorrow? They anticipate a difference from what's happening today and in the past, they're waiting for the other shoe to drop. And so they anticipate a lot of changes. This is consistent with Daoism, with the yin yang, this idea of balance that's tied into Eastern philosophy. In contrast, in the west, we don't expect change. So I've done some research in the US And Canada, in Australia, in the UK and other places, people are generally blindsided by change. So they seem surprised when rainy days turn to sun or sunny days turn to rain, when the stock market improves or does badly after it's been doing well, and so on. And. And that's an interesting cultural difference, but I think why it's really important is that if you don't anticipate change, and there is a lot of change in the world, always in our lives, you will be blindsided by it, and it makes it really hard to be nimble. And so I found That a lot of people feel stuck a lot of the time in a lot of different areas of their lives. This book is sort of 20 years later, a kind of manual for breaking free, for getting unstuck, and for. For reaching breakthroughs in all sorts of different areas of life.

So, you know, I'm a big word nerd. So let's start with definition. How are you defin a breakthrough? And why is having a breakthrough important?

Yeah, so, I mean, starting even one step earlier, talking about the term stuck, that, you know, what does that exactly mean to people and what does it mean to want to get unstuck? And I'm really interested in protracted experiences where you feel stuck, where you feel. Have felt that way for a long time. I've done some research with thousands of people around the world, and everyone feels in some area of their lives as though there's something that they'd like to change that is hard to change, that they've been, as they say, stuck it. And it's also, I'm not so interested in, say, you know, in April 2020, we were all stuck during the pandemic. That wasn't interesting to me psychologically because that was just the way the world was at the time. There wasn't much we could do about it. But most of the instances of stuckness that I focus on, people have quite a lot of room to move. They can do things to get unstuck. And so then asking about what a breakthrough is, the breakthrough is moving through whatever that particular stuckness is to come to the other side. And so it's a really. It can be an objective definition or it can be subjective. Objective basically means there's a yardstick. So if you're. If you're at work, you have to come up with five creative ideas for a new product. Getting unstuck and finding a breakthrough is achieving that, but it can also be the process on the path to achieving that, even if you're on the way to getting there. And it just really sort of depends on the domain that we're talking about. And so the breakthrough is. Is getting to the other side of that stuckness.

So a breakthrough is anytime you get unstuck. Is that.

Is that right? Yeah, basically, in this context, that's how I think of it.

And what are some situations that you find are most common for why people are stuck in the. In the first place? What are some common examples of how people might be stuck?

Yeah, so a lot of people I talk to are in business because that's just. I'm in a business school and so that's where I tend to focus much of my energy. And a lot of people in business need to be on some level creative. And so I talk to a lot of people in business who are coming up with product ideas. My expertise is in product and so I focus a lot on. On getting unstuck in the context of creating or promoting new products. But I also focus a lot on artists, musicians, writers, people who are writing films. And then that's, that's just in the intellectual creativity domain. But there's a lot of work outside of that that I focus on as well. I'm interested in getting unstuck in relationships at work as an organization. If you're trying to make change within your organization in a sort of more managerial rather than marketing context, what are some of the other ones that come up? I'm very interested in how people deal with financial struggles. And so there's a lot of financial stuckness. When you ask people how are you stuck? A lot of the responses are I can't save or I'm really struggling to save or I'm overspending or. And a lot of them other things too that involve self control. Like, you know, I've been in this pattern for a very long time and I can't seem to change how I'm eating. I'm eating unhealthily and I don't like that or I'm struggling to exercise. So it's, it's an incredibly diverse concept, which is one of the things that attracts me to it. But most of my emphasis is on product creativity and that's what much of the book deals with.

Okay, so now we understand what is getting stuck and the for a breakthrough. So walk us through the model. How. How do we get unstuck to. To arrive at a breakthrough?

Yeah. The book's separated into four sections. Each section begins with letter H just because the terms that are the catch all terms happen to begin with H. The first section I call Help the first three chapters. And it's just a demystification of what it is to be stuck. It does a lot of what we've just talked about. It explains why we get stuck so much. The fact that it's incredibly common. The fact that despite its commonness, it's very alienating and so it feels uncomfortable to be stuck. We sort of imagine that we're alone in our stuckness. Even though that's not true. Turns out almost everyone in some respect is stuck. So that's that first section on Help the Next three sections really deal with the unsticking process. And there are three. Three limbs to it that really map on pretty well to psychological research, because psychological research deals with either affect or emotions. It deals with thought patterns or cognitive styles or cognitive approaches to solving problems. And then it deals with action or behavior. And those are the three sections. So the part on emotions dealing with the emotional consequences of being stuck is heart. The part that deals with the thought patterns is head, and the part that deals with the actions is habit. And I basically go through a series of different strategies that culminate in this sort of cheat sheet at the end. That's describe. I describe as 100 ways to get unstuck. That's a kind of compendium of ways that we can deal with being stuck. And the reason I start with this emotional part first is because the intuitive response we have when we're stuck physically is actually quite adaptive. It's very useful. There are all these stories of people doing superhuman things. They get feats of that. You see these feats of. They call it hysterical strength when people see someone's trapped under a car and they lift the car out of nowhere. But that same sort of flailing response that's very useful physically is incredibly unuseful in contexts where you're mentally stuck or you're psychologically stuck. So the first thing you've got to do is kind of dial down the temperature, slow down, take a minute. And this is one of the many paradoxes in getting unstuck, that to go forward, you have to slow down at first, you have to dial down the temperature, even though your instinct will be to do more. And then I go through a whole series of different cognitive strategies and ways of thinking about stuckness that I think are quite freeing. And then I talk about the actual behaviors because obviously getting unstuck really is essentially mostly about behavior. And so that's where. Where the model culminates.

Okay, so heart is about emotion, head is about your.

Your.

Your cognitive assessment of what's going on.

Is that.

Is that right?

Yes. And the strategies for. For moving forward as well.

And then why do you separate habit from head?

Just because, you know, it's. To some extent, I guess, it's. There's a blurry line between them. They don't need to be separated. But habit, when you read the chapters in habit, is really specifically about action. It's about doing. And I think a lot of the cognitive strategies are one step before doing. And so, for example, there's a chapter on what I call recombination and this is particularly relevant to products. This idea that radical novelty is incredibly, vanishingly difficult to find.

We.

We often sort of fetishize originality, and that's what everyone thinks they need to do when they go into business. And then creatives do it too. If you're writing a song, you're looking for something new. If you're painting, you're looking for a new style and so on. So we, we do prioritize newness and novelty in general, which I think is very valuable, but it's very hard to achieve. And so often that makes you feel stuck. So I talk, for example, there about how if you change your criteria, you change your criteria from. From radical novelty to just a recombination, a re. Two existing ideas that you bolt together in a new way, for example, or a tweak over existing ideas, then you'll get unstuck. And so that's. That's really a way of thinking that's a bit different rather than actually doing something different in the moment. So I think there is a. There is a real difference between those two sections. But as you say, they. You know, it's not essential that they're separated that way. Yeah.

Did this come from a personal experience where you yourself felt stuck?

So many. Like everyone else, I've had lots of periods of stuckness. I was. I think it goes back, you know, the. The part that informed my research was when I was an undergrad, I was studying actuarial science, financial math, and I didn't enjoy it at all. And what I remember you didn't enjoy this riveting topic. I still like math, but I did not enjoy. I couldn't imagine a career in this year, so surprisingly so. The professor came in one day and he said the way the Australian system worked. I was on a fellowship and he said, you know, if you continue on with the course a week from today, you're going to have to pay back if you ever quit, if you ever leave the course, you're going to have to pay back all the money that we've given you as part of your fellowship. And so I was like, all right, I know. I'm like 90% out the door. This was the nudge I needed. So I left, but I had no idea what to do next. I felt stuck. So I didn't know what to do with my life. And so what I did was I adopted one of the. One of the strategies I talk about in the book. 1. This is. I actually put this in action, but this could just as easily be in, in the. The cognitive stage. But I started experimenting. And so I sat in on as many lectures as I could in as many different departments as I could. And I did this for months and months and months. And I can't tell you how many lecturers I. I was exposed to and how many different courses from every imaginable area. I sat in on engineering and math courses, I sat in on English literature courses, I sat in on history. And then when I got to psychology and law, I love those. And so much so that I sort of sat in on more and more and more of them. And I drilled deeper into those and figured that they, they were the things that I really enjoyed. And so there. This is 20 something, 20, almost 25 years ago now, I developed a taste for this kind of experimental approach. This, this way of thinking of the world the way kids do. You know, they have a lens of curiosity that makes them incredibly adept at learning that we jettison sometime between childhood and adulthood. And there are some people who have that lens and use it throughout their lives. And I found it incredibly useful. And so that's, that's one example of sadness. I've got many others, but that's, that's probably the earliest one that informed my thinking on the topic.

What's the latest time in your life that you've used these techniques?

That's a good question. What's the most recent? I, you know, probably writing the book. Honestly, there's a. There. The thing about these books, and because I, as I said, I've been thinking about these ideas for about 20 years, is that the first day you have an idea that's relevant to what ultimately becomes the book. It's not. In book four, you know, there's no table of contents laid out for you. There's no framework laid out for you. So what ends up happening, and what I've been doing for years is I collect every interesting idea that I find into documents. There are different documents for different kinds of ideas. But then when it comes time to write the book, when I say, hey, I've been thinking about this for 20 years, and I know that there's enough here that I think I want to make something out of this, the next thing is figuring out what it should look like. And with this book in particular, there was so much information that I was stuck, sort of meta stuck in writing a book about stuckness. And one of the chapters on thinking styles is on the value of collecting opinions from people that you might not otherwise naturally turn to. We often turn to people who are a lot like us, friends, trusted confidants, people like that, family members. Unfortunately, we overlap with them in all sorts of ways. We're kind of redundant with them. So one of the things that research has shown is that black sheep or non redundant voices or agents of chaos, even AI bots are agents of chaos in some of these contexts. They are incredible agents for unsticking. So you know where I spoke to all my friends and said what do I do with this book? And they had some great ideas. It was when I went to, you know, chatgpt or when I went to this is a little before ChatGPT, but I've done that on other research topics now. But I went to people that I wouldn't traditionally consult and that had an incredible unsticking effect on, on everything I was doing. Because instead of just thinking the same way about things and reinforcing my ideas, I got completely different ideas from people with very different backgrounds and levels of understanding of the material I was working on. So that was reasonably recent. That's the most recent I can think of now.

So interesting. So I'm so curious about how you use ChatGPT to do this. How do you now have CHAT GPT give you viewpoints you wouldn't otherwise have have thought of? What kind of prompting do you do?

I, I did it in the last couple of days. I was writing an article that is drawn from this book, but I wanted to add some new things into it. I didn't just want to lift chunks out of the book, so, so I actually said to it, imagine you were writing an opening to a piece that had to include an anecdote about. And I explained what the anecdote was about. Write that opening the opening, 200 words in three different ways. And so CHAT GPT becomes your crowd. It's, it's the wisdom of crowds. But you have an AI performing three tasks simultaneously. And so it says here is one way, here is a second way, here's a third way. And you know, you read two of them and you hate them and you say that's ridiculous and I can't believe you, you would suggest that, but of course you're a bot. And then the third one sparks something in you and you're like, oh, so in, in learning that I don't like those first two ways, I learned something about what I do like. And also there's some, some good things in that third way. Now I'm not going to lift what ChatGPT says, but it inspires you to Think in ways that you might not otherwise have. And, you know, one of the issues with getting access to diverse voices is you need these friends and, and you know, people who are not, not like you in certain ways to be available, which takes time and energy and planning. The nice thing about ChatGPT and other AI bots is they're always available. So if you want a diverse voice, it's there waiting to be spoken to. So I, I, I find it pretty useful in that sense.

This is really interesting because I think the, the current narrative is that, you know, ChatGPT is the dawn of the AI apocalypse and it's going to be programmed to make us more biased and that algorithms do nothing but perpetuate existing systems of oppression. And what you're saying is actually, if we use them correctly, if we search for alternative viewpoints, makes us better. Right? We have a, an opponent on demand. Right. You could very easily say, tell me the three arguments around why I'm wrong according to, you know, the piece you're writing and you'll get those opponent arguments. And so better to know them now before you finish this essay or whatever you're working on than later.

Do you think that, that in general.

We, that people want to get unstuck? I mean, I get the sense that in a way, I mean, the argument to why these tools wouldn't be helpful in this way is that I think a lot of people would say, well, people just want more of the same. They don't want alternative opinions, they don't want to test their view of reality. Do you think that's true?

I think to some extent. But then in a sense, you're not stuck unless you want to be somewhere else. You know that even inherent in the definition of the word stuck is a sort of aversive state. And I do measure emotional responses to being stuck. If you say, I haven't moved in a long time, it's a period of stasis, but I'm very happy and comfortable, then that's fine. You know, it's a sort of matter of, it's a matter of just introspection. And so you can, you can find that two people are in exactly the same position and one person says, I have to change this, I feel terrible, and the other says, I don't, then only one of them is stuck. So I think that's critical. I love your frame on, on, on this Chachi. ChatGPT as a valuable utility. And I think if you go back to the root of almost all technology, technology at its best is Really a utility that makes life better, more convenient, easier to live. Sometimes it's about hedonics making us happier. But I think most of the best technology, at least as far as I'm concerned, is technology that, that make something hard easier. And I think that's the unsticking value in, in new AI and generative AI. And so that's what's so hopeful about Chachi Beatty and really all new tech that. That is used in the best possible way.

So really, your book is. Is for people who want to unstick themselves. Do you think there's an application for helping others have a breakthrough? If somebody you know is stuck, is it a book that you can kind of hand to them and say, hey, here's. Here's how to get unstuck for yourself? I think, I think you're stuck. Here, read this.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's what the roadmap is for. It doesn't just have to be for you. And also it's written for people who are leaders, who manage teams of people. And so that's a big part of it as well. There are sections where I talk about how you construct a team, how to. How to essentially be a leader. I don't frame it that way. It's not. It's not broken down into chapters in that way. But the idea of leadership and managing other people is a big part of it. And of course, if you, if you have a loved one who's stuck, I think the book speaks to those, those kinds of feelings, stuck as well, and can be used as a. As a guide for others.

Well, what's the best thing that you can do to help someone get unstuck if a short of, you know, of course, read the book, but let's say they don't want to read the book. Are there any tips for how we can help others?

Yeah, the best thing you can do is to. To act. This is the last chapter, really. And I think it's really the culmination of everything else I talk about is to shrink down the unit of valuable action. Because by definition, you're not stuck if you're acting. Even if those actions are not great, even if they're not, you know, the action that ultimately leads to the billion dollar idea. They're getting you unstuck on the path to that. And so much of what being stuck is is the inertia that comes from feeling like you can't make any progress. So one of my favorite stories of this is Jeff Tweedy, the frontman from the band Wilco he writes music for the band Wilco, but he also writes books. And he's frequently stuck. And he talks about his process for getting unstuck. And he says that in the morning when he first starts working, whether it's writing music or writing a book or writing language, he. He thinks of it as pouring out the bad ideas. It's like there's a layer above the good stuff that's bad. And so he will actively try to find his worst ideas, which is an incredibly liberating thing to do if you're stuck and you're creative. So what he does is he'll spend half an hour saying, what's the very worst music, most trite, most boring song or series of riffs or melody that I can write? And then he'll do that. And sometimes it's actually much better than he thinks. At first, he ends up using bits of it, but most of the time it's terrible. And that's okay, because then after that half hour, he spends the rest of his creative period getting better stuff by design and learning what the counterpoint to it is. You know, by pouring out that bad stuff, you do seem to lubricate the wheels. You start moving forward more effortlessly. And he's found great success doing that. And I've started doing it too. So you can shrink the unit of action. You can make it basically something like one minute of writing if you're struggling to write, or one minute of thinking or one idea or whatever it might be, whatever the atomic unit might be. And then after that, things start to flow more freely and the situation tends to improve.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm curious. What role do you think agency and autonomy. And it sounds like what you're advocating for just. Is. Just do something, anything is a path to, you know, uncovering what you're truly capable of. Does. Does agency play a big role?

Agency is a really big part of it. I think another way to think of it is, which is related to agency, is that we. We tend to put pressure on ourselves. And so our thresholds tends to be high, and the more stuck you are, the higher your threshold tends to be. And that's. There's a correlation between those two. So, you know, if I. If I'm a product designer and I'm like, well, I just saw three amazing products, and I want mine to be the fourth. That's an incredibly high bar. And so you'll. You'll feel inert because no idea will match that just out of nowhere. It's very rare for that to happen. I've studied creativity extensively. So what do you do instead? You start, if you're looking for a 10 out of 10, you start with a 1 out of 10 or even a 0 out of 10. And that gives you a sense of agency. Absolutely. It implies that you have agency because you're starting to create things, but also by lowering the threshold.

Loosening the constraints seems to free you up to do more. And so that seems to be very useful. And I guess agency is a part of that because it does make you more capable of achieving what it is you want to achieve. And so you start to feel that you have agency. Do you?

Okay, so now I want you to do some, a bit of social commentary. Do you think that the, the world, Are there, are there factors that you're seeing? I mean, you have this front row seat of the next generation. You know, you teach undergraduates and graduate students at NYU at Stern. Do you, do you see society changing in ways that enhance our creativity, that make us lead to more breakthroughs, or do you find that there are factors that are more likely to make us stuck?

I. I'm pretty hopeful. I mean, I think my students, my students have, have. I wouldn't say I've noticed a change in how creative they are in general. One of the things that I've noticed and, and I think this is partly because I teach this very early on in my class. I teach the, the marketing core class to every, pretty much every MBA student at Stern, or many of them.

Is that the way they think of creativity has shifted a little bit. And one of the examples that I start with very early on that I think is quite liberating for a lot of people who do want to go into marketing and product design is the story of the Jitterbug F phone, which is a phone that was designed by an entrepreneur named Arlene Harris. And this was, this is in 2008. She saw the rise of the iPhone beginning in 2007. And she, she was an older adult, you know, 20 or 30 years older than most tech entrepreneurs. And she spoke to other people who are also in her demographic band, and they were all saying things like, yeah, you know, this new phone that came out from Apple, I can't seem to type on it properly. It's not what I'm looking for. I want something a little bit different. Now the interesting thing about older adults is they have way more disposable income than younger adults. They are hungry for products that work for them, but they don't find that many in the tech space. So tech is filled with products that are designed for people in their 20s and 30s. It's not filled with products designed for people in their 50s, 60s and 70s. And so Harris said, well, let's figure out if we were going to make a phone as a counterpoint to the iPhone, what would that look like? She created this phone called the Jitterbug, which is basically not in any sense original. It's a sort of older phone that has all the features that the older adults she interviewed were looking for. She sold the company a few years later for $1 billion. So if my students are looking for billion dollar ideas, you don't need the sexiest product. That's the, the thousandth product in a row that looks a little bit like everything else. But you're trying, trying to find an original niche for the same audience all the time. What you need is to recombine old ideas, maybe take a demographic that hasn't been appealed to, take a product that hasn't been created for them yet. It doesn't have to be original to make tons of money and to be a very successful product. So we try to sort of lower the temperature a little bit and to suggest that the stories you read other 1 in 10,000 ideas that are flashes of insight, because that's interesting, that's not how most things work. And so I found that they are very creative, but in part because they liberated to be that way by not feeling like they have to create the next radical innovation.

Yeah, I mean, in many ways, if you would have sat down and said, hey, let's, what's. What would be the worst phone we could create? All right, let's make big huge buttons that look retro and let's, you know, like, like if you look at the Jitterbug phone, it, it looks like a terrible phone, but it's a terrible phone for some people and it's the perfect phone for other people. So I love that it very much is a, an iteration of, on this theme. So that's, that's fantastic. Excellent. Were there any other insights that you think, you know, really surprised you or you think it's very important for folks to know.

I'll say one thing that I think is really valuable or that's been very valuable for me. And it's this, this distinction between exploration and exploitation. So there's a lot of work that's done not just at the small scale, like I'm trying to come up with an idea, but at the bigger scale of careers and lifetimes. And, and some of the research focuses on scientists, we're trying to create new research. Some focuses on musicians, some on artists, some on filmmakers. It's people in a lot of different contexts. And what the authors are interested in is when is the best period in a person's career, when do they hit a sort of hot streak? And what they find is there are two different kind of modes that we use when we're at work. One is exploration. This is where you say yes to pretty much everything. A new idea comes along, you say yes. A new opportunity comes along, you say yes. I think about my earliest days in college and grad school like this. You know, every opportunity I was like, I don't know. Sure, let's try that out. The thing about that is you, you get exposed to lots of different things. You see new ideas that you had never been exposed to before. Sometimes they're useful, sometimes they're not, and they're a waste of time. But it's, it's a valuable general tool because what it does is it shows you the pastures that might be valuable to you later on. Where should you spend your time? Then you switch into exploitation mode. So if I spend time looking at five different things and I figure out that thing number four is, is where I want to be, then I only have eyes for thing number four. I say no to everything else. My default goes from yes to no, unless it's specifically about drilling down on that one thing that I find really interesting. And these periods where you bounce between the two, you explore, then you exploit. And when you're at the limits of your explorer exploitation to get unstuck, you start exploring again, Then you exploit, then you explore the bouncing between broad and narrow. Every time you see the explore, then exploit, you tend to see some sort of leap forward in a career. And that's where the hot streaks happen. So I find that idea incredibly valuable as a rule of thumb in deciding what to say yes to and what to turn down.

Yeah, no, I love it. We, we used to call that flare and focus. Similar idea in product design where we come up with a bunch of really stupid ideas and, you know, it's just about quantity, not quality. And then we focus in on the ideas that we think we actually want to try. I guess a problem applying it to life as opposed to product design is, is what happens when you have too many potential options. How do you filter down those options? What, what, what are you using as your yardstick to know what to discard so that you can truly focus on the things that, that really matter?

Yeah, it's a good question. I think a lot of people who are purposeful about it will say something like, I'm going to spend X amount of time exploring. So it might be three months or six months or a year, depends what the timescale is. It could even be a week. You know, if you want to make a concerted effort. I'll spend the next five days being as careful as possible about exploring this one topic. And then you have a menu of options. And if you're purposeful about it, you sort of collate them and say, I have five or ten or seven or however many options, assuming they're unpackable and discreet that way. And then you say, well, which one seems like it's most fruitful for me to try first? Or which two are most fruitful? And then you start making your path you exploit. And then if it doesn't work out, you go back to exploring or you go back to your original list that you, you created during the exploration phase. So I think the value of it is that it's, it's very flexible and if it's not working out, you can always go back to exploring. Good.

But are using any kind of filter.

To, to help guide you mean you.

You know, which one looks most fruitful, as you say. But how do you, like, what criteria are you using to filter out ideas? Have you ever come across anything like that?

Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I think it very much depends on the domain. So a lot of it is subjective. It's how it feels like if you're, if you're a creative and you, or you think of yourself as creative, but you're not sure which field to go into. A lot of this is about career finding. In the case of artists, it's about finding the right style. For musicians, it's about finding a way to compose and so on. And so what you end up doing is you have, you know, let's say it's art. You've got five different styles of painting and you have, you know, you try each style for a few months. Jackson Pollock did this actually. And one of those styles happened to be his, his drip style, the technique that generated all of his, his most famous works. He wasn't always painting that way. Peter Jackson, the, the filmmaker, the director, Lord of the Rings fame and the Hobbit fame, same thing. He had all these other kinds of films, different genres that preceded Lord of the Rings. And for both of them, for Jackson Pollock and Peter Jackson, there was a time when they said, hey, look, I'VE hit on this thing and clearly I'm good at it. I like it. It makes me feel alive in a way that these other things don't. And so they, they may be sort of.

Amorphous criteria. It's not like there's necessarily, it's a 10 out of 10 on all these different metrics, which you could do if you wanted to. But for a lot of people in the career sense, you want to be excited about what you're doing. Maybe you could look at, you know, the financial prospects or some other more hard edged factors as well. But they, they sort of grab all of the information, they jam it all together and it's pretty clear to them, at least in those cases, that this is what they should be exploiting because that's very clear that this is where they, their strengths lie and what they want to be spending their time on. Love it.

Fantastic. Well, you want to tell folks a little bit more about where they can find more info?

Yeah, sure. So I am on Twitter and LinkedIn. You can find more info. The book is published by Simon and Schuster. It's out in the United States May 16th. It's out in the rest of the world around that time. I'm not sure all the release dates, but you can also find me online@adamalterauthor.com and you can find the book wherever, wherever you usually find your books.

And the book again is Anatomy of a Breakthrough. And also check out Adam's other books, Drunk Tank, Pink and Irresistible, also two fantastic books I hope you'll check out as well. And Adam, thank you so much again for being here.

Thanks for having me near as always.