CM 263: Adam Alter on Simple Ways to Get Unstuck – Rebroadcast
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Humans are actually very, very good at getting physically on stock. If you trap a person physically, we find these hidden wells or reservoirs of energy, and we tend to fight very strongly. There are all these cases that you read in the news occasionally of people developing what is known as hysterically strength, where they'll lift up a car to save someone, for example. But unfortunately, when we attract psychologically, that kind of filing response is very unproductive.

Well, to curious mize at work on your host, gale Allen, at some point, we all get stuck. Maybe it's in a job or career, maybe it's a relationship or business venture. There is something we all experience.

When IT happens, we can feel long and out of our depth. Emotions may overwhelm mental traps, lois and and no time at all, we can see a way out. Award winning professor, researcher and author adam alter has been decades studying how successful people get on stuck in his latest book, an enemy of a breakthrough, how to get on stuck when IT matters most.

He shares what we can do to move forward. Adams recommendations can help us with what might be the most important times in our lives. One quick ask, if you like the podcast, please take a moment to leave rating on itunes, whatever you subscribe, your feedbacks, ines, a strong signal.

People looking for the next podcast. And now here's my interview with adam alter. Adam malter, welcome to the podcast. IT is great to have you back on.

Thanks so much for having me back home.

You surveyed people to learn about their experiences of getting stuck. Tell us about this survey and what you learned.

It's a survey i've been running for many years now. And in the survey, I asked people to tell me about a time when they were stuck or to tell me about an instance right now where I feel stuck. And I give them some time to think about IT.

And what i've discovered is that within about ten or fifteen seconds, the average person can tell me about an area and his or her life where he or SHE feels stuck right now. So I i've sorted discovered that being stuck is is ubiquity. IT applies to everyone at all times and at least one area of our lives.

IT doesn't feel very good. IT feels lonely and isolated. And people are willing to spend a lot of time and money to get on stock. And so that inspired this book.

Getting stuck can mean different things to different people. You're looking at IT in a specific way with key characteristic tics. Can you share those with us?

Yeah, i'm interested in stockings that is protracted. I'm not interested inside someone who spends a couple of hours strugling with something that's never come up before. I'm interested in occasions where people feel they would like to move through something that has plagued them for it's often months, sometimes years, sometimes decades.

And i'm also interested specifically in kinds of stockings that are within our control to change. So for example, in April twenty, twenty, we may have wanted to travel outside the country we lived in, but based on government guidelines during the pandemic, that might not have been possible. That's not psychologically interesting to me.

It's very frustrating. It's still a form of being stuck, but i'm much more interested in in what turn out to be the majority of instances of starkness where people have some control over the situation. They they are making the wrong kinds of decisions or they don't have the strategies they need or they feel overwhelmed and that that most of what I hear from people, that the areas where they feel stuck are tractable, they can be worked on.

The first recommendation that you make for getting unstuck is to dismissed fy the experience. What do you mean by that?

So I think people don't really understand what IT is to be stuck or how common IT is, and that's one of the first problems they face. So in this survey that I ran, I discovered that people feel very alone in being stuck.

But when you look at at the population and aggregate, you see that everyone says, hey, in some respect i'm stuck and that that should make us feel less lonely at least uh, so that's the first thing is to recognize that this is not unusual. That being stuck is not a glitch, is just a feature of being human and and that that's a sort of liberating idea, because IT takes some of the anxiety away from what IT feels like to be stuck. And so I find that that's a helpful place to begin.

But the other thing is to talk about when and why stucker happens. And so this first section of the book talks about the fact that we often put a lot of energy into something, but then stop a little bit too early. We should continue. And I also talk about where during an experience, we tend to get stuck. Usually it's in middle of experience and I explain how to avoid that, some of the things you can do to to shrink middle, as I call IT uh and then I go through some other of the sort of basics to to dismissive y what that means to be stuck and when and why that happens.

There's a term you use in your book that I really liked, which is that we experience life quakes. Tell us a little bit about that because, again, I think it's pretty ubiquitous, but we don't think about we don't necessarily hear about IT or talk about IT.

Yeah, it's a fascinating term. This was from a rider named to Bruce fira, who interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people around the united states, and I believe, also around the world, to ask them about their own experiences of change in their lives. And he discovered that every few years, roughly every five to ten years, we experience what he described as a lifetime ake.

A lifetime ake is a world changing event, at least for us, that has such a big effect on how we live our lives. That IT forces us to rethink a lot of the the basic foundational structures of our lives. IT could be a career shift.

IT could be a marriage of divorce, the birth of a child, the death of a loved one. IT has many different forms. But one thing, uh, file found is that these live quakes, uh very, very common, much more common than we might imagine, and they always blind inside us.

And sometimes he found they happen a simultaneous that you'll have two or three happening at once. And as you can imagine, that tremendously overwhelmed for a human being. And he talks about that in in his book on the subject.

And then I thought the concept was very useful because one of the things fila says is that lifetimes aes are problematic for us because in our culture, particularly in the west, in the united states and and other western countries, we tend not to anticipate change. Where, as in eastern countries, philosophy suggests that there will be, there will be a lot of change. Things are going to shift constantly. So lightweight es is the term he uses to describe this feeling of being blind sided by a major life event.

Such a super helpful way to think about life. On the one hand, you don't want to anticipate so extensively that IT paralyzes you, but on the other hand, IT Normalizes .

at exactly yeah. So it's funy. This goes back to some research I was doing about twenty years ago where I was investigating how different cultures perceive change.

And I found that in the west, the united states, canada, the U. K. Australian, new zealand, uh, a number of other countries as well, people are surprised by change.

If you tell them that it's been Sunny for five days, I expect the sixth day to be Sunny they say, oh yeah, we're in the mud of a you know a Sunny streak if you told him it's been raining for five days, they say over six days probably going to be the same um and they surprised when that's not true. It's not just about the weather. It's of at all sorts of kinds of change.

But if you go ask exactly the same question in china or japan or south korea, you find the opposite. People say, well, obviously you would would you for a change? Its time, uh, if it's been raining, it's gna be Sunny.

If the stock market is done badly, it's going to do well tomorrow. And and this is consistent with dozen, with the in Young, with the sense of baLance that comes from eastern philosophy. And what that does is IT doesn't mean that you're constantly waiting for change to happen.

IT doesn't mean that you are paralyzed by that expectation. But IT means that when change does happen, you're one step ahead of people in the west who are totally blind sided by IT. It's not part of their world view. And so people in the east seem to cope a little bit Better with change than do people .

in the west hit. Almost sounded like when you described IT, there's a bit of optimism there like like things will change. And that and I almost want to say, dot, dot, not a good thing.

I think that's right because a lot of the instances of darkness we talk about overwhelming because they're not things we necessarily want or and even if the things we want, they demand a lot of time and energy and resources that you know, in this busy world, we often don't feel we have. And so if you anticipate change, you know that things will either get Better or get easier. It's a very useful global framework to bring to bear on your experience of the world, because IT liberates you to behave in a way that I think is more adaptive than its Better if you your psychological well being.

you know, you mentioned this a little bit earlier. But as we engage in a change process, if we're working on something you mentioned that it's important for us to recognize that for the most part, we need to keep going, tell us more about that because that's that's something you write a lot about in the book. And I think it's helpful for us to .

really understand IT. Yeah, it's it's a very popular idea now that and I think it's often right that we don't quit often enough that we we should quit more. Any duke has a fantastic book called quit that's about that very topic.

The economist john list has talked about the idea that you should quit more because the there are so many other things you could be doing. And so if something is playing ging, you you probably should move on. And I think that's right in a lot of circumstances.

But in the course of trying to get unstuck a lot of the time, IT requires just a little more application. And this there's some good evidence of this. One example is the research on what's known as the creative Cliff.

If you ask people to come up with creative ideas, which is really the bread bottle of a lot of the work that many people do, you find that they think that their best ideas will come early. So if you say you're spending twenty minutes coming up with good ideas, trying to come up with good ideas, the first ideas you come up with will come to pretty easily. And we mistake the ease with which they rise up for goodness.

We think, oh, that's a good idea because I came to me really easily. Where is later on, IT becomes harder and harder to come up with ideas. But IT turns out that those good ideas at the beginning of the ones that seem good.

Are shared by everyone. There's a reason I come to you easily and that there are just part of the the kind of cultural ideas that people have in general. And so they're not particularly original and novel.

But if you push through that to the point where IT starts getting hard, that's when the really good ideas arise. That's where you start to diverge from the population at large, from the head. And this is known as the creative Cliff illusion.

We sort of assume that early on, in a creative process, the good stuff full tumble out. And if IT hasn't come out early, IT won't come out later. But actually, the good stuff happens when you persevere, when you spend more time. And so we do tend to stop too soon because we mistake difficulty for a sense that our ideas are declining rather than in in quality.

You know, you're someone who does a lot of creative work, examples being the books that you write. Would you say that in general, as a writer, as an author, that you have found that to be the case even in book writing?

Oh, absolutely, absolutely. That's true. It's been true for all three of my books. And the the creative Cliff illusion research is really liberating because IT says to someone like me that IT will definitely get hard before you hit on the right idea. Because if if it's easy, it's probably going to be tried in a noted that interesting you're looking for something that that feels you know intuitive on its on its face. But also it's a little bit harder to come to IT takes a little bit more time to reach.

And that's been my experience on on all of my books and and really in a lot of the creative work I do, I do, for example, I do some naming consulting for companies and other organizations where we trying to come up with names as a perfect example of this kind of creative task, where you have an extended period of time to come up with names, the ones that come to you first come easily, and then later on you ve got to struggle little bit, but almost always the ones that come no ideas. Number of twenty, thirty, forty, fifty. Those are the really good ones because they aren't the obvious ones. And that's what I found in my riding as well.

You mention that there are some traps that we fall into when we do get stuck. What are some of the ways and how do we manage them? Think about that and not feel so trapped by IT.

Humans are very good at what is known as made a cognition. And meta cognition is this layer of thinking above the task that your attacking at any moment in time. And we're very sensitive to the slowing down, although the increasing speed of something.

So if a task gets suddenly more difficult, what was easy becomes hard. We hit a platov, for example, that feels aversive to human beings. We are sensitive to IT, and we we feel the need to act.

often. Acting means quitting. Moving on to something else, which we've already said earlier on, is is often not a good idea that context because that's just when you're getting to the to the good stuff. You know the reason why the beginning of the book is about is about the mister flying starkness is in part because so much of this can be improved by just knowing what to expect and not being blind sided by IT. So you will hit a plata in pretty much anything you do unless you change what you're doing.

And there's evidence of this from looking at thousands of people whose people's work out regimes, if they keep the same regime across time, is a study that looks at A, I think, fifteen thousand people across seven years. And IT finds that between years one and two of using a particular workout scheme, you will hit a plate to, and the benefits will decline to the point without vanish completely in about the second or third year. And it's not just about workouts. It's really about mental workout as well when we're trying to do something that requires mental work. So it's really good to know that and to know that, that hardness that you experience, that difficulty, that chAllenge is a sign that you have moved through the first process, which is the obvious, not particularly interesting part of the task, and you're moving to the next phase, which is actually quite optimistic.

Is there any advantage to having a lot of projects going on at once? And the reason i'm asking that is because i've seen folks who what kind switch IT up. If they feel stuck in one area, then they'll switch? Or is that just too much going on?

No, I think it's very valuable. I'll i'll get to a caveat in a minute, but yes, it's incredibly valuable to have a number of different tasks going uh, on two fronts. One front is is good to have lots of lots of things going on because you know project sometimes hit a wall and there is no way around that particular wall.

And so you have to abandon them. As a grand student, when I was a first year great student, I spent the first six months of my career working on a research project. I pared hours and hours of time and energy into IT.

I learned new techniques and skills, and as I was about to publish that project, I discovered that someone else had been doing the same thing and had published a paper on that very topic just ahead of me, which in the academic world is known as being scooped. Now, what you're supposed to do if you're in a more senior in season academic because you're supposed to have five, six, seven, however, many other projects, so that you can say that was disappointing. Now gonna pull my energy into the other one.

I didn't have that yet. And so I was very destructive. I was very upset about IT, but I also, you know, changed the way I work forever more, and i'm now much more into diversification.

And I think that's true in in other areas of life as well. You have to diversify and you also have to have things at different stages of completion. So you don't want ten projects that you're just starting to work on. You want to have something that's almost finished, something that's a little bit earlier on in the process, something that's really at its at its infancy.

And the value of that is if you get tired of being at a particular phase in a project because all phases are different, you can jump to another one and make progress on that one at the cavy at that I mentioned is and you you hinted at this, if you do this uh extensively, you can be the kind of person who explores too widely at the expense of what is known as so that the evidence from all sorts of different uh fields and studies shows that the best way to succeeded is to spend a period of time expLoring the options they they look at. For example, painters Jackson pollock. Jackson pollo became very well known for his drip paintings, and he know his blue polls and all of those kinds of works that involved throwing paint to the canvas.

That was not always how he painted. He spent a period before that of several years expLoring five or six different techniques, were very, very different from that. And so you do want to do that.

You want to explore. These techniques have many different irons in the fire. But the only way he became as successful as he ultimately did was because he said, now I know from expLoring what works best.

I'm gonna more of that. I need to do more of that thing that worked for me. And so you don't want to explore so much that you never exploit the thing that's working best for you. So you, you do, anna, jump between the two and not just have time of things going on at once without saying i'm going .

to commit to one. In a second section of your book, you talk about the feelings and emotions that come up with being stuck, and those are really powerful. And I was really glad that you wrote so extensively about them because they paralyze us.

And as you said, if we think we're alone on top of IT, there's so much negativity and toxic that goes into IT. One of the things that we might do is we might respond to ourselves by kind of speaking maybe in a very judgmental way. Our self talk is very judgmental. Sometimes that gets a little bit over the top, like we might want to increase pressure on ourselves, be really bold, talk about that and what the process cons are there.

Yeah, it's some it's a very interesting thing that happened. So humans are actually very, very good at getting physically on stock. If you trap a person physically, we find these hidden whales or reservoirs of energy, and we tend to fight very strongly.

Uh, there are all these cases that you read in the news occasionally of people developing what is known as hypothetical strength, where they're lift up a car to save someone, for example. But unfortunately, when we attract psychologically, that kind of filing response is very unproductive because that leads us to become scattered. We don't think clearly.

We respond to iii vely and instinctively, which often isn't the right way to go. And we become very critical. We're looking for action right now that solves everything and that, that doesn't work.

So the first thing you've really got to do is to to turn down the temperature, to take a little of breath to put to pause. And in the book I talk about the number of examples of people who have have been very successful. Sometimes they're the best of what they do in the world, on the planet. And they are surprisingly likely to spend significant chunks of time effectively doing what looks from the outside like nothing um being inactive so that I can x hio take a breath and pause before I begin taking action that is much more considered and full and strategic.

I'm always amazed by those folks because my first reaction is a biased to action. And IT has its pluses in certain situations. But the folks you really can sit with IT, you know, as I get older, I I work harder and harder to there is extremely adorable.

And I find that their decisions are just more throttled. They don't feel so driven to do something. So I really appreciated that you wrote about that.

Yeah, I did. My favorite example of this is the soccer play, a lionel messy, who, again, I I think he's the best in the world today and possibly the greatest socket player of all time. And this is the worlds most played sport.

And so to be the best of that sport is is an incredible feat. And you would expect that the person who is the best of the sport plays every match as intensely as possible. But if the fascinating thing about messy is he's he's also known for being famously anxious.

A number of these coaches have commented on this, and when he was a Young player, people said he may not succeed because he is such an anxious player. And so the way he learned to cope with this was at the beginning of every match, you can see that when the whistle blows, players are running around the scofield messy basically amble around the center circle. He barely moves.

And what he's doing during that time is two things. One thing is he's coming himself down because he's anxious, even fur. For minor matches. He says that he gets quite anxious.

The other thing he's doing those is he's using those first few minutes to get a sense of how everyone else on the pitches playing so he might notice as a particularly good connection between two of his teammates. And so he will exploit that later on. Or he might notice an injury that some play on the other team has, and so he exploit that later on.

The only way he has the time and energy to attend to that though, is because he's not effectively playing the game until minutes four or five. And we know he does this because he has scored a goal, at least one goal in every minute of the match c except minutes one and two, he's never scored during the first two minutes of the match because, in effect, he hasn't started playing yet. But those two minutes are in the service of the other a plus. And so it's a great example of how this kind of slowing down and and causing is is sometimes tremendous ly valuable if you can deploy IT strategically.

What if we just feel paralyzed? Like what can we do to overcome that overwhelming feeling? Because while there are some of us who I think overact in those situations, others of us can just shut out.

I think this is maybe slightly different advice from from what I just said about messy is if you're feeling genuinely completely paralyzed. Um one of the things that's very helpful is to act no matter what the action is by definition, if you are acting you are not in at least in that moment stuck, you are unstuck in that moment. Uh so this uh some great advice from the uh writer, the song write musician and and also rider of books jeff tweet, the front man of the band wilko, who explains his creative process and he talks about the that most mornings were many mornings he wakes up and feels stuck creatively stuck you know, over a career of decades.

The idea that every day you will have to wake up and produce something radically new and different that's that's an overwhelmed concept but he he's managed that he's written phenomenal books and he he's obvious ly a great song rider he he explains how um when he feels stuck and completely paralyzed he thinks of his ideas as having two levels the top level, the obvious ideas, other bad ones that the obvious ones and he talks about pouring those out as though the water you're gona pour those out at the beginning of the day so that what's underneath the good stuff is allowed to emerge. So a little bit like the creative clifton sion idea. And so what he does is he spends a bit of time in the morning pouring those ideas out by actively cultivating bad ideas.

He loves the thresh hold for what is an idea worth expLoring down to the, basically to the ground, and says to himself, what's the worst song I could right right now? What's the most tried rif or mild? What's the worst sentence I could compose right now that still grammatical? And what that does is that liberal ates the wheels and gets in amid in a position to to start doing IT doesn't matter what he's doing, but he's doing something. And so when you advise or shrink down to its smallest elements, any activity, it's a very, very effective way to get on stuck.

Such a great idea you know as you are describing that I was thinking about how I live near um a child care center and when I get stuck if I want to take like a brief walk, I love just watching kids because they're not trying to do anything perfectly IT can be very stimulating and sort of freeing h absolutely.

I think that's exactly right. And in fact, that's a theme in the book actually that a lot of the things kids do, you don't see kids getting stuck very often. You know they make they make tremendous progress.

They're incredibly curious to learn things that are ridiculous rate that adults could never match. But as a result, as we Christal ze into adult hood, we we stop doing some of the things that is so helpful when we are kids that we should keep doing. Like one of the things is I I have a five year old and a seven year old.

My seven year old son and my five year old daughter both ask infinite follow up questions. Everything's, why? Tell me more, I want to know more, I understand.

But what's what's below that? What's a sort of simple explanation for that? Adults don't do that, whether it's about pollutants or we just kind of trial off and move on to the next thing.

We are not as curious as kidzees don't ask as many questions. And so we learn less, less stuff in general. And so I I think i'm kids certainly lower the threshold theyll act even if acting doesn't mean perfection, but they're also question everything. And I think that makes them tremendously successful. And stickers in general.

if you'd like the chance to get a free copy of this week book, sign up, foreign wars letter, the one, two, three, by heading to my website, gale out and dot, each new subscriber will automatically be entered into a drawing to with our most recent guest book before we released the next episode will send the window the free copy in from the shout out on the podcast. This week's winner is Cooper from north CarOlina. congratulations.

Cooper will be sending you a copy of rena blisses book rethinking intelligence. What's the one, two, three newsletter is one topic, two insights, and three actions. You can take back to my interview with adam alter, you point out in your book that is more helpful to strive for excEllence than perfection. Walk us through this important difference and what I can do for us.

yes. So perfection is is paralized because it's it's sort of the highest bar you could possibly set in any context, right? right? The perfect song, come up with the perfect product idea or business, uh, solve your relationship issues with the perfect style of communication.

The humans are just not engineered for perfection. Might maybe IT comes across time that you get Better and Better at something, but even then, you know there's always something to need big at. So perfection as a standard is is really, really difficult to achieve.

But if you want to be good at something, if you want to do well, which think us do, if you type a or you just care about a particular domain, excEllence is a much Better thing to strive. Because excEllence is about the process, is about the system that you used to, to create the output, whatever IT might be. Rather than focusing on the goal itself, perfection is a goal setting mechanism.

IT basically says, I am here and I would like to be here. And so until you reach perfection, you're effectively in what we turn a failure state. You haven't succeeded till your perfect.

And since they'll never really be perfect, you'll never really succeed. And so that's a really demotivating way to live your life. But if what you're looking for, his excEllence, you might say something like excEllence for me, if i'm a rider, is writing two hundred solid words a day.

So here's my process for doing that. You could use jeff tweets advice. You could pour out the about ideas for an hour, and then spent two hours writing, hopefully two hundred good words.

Um IT IT doesn't matter what the domain is, but excEllence is attainable because it's it's not about the output. It's about how you go about doing things and developing the right kinds of habits. And so I I find IT a much more useful way of of framing what we do than uh than perfection, which which might be the consequence of excEllence. But uh it's it's a paralyzing form of a of standard setting that I think never serves as well.

There are a number of mental strategies that you share in the book. And one of the first things that you recommend we do is conduct what you call a friction audit. What is a friction artic and what can you give us? Yeah.

it's this process i've been using for quite a long time in a business context, work with companies to do IT. I'll give you an example in a minute, but IT actually applies very well to personal experiences to so what what happens in a friction order that is, you find an area of your life where you're stuck or where is some friction instead of kind of finding new things to do in your life to paper IT over, or you ignore IT and you work on something else, you say to yourself, okay, there's a bit of friction here.

Uh, is there an intervention I can bring to bear on this? Can I solve this friction? And then I I need to make sure that what i've done actually works. So let me give you a concrete example of this. Um I did some work with some some companies that that were designing shopping mls in the united states and in australia.

And what they found was that a lot of the time that a certain set of people would go shopping and they fill their carts with with stuff and then they ouldn't buy them. They're abandon the cuts without actually purchasing what they they put in the cuts. And so from the perspective of a shopping mall, you know, the worst is people come spend time.

There are not actually purchase what they seek to buy. They discovered that a lot of the time, this was parents who had come with their kids, and the Young kids had had hit a wall and decided that I was time to move on and that there was no way to pass fy them. And so the parents left in a big hurry.

I have a lot of footage of this. The question then, is that a friction point we can do in order to on that, let's figure out a way, and hopefully an inexpensive way to fix the problem. And so what a lot of these mls did was they ended up building small jungle gym somewhere in the of the mall as a kind of centerpiece, sometimes near a fountain or some other area that eye catching.

And they found that these, these parents, they would shop a little bit, then they would buy some stuff, then they would take their kids to to that little jungle gym. The kids would be happy. They play for a little bit, and I finish the shopping trip.

They had many fewer abandoned carts. So they sort of dealt with that friction point by by peppering or standing IT over. And smoothing IT down. That's really yeah, it's a really smart idea and and it's very inexpensive.

I mean, you can build these for a few thousand dollars and in the course of the year, save hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars of lost merchandise. So it's it's a very valuable tool. But IT applies just as much to our own lives that using that lens and saying, where is the friction in my life and how can I overcome IT?

Can you give us an example of that? I mean, it's really fascinating to think about from a business perspective, and it's also equally fascinating to think about IT as an individual.

yeah. So in any business where you're dealing with humans, you you will have friction. And this is one of the interesting development business last twenty years also is that historically much business required human interaction. Now there was something good about that. It's nice to interact with other people enriches our lives.

Those kind of messy um acquaints based interactions that you have with people at the store every day that you return to, whether you in a city or or a town or a rural area, there's something quite rich about that is the building blocks of what that means to live a kind of meaningful life is to have a lot of those rich interactions with people over time. But this friction there. And so over the last twenty years, also with the adventure of smart phones and and other forms of tech, we have moved away from that to frictionless interactions.

And that's what people demand today. And so one of the big kinds of friction or IT focuses that i've seen and that i've used with a lot of companies is how do you retain the benefits of connecting with people in a real way with your brand? But also, how do you make the process that you have as easy as possible? And so i'll work with big company is sometimes that require you to jump through bureaucratic hoops or red tape.

You know sometimes there's legal is a legal requirement. Uh, maybe it's an insurance company or a financial institution and people know what's good for them. They they wanted buy insurance to protect themselves or they want to save for their future.

So they have money when they retire. But there's so much to wait through, there's so much friction there. If these companies can remove just one or two of those most stuff in friction points, they find dramatic rises in conversion rates, people actually following through the what they intend. Uh and so it's an incredibly valuable process .

when you talk about mental strategies, sometimes those mental strategies come down to how we seek out help, how we seek out advice or opinions from other people. And you talk in your book about times when that's good to do and times when maybe it's more effective to not do that. What could that look like? What about the opinions and idea of that of others? When is you could to reach out perhaps? And when is IT less good?

Yeah researchers who study network effects and and um a multiple opinions on any particular topic. K talk about the concept of non redundancy. Redundancy is when someone who thinks just the way you do, perhaps I have the same intellectual background, the same degree they grew up, the same way as you did, they have the same attitudes and values you're likely to think about many things the same way.

And so your ideas will probably be redundant. You will reinforce each other. Your good ideas will be magnified, and bad ones will unfortunately not be solved, because you won't get any new diverse inputs.

The opposite of that is non redundancy. Non redundancy is when you find someone who is reasonable, intelligent, that has very, very, very different ideas, backgrounds, attitudes, experience and so on. And so there's huge value in seeking diverse inputs whenever you do basically anything, because we tend to be egocentric and mind in our own ways of seeing the world.

Um this is basically what underpinned crowd sourcing and uh seeking at non redundant ideas and networking. I would say that as a general rule of them, at some point before you make any big decision in your life is valuable to find a non redundant input. And one of those actually today, we're very lucky with ChatGPT.

We may fear that it's going to take our jobs, but generative A I is an amazing brainstorming partner because IT isn't non redundant input. For example, if i'm trying to write the first few lines of of the chapter in the book, I might say to ChatGPT, what are three ways to write a chapter that begins with an anecdote about x, and that says, why now i'm not going to steal that. I'm not going to plagiarize, but it'll show me different ways of thinking about the idea from from non redundant inputs because of com the web for different ideas.

Um so that's very valuable. But you also asked about when you shouldn't do this, you you shouldn't do this usually very early on in the process. You can contaminate your very first original early ideas by spending too much time of listening ing to others. So they are very valuable as a counterpoint to what you've come up with. But in the course of brainstorming or in a test that requires a lot of uniformity or precision or specificity, and you know that you have the expertise, you probably don't want to do this, you want to focus just on your own ideas.

That's that's really, really interesting. I have a colleague where when we we are brainstorming new ideas, we will actually frame IT by saying, okay, i'm not necessarily looking for a lot of feedback and input here. Maybe i'm just looking for an initial feeling and will call the idea of baby bird.

So what we use that code with each other, what we're saying is this is a baby bird idea is fragile. It's new, just starting. So i'm not looking for like expertise are weighing ing in. I'm looking for sort of an initial reaction to IT encourage that. The early stage .

that's so interesting. I like baby, but I say it's a really nice way thinking about IT. In fact, um I talk about the gulf of sam sneed who this is much more physical but he in describing how he held the golf club he's known for having the most beautiful swing of all time he talks about cradling the golf club like a baby bird oh wow. And so that gentleman ss with which we hold something that you don't want to let go of, but you want to cultivate and and see grow, or in in the needs case, you know, you obviously can't like go the golf club, but if you struggle, you know gna get the best results from that. I think that's a really use who general frame for for a lot of areas of life.

You talk about two other things that I wonder if you d like to speak to one of them. What about being our own therapists or tapping into our inner crowd? Is there are one of those two ideas that you'd like us to learn a little bit more about .

yeah I did very similar idea that is the basic idea there is um we know from many different instances, in lots of different context, that there is value in seeking information from a crowd. This is known variously as wisdom of the crowd or um as I mentioned earlier, getting non redundant inputs. And so they're great value in that.

And that applies, for example, to maybe to giving yourself therapy because what you can do is you can say yourself, what's my what's my instinct, my intuition about a particular topic, and you can start there. And IT doesn't really matter what the area of your life is, but you can ask yourself to effectively put on a second hat and play devils advocate. And so you can say to yourself, okay, that's interesting.

This is my my initial instinct t on this particular topic, but if I were wrong, how how might I be wrong and and that's what a crowd does, write a questions. One person in the cloud questions the other people in the crowd. And everyone ends up questioning everyone else, not in an aggressive way, but in a way that that opens you up to more ideas.

And you can do that. You ask yourself, you know, if i'm wrong, how more likely to be wrong? And what could I do to remedy that? And if you do that a couple of times, the optimum number seems to be three.

You end up having three inputs. Certainly they are all part of you. But by pushing yourself, you might come to new ideas in the same way as the creative Cliff illusion says that you'll get to the good stuff later on.

Often your best way of dealing with the problem is either the average of those three or IT draws different elements from those three. And and that's the idea of the wisdom of the internal crowd that inside us, we have, we, we are multitudes. And there isn't just one version of who you are. You can coax out those other versions by asking the right questions.

That's really interesting. I really like the phrasing of that question too because it's not about judgment or negativity. It's about being that you could picture asking that question of appear and is very constructive .

yeah exactly it's it's the way I would want someone to ask me a question if um if they were seeking advice, right I would want them to say I look, I might be wrong about this. I don't know uh if i'm wrong, how might I be wrong? And what that does is allows you to criticize, but in a very non judgmental way. And I think that's that's very generous.

So there is a point at which taking action is a great, as you say, on sticker, and it's a habit that we should cultivate. Could you talk a little bit about that?

All of the ideas we've talked about, about understanding what IT is to be stuck when we get stuck, how to deal what the emotional consequences, developing strategies. All of that is ultimately in the service of actually doing something, because that's how you get unstuck. If all you did was steal the emotional consequences and strategies, you would never get anywhere.

So action is paramount, and everything else is in the service of action. You have to do something, you have to make a decision, you have to commit, you have to act, you have to write, you have to draw, you have to compose music, whatever IT might be. And so I I talk about this this idea that action is the last chapter.

The title is action above all, which is the the sense that um to truly measure whether you're getting unstuck, you have to measure you're acting and that that comes back to this idea from jeff tweety about pouring out the bad ideas. There is value in that because it's action even if the action itself doesn't produce immediately any valuable products. Although often he says that he does, when he pause out these bad ideas, he stumbles on good ones.

Um I also talk about the this very famous interviews with pole sim and the musician in the seventies and eighties. H Simon is famously shy despite being a phenomenal musician. And um there are these interviews with the talk show host, the caveat that are on youtube, you can find them actually they're very interesting to watch.

And at the beginning of the interview, Simon is very, very shy and his reaction, he doesn't say much. He looks very uncomfortable. He comments on the position of the microphone.

He's incredibly soft, conscious, and then covered each time very smartly, says to him, I want you to pick up your guitar and explain something to me. And he asks him a question. In the one case, he asks him to explain how he wrote bridge over troubled waters.

And at the minute sim starts strangling the guitar, which is probably the most comfortable action he can take. IT just kind of loosens everything up. He becomes charming and expensive. He says much more what he says, really interesting and informative and it's it's like a magical process watching that unfold. And I think the idea is that doing I just unlocks how we think and our feelings and is if there's something you like doing, if you're comfortable doing, it's an unsticking er in itself just to do pretty much anything.

I wonder if that's why so many people talk about i'll feel like i've read so much about people who walk and they get a lot out of like the walking, of course, but so much more out of like they are thinking the problem solving. If they walk with someone talking through things, there's something about that action in the background.

One hundred percent. yeah. I think that's right. I think that's one of the reasons walking is is so productive. There are similar logical explanations for IT as well. But I I do think that you know your your physically and metaphorically listening things up by walking, and that seems to to turn on the force that the ideas tend to flow.

There is a quote from your book, a phrase that I really liked. And I wondered if you could tell us a little bit more about what that means. You say it's important to recognize and capitalize on near misses. What's that about?

Yeah I I talk a little bit about fAiling. Well um it's the idea that failure is inevitable, but you can use IT to Better yourself and to improve output or you can use IT as a kind of destructive tool that discourages you. And the way you know your your fAiling well is you're getting closer and closer to the mark.

You're converging on whatever your goal might be. But unfortunately, as you do that, as you get closer, in a lot of instances, you you're doing what's what's known as near miss you're committing and near miss, you're almost there but not quite. And so you might feel as though you are particularly frustrated because you almost got there but didn't 快。 But actually, it's a sign that you are about to succeed.

And so it's very important to recognize those instances of the amuses where, for example, you know a golfer who doesn't quite hit the score he or SHE would like or you're trying to come up with an idea and you know the idea is like eighty percent or ninety percent away there, but not quite. That can be really, really frustrating. But in a zoom back more abstract sense, it's a sign that you're doing the right thing and you should keep going.

And there's a very good chance that around the corner you'll find success. And actually researchers who have backend engineer had a look at where successes come from fine, that they are often proceeded by this series of near misses that get nea and nea and nearer to the mark until eventually they get over the over the line. Um and so there's something quite hopeful about that.

The last question I wanted to ask you by taking action is that there are certain actions that are Better to take for certain purposes and we can essentially be a little bit more uh aware and maybe even been strategic about that. What are some ways to think about that? Like you talk about doing small things times, or maybe we should be rigid times, we should create artificial barriers. These are definitely different size of the same coin. Is there one or are there one or two that you'd like .

to talk to us about? yeah. Paradoxically, when you are stuck, giving yourself a lot of rim to move is often paralyzing. What you need to do is restrain yourself or constrain yourself is a huge amount of evidence for this idea.

IT comes from the this notion that you can be paralysed by the options um is one of my favorite examples of this is a painter, a name's phil hanson. Hanson was a pointless, which means that he applied thousands of tiny dots to the canvas. And those dots of paint, when viewed from a far, made a picture that looked coherent and hole and pointed.

Ism is a very precise form of art. But he developed a neurological tremor, and so his little dots started to turn into test polls, and he could no longer practice pointers ism. And he yet to figure out what to do next.

And this was obviously overwhelming for someone who developed expertise in a particular area. And he he described in a ted talk that he gave the experience of trying to figure out what to do next and how overwhelmed he was. You know, he could then take on any style of art, and so he bounced around for a while trying different styles.

But what seemed to be most helpful to him was saying, i'm not gonna X, Y and z. What i'm going to do is focus very narrow ly on a specific thing. So what he would do sometimes, for example, is he would say, i'm gna create an network using only my bare feet, or i'm gna use a two by four to apply paint to the canvas, and that's the only tool i'm going to use.

Or i'm going to create an art work where I don't spend more than a dollar on on materials. So those are you know, if you're stuck, you're saying up, here's an even more different ways to be stuck and fixed in what you're doing. You can't do x, you can't do why. But weirdly, by constraining yourself, you narrow down the options you have and IT makes you really effective at zoom in on the thing that you are doing. Uh, and so there's a lot of evidence that artists in people in other creative fields do this very successfully by constraining themselves.

The theme of the podcasts ers curiosity add what you most curious about today.

So good question. I I mean, i'm curious about a lot of the the strings in the book that I I didn't close off um and one of them I think is the rise of ChatGPT and other generative A I we're all worried that the that a generative A I might be a force for bad overall in our worlds, might take our jobs or make what we're doing redundant. But I think IT has the power to be an incredible tool for creativity and unsticking. And so I wrote this book before generative A, I was what IT is today, but that's something that i'm really focusing on a lot. Now, how can we use these tools to unstick us and unlock in a reservoir of creativity that might others SE be hidden from us?

You work with a lot of clients, you have students. How are they responding to IT? Is there any pattern there that you're seeing yet or too early to tell?

It's a little early to tell. I think most people are just either curious or they they aren't yet engaged with IT. So there are people I I know who have spent out and hours and hours learning about the different generation of A I models, the different applications that are available.

It's obviously ChatGPT is the dominant one, but there are hundreds, if not thousands of others that are out there. now. Some of them are expLoring all the options and others, I think, are just waiting, as with sort of any product or any new idea, others are waiting to see what others make, what the early adopters and the innovators make of of these models. But I think a lot of people are finding great utility, as am I in in these products for al.

Is there anything I haven't asked that you'd like to speak to? There's so much in your book we can get to all of that. But is there anything that you'd want people to live with or maybe to know about that we didn't get a chance to talk about?

Yeah, I guess the last thing i'll say is we talk a little about what kids do so well. The thing that kids do really well that adults don't is adults take whatever is the dominant way of doing something, and they just sort of do IT as fault. But kids don't do that.

They experiment a lot more. And this tremendous value in in developing what is known as an experimental mindset, where you basically question things that are orthodoxy that other people might take for granted. And a lot of unsticking in the world comes from this approach to saying, you know, here are two areas of my life.

Just pick two areas. And this is how I do things in those areas. Maybe you are a runa and you've been training a particular way. Maybe you're an audition. You come up with your ideas using a particular approach. Maybe you're a manager at the company and you want everyone to be in the office every day or you want them to be there eight dollars a day, five days a week or whatever IT might be.

There is a way we do everything right now, but it's worth questioning everything and saying, hon, is that really the best? And if you want to know the answer to that experiment, change things up maybe for the next six months. Try three different options for two months each, see which one's best, and never make the rest of your life Better. Live at least in that domain. And so I think this experimental that is a really valuable way of moving forward .

in the world is a great piece of advice to leave on. Adam, I can't thank you enough. It's a pleasure to speak with you is a pleasure time, and IT continues to be so.

Thank you so much. Thank so much for having me guy. I really enjoy .

curious mize at work is made possible through a partnership with the innovator circle and executive coaching firm for innovative leaders. A special thank you to producer, an editor, rob maka belly, for leaving the amazing behind the scenes team that makes IT all happen. Each episode we give a shout top to something that feeding our curiosity.

This week I hip Manda in gozo, a dishes novel americana. On one level, IT is the story of two nigerians making the way abroad in the U. S.

In U. K. On another, it's a compelling tail of race, identity and a search for home. A D, J takes us deep inside these characters, words in a way few authors do. What a writer, what a story.