Episode 243
Adam Alter, Professor at NYU Stern and NYT Bestselling Author of "Anatomy of A Breakthrough"
In this podcast episode of "Unlocking Your World of Creativity," host Mark Stinson interviews Adam Alter, the author of the book "The Anatomy of a Breakthrough." The episode explores the concept of getting unstuck creatively and provides strategies to overcome creative blockages. Alter's book is well-researched and practical, focusing on four steps to getting unstuck: help, heart, head, and habit.
The first section, "Help," aims to demystify the experience of being stuck and emphasizes that it is a universal phenomenon. The subsequent sections provide strategies for addressing the emotional consequences of feeling stuck (heart), using cognitive strategies to get unstuck (head), and taking action to overcome stuckness (habit).
Alter highlights the experiences of well-known individuals like Harper Lee and George R. Martin, demonstrating that even highly successful and talented people face creative blockages. The discussion emphasizes the importance of understanding that being stuck is a common experience and that there are ways to overcome it.
The podcast also explores the concept of "lifequakes," major life-altering events that can contribute to feeling stuck. Alter references the work of Bruce Feiler, who emphasizes the universality of these changes and the need to navigate them effectively.
The episode further delves into the idea that creativity often involves recombination rather than radical originality. It highlights examples like Bob Dylan, who combined elements from different musical genres to create something new. Additionally, the benefits of crowdsourcing and diverse perspectives in overcoming creative blockages are discussed.
The final section of Alter's book, "Habit," emphasizes the need to break free from old ideas and explore new approaches to getting unstuck. The podcast concludes by highlighting the extensive list of techniques provided in the book, offering listeners numerous ways to overcome creative blockages.
Key Quotes from Adam Alter:
- "A lot of us don't fully understand what it is to be stuck. We seem to be blindsided by stuckness and by change... 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 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."
- "You want people, specialists, from all sorts of different areas so that they all bring their own lens to the problem." - Adam Alter
Adam Alter is a professor of marketing, and the Stansky Teaching Excellence Faculty Fellow at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He also holds an affiliated professorship in social psychology at NYU’s psychology department. In 2020 he was voted professor of the year by the faculty and student body at NYU’s Stern School of Business, and was among the Poets and Quants 40 Best Professors Under 40 in 2017. Alter is the New York Times bestselling author of two books: Drunk Tank Pink and Irresistible.
Copyright 2024 Mark Stinson
Transcript
auto generated transcript
Announcer: [: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.
y about ways to get unstuck, [: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.
each of those steps includes [: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.
tuck. And all of this really [: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.
rote To Kill a Mockingbird in: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.
nted, very successful people [: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.
down, and he merges them in [: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.
t, then we move to the head. [: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.
ine them in new ways. I talk [: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.
rowdsourcing as a way to get [: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.
eally trying to do is to get [: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.
nd it unlocks something new. [: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.
e people, you'll have people [: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.
o get unstuck, then we'll be [: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.
particular, the last chapter [: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.
ent that's about things that [: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.
t and maybe I guess apply or [: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?
y teaching. One of them is a [: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 [: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.
ll deal with those when they [: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?
idea that belongs in a book [: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
k again next time. We've had [: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
