Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Humans are actually very, very good at getting physically unstuck. 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 hysterical strength, where they'll lift up a car to save someone, for example. But unfortunately, when we're trapped psychologically, that kind of flailing response is very unproductive.
Welcome to Curious Minds at Work. I'm your host, Gail Allen. At some point, we all get stuck. Maybe it's in a job or career. Maybe it's a relationship or business venture. Though it's something we all experience, when it happens, we can feel alone and out of our depth. Emotions may overwhelm us. Mental traps lure us in. In no time at all, we can't see a way out.
Award-winning professor, researcher, and author Adam Alter has spent decades studying how successful people get unstuck. In his latest book, Anatomy of a Breakthrough, How to Get Unstuck When It Matters Most, he shares what we can do to move forward. Adam's 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 a rating on iTunes or wherever you subscribe. Your feedback sends a strong signal to people looking for their next podcast. And now here's my interview with Adam Alter.
Adam Alter, welcome to the podcast. It is great to have you back on. Thanks so much for having me back, Gail. 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 ask people to tell me about a time when they were stuck or to tell me about an instance right now where they feel stuck. And I give them some time to think about it. And what I've discovered is that
Within about 10 or 15 seconds, the average person can tell me about an area in his or her life where he or she feels stuck right now. So I've sort of discovered that being stuck is ubiquitous. It applies to everyone at all times in at least one area of our lives. It doesn't feel very good. It feels lonely and isolating. And people are willing to spend a lot of time and money to get unstuck. 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 characteristics. Can you share those with us?
Yeah, I'm interested in stuckness that is protracted. I'm not interested in, say, someone who spends a couple of hours struggling 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 stuckness that are within our control to change.
So for example, in April 2020, 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 what turn out to be the majority of instances of stuckness where people have some control over the situation. They're making the wrong kinds of decisions or they don't have the strategies they need or they feel overwhelmed.
And that's 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 demystify 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. In this survey that I ran, I discovered that people feel very alone in being stuck. But when you look at the population in aggregate,
you see that everyone says, hey, in some respect, I'm stuck. And that should make us feel less lonely, at least. So that's the first thing, is to recognize that this is not unusual, that being stuck is not a glitch, it's just a feature of being human.
And 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 stuckness happens. And so this first section of the book talks about the fact that we often think
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 the middle of an experience. And I explain how to avoid that, some of the things you can do to shrink the middle, as I call it, and then go through some other of the sort of basics to demystify what it 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 it. We don't necessarily hear about it or talk about it. Yeah, it's a fascinating term. This was from a writer named Bruce Feiler.
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 lifequake. A lifequake 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 basic foundational structures of our lives. It could be a career shift, it could be a marriage, a divorce, the birth of a child, the death of a loved one. It has many different forms and
But one thing Filer found is that these lifequakes are very, very common, much more common than we might imagine. And they always blindside us. And sometimes he found they happen simultaneously. You'll have two or three happening at once. And as you can imagine, that's tremendously overwhelming for a human being. And he talks about that in his book on the subject. And then I thought the concept was very useful because one of the things Filer says is that
Lifequakes are problematic for us because in our culture, particularly in the West, in the United States and other Western countries,
We tend not to anticipate change, whereas in Eastern countries, philosophy suggests that there will be a lot of change. Things are going to shift constantly. So lifequakes is the term he uses to describe this feeling of being blindsided by a major life event. It's 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 you.
Exactly. Yeah. So this, this, it's funny, this goes back to some research I was doing about 20 years ago, where I was investigating how different cultures perceive change. And I found that in the West, the United States, Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, a number of other countries as well, people are surprised by change. If you tell them that it's been sunny for five days, they expect the sixth day to be sunny. They say, oh, yeah, we're in the middle of a, you know, a sunny streak.
If you tell them it's been raining for five days, they say, oh, the sixth day is probably going to be the same. And they're surprised when that's not true. It's not just about the weather. It's about all sorts of kinds of change.
But if you go and ask exactly the same question in China or Japan or South Korea, you find the opposite. People say, well, obviously, you know, we're due for a change. It's time. If it's been raining, it's going to be sunny. If the stock market has done badly, it's going to do well tomorrow. And this is consistent with Taoism, with the yin yang, 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're 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 blindsided by it. It's not part of their cultural worldview.
And so people in the East seem to cope a little bit better with change than do people in the West. It almost sounded like when you described it, there's a bit of optimism there, like things will change and that, you know, I almost want to say dot, dot, dot, and that's a good thing. I think that's right. Because a lot of the instances of stuckness we talk about are overwhelming because they're not things we necessarily want, or even if they're 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 that we have. And
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 and that's better for your psychological well-being.
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 something you write a lot about in the book and I think it's helpful for us to really understand it.
Yeah, it's a very popular idea now that, and I think it's often right that we don't quit often enough, that we should quit more. Annie 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 there are so many other things you could be doing. And so if something is plaguing 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 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 and butter 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're, say you're spending 20 minutes coming up with good ideas or trying to come up with good ideas, the first ideas you come up with will come to you pretty easily. And we mistake the ease with which they rise up for goodness. We think, oh, that's a good idea because it came to me really easily. Whereas later on, it becomes harder and harder to come up with ideas.
But it turns out that those good ideas at the beginning or the ones that seem good are shared by everyone. There's a reason they come to you easily. And that's they're just part of the kind of cultural ideas that people have in general. And so they're not particularly original or 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 herd.
And this is known as the creative cliff illusion. We sort of assume that early on in a creative process, the good stuff will tumble out. And if it hasn't come out early, it won't come out later on. 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 improving in quality.
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 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 ideas. Because if it's easy, it's probably going to be trite and not all that interesting. You're looking for something that feels...
you know, intuitive on its face, but also that's a little bit harder to come to, that takes a little bit more time to reach. And that's been my experience on all of my books. 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're trying to come up with names. It's 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 a little bit. But almost always, the ones that come, ideas number 20, 30, 40, 50, those are the really good ones because they aren't the obvious ones. And that's what I found in my writing as well. You mentioned 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 that and think about that and not feel so trapped by it?
Humans are very good at what is known as metacognition. And metacognition is this layer of thinking above the task that you're attacking at any moment in time. And we're very sensitive to the slowing down or the increasing speed of something. So if a task gets suddenly more difficult...
what was easy becomes hard. We hit a plateau, for example, that feels aversive to human beings. We are sensitive to it and we feel the need to act. Often acting means quitting, moving on to something else, which we've already said earlier on is often not a good idea in that context because that's just when you're getting to the good stuff.
The reason why the beginning of the book is about demystifying stuckness is in part because so much of this can be improved by just knowing what to expect and not being blindsided by it. So you will hit a plateau 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's workout regimes, if they keep the same regime across time, there's a study that looks at, I think, 15,000 people across seven years. And it finds that between the years one and two of using a particular workout scheme, you will hit a plateau and the benefits will decline to the point where they'll vanish completely in about the second or third year. And it's not just about workouts. It's really about mental workouts 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 will kind of 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 get to a caveat in a minute. But yes, it's incredibly valuable to have a number of different tasks going on two fronts. One front is it's good to have lots of things going on because...
you know, projects sometimes hit a wall and there's no way around that particular wall. And so you have to abandon them. As a grad student, when I was a first year grad student, I spent the first six months of my career working on a research project. I poured
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 a more senior and seasoned academic is you're supposed to have five, six, seven, however many other projects so that you can say that was disappointing. Now I'm going to pour my energy into this other one.
I didn't have that yet. And so it was very destructive. I was very upset about it, but I also changed the way I work forever more. And I'm now much more into diversification. And I think that's true 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 10 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 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. The caveat that I mentioned is, and you hinted at this, if you do this extensively,
you can be the kind of person who explores too widely at the expense of what is known as exploitation. So the evidence from all sorts of different fields and studies shows that the best way to succeed is to spend a period of time exploring your options,
They look at, for example, painters, Jackson Pollock. Jackson Pollock became very well known for his drip paintings and his blue poles and all of those kinds of works that involved throwing paint at the canvas. That was not always how he painted. He spent a period before that of several years exploring five or six different techniques that 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 going to do 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 do want to jump between the two and not just have tons 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 just so much negativity and toxicity 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 gets very judgmental. Sometimes it 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 pros and cons are there.
Yeah, it's a very interesting thing that happens. So humans are actually very, very good at getting physically unstuck. 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 hysterical strength, where they'll lift up a car to save someone, for example. But unfortunately, when we're trapped psychologically, that kind of flailing response is not
is very unproductive because it leads us to become scattered. We don't think clearly. We respond intuitively 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 doesn't work. So the first thing you've really got to do is to turn down the temperature.
to take a bit of a breath, to pause. And in the book, I talk about a number of examples of people who have been very successful. Sometimes they're the best at 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, being inactive so that they can exhale, take a breath,
pause before they begin taking action that is much more considered and thoughtful and strategic. I'm always amazed by those folks because my first reaction is a bias to action. And it has its pluses in certain situations, but the folks who really can sit with it, as I get older, I work harder and harder to get there. It's extremely admirable. And I find that their decisions are just more thoughtful. They don't feel so
driven to do something. So I really appreciated that you wrote about that. Yeah. My favorite example of this is the soccer player Lionel Messi, who again, I think he's the best in the world today and possibly the greatest soccer player of all time. And this is the world's most played sport. And so to be the best at that sport is an incredible feat. And you would expect that the person who is the best at the sport plays every match that
as intensely as possible. But the fascinating thing about Messi is he's also known for being famously anxious. A number of his coaches have commented on this. And when he was a young player, people said he may not succeed because he's 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 soccer field. Messi basically ambles around the center circle. He barely moves. And what he's doing during that time is two things. One thing is he's calming himself down because he's anxious. Even for minor matches, he says that he gets quite anxious.
The other thing he's doing, though, is he's using those first few minutes to get a sense of how everyone else on the pitch is playing. So he might notice there's a particularly good connection between two of his teammates, and so he'll exploit that later on. Or he might notice an injury that some player on the other team has, and so he'll 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, 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 88 plus. And so it's a great example of how this kind of slowing down and pausing plays
is sometimes tremendously valuable if you can deploy it strategically. What if we just feel paralyzed? 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 down. I think this is maybe slightly different advice from what I just said about Messi is
If you're feeling genuinely completely paralyzed, one of the things that's very helpful is to act no matter what the action is. By definition, if you're acting, you are not in, at least in that moment, stuck. You're unstuck in that moment. So there's some great advice from the writer, the songwriter and musician and also writer of books, Jeff Tweedy, the front man of the band Wilco,
who explains his creative process. And he talks about the fact that most mornings or many mornings he wakes up and feels stuck, creatively stuck. You know, over a career of decades, the idea that every day you have to wake up and produce something radically new and different, that's an overwhelming concept.
But he's managed that. He's written phenomenal books, and he's obviously a great songwriter. He explains how when he feels stuck and completely paralyzed, he thinks of his ideas as having two levels. The top level, the obvious ideas are the bad ones. They're the obvious ones. And he talks about pouring those out as though they're water. You're going to pour those out at the beginning of the day so that what's underneath, the good stuff, is allowed to emerge. It's a little bit like the creative cliff illusion 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 lowers the threshold 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 write right now? What's the most trite riff or melody? What's the worst sentence I could compose right now that's still grammatical? And what that does is it lubricates the wheels and gets in a position to start doing. It doesn't matter what he's doing, but he's doing something. And so when you atomize or shrink down to its smallest elements, any activity, it's a very, very effective way to get unstuck.
That's such a great idea. You know, as you were describing that, I was thinking about how I live near a childcare center. And when I get stuck, if I go out and 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.
Oh, 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. They make tremendous progress. They're incredibly curious. They learn things at a ridiculous rate that adults could never match. But as a result, as we crystallize into adulthood, we stop doing some of the things that are so helpful when we're kids that we should keep doing. One of the things is
I have a five-year-old and a seven-year-old. My seven-year-old son and my five-year-old daughter will both ask infinite follow-up questions. Everything's why, tell me more, I want to know more, I understand, but what's below that? What's the sort of simpler explanation for that?
Adults don't do that, whether it's about politeness or we just kind of trail off and move on to the next thing. We are not as curious as kids are. We don't ask as many questions. And so we learn less stuff in general. And so I think kids certainly lower the threshold. They'll act even if acting doesn't mean perfection, but they'll also question everything. And I think that makes them tremendously successful unstickers in general.
If you'd like the chance to get a free copy of this week's book, sign up for our newsletter, The123, by heading to my website, gailallen.net. Each new subscriber will automatically be entered into a drawing to win our most recent guest's book. Before we release the next episode, we'll send the winner their free copy and give them a shout out on the podcast. This week's winner is Cooper from North Carolina. Congratulations, Cooper. We'll be sending you a copy of Rena Bliss's book, Rethinking Intelligence.
What's the 1-2-3 newsletter? It's one topic, two insights, and three actions you can take. Now back to my interview with Adam Alter. You point out in your book that it's more helpful to strive for excellence than perfection.
Walk us through this important difference and what it can do for us. Yeah, so perfection is paralyzing because it's sort of the highest bar you could possibly set in any context, right? Write the perfect song, come up with the perfect product idea or business, solve your relationship issues with the perfect style of communication. Humans are just not engineered for perfection. Maybe it comes across time that you get better and better at something, but even then, you
So perfection as a standard is really, really difficult to achieve. But if you want to be good at something, if you want to do well, which I think many of us do, if you're type A or you just care about a particular domain,
Excellence is a much better thing to strive for because excellence is about the process. It's about the system that you use 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'm here and I would like to be here. And so until you reach perfection, you're effectively in what we term a failure state. You haven't succeeded till you're perfect.
And since you'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 is excellence, you might say something like, excellence for me, if I'm a writer, is writing 200 solid words a day. So here's my process for doing that. You could use Jeff Tweedy's advice. You could pour out the bad ideas for an hour and then spend two hours writing, hopefully, 200 good words. 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 find it a much more useful way of framing what we do than perfection, which might be the consequence of excellence. But it's a paralyzing form of standard setting that I think never serves us 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 audit and what can it give us? Yeah, it's this process I've been using for quite a long time in a business context. I work with companies to do it. I'll give you an example in a minute, but it actually applies very well to personal experiences too. So what happens in a friction audit is you find an area of your life where you're stuck or where there's 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. Is there an intervention I can bring to bear on this? Can I solve this friction? And then I need to make sure that what I've done actually works. So let me give you a concrete example of this. I did some work with some companies that were designing shopping malls.
in the United States and in Australia. And what they found was that a lot of the time, a certain set of people would go shopping and they'd fill their carts with stuff, and then they wouldn't buy them. They'd abandon the carts without actually purchasing what they put in the carts. And so from the perspective of a shopping mall, the worst thing is to have people come, spend time there and not actually purchase what they seek to buy. And they discovered that a lot of the time, this was parents who had come with their kids.
And their young kids had hit a wall and decided that it was time to move on and that there was no way to pacify them. And so the parents left in a big hurry. They have a lot of footage of this. The question then is, that's a friction point. We can do an audit on that. Let's figure out a way, hopefully an inexpensive way to fix the problem. And so what a lot of these malls did was they ended up building small jungle gyms somewhere in the center of the mall as a kind of centerpiece, sometimes near a fountain or some other area that's eye-catching.
And they found that these parents, they would shop a little bit, then they would buy some stuff, then they would take their kids to that little jungle gym. The kids would be happy. They'd play for a little bit and then they'd finish the shopping trip. They had many fewer abandoned carts. So they sort of dealt with that friction point by papering or sanding it over and smoothing it down. That's brilliant. Yeah, it's a really smart idea. And it's very inexpensive. I mean, you can build these for a few thousand dollars and in the course of a year save hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars of lost merchandise.
So it's a very valuable tool, but it applies just as much to our own lives that using that lens and saying, where is there 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 of it 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, right?
you will have friction. And this is one of the interesting developments in business over the last 20 years or so is the...
that historically much business required human interaction. Now, there was something good about that. It's nice to interact with other people. It enriches our lives. Those kind of messy acquaintance-based interactions that you have with people at the store every day that you return to, whether you're in a city or a town or a rural area, there's something quite rich about that. It's the building blocks of what it means to live a kind of
meaningful life is to have a lot of those rich interactions with people over time, but there's friction there. And so over the last 20 years or so with the advent of smartphones 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 audit focuses that I've seen and that I've used with a
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 companies sometimes that require you to jump through bureaucratic hoops or red tape. Sometimes there's a legal requirement. Maybe it's an insurance company or a financial institution. And
People know what's good for them. They want to 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 wade through. There's so much friction there.
If these companies can remove just one or two of those most stubborn friction points, they find dramatic rises in conversion rates, people actually following through with what they intend. 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
It's more effective to not do that. What could that look like? What about the opinions and ideas of others? When is it good to reach out perhaps? And when is it less good?
Yeah, researchers who study network effects and multiple opinions on any particular topic talk about the concept of non-redundancy. Redundancy is when someone who thinks just the way you do, perhaps they 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'll reinforce each other. Your good ideas will be magnified and your 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 reasonably intelligent
but 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 mide in our own ways of seeing the world. This is basically what underpins crowdsourcing and seeking out non-redundant ideas and networking. I would say that as a general rule of thumb,
at some point before you make any big decision in your life, it's 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 AI is an amazing brainstorming partner because it is a non-redundant input. For example, if I'm trying to write the first few lines of a chapter in a book, I might say to ChatGPT, what are three ways to write a chapter that begins with an anecdote about X and that says Y? Now,
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 non-redundant inputs because it'll comb the web for different ideas. So that's very valuable. But you also asked about when you shouldn't do this. You shouldn't do this usually very early on in a process. You can contaminate your very first original early ideas by spending too much time listening 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 task 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 really, really interesting. You know, I have a colleague where when we are brainstorming new ideas, we'll actually frame it by saying, okay, what
I'm not necessarily looking for a lot of feedback or input here. Maybe I'm just looking for an initial feeling and we'll call the idea of baby bird. So when we use that code with each other, what we're saying is this is a baby bird idea. It's fragile, it's new, it's just starting. So I'm not looking for like expertise or weighing in. I'm looking for sort of an initial reaction to it. Encourage that early stage. That's so interesting. I like baby bird a lot. It's a really nice way of thinking about it. In fact,
I talk about the golfer Sam Snead, 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 gentleness with which we hold something that
you don't want to let go of, but you want to cultivate and see grow. Or in Snead's case, you obviously can't let go of the golf club, but if you strangle it, you're not going to get the best results from it. I think that's a really useful general frame for a lot of areas of life.
You talk about two other things, and 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 one of those two ideas that you'd like us to learn a little bit more about? Yeah, they're very similar ideas. The basic idea there is we know from many different instances in lots of different contexts that there is value in seeking information from a crowd.
This is known variously as wisdom of the crowd or, as I mentioned earlier, getting non-redundant inputs. And so there's great value in that. And that applies, for example, to maybe to giving yourself therapy, because what you can do is you can say to yourself, 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 devil's advocate. And so you can say to yourself, okay, well, that's interesting. This is my initial instinct on this particular topic. But if I were wrong, how might I be wrong?
And that's what a crowd does, right? It questions one person in the crowd, questions the other people in the crowd, and everyone ends up questioning everyone else, not in an aggressive way, but in a way that opens you up to more ideas. And you can do that. You ask yourself, you know, if I'm wrong, how am I 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 a problem is either the average of those three or it draws different elements from those three. And that's the idea of the wisdom of the internal crowd that inside us, we are multitudes and there isn't just one version of who you are and 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 a peer and it's very constructive. Yeah, exactly. It's the way I would want someone to ask me a question if they were seeking advice, right? I'd want them to say, look, I might be wrong about this. I don't know. If I'm wrong, how might I be wrong? And what that does is it allows you to criticize, but in a very nonjudgmental way. And I think that's very generative.
So there is a point at which taking action is a great, as you say, unsticker, 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 with 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 deal with the emotional consequences and strategies, then
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 talk about this idea that action is the last chapter, the title is action above all, which is this sense that, um,
To truly measure whether you're getting unstuck, you have to measure whether you're acting. And that comes back to this idea from Jeff Tweedy 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 it does when he pours out these bad ideas, he stumbles on good ones. I also talk about these very famous interviews with Paul Simon, the musician,
in the 70s and 80s. Simon is famously shy despite being a phenomenal musician. And there are these interviews with the talk show host Dick Cavett 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. He's reticent. He doesn't say much. He looks very uncomfortable. He comments on the position of the microphone. He's incredibly self-conscious.
And then Cavett 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 the minute Simon starts strumming the guitar, which is probably the most comfortable action he can take,
it just kind of loosens everything up. He becomes charming and expansive. He says much more. What he says is really interesting and informative. And it's like a magical process watching that unfold. And I think the idea is that doing just unlocks how we think and our feelings. And if there's something you like doing, that you feel comfortable doing, it's an unsticker in itself just to do pretty much anything.
I wonder if that's why so many people talk about, I feel like I've read so much about people who walk and they get a lot out of the walking, of course, but so much more out of the thinking, the problem solving. If they walk with someone talking through things, there's something about that action in the background. 100%. Yeah, I think that's right. I think that's one of the reasons walking is so productive. There are some neurological explanations for it as well, but I do think that
You know, you're physically and metaphorically loosening things up by walking. And that seems 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 it means. You say it's important to recognize and capitalize on near misses. What's that about?
Yeah, I talk a little bit about failing well. 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 you're 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're doing what's known as a near miss. You're committing a 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 quite. But actually, it's a sign that you're about to succeed. And so it's very important to recognize those instances of near misses where, for example,
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 the idea is like 80% or 90% the way there, but not quite. That can be really, really frustrating. But in a zoomed 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 backward engineered, had a look at where successes come from, find that they are often preceded by this series of near misses that get nearer and nearer and nearer to the mark until eventually they get over the line. And so there's something quite hopeful about that. The last question I wanted to ask you about taking action is that there are certain actions that are better to take for certain purposes. And we could essentially be a little bit more aware and maybe even strategic about that.
What are some ways to think about that? Like you talk about doing small things, times when maybe we should be rigid, times when we should create artificial barriers. These are definitely different sides 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 room to move is often paralyzing. What you need to do is restrain yourself or constrain yourself.
There's a huge amount of evidence for this idea. It comes from this notion that you can be paralyzed by the options. One of my favorite examples of this is a painter named Phil Hansen.
Hansen was a pointillist, which means that he applied thousands of tiny dots to the canvas and those dots of paint when viewed from afar made a picture that looked coherent and whole. And pointillism is a very precise form of art, but he developed a neurological tremor. And so his little dots started to turn into tadpoles and he could no longer practice pointillism. And he had to figure out what to do next.
And this was obviously overwhelming for someone who had developed expertise in a particular area. And 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 going to do X, Y, and Z. What I'm going to do is focus very narrowly on a specific thing. So what he would do sometimes, for example, is he would say, I'm going to create an artwork using only my bare feet, or I'm going to 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 artwork where I don't spend more than a dollar on materials.
So those are, you know, if you're stuck, you're saying, 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 Y. But weirdly, by constraining yourself, you narrow down the options you have, and it makes you really effective at zooming in on the thing that you are doing.
And so there's a lot of evidence that artists and people in other creative fields do this very successfully by constraining themselves. The theme of the podcast is curiosity. Adam, what are you most curious about today?
It's a good question. I mean, I'm curious about a lot of the strings in the book that I didn't close off. And one of them, I think, is the rise of chat GPT and other generative AI. You know, we're all worried that generative AI 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 AI 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, you know, reservoirs of creativity that might otherwise 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 aren't yet engaged with it.
So, you know, there are people I know who have spent hours and hours and hours learning about the different generative AI 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 these models.
Um, but, uh, I think a lot of people are finding great utility as am I in, in these, these products for sure. Is there anything I haven't asked that you'd like to speak to? There's so much in your book. We can't get to all of it, but is there anything that you'd want people to leave 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, um,
We talked a little bit 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 the default. But kids don't do that. They experiment a lot more. And there's tremendous value 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,
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 runner and you've been training a particular way. Maybe you're an artist and you come up with your ideas using a particular approach. Maybe you're a manager at a company and you want everyone to be in the office every day, or you want them to be there eight hours 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, hang on, 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 that'll make the rest of your life better.
better lived at least in that domain. And so I think this experimental mindset is a really valuable way of moving forward in the world. That's a great piece of advice to leave on. Adam, I can't thank you enough. It's a pleasure to speak with you. It was a pleasure last time and it continues to be so. Thank you so much. Thanks so much for having me, Gail. I really enjoyed it.
Curious Minds at Work is made possible through a partnership with the Innovator Circle, an executive coaching firm for innovative leaders. A special thank you to producer and editor Rob Machabelli for leading the amazing behind-the-scenes team that makes it all happen. Each episode, we give a shout-out to something that's feeding our curiosity. This week's, it's Shimemanda Ngozi Adichie's novel Americana. On one level, it's the story of two Nigerians making their way abroad in the U.S. and U.K.,
On another, it's a compelling tale of race, identity, and a search for home. Adichie takes us deep inside these characters' worlds in a way few authors do. What a writer, what a story.