auto generated transcript

Announcer: [00:00:00] Tap to your most original thinking. Organize your ideas and create the opportunities to launch your creative work, unlocking your world of creativity With bestselling author and brand innovator, mark Stinson.

Mark Stinson, host: Welcome back friends to our podcast, unlocking Your World of Creativity. And when we say unlock, There are so many times that we as creative people get stuck and the doors closed.

We're wiggling the key. We're trying to kick the door down to get our project or our creativity moving, and we just need some new strategies, some new help. We're nearing 250 episodes of our podcast and almost every one of them, somewhere along the way, we've talked to the creative person who's been stuck, might be writer's blocker, some other stuckness, and we're gonna have a great conversation today about ways to get unstuck, [00:01:00] and I'm just so honored and pleased to have as our guest, Adam.

Alter. He is a professor at NYU Stern business in marketing and in psychology, and he is the author of a terrific new book just released, it's called The Anatomy of a Breakthrough. Adam, welcome

Adam Alter, Author: to the show. Thanks so much for having me, mark.

Mark Stinson, host: In this book, I have to say, it's not one of these little tiny motivational books like that.

You can do it a book. There's 29 pages of references and research in the back of this book, so it's well researched. But give us an overview of what you found in your research about stuckness and some strategies that you've outlined to get unstuck.

Adam Alter, Author: Yeah, so the book is really a roadmap for getting unstuck.

It's designed that way. It's designed to be very practical, but also to be grounded in science, which is why it has all of those pages of references. Once a scientist, always a scientist, and It. It basically boils down to four big steps, and each of those steps includes [00:02:00] three chapters that try to unpack that step, and they go by the, they all have titles that begin with the letter H.

So the first section is title help. And the idea behind help is that a lot of us don't fully understand what it is to be stuck. We seem to be blindsided by stuckness and by change we tend to think that we are isolated or alone in our. Stuckness, but in fact it's universal. And so that first section is designed to demystify what it is to be stuck, to explain it, and to.

Tell people that it's gonna happen, so they should be ready for it. The second, third, and fourth sections are all ways of getting unstuck or a sort of three part model for getting unstuck. And they go by the A, by the terms heart, which is dealing with the emotional consequences of feeling stuck because we tend to be anxious.

It's a very negative experience, at least initially. Head, which is all the strategies we can use to get unstuck. The cognitive strategies the mental strategies for getting unstuck. And the last section is habit, which is really about the actions we can take to get unstuck. And all of this really [00:03:00] ultimately is in the service of action.

You can't get unstuck just by changing how you feel or changing how you think you actually have to do something. And so that's the culminating. Part of the book the culmination of the book is this section that says we have to act, action is paramount and this is what you should actually be doing with yourself.

Mark Stinson, host: And Adam, when you say we all get stuck sometimes I, I'm stuck by the stories in the book of. Known, name brand writers, for example, Harper Lee, you wrote To Kill a Mockingbird in 1960, but the sequel didn't come out until 2015. Where was the writer's block in all those years?

But I was particularly George R. Martin, who's of course the stories, in informed and inspired Game of Thrones. 3 billion of entertainment, later. But he never wrote. Some of the following books that he said I always wanted to get around to. So even these, high level people get

Adam Alter, Author: stuck.

Yeah, I think the reason to focus on very talented, very successful people [00:04:00] is because if they are stuck and they are, all of them at times feel stuck, then that liberates the rest of us. It allows us to accept that we will probably be stuck as well. And if they're struggling with it, in the case of Harper belief for 55 years, some people are stuck for half a lifetime or longer.

Then first of all, That's unfortunate and there should be a way through it for them. And the good news is there is a way through. It's really just a matter of understanding the science and getting all the steps in a row and figuring out what to do next. And there is so much you can do if you know where to look.

Yes.

Mark Stinson, host: And the empathy in this help section the of the step that you mentioned of, really understanding that there are life events that happen. You introduced me to a term life quakes, about these disruptions.

Adam Alter, Author: Yeah, this is a term that Bruce Fler used. Bruce Fler is a writer. He's written a number of books, and he's this wonderful blend of scientist and thinker, and he's got the spiritual side and the scientific side down, and he merges them in [00:05:00] this wonderful way, and he wrote a book, in particular, the one that I refer to in my book about, How people experience change and when they experience change and how common it is.

And what he found was that we experience small changes all the time, but we also experience a number of really major life altering changes throughout our lives. Some of these are invited, some of them are uninvited, some of them are wanted, some of them are unwanted, some of them are positive, some of them are negative.

He talks about things like the death of a loved one, the birth of a child, divorce, separation, marriage. Moving to a new country, moving to a very new job or career. These are all really big events and they happen, some of them in various forms to all of us. And so his book really is about the universality of that kind of change and how poorly we deal with it because we tend to be blindsided by it, despite the fact that across the lifespan it is inevitable that we will have five or 10 or even 15 of these changes.

Mark Stinson, host: Amazing. And I guess conversely from the heart, then we move to the head. [00:06:00] And some of these challenges just need to be addressed intellectually with research or with steps or with formulas. And, you're speaking to the creative spirit when they say, we don't wanna be formulaic. But I'll be darn if you don't share the story of Pixar and one of their story artists that basically says, have you ever noticed that all of our movies have the same formula?

Yes, that's right. So every now and then you just gotta get to the recipe, don't

Adam Alter, Author: you? Yeah it's so funny. There's this sort of theory that there is radical originality and very successful. Commercial products or cultural products, whether they're artworks or films or musical scores or songs, it doesn't matter what kind of product we're talking about, whenever we're talking about creativity.

The holy grail is radical originality, but it is vanishingly rare, and that's because. The best do it often, very similarly to each other. They sometimes bring in new elements or they tweak a formula that works, or they'll take two existing things and combine them in new ways. I talk [00:07:00] about this in, I use the term recombination, that a lot of the best ideas, even if they look like they're radically new, are actually a combination of two or three or more things that existed before.

The genius is in the new combination. It's not in generating something from whole cloth. It's not like you find a new. Adam in the table of elements, it sits that you take two or three existing elements that you hadn't used in a particular way before, and you combine them in just the right way. And this is one of my favorite anecdotes in the book, is this story of Bob Dylan.

He is most often cited by other musicians as the most truly original voice and musician and talent of the 20th century in the musical world. But when you look at his past, including things that he himself admits about his past and where his inspiration came from, it was all a matter of taking bits and pieces from different parts of the musical cannon, different genres, merging them in ways that were novel, but the actual building blocks themselves are not.

Mark Stinson, host: Absolutely. And you address crowdsourcing as a way to get [00:08:00] unstuck too, that every now and then it's like, Hey, let's get thousands of other brains on this. And of course little controversy these days about how much ai is contributing to this speeding up of the crowdsourcing. Where does the creativity find a nice

Adam Alter, Author: balance there?

Yeah, so it's funny, when I was writing this book, it was before the huge wave of generative AI was unleashed upon us. And I didn't write about it in the book explicitly, but I've been using it and thinking about it a lot since then. And one of the things that I think generative AI does really is it functions as a brilliant brainstorming partner.

I don't think it's. The source of the ideas, they don't, it, it doesn't give you the ideas, but it changes how you think. And so o one of the ideas in that diversity and crowdsourcing chapter is that we often instinctively turn to other people who are a lot like us. They magnify our strengths, they.

Magnify our weaknesses as well, and they basically reinforce what we already believe about the world. And so if what you're really trying to do is to get [00:09:00] unstuck, that can be an entrenching force that further admires you. The better way to go is to find a non-redundant source of information or ideas, or a non-redundant way of looking at the world.

So you speak to someone with a different background. Maybe they've had different training, different attitudes or values or cultural beliefs or religious beliefs, or. Whatever the difference might be. The good news about chat G P T and other generative AI models is they are. By definition diverse. They are the sum product of all the information that's floating around that they've scraped on the web.

And so one thing you can do, and I've done this, is to say, I'm writing a chapter. I don't know how to begin the chapter. Here's what it's about. Tell me three different ways I could begin this chapter. Now, I'm not gonna use any of them, but having essentially three very smart different ways of doing something.

And sometimes they're not smart, they're actually just outlandish and weird. But that's also useful because it just changes the way you, in your rut think about this thing and it unlocks something new. [00:10:00] And I've found that extremely productive in creative settings. Yes. When

Mark Stinson, host: you also mentioned tapping into other people's experiences yeah.

Throughout, throughout my career in healthcare dealing with patients and medical research and so forth you mentioned a company that was really designed to crowdsource all the experiences that say, patients have spent seven years and hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical visits and they still don't have a diagnosis.

How could we speed that up? You've got a story there.

Adam Alter, Author: Yeah. Yeah. This is CrowdMed. It's almost like a wiki for solving. Complex medical problems that no doctor alone has seemed to be able to solve. And one of the things that I find really interesting about CrowdMed is that they don't just assemble a traditional set of doctors, which they do.

They have traditional medical professionals in the areas that matter. And so if you're dealing with a kidney issue, you'll have a nephrologist. And if you're dealing with a head issue, a brain issue, you'll have a neurologist. But in addition to those people, you'll have people [00:11:00] in tangential, non-redundant.

Fields that don't perfectly overlap. Some of them are not even doctors, they're anthropologists, or they might be psychologists. They might be people with some knowledge about the area, but not a lot. But they're valuable because they throw a pebble in the pond. They change the way that particular issue is framed.

One of the things I was told as a, when I was in my twenties I had a chronic Stomach issue and it prevented me from eating all sorts of foods. And I remember someone saying to me, if you go to a gastroenterologist, that's fine. They'll deal with your stomach, but they just see you as one giant stomach.

And that's gonna be true about different specialists that they will see you in, in terms of whatever the lens is that they use to see the world. But you want people, specialists, from all sorts of different areas so that they all bring their own lens to the problem. And that's what CrowdMed does so successfully.

So good.

Mark Stinson, host: Then the last stage on habit. It's if we keep going to the well with the same old ideas about how to get unstuck, then we'll be [00:12:00] just as stuck. I love your the craftsmanship of the conclusion of the book, where it basically says, if you went through this whole book and just wrote down the idea practically on every page, there would be a hundred ways to get unstuck, and you basically list them.

That's right. It's almost like a randomized I could just turn to page 2 47 and get an idea to get unstuck right now. I love this craftsmanship of the writing.

Adam Alter, Author: Thank you. I appreciate it. Yeah, that, that's so the last section of the book is about what you can do, but really what you can do, as you've said is there are a lot of very discrete, specific techniques in the book, and I write about them in a way that tries to enliven them so that you can see how they're applied in different settings.

But when it, what it all boils down to is this hundred ways to get unstuck is this list of different techniques we can apply. And it's inevitable that if you have a hundred different things that you can apply to the problem. You're gonna find that there is some movement. And the last section in particular, the last chapter [00:13:00] is titled Action Above All because really what matters the most in the end is, are you acting?

Are you doing something? Because that's how you get unstuck. There's no way to get unstuck if you're not doing something. Yes. Folks,

Mark Stinson, host: my guest is Adam Al Alter. He's the author of a terrific new book called The Anatomy of a Breakthrough. Just release now from Simon and Schuster. And Adam, we'd like to talk a little bit about Creative Pod process on this podcast.

And I can only imagine as a creative and an author yourself, you must have been stuck along the way here. In the rollercoaster R of writing a book, where did you find your potholes and how did you push through them?

Adam Alter, Author: So here's my secret. It's maybe a little bit unusual, but I do get stuck certainly.

But what I have and what I've amassed over the last 20, 25 years is I have several documents where I collect good ideas over time. I talk about this in the book actually. So there's one version of the document that's about things that [00:14:00] I find interesting enough that they might one day appear in a book.

And if I said to you right now, here's a topic. Tell me everything you know that's interesting about that topic. It's very difficult to do that in a way that you could construct a book from. But if you spent 25 years, every time you see anything that's remotely interesting to you, compiling those ideas, when you go back to that and you draw from it, you'll find tremendous inspiration.

And so I talk about this keeping of a journal as a kind of long-term practice for Unsticking for those moments when it feels like you are mired in. A creative pit. And for me, that's been very helpful. And with this book, it was very helpful. I would, whenever I hit a roadblock, delve into that trove of ideas, and either combine two in a new way, recombination, or I would just find one idea that on its own inspired other ideas.

So I never found myself stuck for all that long.

Mark Stinson, host: And some of these might be concepts or principles or philosophies, but there are dozens of stories here. It must have been quite a challenge to collect and maybe I guess apply or [00:15:00] put the story next to the concept.

Adam Alter, Author: Yeah, that document is very long.

Certainly not everything in the document appears in the book, but there was plenty there and a lot of inspiration. And so I'd have a link, for example, I'd click on the link and I'd say, oh, that's right. I remember reading 10 years ago about this thing. I wonder what happened with that. And then I'd go down the rabbit hole for a few hours and then that would become an anecdote that I'd describe in the book.

Wonderful.

Mark Stinson, host: And I love Adam little. Small footnotes in these introductions and bios, including yours, that a couple of years back you were named the Professor of the Year by the faculty and students at the N Y U School of business there. What does it take to be so I, is it popularity? Is, certainly your rigor and your professorship, contributes to that.

But what is it that might elevate you and I guess by way of inspiration and encouragement to our listeners?

Adam Alter, Author: Yeah, so I do two things that I think have been very helpful in my teaching. One of them is a [00:16:00] version of what I've just described. So if, for teaching purposes, I have a document that is, Good business examples that I can teach MBA students, and so I draw them out whenever they're relevant to a topic and that way the class is just a series of what I think of as very rich vivid concrete anecdotes, one after another that illustrate the principles that I'm trying to discuss, because you can make a course unbelievably boring if you want to or if you don't, try very hard.

Everything that makes a course interesting is the examples. So you've gotta have strong examples and so I make a habit of that. But the other thing I do, we spoke about diversity in finding good ideas from the crowd. My students have to participate in the class. They get a participation grade for participating during the class itself.

They can also get points towards participation by sending me interesting things they find. So over the last 20 years, I've had hundreds of students effectively do my job for me by finding good examples and sharing those with me. And so now I've called it to the best examples, and the course is just a series of these.

What I think of is very [00:17:00] rich, vivid, engaging examples and that's helped a lot.

Mark Stinson, host: Yes. And certainly in the world of academia, but in publishing the idea of getting the work up and out, you finally say, this is good and it's good enough, or it's really reached this kind of confidence level that you're ready to hit the send button.

How do those pressures of being good and right, affect your

Adam Alter, Author: creativity? Yeah I've never really been paralyzed by the idea that anything that I do is the last word. I think some people sit and mull over things a lot, and there's perfectionism that goes into it. That's not really how the scientific process works, and it's never worked that way for me.

I think I'm lucky in that sense that I don't hold myself to the sort of perfect standard. Or standard of perfection. I just do my best. And at the point where I feel that something is ready, where it's rigorous enough that it passes, whatever my internal test might be, I unleash it. And if there are responses, I'll deal with those when they [00:18:00] come.

But yeah, you just have to have a sense of what's good enough, what feels right enough for you. And that's that in, I talk in the book about the difference between perfection and excellence. You've gotta try to be excellent, but if you try to be perfect, that's a bar that no one can quite reach.

And so that's not the right standard.

Mark Stinson, host: That's worth underscoring for our listeners. For sure. Let's go for excellence. Very good. Exactly. Adam, can't thank you enough for being on our program and congratulations on the

Adam Alter, Author: book release. Thank you so much. Thanks for your time, mark. I appreciate it.

Yeah, absolutely.

Mark Stinson, host: And I can't help but think that there must be a new file, a new document. What are some of the new ideas that you're percolating on that may or may not become a future book?

Adam Alter, Author: Yeah, there are so many of them. It's funny, they don't present themselves as a book, right?

They're just all these discreet, separate ideas, and it's only in reading them that I will go back and I'll say, oh, it turns out for the last 15, 20 years I've been thinking about this problem of how do we. How do we get moving again when we're stuck? And they don't. It's not like you have an idea and it says to you, I'm an idea that belongs in a book [00:19:00] about stuckness.

And I, until I go through that process, which I'll be going through soon, because I'm getting itchy to write another one, I don't have a good answer for you yet, but there are certainly lots of little individual nuggets in there.

Mark Stinson, host: We'll be coming back to you to find out what those are for sure.

Thank you. You've just uncovered a bad habit of mine and it's Hey, we're trying to celebrate a new book here. Don't ask me about the next book. It's like when I asked the songwriter, it's like, congratulations on the new song. Hey, what are you else

Adam Alter, Author: you working on? What's next? Yeah. Yeah. I do the same thing.

I totally understand that instinct and I also, I'm always thinking about what comes next. Yes, very good.

Mark Stinson, host: Listeners, my guest has been Adam Al Alter. He's a professor of marketing and psychology at the New York university Stern School of Business. He's just re released a wonderful new book called Anatomy of a Breakthrough.

Adam, thanks for being on our show.

Adam Alter, Author: Thanks again, mark. I appreciate it. And I'll put all

Mark Stinson, host: the links in the show notes so we can find the book, find your work, and follow what else is coming down the road. Perfect. Which I know will be fantastic too. Listeners, come back again next time. We've had [00:20:00] our creative journeys now, as I mentioned, almost 250 episodes, and we've been from New York to la.

We've been from Norway to South Africa, talking with creative practitioners about how they get unstuck, how they get inspired for new ideas and organized ideas, and most of all, gain the confidence and the connections, as we've talked about today, to get our workout into the world. Until next time. I'm Mark Stenson, and we're unlocking your world of creativity.

We'll see you next time