Speaker 1: More often people quit too soon, so they stop things
Speaker 1: too soon. That doesn't mean you shouldn't say, all right,
Speaker 1: I'm done with this thing. I should move on. And
Speaker 1: it's great to try new things, but I think our
Speaker 1: tendency is to say this got hard and I'm just
Speaker 1: going to abandon it.
Speaker 2: Welcome to the one you feed throughout time. Great thinkers
Speaker 2: have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes
Speaker 2: like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think,
Speaker 2: ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts
Speaker 2: don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy,
Speaker 2: or fear. We see what we don't have instead of
Speaker 2: what we do. We think things that hold us back
Speaker 2: and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.
Speaker 2: Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort
Speaker 2: to make a life worth living. This podcast is about
Speaker 2: how other people keep themselves moving in the right to
Speaker 2: how they feed their good wolth Thanks for joining us.
Speaker 2: Our guest on this episode is Adam Alter, a professor
Speaker 2: of marketing at New York University Stern School of Business
Speaker 2: and the Robert Stansky Teaching Excellence Faculty Fellow with an
Speaker 2: affiliated appointment in the New York University Psychology Department. Adam
Speaker 2: is a New York Times best selling author, and he's
Speaker 2: also written for The New York Times, New Yorker, Washington Post, Atlantic, Wired,
Speaker 2: and many others. He's also shared his ideas on NPR's
Speaker 2: Fresh Air, at the con Leon Festival of Creativity, and
Speaker 2: with dozens of companies. Adam's academic research focuses on judgment
Speaker 2: and decision making and social psychology, with a particular interest
Speaker 2: in the sometimes surprising effects of subtle clues in the
Speaker 2: environment on human cognition and behavior. Today, Eric Jinny and
Speaker 2: Adam discuss his book The Anatomy of a Breakthrough, How
Speaker 2: to Get Unstuck When It Matters Most.
Speaker 3: Hi, Adam, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 4: Thanks very much for having me.
Speaker 3: I'm happy to have you on.
Speaker 5: We're going to be discussing your book, Anatomy of a Breakthrough,
Speaker 5: How to Get Unstuck When It Matters the Most. But
Speaker 5: before we get into that, we'll start, like we always do,
Speaker 5: with the parable. And to read the parable is my
Speaker 5: co host, Ginny, who is here.
Speaker 6: Yes, hello everybody, Hi Adam, Hi, Ginny. So the parable
Speaker 6: guyes like this. There's a grandparent talking with their grandchild,
Speaker 6: and I say, in life, there are two wolves inside
Speaker 6: of us who are always at battle. One is a
Speaker 6: good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love,
Speaker 6: and one is a bad wolf, which represents things like
Speaker 6: greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and
Speaker 6: thinks about it for a second, looks up at their grandparent, says, well,
Speaker 6: which one wins, And the grandparent says, the one you feed.
Speaker 6: So I'd love to know how that parable applies to
Speaker 6: you and your life and in the work you do.
Speaker 1: So I think all of my work, all of my
Speaker 1: research work, at least, has been an attempt to understand
Speaker 1: those two competing forces and the fact that they drive
Speaker 1: us in opposite directions. And a lot of that, it
Speaker 1: turns out, is I think, out of our control. And
Speaker 1: so then the question is how do we manage whatever
Speaker 1: has guided us in either the right direction or the
Speaker 1: wrong direction. And so all of my books, a lot
Speaker 1: of my research is about how we spend our time, money,
Speaker 1: and other resources to maximize our own welfare and the
Speaker 1: welfare of people around us. So it's really a matter
Speaker 1: of feeding the right wolf as the way that I
Speaker 1: think a lot of my research has been geared.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So I think that this idea of competing forces getting
Speaker 5: pulled one direction or the other is the primary challenge,
Speaker 5: but there's often after that, or maybe embedded in that,
Speaker 5: the challenge of being stuck. It's what the new book
Speaker 5: is about. It's about places where we get stuck. And
Speaker 5: I was wondering if first you could describe to us
Speaker 5: what that word means to you when you say duck,
Speaker 5: what are you referring to?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think there are, broadly speaking, two kinds of stuck.
Speaker 1: One stuck is there's a pandemic and I can't get
Speaker 1: to where I want to get to. You know, a
Speaker 1: few years ago that was an issue for a lot
Speaker 1: of us, and there's not much you can do about that.
Speaker 1: There are quarantine laws that prevent you from leaving a
Speaker 1: certain area and you're stuck. That's not all that interesting
Speaker 1: to me. I think that happens from time to time.
Speaker 1: There are constraints, financial.
Speaker 4: Political, whatever.
Speaker 1: But what's interesting to me is that the vast majority
Speaker 1: of stuckness, when we feel like we can't move forward,
Speaker 1: is actually within our control. And so I've spent a
Speaker 1: lot of time trying to devise a sort of manual
Speaker 1: or set of rules that you can apply to lots
Speaker 1: of situations where where we as individuals might feel stuck,
Speaker 1: and then you can sort of unpack those rules and
Speaker 1: then apply them to whatever this particular instance of stuckness is.
Speaker 1: And it's very broad. It can be financial stuckness. It
Speaker 1: can be stuck trying to find a creative idea and
Speaker 1: you can't get there. It could be that you're stuck
Speaker 1: at work, stuck in relationships. There are just tons of
Speaker 1: different contexts where it comes up. Around a survey with
Speaker 1: thousands of people around the world and said, can you
Speaker 1: think of an instance or an area of your life
Speaker 1: in which you're stuck? Everyone could took them an average
Speaker 1: of ten seconds to do it. They all said, this
Speaker 1: makes me feel terrible. It consumes me. I really want
Speaker 1: to work it out. And the breadth and diversity of
Speaker 1: responses was incredible. So it's a very broad concept.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's really broad, and it's really painful and difficult
Speaker 6: when you're there. I mean, it is a sense of
Speaker 6: wanting to move forward, but doubting yourself and doubting that
Speaker 6: you have what it takes or doubting that you can.
Speaker 6: You know, it feels overwhelming. It feels like an invisible
Speaker 6: wall and you just don't know how to break through.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it's very overwhelming. And what's really interesting
Speaker 1: about stuckness is I've been fascinated with the difference between
Speaker 1: being physically stuck and being psychologically stuck, and I focus
Speaker 1: on the psychological side. Humans are really well designed to
Speaker 1: be physically stuck. We do all sorts of things that
Speaker 1: are very adaptive. We develop huge amounts of strength, you're
Speaker 1: adrenaline pumps. You do all sorts of things that get
Speaker 1: you unstuck pretty fast most of the time. There are
Speaker 1: these stories in the news every now and again of
Speaker 1: someone who lifts a car to fee themselves physically. The
Speaker 1: problem is, all of those instincts that are great in
Speaker 1: that context do exactly the opposite when you're psychologically stuck.
Speaker 1: They get you into a kind of tizzy and then
Speaker 1: you can't think rationally. You are just overwhelmed with emotion
Speaker 1: and it's very very hard to make steps forward. So
Speaker 1: really figuring out the emotional part is the first part
Speaker 1: of moving past that sense of being completely overwhelmed.
Speaker 6: Yeah, one of the things. I think is so powerful
Speaker 6: in your book is that the point that you start
Speaker 6: off with, which is that like not only the first
Speaker 6: rule is is that you will get stuck. This is
Speaker 6: an inevitability and it's universal, you know. You talk about
Speaker 6: how the first step is to accept, you know, the
Speaker 6: fact that you're stuck. And I think just naming that
Speaker 6: and normalizing it is powerful because, at least for me,
Speaker 6: when I'm stuck, the first thing I do is make
Speaker 6: it mean something, and I make it mean that I
Speaker 6: can't do this right. I make it mean that I
Speaker 6: don't have what it takes. I make it mean that,
Speaker 6: you know, I'm sort of faded to this place for
Speaker 6: the rest of my life and forward motion is just
Speaker 6: not in the cards, you know. So I think that's
Speaker 6: really powerful. In fact, as a side note, you talk
Speaker 6: about acceptance, and in your book you talk about Ti.
Speaker 6: She's a teacher that I have learned so much from.
Speaker 4: She's amazing.
Speaker 6: She's amazing. She was the teacher I turned to actually
Speaker 6: almost daily in the most difficult years caring for my
Speaker 6: mom with Alzheimer's. The wisdom she shares and specifically around
Speaker 6: acceptance is transformational.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I totally agree.
Speaker 1: I mean I think one of the really interesting things
Speaker 1: about Tara Bark's work is the marriage of the East
Speaker 1: and West. And I've done a lot of research into
Speaker 1: how the Eastern and West, or people in those cultural areas,
Speaker 1: think about different topics, and one of them is how
Speaker 1: we think about being stuck. So in the West, if
Speaker 1: you ask people in the US, in Australia and Britain,
Speaker 1: in Canada, in New Zealand, you ask them say we've
Speaker 1: had three sunny days in a row, what's going to
Speaker 1: happen tomorrow? And they say it's going to be sunny again.
Speaker 1: We're in a sunny patch. Or you say, you know,
Speaker 1: the economy is not doing so well, what's going to
Speaker 1: happen tomorrow? They say, oh, yeah, we're in a rough patch.
Speaker 1: But if you ask people in the East, China, South Korea,
Speaker 1: Japan the same question. You say, it's been sunny for
Speaker 1: three days, they say, oh, tomorrow it's probably going to rain,
Speaker 1: or it's been rainy for three daysbably going to be
Speaker 1: sunny tomorrow. They are very open to the idea that
Speaker 1: things are going to shift constantly. It's part of Taoism,
Speaker 1: the yin yang, that sense of balance from day to night,
Speaker 1: the seasons shift. We find that sort of hard to
Speaker 1: grapple with in the West.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I think.
Speaker 1: That makes us really poorly positioned for being stuck because
Speaker 1: it feels like things should have kept going the way
Speaker 1: they were going. Whatever that meant. You know, if things
Speaker 1: were going smoothly, they should keep doing that. But that's,
Speaker 1: as you say, not the way the world works, and
Speaker 1: so being prepared for it is I think the first
Speaker 1: step in managing it.
Speaker 6: That's fascinating. I did not realize there was a difference
Speaker 6: Eastern culture versus Western. I mean, the other thing I
Speaker 6: know I do is every time I'm feeling blue or
Speaker 6: you know, grumpy, depressed, whatever, it's like, oh, I'm always
Speaker 6: going to feel this way.
Speaker 1: Right exactly, it feels like it's going to last forever.
Speaker 1: And it's a big part of the way we think
Speaker 1: in the West in particular.
Speaker 5: There's a lot to go into there, but I think
Speaker 5: I'll keep us moving because that could be a deep
Speaker 5: rabbit hole.
Speaker 4: But I'm fascinated by it.
Speaker 5: And I'm fascinating particularly that you yourself have done some
Speaker 5: of that research, because so hear about those type of
Speaker 5: cultural differences a lot. And then I'm always sort of like,
Speaker 5: I don't want to assume that that's necess they're really
Speaker 5: true in all cases, but it's interesting that you've done
Speaker 5: that research fairly recently.
Speaker 1: I assume, yeah, that was some of my research as
Speaker 1: a grad student, and I've kept up with it. So
Speaker 1: this was probably fifteen years ago and it's still been
Speaker 1: bubbling along, and I think it inspired a lot of
Speaker 1: what made this book interesting to me, So it's been
Speaker 1: there for a while.
Speaker 5: Do you think that as many of the Eastern countries
Speaker 5: are by many accounts, becoming more westernized, that that is
Speaker 5: shifting and I know I'm asking an opinion here, or
Speaker 5: do you think that's deeply embedded enough culturally that even
Speaker 5: though they may becoming more Westernized in certain ways, that
Speaker 5: some of those philosophical underpinions are strong enough to withstand that.
Speaker 1: I think it's a bit of both. I think that
Speaker 1: there are some deep philosophical ideas that aren't shifting all
Speaker 1: that much that will continue. The idea of collectivism in
Speaker 1: the East versus individualism in the West is a really
Speaker 1: big one, and that seems to still be quite a
Speaker 1: big difference between the cultures. But you're right, you know,
Speaker 1: as you introduce more Western ideas to the east, things
Speaker 1: shift a little bit, and that's actually what a lot
Speaker 1: of my research was about in those early days. It
Speaker 1: was about the shifting nature of cultural ideas and whether
Speaker 1: there might be a coming together of those disparate cultures
Speaker 1: that they're starting to look a little bit more like
Speaker 1: each other.
Speaker 5: And that's what I found well, and we can see
Speaker 5: it in the West, right, I mean with the huge
Speaker 5: amount of people who've turned to meditation and mindfulness all that. Right,
Speaker 5: those are ideas that are pretty well imported and have
Speaker 5: really seeped into our Western culture in a pretty deep way.
Speaker 5: I think they could go a lot further and it
Speaker 5: would still be beneficial, but compared to fifteen or twenty
Speaker 5: years ago, it's radically different.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I agree, And I think a big part of
Speaker 1: what's pushing us in this direction where we aren't maybe
Speaker 1: great at dealing with change, is the rise of science
Speaker 1: and advanced medicine, Because what that's doing is it's showing
Speaker 1: us that we have the ability to overcome certain things
Speaker 1: that maybe historically we felt were beyond our control. So
Speaker 1: the fact that there are incredible scientific and medical advances
Speaker 1: tells us something about our dominion over the world. And
Speaker 1: I think that gives us this sort of sense that
Speaker 1: we have a command that perhaps we don't really have
Speaker 1: more broadly, and so generalize that and when we get
Speaker 1: personally stuck, we're sort of blindsided by it.
Speaker 5: Yep.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: One of the ideas that goes into this sense that
Speaker 5: everybody gets stuck is genuine sort of saying it's really
Speaker 5: helpful to know, because then it's not my own personal failing.
Speaker 5: And the corollary to that that you talk about that
Speaker 5: I really like is that when we struggle, we just
Speaker 5: see how hard it is for us, and we look
Speaker 5: at other people and we think, well, it's not so
Speaker 5: hard for them. You know. We were talking about this
Speaker 5: in regards to writing a book right right before we
Speaker 5: start talking, and it's like, well, when you're in the
Speaker 5: middle of struggling with the writing, you think, ah, I'm
Speaker 5: not any good at this, and then you pick up
Speaker 5: a book and read somebody who is good, and you're like,
Speaker 5: it just must come easy to them because we don't
Speaker 5: see their struggle.
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: It's one of the things I found in the survey
Speaker 1: that I run that everyone says they're stuck, but they
Speaker 1: think no one else is stuck. And I think it's
Speaker 1: because what we see in the world is the finished product,
Speaker 1: whether it's on social media platforms where everything is curated,
Speaker 1: whether it's the finished book rather than all the drafts
Speaker 1: that went into it. You know, the book can be
Speaker 1: twenty five, thirty, forty fifty years of work, and what
Speaker 1: you end up getting is the perfected, final, polished version.
Speaker 1: And I actually begin the book by talking about the
Speaker 1: actress Brie Larsen, who was unusually transparent about this. She
Speaker 1: released a two part video on YouTube basically saying, I'm
Speaker 1: going to tell you all the auditions that didn't work out,
Speaker 1: all of the casting calls that didn't work out. And
Speaker 1: that's really disarming because I think we spend so much
Speaker 1: time imagining that someone who wins an Academy Award for
Speaker 1: Best Actress had it smoothed all the way through, and
Speaker 1: that's overwhelming if you see too many of those exemplars
Speaker 1: over time. And so it's really nice to know that
Speaker 1: that's not the case.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 5: And I think this idea back to what we're talking
Speaker 5: about around where in the West we think things are
Speaker 5: a little bit more permanent, right. It's kind of the
Speaker 5: opposite of what Carol Dweck famously coined the growth mindset,
Speaker 5: which is this sense like if I'm not good at something,
Speaker 5: then I'm just not good at it, and that's it.
Speaker 5: Whereas Jinny, you were referencing this and what we're talking
Speaker 5: about in general is to get unstuck, assume part of
Speaker 5: it is the belief that I can get unstuck, that
Speaker 5: I can make progress.
Speaker 4: It's a huge part of it.
Speaker 1: I spend a huge chunk of the beginning of the
Speaker 1: book talking about exactly this, that the first step in
Speaker 1: getting unstuck is understanding what it is, what it means
Speaker 1: to be stuck, and grappling with the emotional consequence of
Speaker 1: feeling stuck. And I think having a growth mindset, believing
Speaker 1: you can change, things will shift, you can improve, you
Speaker 1: can learn skills, you can apply skills, is a huge
Speaker 1: part in ultimately getting unstuck. And so this isn't just
Speaker 1: a book that says, you know, here are ten strategies.
Speaker 4: It's also a book that says.
Speaker 1: That's kind of marinate and being stuck and accept that
Speaker 1: this is the way the world is. It's going to
Speaker 1: happen again, you may as well accept it. And once
Speaker 1: you accept it, you're that much closer to getting through it.
Speaker 6: When you say accept it, just to double click on
Speaker 6: that for a second, And you mean not to say
Speaker 6: you like it, not to say that you embrace it
Speaker 6: and hope that it's the case forever. You just mean
Speaker 6: to potentially, I'm assuming, like stop sort of fighting the
Speaker 6: fact that it's there, exactly.
Speaker 1: I mean to accept that it's occurred rather than denying it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because I think that's our first in distinct. A lot
Speaker 1: of the time is to kind of push it off,
Speaker 1: ignore it, don't grapple with it. You have to do
Speaker 1: something to get past it, and so you don't want
Speaker 1: to accept that it's here permanently. But by accepting it exists,
Speaker 1: you start to marshal resources that can help you tackle it.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I think that's a.
Speaker 1: Really important step that a lot of people struggle with.
Speaker 6: Yeah, like, this is my reality, So now what can
Speaker 6: I do? I mean, you talk about focusing on what
Speaker 6: are the parts that are out of my control? And
Speaker 6: then what are the parts that are in my control
Speaker 6: that I can affect. So the rest of your book
Speaker 6: goes into so many really helpful, practical, applicable strategies and
Speaker 6: not even just things you can do, but just mindset
Speaker 6: shifts or once you learn this concept, you realize that
Speaker 6: it exists, so you can sort of kind of tackle
Speaker 6: it so specifically, Like if we transition into the first
Speaker 6: section of your book entitled help Sure, Yeah, the first
Speaker 6: concept that you present that I thought was really transformational
Speaker 6: was this idea of getting rid of the middle. Yeah.
Speaker 6: So can you talk a little bit about maybe the
Speaker 6: research that was done even in rats and the mazes,
Speaker 6: what was the and then what that might tell us
Speaker 6: about how we can apply it in our lives.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So a lot of the things we try to do
Speaker 1: have a long arc. In other words, they're big things
Speaker 1: that we're trying to do, especially the most important things
Speaker 1: in our lives. They involve sometimes weeks, months, years of action,
Speaker 1: and a lot of the research shows that when you
Speaker 1: first start something big like that, whether it's a career
Speaker 1: or a task you're trying to achieve a certain goal
Speaker 1: in are energized at the beginning, and then when you
Speaker 1: can see the finish line, you're energized again. But there's
Speaker 1: this very big middle part, the middle lull. And it's
Speaker 1: true with rats in mazers, it's true with humans when
Speaker 1: they're trying pretty much anything. If you're painting a big
Speaker 1: artwork and you are stuck in the middle, there will
Speaker 1: be a lull. If you're trying to raise money for
Speaker 1: a charity, there will be a lull in the middle,
Speaker 1: and people won't donate as much. It just has one
Speaker 1: hundred thousand different applications, and in every case it's the
Speaker 1: sense that you aren't still getting that same wind behind
Speaker 1: your sales, and you're also you can't see the finish line,
Speaker 1: and so you're stuck in the middle. That's the term
Speaker 1: that's used. Actually, one of the best papers on the
Speaker 1: topic is called Stuck in the Middle. The best thing
Speaker 1: you can do, I think, is to do what psychologists
Speaker 1: call bracketing, which is where you rebracket a big experience
Speaker 1: into smaller chunks, so you adopt narrower brackets. So if
Speaker 1: you think about the example of raising money for a charity,
Speaker 1: let's say you want to raise a million dollars for
Speaker 1: a hospital, you could break that down into one hundred
Speaker 1: smaller ten thousand dollar chunks, and then you don't have
Speaker 1: middles because each little chunk is so small that you
Speaker 1: eradicate the middle from each one. And so there are
Speaker 1: lots of examples of this kind of narrow bracketing where
Speaker 1: you take a big experience, a big goal, you break
Speaker 1: it down into a smaller one, and that effectively eliminates
Speaker 1: the middle by giving yourself these little sub rewards all
Speaker 1: the way along.
Speaker 6: Yeah, you get started, and then immediately you can also
Speaker 6: see the end.
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 6: Yeah, Yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 5: In that same idea, you talk a lot about the
Speaker 5: idea of plateaus. Yeah, can you share a little bit
Speaker 5: about what you mean by that and some of the solutions.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So, in human endeavors, when we try to learn things,
Speaker 1: there's a huge amount of evidence no matter what you're
Speaker 1: trying to learn, that we hit a plateau at a
Speaker 1: certain point. So what usually happens is you develop a
Speaker 1: strategy that gets you a certain way to where you
Speaker 1: want to be. If you're learning a language, for example,
Speaker 1: you want to become as close to fluent as possible.
Speaker 1: You start doing that thing, and you start doing whatever
Speaker 1: it is that's been working for you, you will hit a
Speaker 1: plateau and you'll need to change things. If you work
Speaker 1: out at a gym and you try to train your muscles,
Speaker 1: or you're a runner and you're trying to get fit,
Speaker 1: you will reach a plateau where you have to change
Speaker 1: things up. And so this idea of the plateau, there's
Speaker 1: a great book called the Plateau Effect, which basically suggests
Speaker 1: that no matter what you're trying to achieve, as you
Speaker 1: grow and move towards that goal, things will reach a
Speaker 1: point where whatever you've been doing in the past no
Speaker 1: longer works as effectively and you have to switch things.
Speaker 1: So again, this idea that there's constant change and change
Speaker 1: can lead you to feel stuck, and so you've got
Speaker 1: to be open to the idea that whatever has worked
Speaker 1: in the past may need a little bit of shifting
Speaker 1: in the future.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's kind of mind bargling, isn't it that, Like
Speaker 6: it worked then, I don't understand why doesn't it work now?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think this is a really important point if
Speaker 5: we turnally apply it to spiritual development or even psychological development, right,
Speaker 5: because what I know is that a lot of people
Speaker 5: over the years have done a lot of different things,
Speaker 5: and people often frame that as a failure. They often
Speaker 5: say like, well, I started doing this thing and I
Speaker 5: thought it was the answer, but then it really wasn't.
Speaker 5: And then I did this thing and I thought it
Speaker 5: was the answer, and then it really wasn't as if
Speaker 5: there's a permanent answer.
Speaker 4: It's a really good point, right, Yeah.
Speaker 5: And so if we see that as a very natural like, Okay,
Speaker 5: I went here and I learned what I had to
Speaker 5: learn from this approach, this person, this place, this community,
Speaker 5: and then it just didn't feel like there was more
Speaker 5: there for me. So then I moved on. And that's
Speaker 5: not bad, it's actually skillful.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 5: What I think is really interesting though, if we think
Speaker 5: about something like spiritual development, there are periods where there
Speaker 5: are plateaus, and oftentimes the encouragement is stay with this thing, right.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 5: I had this in my zen practice where I would
Speaker 5: hit these points where I had a spiritual director at
Speaker 5: the time, and I talked with them about it. I
Speaker 5: was like, I don't know whether I'm in a natural
Speaker 5: foulow period or a natural dry period and I need
Speaker 5: to just walk through or if I should trust this
Speaker 5: thing that's calling me to do something else. Right.
Speaker 3: That takes a lot of discernment.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think it does.
Speaker 1: And I think this idea, it's a sort of cultural
Speaker 1: idea that we have that there is a solution to problems.
Speaker 1: Whereas I think in truth on day one, maybe for
Speaker 1: the first three hours of the day, there's a solution,
Speaker 1: and by the fourth hour of the day there's a
Speaker 1: completely different solution. And so the switch from one to
Speaker 1: another is a competency rather than a failing to suggest
Speaker 1: that the first solution that worked for those three hours
Speaker 1: wasn't the ultimate one. So you can be open to
Speaker 1: the idea that across time, whether it's across days or
Speaker 1: weeks or months or even hours, different things are going
Speaker 1: to work at different times, and that's totally fine.
Speaker 4: But you're right.
Speaker 1: There is also this sense that if you jump around
Speaker 1: too much, you you ever know if perhaps you should
Speaker 1: have pushed a little further. Yeah, and that's one thing
Speaker 1: I saw a lot in doing the research for this
Speaker 1: book that more often people quit too soon, so they
Speaker 1: stop things too soon. That doesn't mean you shouldn't say,
Speaker 1: all right, I'm done with this thing. I should move on.
Speaker 1: And it's great to try new things, but I think
Speaker 1: our tendency is to say this got hard and I'm
Speaker 1: just going to abandon it.
Speaker 5: What was it that determined in that research that caused
Speaker 5: you to conclude they quit too soon? Is there anything
Speaker 5: about that research and that conclusion that can help us
Speaker 5: decide whether we're quitting too soon.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think one of the most useful guides is,
Speaker 1: you know, the theory of quitting too soon is based
Speaker 1: on the idea that you're not reaching a certain bar
Speaker 1: that you want to reach. There's some metric for saying
Speaker 1: I'm doing well and things are going fine, and so
Speaker 1: what you want to try to do is if you
Speaker 1: fail repeatedly, which is fine, I don't even know if
Speaker 1: fails the right term, but you don't quite reach that
Speaker 1: mark repeatedly and you don't feel like you are where
Speaker 1: you want to be, that gap should get smaller over time.
Speaker 1: So if you are a creative mind and you're trying
Speaker 1: to come up with like a perfect book idea, or
Speaker 1: your painting, or you are a filmmaker or whatever it is,
Speaker 1: you know that when you're producing things, they might not
Speaker 1: be exactly where you want them to be, but you
Speaker 1: usually have a sense of how close you are to
Speaker 1: the mark, especially as you've done these things for a while.
Speaker 1: That might be true in meditation, in mindfulness, in zen
Speaker 1: practice as well. You know where you want to be,
Speaker 1: and you know the gap between where you are and
Speaker 1: where you want to be. If that gap gets smaller,
Speaker 1: over time. Across a reasonable time period, that means you're
Speaker 1: getting closer, and there's value in continuing. But when you
Speaker 1: start to see a divergence where the gap starts to
Speaker 1: grow consistently larger, that's usually a time to invest your
Speaker 1: time elsewhere, at least exploring other options and opportunities. So
Speaker 1: I think that's been really helpful. And there's some really
Speaker 1: interesting research tracking the careers of filmmakers, artists, writers who
Speaker 1: have a huge success, and the question is what came
Speaker 1: before that huge success, And that's what you see. It's
Speaker 1: usually the narrowing between where I am and where I
Speaker 1: need to be for that success to emerge. And so
Speaker 1: it's good to kind of constantly do this little audit
Speaker 1: where you say to yourself, am I getting close said
Speaker 1: to the mark, even if I'm not quite there yet.
Speaker 6: Something that I think is interesting to also reflect on,
Speaker 6: back to this idea of the plateau effect, is how
Speaker 6: things are constantly changing and just remember that and then
Speaker 6: contrast that with our brain's natural tendency to sort of
Speaker 6: set it and forget it, like we name something and
Speaker 6: then we don't really see it anymore. Right, The idea
Speaker 6: of like once you call a bird or bird you
Speaker 6: don't see it anymore, or like you know, our brains
Speaker 6: can't constantly be looking for how things are changing. I mean,
Speaker 6: it's got a lot going on up there. The resources
Speaker 6: need to be allocated to keep us surviving. But like
Speaker 6: you know, we do need to pause periodically and say,
Speaker 6: like what has changed? What has changed? Because something has
Speaker 6: and so now what's needed?
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I did this research with a colleague of mine, Hal Hirschfield,
Speaker 1: at UCLA, and we were really interested in understanding when
Speaker 1: people do this thing where they zoom back and say
Speaker 1: what's going on in my life? Because we don't do
Speaker 1: that often. Yeah, you know, your often nose to the grindstone.
Speaker 1: You're either exhausted or overworked.
Speaker 4: And you've got too much going on. It's hard to
Speaker 4: do that.
Speaker 1: But what we found was that when people's ages end
Speaker 1: in a nine, when twenty nine, thirty nine, forty nine,
Speaker 1: fifty nine, it's a reminder the time is passing because
Speaker 1: you're about to reach a new decade just by an
Speaker 1: accident of the way we count with the base ten system.
Speaker 1: And so what we found was that these years, there
Speaker 1: are these surveys that ask hundreds of thousands of people
Speaker 1: around the world. How much do you question whether your
Speaker 1: life is meaningful? And we found that at these nine
Speaker 1: ending ages, there's a big, big bump in that number,
Speaker 1: and also that they do all sorts of things. They
Speaker 1: sign up for marathons. You see some really good things
Speaker 1: like signing up for marathons and getting fit and all
Speaker 1: of that, and you also see some less good things,
Speaker 1: like you see arise in extramarital affairs. And so what
Speaker 1: you have is this sort of extraneous queue, this external
Speaker 1: cue that says, hey, it's time to think about your life,
Speaker 1: which forces us to make these really big decisions, some
Speaker 1: of them good, some of them are less good. But
Speaker 1: you don't need to wait for your age to end
Speaker 1: in a nine to do that. It's just that that
Speaker 1: reminds you of the passage of time. So I think
Speaker 1: it's useful to building these reminders. I actually have one
Speaker 1: in my calendar. Every year it pops up, I pick
Speaker 1: a random day in the year, and it says audit.
Speaker 4: It's a kind of a scary word. It's my cue.
Speaker 4: It's like now is now is the story?
Speaker 5: That's I'm sure when that comes up, it just fills
Speaker 5: your heart with warmth, with a.
Speaker 1: Lot of yeah, I could probably choose a better brand,
Speaker 1: a better term for that. As a marketing professor, you
Speaker 1: think I've done, I would have done better than audit.
Speaker 4: But that's it. Pops up. I'm like, oh, it's time again.
Speaker 4: Let's let's take a day in zoom back and figure
Speaker 4: it out.
Speaker 5: Well. The good news then, is I have six years
Speaker 5: before I have to reflect on my life at all.
Speaker 6: Exactly good yearly.
Speaker 3: Oh, I just use it.
Speaker 5: You can if you want to be along with the
Speaker 5: idea of plateaus. You know, that's something that was working
Speaker 5: for us stops working. Is the idea of the creative cliff.
Speaker 5: Can you share a little bit about that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's one of my favorite pieces of research from
Speaker 1: the last decade. I think it's totally fascinating and has
Speaker 1: so many applications. And it's this idea that when you
Speaker 1: ask people when will your best ideas emerge? Like if
Speaker 1: you're trying to do something creative, or you say you're
Speaker 1: a comedian you're writing jokes, or you're trying to come
Speaker 1: up with creative you uses for a paper clip, It.
Speaker 4: Doesn't matter what it is.
Speaker 1: We're always doing creative things, trying to think of new ideas.
Speaker 1: People assume the best stuff will come first. So they
Speaker 1: assume that in the first five minutes of any attempt
Speaker 1: to come up with creative ideas, whatever's there, the good
Speaker 1: stuff will tumble out.
Speaker 4: It'll be easy to do.
Speaker 1: And as soon as it starts getting hard to think
Speaker 1: of new ideas, that's when things go south.
Speaker 4: It's no good. There's a cliff.
Speaker 1: My creativity is going to fall off a cliff. And
Speaker 1: in truth, what happens is the obvious stuff tumbles out first,
Speaker 1: and it feels easy because it's orthodox. Everyone has the
Speaker 1: same ideas. You know, I say, think of a creative
Speaker 1: use for a paper clip, and everyone has the same
Speaker 1: basic ideas.
Speaker 4: We could turn it into an earring.
Speaker 1: Or something like that, and that feels easy and it
Speaker 1: comes out pretty fast. But it's when things start to
Speaker 1: get hard. There's an inflection point. That's when things get interesting.
Speaker 1: It's grappling with the hardness of that. It does get
Speaker 1: more difficult, but that heralds the more interesting, divergent ideas
Speaker 1: that are more creative, more inventive. And there's a huge
Speaker 1: amount of research to show exactly that. You take comedians
Speaker 1: and you say, come up with some jokes. The first
Speaker 1: jokes come easily, but they're not very good. The good
Speaker 1: stuff comes later on, and that's true for almost any
Speaker 1: creative pursuit.
Speaker 5: That's a really interesting idea, and I think a lot
Speaker 5: about it in relation to music. Yeah, and if you
Speaker 5: read about musicians who have created great pieces of music,
Speaker 5: there tends to be a certain number of them who
Speaker 5: say like this just arrived, like it just showed up.
Speaker 5: I mean, Keith Richards talks about the Riff for Satisfaction
Speaker 5: like it was in his dream he woke up, right,
Speaker 5: you know. Other people will say like it just all
Speaker 5: kind of just showed up at once, and it feels
Speaker 5: like this remarkable, incredible experience, right. And I think it
Speaker 5: does happen that way some of the time, right. The
Speaker 5: problem is you can't make it happen, no, And then
Speaker 5: you hear on the opposite end, people like Leonard Cohen,
Speaker 5: you know, one of my favorite songwriters of all time,
Speaker 5: who will say like I wrote one hundred verses for
Speaker 5: that song. Yeah, he was the opposite extreme, like he
Speaker 5: just was like I'm going to keep at this until
Speaker 5: I get it right, you know. And so that idea
Speaker 5: of writing a hundred verses, and so I think with
Speaker 5: creativity It's interesting because that first kind does happen, and
Speaker 5: I think we have those experiences, which probably then leads
Speaker 5: us to think that's the way it always happens, or
Speaker 5: it should happen. And I think what your research is
Speaker 5: saying is that, yeah, but most of the time it
Speaker 5: happens by sticking with it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, most of the time, for most of us, that's
Speaker 1: how it happens. It is the Leonard Cohen version of
Speaker 1: sitting and trying for sometimes days, hours, months, years, whatever
Speaker 1: it might be, and multiple iterations to get to the
Speaker 1: point where you're happy with something. That doesn't mean eureka
Speaker 1: effects don't happen, you know, let certainly do and we're
Speaker 1: hit by a flash of insight. But I actually think
Speaker 1: a lot of those flashes of insight it's a mistake
Speaker 1: to see them way. It's just that we don't know
Speaker 1: where they've come from, and they've come from the hours
Speaker 1: of work that you've done before.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's so great because there's an idea in spiritual
Speaker 5: circles that has emerged around that awakening just happens, and
Speaker 5: that all this straining and struggling and meditating and put
Speaker 5: all this time in like you don't really have to
Speaker 5: do that. The thing that I find so difficult about
Speaker 5: that idea is that the people who are saying that
Speaker 5: have put in years of meditating, they've done all those things,
Speaker 5: and so to say that it just arrived without all
Speaker 5: those preconditions being set is to kind of miss the point.
Speaker 5: It's sort of like Barry Bond saying like, well, you
Speaker 5: don't have to do a lot of batting.
Speaker 7: Practice, right, like just step up to the plate and
Speaker 7: hit out of the park. But you wouldn't say that
Speaker 7: to a six year old. N Right, they have to
Speaker 7: put in the batting practice. So I'm just applying it
Speaker 7: back to a different domain, but I think it rings true. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think it's generally hard for us, especially when we've
Speaker 1: had some experience at something, to understand what led us
Speaker 1: to where we are either amnesia or you just don't
Speaker 1: have good access to whatever it was that formed you
Speaker 1: the way you are. And this is especially true as
Speaker 1: you get better at something, you don't really know how
Speaker 1: to unpack what got you to the point where you
Speaker 1: were better than you used to be, And so when
Speaker 1: you're explaining it to other people, there's this kind of
Speaker 1: knowledge gap where if someone says to me, like how
Speaker 1: did you get good at X? If there's something that
Speaker 1: you're good at, it's very very hard actually to explain that.
Speaker 1: It's tough unless it's a series of very concrete, algorithmic
Speaker 1: steps where you're just unpacking it one at a time.
Speaker 1: It's a kind of mystical thing, and it's very hard
Speaker 1: to know how to explain it. So I think that
Speaker 1: explains a lot of what seems like just a burst
Speaker 1: or a flash of insight in any context.
Speaker 6: So the rest of your book is really wisely broken
Speaker 6: into the emotional terrain of being stuck, the mental terrain,
Speaker 6: and then the habits that we can engage in to
Speaker 6: really work with these different components. So if we focus
Speaker 6: in on the heart section, Yeah, as you guys are
Speaker 6: seeing you're talking, I'm thinking about how interesting it is that, like,
Speaker 6: as humans, it's through leaning into the sure the external
Speaker 6: forces that we get better. Like strength training, you're engaging
Speaker 6: with resistance and that makes you stronger, right, but emotionally,
Speaker 6: as it turns out, right, actually it's the opposite that
Speaker 6: can be the most productive. You talk about removing pressure
Speaker 6: from yourself and others as the first easy step to
Speaker 6: improving creativity. In general, performance you highlight this or illustrate
Speaker 6: this rather you're talking about Miles Davis. Yeah, would you
Speaker 6: share that story with us, tell us a little more.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 1: This is the story of Herbie Hancock, the great pianist,
Speaker 1: and he was playing in Miles Davis's band as he
Speaker 1: was auditioning. This is a long time ago. This is
Speaker 1: very early on in his career. He was a very
Speaker 1: young guy. He was in his late teens, and he
Speaker 1: was overwhelmed by the idea of playing for Miles, who
Speaker 1: was a giant. All the other musicians were giants, and
Speaker 1: they played a rehearsal one day at miles house. This
Speaker 1: was Herbie's audition, and Herbie Hancock tells the story of
Speaker 1: this now, and it's absolutely magnetic because what happened was
Speaker 1: Miles was known for being a perfectionist, for being extremely talented,
Speaker 1: and for knowing exactly what he was aiming for with
Speaker 1: every piece, and so all the other musicians their role
Speaker 1: was to basically guess what Miles wanted and then to
Speaker 1: produce it for him. And so Herbie Hancock goes into
Speaker 1: this knowing that that's what he's trying to do, and
Speaker 1: Miles sits there through the beginning of the audition, which
Speaker 1: is going to last a few days. They're all jamming together,
Speaker 1: and he throws his trumpet down after a couple of numbers,
Speaker 1: and then he goes upstairs and they don't see him
Speaker 1: for days, and Hancock thinks to himself, well, obviously I
Speaker 1: bombed it.
Speaker 4: He left the room.
Speaker 1: He's not even listening, he's not interested. But it also
Speaker 1: liberated him. It made him feel like, well, the stakes
Speaker 1: are much lower now, you know, I'm just jamming with
Speaker 1: a couple of the greatest musicians of the day. And
Speaker 1: he starts having fun, and he starts playing some things
Speaker 1: that maybe he didn't even expect to play in front
Speaker 1: of Miles. At the end of the third day, Miles
Speaker 1: comes down the stairs and says, you know, I've been
Speaker 1: listening and on the intercom for the last few days,
Speaker 1: and I like what I'm hearing. And so this guy
Speaker 1: who is known for dialing up the pressure constantly, also
Speaker 1: knew when to dial it back. And he knew that
Speaker 1: by giving someone who was young and unformed but who
Speaker 1: was very talented a little bit of extra emotional space,
Speaker 1: he was going to get the best from him. Now
Speaker 1: we can do that for ourselves as well.
Speaker 4: To a large extent.
Speaker 1: I think we often put so much pressure on ourselves
Speaker 1: because we see other talented people famously being hard on
Speaker 1: themselves in many contexts, it's almost always the wrong way
Speaker 1: to go if you're trying to get the best from yourself.
Speaker 1: And so I'd spend a good few chapters talking about
Speaker 1: taking a pause, dialing down the emotional intensity, and how
Speaker 1: giving yourself a bit of breathing space emotionally is usually
Speaker 1: the best way to start getting unstuck.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it connects back to in kind of a spiritual realm,
Speaker 6: like the idea of self compassion, But that term doesn't
Speaker 6: connect for a lot of people, right, So I like
Speaker 6: this as another avenue in which is to think about
Speaker 6: how you can lower the stakes on what's expected. I mean,
Speaker 6: so many of us right when we know we want
Speaker 6: or need to perform, we get really hard on ourselves,
Speaker 6: like come on, you can do it, Yeah, thinking that
Speaker 6: that's actually going to help us produce our best work.
Speaker 6: Maybe it does once or twice. But as Erica said before,
Speaker 6: I like this term. It's sort of a dirty fuel,
Speaker 6: like it burns, you know, like over time that actually
Speaker 6: corrodes us and it keeps us stuck. It can keep
Speaker 6: us from performing at our best. So one of the
Speaker 6: ideas you talk about is it's maybe a semantic thing,
Speaker 6: but it really works. And I'm going to take a
Speaker 6: step further. You say you can rise to a challenge
Speaker 6: where you might succumb to a threat. So if you
Speaker 6: can reframe things, you know, but I even need it
Speaker 6: to go lower. So like, for example, we ride the
Speaker 6: peloton and Eric loves the like different you know, niney
Speaker 6: day challenger, thirty day challenge or it's like everybody's got
Speaker 6: a challenge for something and I'm like, I am not
Speaker 6: the least but interested in joining your challenge. Now an experiment,
Speaker 6: I'm all for it, Like give me a thirty day
Speaker 6: experiment and okay, like let's see what we can do.
Speaker 6: I need it even a step.
Speaker 1: I love that as a dialing down from challenges, this
Speaker 1: threat to this challenge, there's experiment because who knows what's
Speaker 1: going to happen.
Speaker 4: That that really takes the emotional intensity down. Yeah that's great.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, the threat is just so daunting, right, but
Speaker 6: challenge makes you feel like, let's see because it brings
Speaker 6: curiosity in exactly.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I talk a lot about experimenting in a later
Speaker 1: part of the book. But I think as a way
Speaker 1: of reframing that overwhelming sense that I have to achieve something,
Speaker 1: it's very valuable. And I think in general we don't
Speaker 1: go very far imagining this, but we think about worst
Speaker 1: case scenarios, but we don't go far enough into that
Speaker 1: because usually things that don't quite work out, there's something
Speaker 1: on the other side of that, and you can try again,
Speaker 1: you can try something different, and even recognizing that that's
Speaker 1: true usually takes the emotional intensity down to a point
Speaker 1: where you perform better in the moment.
Speaker 5: I'm going to go back to music for a second
Speaker 5: because question has been bouncing around in my mind and
Speaker 5: it may not be relevant. So we're talking about this idea.
Speaker 5: There's not a creative cliff that you get better at
Speaker 5: something the more you work on it, the longer you
Speaker 5: spend on it, right, And there's a domain in which
Speaker 5: I'm wondering how true that is, and it's rock and
Speaker 5: roll music. And the reason I'm wondering is that there
Speaker 5: are some examples. You've got Bob Dylan is probably the
Speaker 5: primary one who is creating what I would say is
Speaker 5: some of his best music.
Speaker 4: Yeah, at the age years, right, But.
Speaker 5: So many musicians it's in their first couple years that
Speaker 5: they just nail it and then it kind of fades.
Speaker 5: And I'm just curious what you think about that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's funny.
Speaker 1: I was investigating this idea that we have hot streaks
Speaker 1: in our careers. Yes, and I talk about this in
Speaker 1: the book. And one of the things that I found
Speaker 1: most interesting about hot streaks is there is no recipe
Speaker 1: for when a hot streak will happen. There's no way
Speaker 1: to predict it for some people. There are many hot
Speaker 1: streaks in our careers. Some people just have one. Most
Speaker 1: people have at least one. But when they look at
Speaker 1: the careers of musicians, there are people who have that
Speaker 1: hot streak during the January of their careers, some in
Speaker 1: the December, comes like seasons throughout their careers, and it's
Speaker 1: a little hard to predict. The biggest predictor of when
Speaker 1: you'll get a hot streak is to do two things
Speaker 1: in a particular order. And the first thing is to explore,
Speaker 1: is to experiment. It's to roam widely and say, hey,
Speaker 1: I haven't figured out exactly what works best for me,
Speaker 1: and so I'm going to try like five, six seven
Speaker 1: different things and so you see musicians or artists trying
Speaker 1: all these different styles and approaches and different instruments and
Speaker 1: different ways of different time signatures and different crafts and
Speaker 1: approaches and so on, and then they say, hey, you
Speaker 1: know that this one of them, the third one I tried,
Speaker 1: I think I liked that there was something that resonated there.
Speaker 1: Then you go as deep as you can into that thing.
Speaker 1: So the first period is scan as much territory as
Speaker 1: you can. The second is whatever worked best, go really
Speaker 1: deep on that thing, just exploit it. That's actually the
Speaker 1: term they use, exploited as much as possible. And when
Speaker 1: you do that, explore then exploit in that order, that's
Speaker 1: when the hot streak emerges.
Speaker 4: I love that term.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, I think that's exactly right, because when I
Speaker 5: look at musicians and some of them that I love,
Speaker 5: I can almost always see like a three album period
Speaker 5: where I'm like, I don't know what happened right those
Speaker 5: three records, but they had it like totally and before that,
Speaker 5: I mean, sometimes it's their first record that they start
Speaker 5: to that way. Sometimes it's their second or third record,
Speaker 5: and then you know, the hot streak ends. But to
Speaker 5: your point, there can be others and it seems like
Speaker 5: probably then what's happening is they are then moving into
Speaker 5: exploring again. I mean exactly, you know, exploration happens. I mean,
Speaker 5: certainly that's been the case with many people who've had
Speaker 5: second acts.
Speaker 4: As we would say, yeah.
Speaker 5: You know, they explored and they came back and then
Speaker 5: were able to do something slightly differently.
Speaker 1: Really well, yeah, there's something really liberating about this. And
Speaker 1: this is what I found over and over again that
Speaker 1: it's never too late. So a career that hasn't yet
Speaker 1: had a hot streak, or someone who's still struggling as
Speaker 1: they move into middle and later adulthood, there are people
Speaker 1: who at the very end of their careers have this great,
Speaker 1: incredibly productive, incredibly self fulfilling period. And so by just applying,
Speaker 1: even at times where it feels like behind you perhaps
Speaker 1: things haven't looked the way that you wanted them to,
Speaker 1: you could get there, and you can get there, and
Speaker 1: people do.
Speaker 3: That's really important.
Speaker 5: I think in our business, and I'm looking at Ginny
Speaker 5: sort of as I say this a little bit, but
Speaker 5: in our business, there have been plenty of times where
Speaker 5: I've concluded, like that's it, Like we've been doing this
Speaker 5: this long and we're about as far as we're going
Speaker 5: to get. And you know, like it's just anybody who
Speaker 5: wanted to listen to us would have been listening to
Speaker 5: us by now, and you know, or whatever it is.
Speaker 5: And I've been proven wrong again and again by saying, hey,
Speaker 5: let's just stay with you.
Speaker 3: And then you're like, oh, look at that.
Speaker 6: Yeah, we may be jumping ahead a little bit by
Speaker 6: talking about this, exploring exploiting, but I wanted to ask
Speaker 6: one more thing about this because I really liked it,
Speaker 6: which was the idea of how do you know when
Speaker 6: you're in one mode or the other, which is the
Speaker 6: yes and no?
Speaker 4: We talk about that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So this makes me think about what it was
Speaker 1: like when I was a very young assistant professor. I
Speaker 1: just started as a professor, and I was saying yes
Speaker 1: to everything every opportunity that came by. I was like,
Speaker 1: I will try that, I will try that, I will
Speaker 1: try that. I will be up for eighteen hours a day.
Speaker 1: I will say yes to everything. And that was great
Speaker 1: and it showed me that I could write books, and
Speaker 1: it showed me that I could consult and do other
Speaker 1: things that I perhaps hadn't imagined doing. But I was exhausted.
Speaker 1: But that was a period of exploration. I had to
Speaker 1: say yes to everything to sort of sift through all
Speaker 1: the options and to get a sense of what worked.
Speaker 1: And then I reached a point where I was like,
Speaker 1: I don't think I want to keep doing that so furiously.
Speaker 1: What I want to do is figure out what works
Speaker 1: and then really do that. And to do that you
Speaker 1: have to start saying no. So there are yes modes
Speaker 1: where you're saying yes to everything, opportunities arise, people.
Speaker 4: Want to hang out.
Speaker 1: Everything's yes, that's exploring, and then the exploiting period is
Speaker 1: where you say, if it's about this, and it's a yes,
Speaker 1: but almost everything else is a no. I've got to
Speaker 1: shut myself off from those other distractions as I make
Speaker 1: the very most of this thing that seemed to be
Speaker 1: best during the exploration.
Speaker 4: And yes phase.
Speaker 6: Yeah, you go deep into that, you.
Speaker 4: Go deep and say no to everything else.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's a great way to think about that time frame.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I found it useful.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Another idea that comes up in this section of the
Speaker 5: book is the idea of an ideal success to failure
Speaker 5: ratio right, and the idea that we should fail often
Speaker 5: has become something that's been more culturally accept did and
Speaker 5: talked about, even though I think it's still much harder
Speaker 5: for people to do then we might think, given the
Speaker 5: cultural dialogue about it, but there's actually a ratio that
Speaker 5: tends to be beneficial for how often they should be
Speaker 5: succeeding versus how often they should be failing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so just a caveat. It really depends on the domain.
Speaker 1: But the basic idea is you should succeed more often
Speaker 1: than you fail, and it should be something like three
Speaker 1: quarters to even four fifths of the time you should
Speaker 1: be succeeding. What that basically means is if you're trying
Speaker 1: something and you're constantly failing over and over and over again,
Speaker 1: it's demotivating. You don't want to be in that situation.
Speaker 1: You want to challenge yourself occasionally, but you also want
Speaker 1: to be within a comfortable zone for much of the time.
Speaker 1: That builds confidence. It also builds this liking for the
Speaker 1: thing you're doing, because we like to succeed. So I
Speaker 1: was very lucky I got to visit with a whole
Speaker 1: lot of Australian coaches of elite athletes, and I asked
Speaker 1: about one hundred of them this question, how do you
Speaker 1: get the best from your athletes? Do you put them
Speaker 1: in a situation where they're challenged constantly and they're really
Speaker 1: struggling through things, or do you give them tasks that
Speaker 1: are so that they can build confidence. And most of
Speaker 1: them said most of the time, they have to be
Speaker 1: able to do the thing that you're giving them to do.
Speaker 1: But if you always do that, they'll never grow. And
Speaker 1: so you've got to pepper those experiences of capability with
Speaker 1: extensions and you know, dialing up the.
Speaker 4: Difficulty just a bit.
Speaker 1: And so this research basically says that across context, it's
Speaker 1: about eighty percent of the time roughly that you succeed.
Speaker 5: I've started sending a couple of text messages after each
Speaker 5: podcast listener with positive reminders about what's discussed and invitations
Speaker 5: to apply the wisdom to your life. It's free, and
Speaker 5: listeners have told me that these texts really help to
Speaker 5: pull them out of utopilot and reconnect them with what's important.
Speaker 5: When you get a text for me during your day
Speaker 5: to day life, it's one more thing that helps you
Speaker 5: further bridge that gap between what you know and what
Speaker 5: you do. Positive messages when you need them for me
Speaker 5: to you so if you'd like to hear from me
Speaker 5: a few times a week via text, go to oneufeed
Speaker 5: dot net slash text and sign up for free. It's
Speaker 5: interesting because that correlates very closely idea wise to the
Speaker 5: research on flow yes, meaning right, like we have to
Speaker 5: be kind of in a place where we are challenged,
Speaker 5: but not so challenged that we get discouraged and give up,
Speaker 5: but it's not so easy that we're bored. There is
Speaker 5: an optimal place of the difficulty level. And I think
Speaker 5: that's a really important idea that everybody can work with
Speaker 5: and play with. Is you know what is the difficulty
Speaker 5: level that I'm at. I'm a guitar player, and it
Speaker 5: took me a long time. Some people did this very
Speaker 5: well early on. My best friend Chris, who was the editor,
Speaker 5: he did this very early on, like he knew how
Speaker 5: to bring the difficulty level to write where he needed
Speaker 5: it to be. And I was sort of the opposite,
Speaker 5: which was that if anything was slightly difficult, I just
Speaker 5: gave up. Yeah, I didn't know how to turn the difficulty.
Speaker 5: Like if I couldn't play something like almost immediately I
Speaker 5: went I can't play it, and I gave up.
Speaker 3: And there were some benefits.
Speaker 5: In that I just learned to write my own music
Speaker 5: right away because I kind of had to, So that
Speaker 5: was a benefit. But I didn't progress much as a
Speaker 5: musician because I didn't know how to get that difficulty
Speaker 5: level right, because it was always too hard, and so
Speaker 5: I just didn't do it.
Speaker 1: I think at the very beginning of anything, if you're
Speaker 1: just learning something like an instrument, I think there's going
Speaker 1: to be a higher failure rate because everything is hard. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you've got to be okay with that early on. I
Speaker 1: think this failure rate really describes what it's like to
Speaker 1: be entering a period of maturity or mastery and you're
Speaker 1: trying to get better. So you're not a complete novice,
Speaker 1: whether it's an instrument or a new language already, anything
Speaker 1: that you're trying to get better at. So you have
Speaker 1: to be open to the idea that's starting something new.
Speaker 1: Like if I decide tomorrow that I want to learn
Speaker 1: the guitar, I'm going to fail more than twenty percent
Speaker 1: of the time.
Speaker 4: I'll fail all the time. Now that's got to be okay, I.
Speaker 1: Think, Yeah, But you're right, you've got to very quickly
Speaker 1: get to the point where you say I need to
Speaker 1: get something out of this. I need to enjoy it
Speaker 1: early on so that I want to keep doing it.
Speaker 1: So maybe it's just a matter of strumming mindlessly, and
Speaker 1: maybe teaching yourself and composing your own music is the
Speaker 1: way to do it, because then you set the difficulty.
Speaker 5: It certainly worked in that way. But what I learned,
Speaker 5: and it took time to learn it, is that like,
Speaker 5: no matter what you're trying to play, you can dial
Speaker 5: the difficulty level down and just go like, I'm going
Speaker 5: to work on playing these two notes, and I'm going
Speaker 5: to work on playing them really slow. Okay, now that
Speaker 5: I can play them at that speed, can I play
Speaker 5: them a lot? And I just didn't understand that for
Speaker 5: a long time. It seems kind of obvious. And I
Speaker 5: think that's one of the in my case, the danger
Speaker 5: of being entirely self taught and never having had any lessons,
Speaker 5: as I was never shown how to deconstruct it in
Speaker 5: that way.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm I'm smiling because I remember in grad school,
Speaker 1: I had this classmate who lived in the next room
Speaker 1: over from me, and I just heard him playing over
Speaker 1: and over again. He had a bass guitar and he
Speaker 1: played the beginning to Smoke on the water, but literally
Speaker 1: for a year, do do do do? Just over and
Speaker 1: over again. And I would say to him, dude, are
Speaker 1: you going to do something different? He was like, no,
Speaker 1: I'm happy. I like, I know what I'm doing. I'm
Speaker 1: getting better and better at this. I feel happy every
Speaker 1: time I play. But he would do it for hours,
Speaker 1: and I think, I think there is there is a
Speaker 1: level where you want to build in that twenty percent failure, right,
Speaker 1: And he was content, and that's great, But if you
Speaker 1: want to get better at something, obviously you can't keep
Speaker 1: playing smoke in the water over and over.
Speaker 5: We have a version of that in our own household
Speaker 5: occasionally where I will be like working on a difficult
Speaker 5: piece and after a while, Genny, you'll be.
Speaker 3: Like, can we do something else?
Speaker 7: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, can you play something else?
Speaker 5: Not very off and she's pretty patient, but every once
Speaker 5: in a while it gets.
Speaker 4: To be chill take so much.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's funny, all right.
Speaker 6: So if we move into the head section, so the
Speaker 6: mental tour of getting unstuck, there's something you talk about
Speaker 6: which I really connected with for a while. Actually, I
Speaker 6: thought this might have been a failing of mind, a
Speaker 6: weakness of mine. Or like evidence that somehow I wasn't
Speaker 6: quite good enough. But so, and it's actually a difference
Speaker 6: that you and I have. You're gonna have to correct
Speaker 6: me here if I don't sort of language this correctly
Speaker 6: for you. But in general, you can sort of sit
Speaker 6: down at a computer and kind of do your work,
Speaker 6: like think your way into the thing you want to create, right,
Speaker 6: Like you're able to sort of solo it. Now, I'm
Speaker 6: not saying you never work with others, but you know, yeah,
Speaker 6: I have always note about myself that I need sort
Speaker 6: of other people to collaborate in order to create something.
Speaker 6: That it's the interaction with someone else, the exchange of ideas,
Speaker 6: the thing that they say that sparks something I thought
Speaker 6: or never saw before. And it's in that realm that
Speaker 6: I can kind of create something. I always thought that
Speaker 6: was a weakness, but it's actually put myself on the
Speaker 6: back of genius that I have no kidding. But you
Speaker 6: say that working with new people can inspire creative uns
Speaker 6: sticking for at least two reasons, right, So they bring
Speaker 6: fresh ideas as one of those.
Speaker 1: Reasons, Yeah, one of them is just that if you
Speaker 1: are different from someone else in any way, you have
Speaker 1: different content in your head, and they will bring ideas
Speaker 1: that you just don't have. And so there's huge value
Speaker 1: in just talking to people who are as different as
Speaker 1: possible from you. That's the sort of theme in that
Speaker 1: chapter is that we often surround ourselves with people who
Speaker 1: are in some way like us, Like we think the
Speaker 1: same way, we have the same attitudes and values and
Speaker 1: so on. And there's nothing wrong with doing that. But
Speaker 1: if you're trying to get unstuck, you don't need more
Speaker 1: of yourself, right, you need something new, and so speaking
Speaker 1: to someone who's different from you on some critical dimension
Speaker 1: is the way to do that. There are all these
Speaker 1: examples of very successful companies like Pixar creating these incredible
Speaker 1: films where on every team they will go out and
Speaker 1: hunt what they call a black sheep.
Speaker 4: I'll hunt. They will bring someone in their problem probably
Speaker 4: the wrong term for talking about it.
Speaker 3: He'll bring them in.
Speaker 5: Then they will hunt them on the Pixar grounds.
Speaker 3: Let's all that Backpixar. We're just kidding.
Speaker 1: So there's a great example with Pixar, and they will
Speaker 1: assemble the team and they'll always put a black sheep
Speaker 1: on the team, and the black sheep is someone who
Speaker 1: thinks differently from everyone else in some critical way, Like
Speaker 1: everyone thinks that animation is key. This person is a
Speaker 1: storytelling maven and they're like, no, let's just put the
Speaker 1: animation aside for a minute. It's all about the narrative.
Speaker 1: And they find that in all these different contexts, just
Speaker 1: having that different, divergent voice is unbelievably valuable as an
Speaker 1: unlocking agent. There are even studies where they ask people
Speaker 1: in groups to solve puzzles and they have this little
Speaker 1: AI like a bot that gives them solutions that are
Speaker 1: come up on a screen, like it'll say why don't
Speaker 1: you try this? Why don't you think about that? And
Speaker 1: there are two versions of the bot. There's the bot
Speaker 1: that kind of mirrors what everyone else is saying but
Speaker 1: does a slightly better version of it, and that's okay.
Speaker 1: But then there's also the chaos spot. This is the
Speaker 1: black sheep bot that just kind of throws out random nonsense.
Speaker 1: And when they do that, these people are like, wow,
Speaker 1: I didn't think of that, Yeah, and it unsticks them.
Speaker 6: That's great.
Speaker 5: It's so interesting. I've played with chat GPT so well.
Speaker 5: I have with chat GPT, but with GPT itself. Yeah,
Speaker 5: and I don't know what the parameter is, right, but
Speaker 5: there's a parameter that you can dial up and down
Speaker 5: for sort of what you're saying, like, just how crazy
Speaker 5: can this thing get? Exactly right? And by its default,
Speaker 5: I mean I think chat GPT is extraordinarily boring. I mean,
Speaker 5: it just says exactly what you will expect it to
Speaker 5: say ninety five percent of the time. Like it's just
Speaker 5: not very interesting. But when you go in and you
Speaker 5: start changing that setting and you start being like and
Speaker 5: same thing with AI image generation. Yep. Right, if you
Speaker 5: basically turn up the chaos setting, things get really interesting,
Speaker 5: really fast. Exactly not necessarily useful, but interesting and created.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think the biggest and best use case
Speaker 1: for the chat GPT and these other generative AI engines
Speaker 1: now is exactly for that.
Speaker 4: It's fron sticking.
Speaker 1: I think what they do better than anything is they
Speaker 1: are those divergent voices that you need, those black sheet
Speaker 1: and so you know, let's say I'm stuck, I'm trying
Speaker 1: to write the beginning to a chapter of a new book.
Speaker 1: Ask chat GPT to give you, like the first sentence,
Speaker 1: and it might be horrible, but at least it's not
Speaker 1: from your brain. It's from some other collective brain out
Speaker 1: in the world that it's it's scraped from the Internet
Speaker 1: and just asking it to give you three alternatives, give
Speaker 1: me three alternative ways to begin a chapter on X
Speaker 1: and no, that's not what the book's going to look like.
Speaker 4: But it jostles you.
Speaker 1: It's kind of shakes you up in a way that
Speaker 1: helps you get unstuck. And you used to have to
Speaker 1: go and consult with your three friends, and now you
Speaker 1: just ask the computer to do.
Speaker 4: It for you.
Speaker 1: I think it's incredibly valuable to have that at our disposal.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 5: I think it is that sort of asking it for
Speaker 5: alternats or different ideas, because I find its first few
Speaker 5: ideas are like really boring, like the most vanilla way
Speaker 5: of saying what I wanted to say is possible, But
Speaker 5: you can prompt it to sort of get it get interesting.
Speaker 1: I've run my assignments actually through there like my students,
Speaker 1: and I say, here is the assignment, answered the assignment,
Speaker 1: and it is like the most c plus thing I've
Speaker 1: ever seen because it's totally part It's a pass, there's
Speaker 1: no doubt, but it is the most plain, vanilla boring
Speaker 1: pass I've ever read, and I'm like, this had to
Speaker 1: have been written by something that's just scraping things together.
Speaker 5: Yep, I agree, it's great. Plus, that's a great way
Speaker 5: of putting it. That's a great way of putting it.
Speaker 5: Along that idea, you talk about learning to be your
Speaker 5: own therapist, and you say, question your own decisions the
Speaker 5: way a smart outsider mate ask yourself complex questions more
Speaker 5: than once, answering with the different lens each time. This
Speaker 5: takes advantage of the so called wisdom of the inner crowd.
Speaker 3: I love that idea.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So there's this very famous idea that there's the wisdom
Speaker 1: of the crowd that if you ask one hundred people
Speaker 1: to estimate the number of jelly beans and ajar, they're
Speaker 1: all going to bounce around, they'll have different ideas, but
Speaker 1: actually the average is pretty close to the right number.
Speaker 1: And that's because our errors in whichever direction tend to
Speaker 1: counsel each other out, and so you end up getting
Speaker 1: pretty close to the number. It turns out there's an
Speaker 1: internal version of this. So what you can do is
Speaker 1: you can say, you know, let's say you've got a
Speaker 1: relationship issue and you're trying to work out how to
Speaker 1: get through it. The first thing you say to yourself
Speaker 1: is what a therapist would do, is they would say, well,
Speaker 1: tell me what you're thinking, like, where are you now,
Speaker 1: what's your default, what's your baseline? And so you come
Speaker 1: up with a solution and you say, well, let's imagine
Speaker 1: you're wrong. What's the other side of you saying there's
Speaker 1: a version of you that thinks something different. It may
Speaker 1: need to be peeled back, You've got to get through
Speaker 1: a few layers to get there. But the version of
Speaker 1: you that disagrees with that or thinks there's another option,
Speaker 1: what does that look like? All right, So now we've
Speaker 1: got these two ideas on the table. Maybe the dominant
Speaker 1: one is the first one, maybe the other one's a
Speaker 1: little bit more outlandish. Let's have a conversation between those two.
Speaker 1: What are the best things of that second idea that
Speaker 1: you could bring to improve the first? And so, what
Speaker 1: you're essentially doing, just as these crowds do of lots
Speaker 1: of people, is you take all the different kind of
Speaker 1: opinions and ideas in your own head and you find
Speaker 1: this average that is theoretically better than all the kind
Speaker 1: of strings that make up the average, and it's been
Speaker 1: proven to be pretty effective. So you effectively interrogate yourself
Speaker 1: a degree or two past where you normally would for
Speaker 1: really important questions instead of just going with that first idea,
Speaker 1: and the results are often very promising.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I think that's really interesting, and I think it's part
Speaker 5: of the reason that having questions that we can ask ourselves.
Speaker 5: And I find it helpful to have actual questions like
Speaker 5: that are like you said, there was a question there,
Speaker 5: like what's another idea here? But we can find these
Speaker 5: different questions that can help us interrogate our own thoughts.
Speaker 5: That sounds more harsh than yeah, but I need that
Speaker 5: prompting to know kind of where to look inside, because
Speaker 5: when I look inside, I just see one thing. Yeah,
Speaker 5: with well crafted questions, I can sort of look different
Speaker 5: ways and pull different things out.
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: I think that's that's key, and I think that's a
Speaker 1: thread that runs through a lot of the research that
Speaker 1: I do and the things that I think about is
Speaker 1: I don't necessarily want the answers, but I want to
Speaker 1: know what questions to ask. You can't always know what
Speaker 1: the answer is going to be, and sometimes it's hard
Speaker 1: to access the answer, but you get a lot of
Speaker 1: the way there by knowing here are the next ten
Speaker 1: best questions to ask.
Speaker 7: Yes.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: In fact, the back of the book is a hundred
Speaker 1: ways to get unstuck, because I wanted to do something
Speaker 1: different from my other books, which was just to have
Speaker 1: a roadmap, a very concrete Here are a hundred things
Speaker 1: you can do. Check off the list and make it
Speaker 1: very practical. And I think you're right. Having that very
Speaker 1: concrete set of steps that algorithm for getting unstuck is
Speaker 1: really useful.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 6: So the last section habit yes, the things that we
Speaker 6: can physically do. You start off the section talking about
Speaker 6: the power of curiosity. I really have come to believe
Speaker 6: that curiosity is like a superpower, and it's one you
Speaker 6: can hone you can grow, you can develop. It's certainly
Speaker 6: not a birthrate, you know, but as humans we do
Speaker 6: have an innate curiosity. I think, so we can cultivate it.
Speaker 6: But tell me about the role of curiosity.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm fascinated by this. So on the one end
Speaker 1: of the curiosity spectrum, you have kids. Kids ask questions
Speaker 1: about everything to the ends of the earth. Nothing makes
Speaker 1: sense until they've asked a hundred questions. On the other end,
Speaker 1: you have. Most adults, we take everything for granted pretty much.
Speaker 1: There's an orthodoxy we heard together. We do things the
Speaker 1: same way most of the time as other people do them.
Speaker 1: If you see something as a certain way, you assume
Speaker 1: there's a reason for that. That's what it is to
Speaker 1: be an adult. Then there are these really interesting people
Speaker 1: that I met in the course of researching with this book.
Speaker 1: Who are They're known as experimentalists, and what they do
Speaker 1: is they effectively do what kids do, and they are adults,
Speaker 1: but they say, why why are we taking this for granted?
Speaker 1: And some of them are tremendously successful for that reason,
Speaker 1: because they diverged from the crowd. One of my favorite
Speaker 1: examples is this Olympic swimmer, Dave Berkhoff, who in the
Speaker 1: late eighties early nineties was a bit smaller than a
Speaker 1: lot of the other swimmers. He was not quite as
Speaker 1: tall as they were, he didn't have quite the same build,
Speaker 1: but he was very, very intellectual, very bright guy, and
Speaker 1: he sort of thought, well, how do I get an
Speaker 1: advantage here? Everyone swimming the backstroke the same way? Is
Speaker 1: there a way for me to do it differently? And
Speaker 1: he discovered that you go about almost twice as fast
Speaker 1: when you're fully submerged underwater. So he developed a technique
Speaker 1: that meant that he was underwater for longer than the
Speaker 1: other swimmers. It made him incredibly fast. He broke the
Speaker 1: world record, he won gold medals at the Olympics. And
Speaker 1: when other coaches from other countries, there's a very famous
Speaker 1: Australian coach who I remember from growing up, very flamboyant guy,
Speaker 1: met Dave Berkov. He's like, how did this guy break
Speaker 1: the world record? He doesn't look like all the other swimmers,
Speaker 1: he's a head shorter than them. And it's all just curiosity.
Speaker 4: It's questions.
Speaker 1: It's pushing back against the orthodoxy and saying does this
Speaker 1: really have to be this way? And it's an incredibly
Speaker 1: valuable rule. You don't have to be an Olympic swimmer,
Speaker 1: but in every area of life it's very valuable to
Speaker 1: ask those questions.
Speaker 6: Yeah. The other thing you talk about in this section,
Speaker 6: which really resonated with me and Eric, is this idea
Speaker 6: of action above all. Yeah, it's the idea that sometimes
Speaker 6: the motivation and momentum or the forward motion comes after
Speaker 6: you take the first step. You say, as soon as
Speaker 6: you act, even modestly, you're no longer stuck. That's true
Speaker 6: no matter the context, and a kernel of action should
Speaker 6: be within reach, no matter the situation. Talk more about
Speaker 6: the power of just getting started.
Speaker 4: Yeah, just doing anything.
Speaker 1: So Tweety, the frontman from Wilco, has this great description
Speaker 1: of what.
Speaker 4: This is like for him.
Speaker 3: Credit Tweet is amazing.
Speaker 1: He's incredible, and he's a writer, and he's also he
Speaker 1: writes music, so he does a couple of things that
Speaker 1: I really love, and I was always curious about how
Speaker 1: he did what he did. And then he gave an interviewer.
Speaker 1: He basically said that the first stuff in my head
Speaker 1: is terrible stuff. It's not good, it's not interesting. I've
Speaker 1: got to pour out the bad stuff. That's how he
Speaker 1: describes it. I get up in the morning and I
Speaker 1: pour out the nonsense, and then what's left is the
Speaker 1: good stuff underneath that. But you've got to pour the
Speaker 1: bad stuff out first. So what that means is where
Speaker 1: the rest of us is sitting there saying I have
Speaker 1: to write the best first sentence for my chapter, or
Speaker 1: I've got to write the perfect opening stanza to this
Speaker 1: particular song. He's saying, of course that's not going to happen.
Speaker 1: All I have to do is do anything, Just do something,
Speaker 1: and then the ball is rolling, things get moving. I
Speaker 1: feel a little bit more liquid. Interesting ideas can come
Speaker 1: into play. This idea that doing a small things but
Speaker 1: be even bad things. You can write badly, which is
Speaker 1: better than not writing at all. You can have a
Speaker 1: conversation not expertly, which is better than not having the
Speaker 1: conversation at all. So getting things started, I think is
Speaker 1: even in small dose, is an absolutely critical part of
Speaker 1: getting unstuck.
Speaker 6: Yeah, lowering the sort of barrier to entry.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 6: So it's the idea of like perfectionism, getting that out
Speaker 6: of the way, getting that you have to do this
Speaker 6: exactly this way or in the most excellent manner. You
Speaker 6: can remove all of that and just get started, give
Speaker 6: yourself a safe place to do that. What is it
Speaker 6: like the shitty first draft or whatever the term is
Speaker 6: that we use, you know, just get started.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you have to do the first draft, so
Speaker 1: I get it out of the way and then you
Speaker 1: can get to the good stuff like that.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, this is such a life philosophy for me. I
Speaker 5: talk on the show often. Maybe my most used phrase is,
Speaker 5: sometimes you can't think your way into right action.
Speaker 3: You have to act your way into right thinking.
Speaker 4: Totally agree, you.
Speaker 5: Know, and I think this is for creative projects, but
Speaker 5: anything in general. I didn't make up that phrase or
Speaker 5: this phrase, but one that I absolutely love is depression
Speaker 5: hates a moving target. And as somebody who struggles with
Speaker 5: depression from time to time, I just find moving. Yeah,
Speaker 5: and I don't necessarily mean like on a treadmill, although
Speaker 5: that's great. Exercise is really good, but just get outside,
Speaker 5: do something. Any movement tends to be good. And I
Speaker 5: think any movement tends to be good when we're stuck,
Speaker 5: whether it's mentally emotionally.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's this really fascinating research on this that shows
Speaker 1: that startups where people are forced to move where they're
Speaker 1: forced to walk because of where the startup is located,
Speaker 1: maybe it's in a walking city or something like that,
Speaker 1: they have better ideas. So by physically moving, yeah, you
Speaker 1: actually somehow liberate better ideas.
Speaker 4: It's really interesting.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I've learned that about myself that I like to
Speaker 5: work different places, So like work from home one day,
Speaker 5: go to the library another day, go to a coffee
Speaker 5: shop another day. But like, there's something for me about
Speaker 5: moving from one place to the next. It just tends
Speaker 5: to help me not at least feel so stuck.
Speaker 1: It's another way to get over the plateau. Right if
Speaker 1: you feel that you've hit a plateau, just changed things up,
Speaker 1: And so by constantly shifting things, whether it's a physical
Speaker 1: task or something like writing, changing the place where you're
Speaker 1: doing it makes a huge difference.
Speaker 6: I've heard some science behind this that the movement in
Speaker 6: our body just stimulates our brain in such a way
Speaker 6: that we're able to make connections or access filed away
Speaker 6: connections that we otherwise just didn't quite have all of
Speaker 6: our neurons firing to make happen. I mean, that's a
Speaker 6: very unscientific way to explain it, but I know that,
Speaker 6: Like when I'm on the peloton in the morning and
Speaker 6: I'm listening to a podcast, I'm like grabbing my phone
Speaker 6: to write down these ideas. It's just firing like crazy.
Speaker 6: But it was just getting my body moving.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So I run, and I've started running with a
Speaker 1: little piece of paper and a tiny pencil because I
Speaker 1: find that happens all the time. And I'm on the
Speaker 1: middle of a run and I'm like, I'm going to
Speaker 1: forget this, and I always forget this, but it's true
Speaker 1: how often do those great ideas just pop up? It's
Speaker 1: when you're asleep unfortunately totally and when you are moving
Speaker 1: are moving yep.
Speaker 6: So I'm curious about something. Instead of saying, did you
Speaker 6: I'm going to say, when you got stuck at some
Speaker 6: point writing this book?
Speaker 4: At some point okay.
Speaker 6: Many points, many you can draw down here to what
Speaker 6: not to put you on the spot, But like, can
Speaker 6: you think of a time writing this book when you
Speaker 6: got stuck and maybe give us an example of how
Speaker 6: you applied any of this knowledge to get yourself moving.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So I read this interview with Jeff Tweety and
Speaker 1: he talked about pouring out all the bad ideas. I
Speaker 1: can't tell you how many bad ideas I poured out
Speaker 1: to get to the version that you see. Because writing
Speaker 1: is hard, it's a very long term process.
Speaker 4: It takes.
Speaker 1: In the case of this book, it was an eighteen
Speaker 1: month process. And so there were many days where nothing
Speaker 1: came out, or not very much came out, or what
Speaker 1: came out wasn't great and I didn't use it. But
Speaker 1: that paved the way for the next day and the
Speaker 1: day after. And sometimes you'll have these magical days where
Speaker 1: you'll write thousands of words. They tumble out exactly as
Speaker 1: you like. And the thing that I always do when
Speaker 1: that happens is I ask where that comes from, because
Speaker 1: I think it's hard to know, but if you're really
Speaker 1: thoughtful about it, sometimes you can see the origins of
Speaker 1: it in the failures of the days before. And so
Speaker 1: I look back at what I poured out yesterday and realized, oh,
Speaker 1: this is just like the ten times better version of
Speaker 1: what I did yesday. And had I not done that yesterday,
Speaker 1: I wouldn't have been able to get to where I
Speaker 1: am today. I think writing a book about being stuck
Speaker 1: and getting unstuck is great because you're constantly using the
Speaker 1: techniques that you're writing about in the course of writing
Speaker 1: the book.
Speaker 6: Yeah all bad. I love how you use the good
Speaker 6: days to connect back to the days that feel tough,
Speaker 6: so that when you're in them the next time, you
Speaker 6: can exactly remember that and see that as even though
Speaker 6: it doesn't look like immediate progress, it's still making progress.
Speaker 1: Because you want to feel like there's meaning to the
Speaker 1: failures too.
Speaker 7: Sure.
Speaker 1: You want to feel like when things are difficult and
Speaker 1: when you're not pouring out thousands of great usable words,
Speaker 1: that there's a purpose for it, and I think that's
Speaker 1: so much of what our lives are about. It's even
Speaker 1: the hard moments, the moments that aren't going exactly to plan,
Speaker 1: you have to feel like there's some value to them,
Speaker 1: and telling that story and finding that narrative, I think
Speaker 1: is a huge part of moving forward to the next
Speaker 1: step that hopefully is better.
Speaker 4: Marvelous Well, I.
Speaker 5: Think that is a perfect note to wrap up on.
Speaker 5: Thank you so much. This has been such a great conversation.
Speaker 5: We really love the book and it's been a pleasure
Speaker 5: to sit here in top with you.
Speaker 4: And with you. Thanks so much, Thank you so much.
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