Psychology Expert: How Colours, Your First Name And Your Location Might Be Ruining Your Life!

1. 0:00 – 2:47

   Intro

   1. AAAdam Alter0:00

      People are actually stuck in relationships, in jobs, financially stuck. Becoming much lonelier as a species, but there is a way to get unstuck.

   2. SBSteven Bartlett0:07

      And we're gonna find out right now. (reel rolling)

   3. AAAdam Alter0:09

      Adam Alter.

   4. SBSteven Bartlett0:11

      New York Times best-selling author and psychologist. This episode is for people who are stuck in their careers.

   5. AAAdam Alter0:16

      Relationship, or any aspect of life. And how to become unstuck. The career model for how we live our lives professionally is broken. As you specialize, you have less variety in what you do, and there's a massive rise in loneliness and depression and anxiety. And part of the reason for that is we don't share our stuckness, and they also have no idea how common it is.

   6. SBSteven Bartlett0:35

      So, what is the relationship between perseverance or knowing when to quit?

   7. AAAdam Alter0:38

      Research basically shows that it's a good idea to persevere beyond the point where you say, "This is hard, but then I feel stuck." How long you should do that is another question, and the best example of this is an idea known as the creative cliff illusion. And it's this illusion where you're ... That's when the good stuff comes, if you persevere.

   8. SBSteven Bartlett0:55

      How do you teach someone to be that kind of person?

   9. AAAdam Alter0:57

      There are two things. One thing is-

   10. SBSteven Bartlett1:00

       I remember reading about the studies where people would rather take an electric shock than to sit idly on their own.

   11. AAAdam Alter1:05

       It's a brilliant study. They've tried it already, so they know it hurts, but it's so aversive to just sit with our own thoughts for even half an hour, two-thirds of them go and start playing with this machine. So, what we found is that we don't pay enough attention to what will be good for us, and that's often when we get stuck.

   12. SBSteven Bartlett1:19

       What do we need to do then?

   13. AAAdam Alter1:20

       If you wanna be able to get unstuck quickly, the best thing you can do is-

   14. SBSteven Bartlett1:25

       Have you ever been stuck? Are you stuck in an area of your life right now? I think you are. And I say that because I think, to some degree, we all are. Some of us more than others. And that is exactly why I had to have this conversation with Adam Alter, the guy that literally wrote the book about being stuck, and how to know if you are, and maybe most importantly of all, how to get unstuck. Adam is a master of what he calls the art of the breakthrough, which is really looking at why some people fail, why they get stuck, and why others don't. He's also a genius when it comes to marketing and psychology. He's the professor of marketing and psychology at one of the top schools in America. He kinda just knows why people do what they do, and how to help them do something else. How do we know if the decisions we're making in our life right now, in all the areas of our life, are the right decisions or the wrong decisions? Adam has scientifically backed answers to all of these questions. He is refreshing, he is positive, and he is full of just as many important questions as he is valuable life-changing answers. I feel so much richer for having this conversation with Adam, and I know you will too. Enjoy. (instrumental music)

2. 2:47 – 3:22

   Who are you & what do you do?

   1. SBSteven Bartlett2:49

      Adam, from an academic standpoint, who are you?

   2. AAAdam Alter2:55

      I am a professor of marketing and psychology, so I'm very interested in business, but also interested in the psychological side of it, so how do consumers behave, how do they think, what do they buy, how do they spend their time and money, and other resources.

   3. SBSteven Bartlett3:08

      I'm incredibly interested and curious about all of your books. Specifically-

   4. AAAdam Alter3:16

      Thank you.

   5. SBSteven Bartlett3:16

      ... this book here, Anatomy of a Breakthrough, and also your, your first book,

3. 3:22 – 4:55

   Why did you write this book?

   1. SBSteven Bartlett3:22

      Drunk Tank Pink. Because this book helps people to get unstuck. Why did you decide to write a book called Anatomy of a Breakthrough? And, you know what, writing books takes a huge amount of time and effort, and you're a man that has many things he could be doing, so why was this so important that you chose to write about it?

   2. AAAdam Alter3:40

      It's something that I've been thinking about, in some form or another, for years. Lit- literally, I'd say 25 years. I- I- I've been stuck a lot in my life, and so even before I became intellectually interested in the topic, it was a factor that had had a big effect on the way I was living my life, and I wanted to understand whether there was maybe a road map that I could present to other people that would help them get unstuck. Um, but I think the real answer is, there was some research that I was doing in, I think this would've been in about 2005, and I found this really interesting cultural difference in how people anticipate or expect change in the world. And so what we found is that people in the West, people in places like the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, they tend to be blindsided by change. So if you give them five days in a row and you show that it's been rainy for five days or sunny for five days, they anticipate that that's gonna continue, and they- they think the same about the stock market and other- other variables that can shift or stay the same. But if you do that with people in East Asia, Japan, South Korea, China, when they see a pattern that's gone a particular way for a while, they think that it's about to change, and what that does is it means that they're much more nimble in the face of change, whereas in the West, people tend to be blindsided by it, and it makes us especially slow at coming to grips with the idea that the world's changed and we need

4. 4:55 – 5:51

   Common themes of feeling stuck

   1. AAAdam Alter4:55

      to pivot in order to get unstuck.

   2. SBSteven Bartlett4:57

      Can you give me, you know, the- the most popular examples of being stuck that my listeners now could relate to?

   3. AAAdam Alter5:06

      Yeah, I've been running this survey for about five years on people all around the world asking them, with that definition of stuckness, "Are you stuck in some way?" And I find that people usually within about 15 seconds start typing a response, which means that stuckness is very top of mind. And their responses vary. So some of them are financially stuck. They wanna be able to save or they wanna be able to earn more money. Some of them are stuck in relationships. Some are stuck in jobs. A lot of them are stuck quite narrowly in creative pursuits, like, "I'm trying to learn this piano piece," "I'm trying to learn this new art technique," "I'm a filmmaker and I can't come up with creative ideas," uh, "I'm a businessperson and I can't figure out what my next venture should be." So, there's a, there's a very broad range, um, and I find that almost everyone in at least one respect, with a bit of time, comes up with something. They say, "I'm

5. 5:51 – 8:11

   Is there a trend in who's getting stuck?

   1. AAAdam Alter5:51

      stuck in this way," and then they can express it.

   2. SBSteven Bartlett5:53

      Is there a trend in who's getting stuck?... more often.

   3. AAAdam Alter5:57

      Yeah, so I have a pet theory. I think, um, the kind of career model for- for how we live our lives professionally is broken for most people. I think what happens is as you specialize, you're supposed to get more and more narrow in what you do, and you have less variety in what you do. And that's how you get stuck, is by doing the same thing every day. And there's a huge amount of evidence for that in all sorts of different areas. Actuarial science, for me at least, very quickly put me into that little pigeon-holed spot where I felt I was getting trapped, and it was only going to increase. And so y- the thing I've done ever since is to try to create as much variety in my professional life as possible. Because then if you don't like aspect number one but you have nine other aspects to your job, you can go and do that for a- for a little while. And so bouncing around, I think, is critical for getting unstuck. Often very smart people get very, very interested in very narrow topics, and that's- that's essentially the definition of a PhD, is you spend a huge amount of time becoming an expert in a very narrow area. And I think that's fine for a PhD itself, but if you're gonna make a whole life out of doing that, I think if you're a restless, intellectually curious person, you're going to get stuck really fast.

   4. SBSteven Bartlett7:03

      You almost become a victim to being good at something in life, don't you, because you get promoted and promoted and promoted up in that direction, and your label, whatever it is, doctor, dentist, lawyer, becomes reinforced by your own success at that thing. And you can get 10 years down the line at something and go, "How the fuck am I living next to the office-

   5. AAAdam Alter7:21

      Yeah.

   6. SBSteven Bartlett7:21

      ... I'm a lawyer- doing law 14 hours a day. What happened to that violin I used to play?" And we become, you're right, we become really narrow individuals. And when you think about what a human is, we're so multifaceted, uh, especially when we're younger-

   7. AAAdam Alter7:35

      Yeah.

   8. SBSteven Bartlett7:35

      ... we're doing all of these things, it's a real shame.

   9. AAAdam Alter7:37

      I also think what happens is you get promoted, and it does get narrow, but it also changes. So the thing that you were really good at is no longer the thing that you're doing. And a lot of what happens in promotion, especially professionally, is you become a manager, and you manage people who do the thing you love instead of doing the thing you love. And so that's how you get stuck as well, is by- by being promoted out of the thing that got you passionate about what you were doing and being told "No." Instead you're gonna watch other people do the thing you love. Now you suddenly have to be a people manager, which some people like doing, but a lot don't. And so that's also inherent in the kind of professional models that we

6. 8:11 – 12:45

   How do we prevent being stuck?

   1. AAAdam Alter8:11

      have in hierarchical organizations.

   2. SBSteven Bartlett8:13

      This happens by, I guess in part by being a bit unconscious about what you want.

   3. AAAdam Alter8:19

      Yeah.

   4. SBSteven Bartlett8:20

      And you just kind of take what you're given. So you take the promotion, and you take this, and you take the- the relocation to this place, and ... H- how do we prevent that happening?

   5. AAAdam Alter8:28

      I- I think that's the job of people who write about these subjects, right? And that- that's kind of what I saw as- as the mission for this book, was to try to say, y- you know, if you don't want to be stuck or if you want to be able to get unstuck quickly, there's a set of questions you can ask yourself. And let me just lay them out for you. Here they are. In fact, the last thing in the book is 100 ways to get unstuck, it's just a digestion of all these ideas. And I think those are questions that people don't often ask themselves, you're right. There's this sort of accidental way that we live our lives and we take what's given, and if someone says, "Here's a promotion," you hear that word and you grab onto it and you- you ride it as far as you can. But, um, I- I think it's- it's easy to be a little bit mindless about where your life takes you. And- and sometimes that's fine, but in a lot of cases it's not. And the book tries... In- in the book, I try to distinguish those cases from- from, uh, each other, like when should you let life lead you and when should you be a little more purposeful.

   6. SBSteven Bartlett9:22

      On- on that exact point, I've- I've mulled over the last couple of weeks this idea that there's kind of two narratives that prevail in our lives, kind of two instructors. One of them is th- this external narrative, it could come from your parents or society's expectation of you taking that promotion, or thinking that that job is a admirable job for you to take so you take it. That's the external narrative. Then the other narrative, if I can call it that, is how you feel.

   7. AAAdam Alter9:48

      Yeah.

   8. SBSteven Bartlett9:49

      And I think we're- we're conditioned to care more about that external narrative 'cause the rewards seem to be more aligned with the external narrative than, like, how you feel. 'Cause if people really were orientated by how they felt in that job, in that relationship, in that city, whatever, in that course at university, um, they would make significantly different decisions. But we always... We... It's almost like we've tuned out of that.

   9. AAAdam Alter10:12

      Yeah. I- I- I think the problem is that humans don't know how they feel in isolation as well. If I took you and put you in a room for a week and said, "You can have food and water and you can have your thoughts," and I took you out after a week and said, "So what are you thinking? Like, what's real, what's not real? What do you believe? What are your preferences and values?" You'd struggle. It's really... There's a lot of really interesting evidence that if you isolate humans they don't really know what to do with themselves. So tho- those external forces, that there's a kind of permeability between what I'm feeling inside my head and thinking and what these other forces are suggesting to me. So I- I think, I think it's totally true that we don't pay enough attention to what will be good for us separate from what other people think we should be doing, but I also don't even think many of us know the answers to those questions. Not all the time, but about a lot of things. Like I know deep somewhere I know that I love to draw, that I'm- I'm at peace when I'm drawing and painting. I haven't done that for a really long time, I'm too busy, to your point, of being too focused, but I know that that's something that preference-wise I love doing. But the- then the question, should I make my career and my life about that? The only way I knew how to answer that was by speaking to lots of people who said it's very difficult to become an artist, here's the path, it's probably gonna be hard to make any money, so keep it as a hobby. But- but knowing just based on my feelings what to do, I wouldn't have known what to do as a young person. And so I think that's- that's part of the problem is that it's not just that we're silly for kind of paying attention to others, it's also that I don't even know if we know in isolation without those inputs what the right kinds of paths are.

   10. SBSteven Bartlett11:48

       You said about putting me in a room and leaving me with my thoughts, that sounded like hell.

   11. AAAdam Alter11:51

       It does, yeah (laughs) .

   12. SBSteven Bartlett11:52

       And there's... I- I remember reading about the studies where people would rather take an electric shock-... than to sit idly on their own.

   13. AAAdam Alter12:00

       Yeah.

   14. SBSteven Bartlett12:00

       And they tested people, and they said, "Would you rather take an electric shock or sit here for a couple of minutes on your own?" And people took the... (laughs)

   15. AAAdam Alter12:07

       It's a, it's a brilliant study. I mean, the way they set it up is brilliant because they get you to sit in this room, and they do it with men and women. They're mostly college undergrads, (laughs) and they say to them, "You're just gonna be sitting here for half an hour." There's a little machine in the corner. It delivers electric shocks. They've tried it already, so they know it hurts. It doesn't feel good. And they're told, you know, "You can sit with your thoughts, or, you know, the machine's there if you wanna go and use it," which is a bizarre thing to say to people. And they sit there for a while, and time passes, and, uh, the vast majority of them go, I think it's two-thirds of them go and start playing with this machine. It, it's so aversive to just sit with our own thoughts for even half an hour that we need stimulation,

7. 12:45 – 13:41

   Your biggest learning about humans getting distracted

   1. AAAdam Alter12:45

      even if it's negative stimulation.

   2. SBSteven Bartlett12:47

      And you wrote a book about this, this subject matter about addiction and screens and all of these things.

   3. AAAdam Alter12:51

      Yeah.

   4. SBSteven Bartlett12:51

      This, this so- sort of incessant need for distraction that we seem to have developed. What was your biggest sort of takeaway and learning from that process of putting that book together?

   5. AAAdam Alter13:00

      I, I think the biggest thing for me was I'd always imagined that addiction and the need for this kind of stimulation was a sort of personality thing. Like, you, you either have that personality or you don't. But I became absolutely convinced by, not only by the book and what I was researching, but by understanding how many of us fall prey to these devices, that this is universal. It's just about being human, that if you know how to push the right buttons in a human, you can turn that human, as you can with rats and monkeys and other animals, into a, into a bit of a fiend for whatever the thing is that it needs. And the people who design the platforms that we use are so good at that job, and they have so much data to, to perfect what they've done, that ultimately the platforms they design for us are, are like

8. 13:41 – 15:24

   How people behave differently in the presence of others

   1. AAAdam Alter13:41

      crack. They're very, very difficult for us to resist.

   2. SBSteven Bartlett13:44

      You talk about in Drunk Tank Pink how people behave differently when they're in the presence of others, and I found that really, really curious. Could you just give me a flavor of the, some of the studies and insights you gained from that? Because that kind of links to what you were saying there about how living behind screens might decay our humanity a little bit.

   3. AAAdam Alter14:02

      Yeah, well, I think part of it is just that the best versions of ourselves come out when we're around other people. Um, we are much, much more likely to be civil and decent to other people when they're around, when we see them and when we spend time around them. That kind of shared social space is really important. It, it's also really interesting. When we're around other people, um, we, we tend to default to the thing that we are most like, likely to do in any moment. Um, so there's a lot of good evidence for this. Like, if you, if you take a champion cyclist, you put him or her on a bike, a, a stationary bike, that person will go faster in the presence of other people than alone. And there's something about this kind of, they call it latent energy. This is a very old psychological study that talks about latent energy that is liberated from us when we're in the presence of other people. So, if you're trying to learn something new, you know, imagine you're in class at school, and there's a teacher who's staring over your shoulder. That's terrible because we don't really know how to take on board new information. We're just overwhelmed by the cognitive load of that experience. But if it's something you're good at, you will be extra good at it in front of other people. There's something about being energized by others.

   4. SBSteven Bartlett15:11

      So if I work out with someone, then I'm more likely to...

   5. AAAdam Alter15:14

      You'll lift more. You'll run faster and so on, yeah, pretty reliably.

   6. SBSteven Bartlett15:19

      In that book as well, um, before we get on to Being Unstuck, there were some other things that I found really curious that I was

9. 15:24 – 19:57

   Our names have a huge impact on our outcomes

   1. SBSteven Bartlett15:24

      keen to ask you about. Um, this is your... That was your first book, Drunk Tank Pink. You, you say how our names have a huge bearing on our outcomes across various facets of our life.

   2. AAAdam Alter15:35

      Yeah.

   3. SBSteven Bartlett15:36

      That's quite, it's quite shocking to me because-

   4. AAAdam Alter15:38

      (laughs)

   5. SBSteven Bartlett15:38

      ... our name is something that we don't choose, and it seems to be so simple and slightly irrelevant.

   6. AAAdam Alter15:42

      Yeah.

   7. SBSteven Bartlett15:43

      Is it-

   8. AAAdam Alter15:43

      Yeah. It's, it's true. I mean, there are lots of different ways names influence us. Um, one of these little demonstrations that I do when I give talks on this subject is I'll, I'll present the letters of the Roman alphabet, the 26 letters that we, we understand to be the letters in the English language, and I'll ask people to think about their three favorite letters. And then I say, "Now, put your hand up in the room if one of those at least was the first letter of your first name, middle name, or last name," and almost every hand goes up. So, these are letters. Who has preferences for letters? It's a bizarre thing to have to answer, but we do, and it's because there's... the- these letters are such a strong expression of who we are. It's a, it's a part of our ego that's contained in the letters of our name. And so even that alone shows the power of names over us, that they are such a strong reflection of who we are and our i- our identity. Uh, so that's the first thing, and you find interesting effects from this actually. If you look at the hurricanes that we name in the US or that you name around the world in other places, you get much more donation aid if the hurricane name matches your initial. So, they've found that when Hurricane Katrina came through and devastated New Orleans, people whose names began with a K donated way more than people whose names didn't begin with a K. The same for a whole lot of other hurricanes with other initials. The other big thing is the ease with which people can pronounce your name. So that seems to have a really big effect on all sorts of outcomes. If people can pronounce your name, there's this kind of sense of familiarity. It... if that's... the, the breaking of the ice happens over that first pronunciation of your name. Obviously, the easier it is to say the name, the less anxiety you have about it, I guess the more smoothly that breaking of the ice goes. And there's a lot of evidence. Um, from some of my own research, we looked, for example, at how quickly people rise up through law firm hierarchies, how quickly do they become partners. And there's a period in the middle of careers, in like the f- about the tenth to the twentieth year of a career for a lawyer, where there's a premium. You are much more likely to become a partner, several percent more likely to become a partner earlier if your name is pronounceable. And I think what's, what's happening there is, if I'm a partner at a firm and there are a whole lot of young associates and I'm trying to put together a team, if there's someone with a name that's easy to pronounce and someone whose name I'm anxious about pronouncing, I don't know how to pronounce it, I will default to the one who's easy to pronounce. I'm not trying to be rude about it, but in that moment, it just seems easier. It's the path of least resistance, and that's how humans act much of the time.

   9. SBSteven Bartlett18:06

      Is there not an element of, um, discrimination and prejudice associated with that? Because I think if a name was easier to pronounce, it's probably familiar. It's therefore probably...... culturally popular. They're probably like me, you know, like a Jack or like a Stephen. But if it's a, a name that I've not seen, uh, trying to figure out causality here, uh, it could be because they're foreign. You know, my mother, I always think about this, my mother's from Nigeria, and she could have given me a, like a traditionally Nigerian name-

   10. AAAdam Alter18:35

       Right.

   11. SBSteven Bartlett18:36

       ... but she called me Stephen. And I think, you know, I was also born in Botswana in Africa. Um, I think had she called me something else, my life probably would've been quite different, in all honesty. I, you know, I worked for four years on, on phones doing, like, telesales.

   12. AAAdam Alter18:51

       Yeah.

   13. SBSteven Bartlett18:52

       And when you call up and your name is Stephen in the UK, and you sound like I do-

   14. AAAdam Alter18:57

       Yeah.

   15. SBSteven Bartlett18:58

       ... I think any prejudice someone might have had because of the color of my skin or where I'm from, um, vanishes. Is there any evidence to support that?

   16. AAAdam Alter19:06

       Yeah. So there are two things. One thing is absolutely the prejudice that goes along with having a foreign-sounding name. Uh, and there's evidence, for example, in the United States, there's a, a study where thousands of CVs were mailed out and applications for jobs either with a traditionally white name or a traditionally Black name, as we think of them in the United States based on the demographic naming trends. And especially for the ones that were kind of in the middle of the pack, not especially strong and not especially weak, there's a huge premium to having the traditionally white name. So there's a lot of prejudice that goes on with naming. But also in the studies we did, we wanted to partial out this specific effect of fluency, of how easy it was to pronounce, so we restricted our analysis in the one case to just white lawyers who were born in that particular country. And so you find the same effect even there, that the white lawyers with white names that were easier to

10. 19:57 – 24:11

    How does our environment affect our outcomes?

    1. AAAdam Alter19:57

       pronounce tended to do a little bit better. But you're right, I think a huge part of it is prejudice and discrimination.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett20:02

       What about our environment, our surroundings? How does that have an impact on how we're feeling and our behavior from, from what you learned writing your first book?

    3. AAAdam Alter20:10

       Yeah. So I focused a lot on, uh, physical environments, things like natural environments, the power of nature to, to replenish us in general. Which, which sounds like a kind of non-scientific idea, but there's a huge amount of science to this idea that if you happen to spend a lot of time in urban environments, and then you go to a place where you have, say, a running stream or wind through the leaves on a tree or something like that, it's deeply replenishing. It, it, it has all sorts of a- amazing psychological and emotional effects. Um, I- I was also very, very interested in the effects of, uh, of the weather and of colors around us and how those shape our, our experiences of the world. So there's a, some of it's not all that surprising, but, uh, you, you see even in baseball matches in the United States, when the game is being played on a warmer night, there is more aggressive behavior. Um, you see huge rises in crime, things like that, on hot nights. Um, and then with colors, you know, that's really the centerpiece of the book. I'm colorblind, so I've always been fascinated by color. But the title of the book, Drunk Tank Pink, is specifically about this color that is used to paint the inside of jail cells in some places, and it's a color that's supposed to pacify people. It's like this bright bubble gum pink color. And they found quite a lot of evidence for the last 30 or 40 years now that there's something about this color that does seem to calm people down, at least initially.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett21:28

       Pink.

    5. AAAdam Alter21:29

       It's bright bubble gum pink, yeah.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett21:31

       And it sedates people?

    7. AAAdam Alter21:33

       Briefly, and then they go... Th- then there's a backlash effect, but yeah. (laughs)

    8. SBSteven Bartlett21:36

       Oh, really?

    9. AAAdam Alter21:37

       Yeah. They've found that if you leave people in there for too long a- app- apparently there's a, a backlash. Yeah.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett21:42

        Hitchhikers should wear red.

    11. AAAdam Alter21:45

        Yeah. This is, uh, this is research looking at how, how essentially attractive we are to other people depending on the colors we're wearing. Um, and the, the early studies were done on online dating platforms where you have the same picture of a person and you, you Photoshop the shirt they're wearing. This is true for men and women, and it doesn't matter whether they're trying to attract men or women. But there's something about the color red in particular that's really attractive to humans, and actually to other animals too. Um, and when you see the color red, it, it inspires a kind of approach-oriented behavior. So where you might have passed that person by if you're thinking about dating apps and you're swiping, there's something about the color red that s- that slows you down and attracts you. And in the context of hitchhiking, it has a similar effect, especially when you, you have a heterosexual male driving and you have a woman wearing a red shirt. You get a very strong effect.

    12. SBSteven Bartlett22:33

        So if I'm trying to find a girlfriend or boyfriend, you're saying...

    13. AAAdam Alter22:38

        Make sure they're not wearing red. (laughs)

    14. SBSteven Bartlett22:40

        (laughs) Make sure they're not wearing red.

    15. AAAdam Alter22:41

        Well, if they're wearing red, you've gotta ask yourself, am I attracted to the red shirt or am I attracted to the person? Whereas if they're wearing another color, it's much more likely to be an unbiased, unvarnished opinion of them.

    16. SBSteven Bartlett22:51

        But if I want to attract the opposite sex-

    17. AAAdam Alter22:52

        Oh, if you want to attract-

    18. SBSteven Bartlett22:53

        Really.

    19. AAAdam Alter22:53

        ... wear red, yeah. (laughs)

    20. SBSteven Bartlett22:54

        Okay. That's useful to know.

    21. AAAdam Alter22:57

        Yeah. (laughs)

    22. SBSteven Bartlett22:58

        I am not single, but, um-

    23. AAAdam Alter23:00

        (laughs)

    24. SBSteven Bartlett23:00

        ... but if I ever happened to be.

    25. AAAdam Alter23:02

        If one... Yeah. (laughs)

    26. SBSteven Bartlett23:03

        Yeah, yeah. Oh, but even for your partner, this is probably why Conor McGregor has this famous saying where he says, "It's red panty night."

    27. AAAdam Alter23:08

        (laughs) Oh, right.

    28. SBSteven Bartlett23:09

        So when he wins a fight, he, I think he said it on the microphone to Joe Rogan, he said, "Oh, it's red panty night tonight," which means that h- him and his wife are gonna be intimate tonight.

    29. AAAdam Alter23:16

        Yeah, yeah.

    30. SBSteven Bartlett23:16

        But red is always s- for whatever reason in, in society been seductive, hasn't it?
11. 24:11 – 25:39

    How do I know I'm stuck?

    1. SBSteven Bartlett24:11

       Thank you. Thank you so much. Back to the episode. So getting, getting to the topic of being unstuck then, which is what y-... the anatomy of a breakthrough is all about. What does it feel like when someone is stuck? So how do I know if I'm stuck? Is there an emotional sort of, you know, sensation?

    2. AAAdam Alter24:27

       Yeah, it's an interesting question. So, it's- it's subjective. You know if you're stuck, you can feel it because you could be in the same situation and not feel stuck. I'll give you a good example of this. I had a conversation with Malcolm Gladwell, who was telling me about his dad, who was a math professor. And his dad was trying to solve a math conundrum for 30 years. By external definitions, he was stuck for 30 years because he couldn't solve this math puzzle, which is a common experience for- for math professors, I imagine. But he loved it. He didn't think of himself as being stuck. That, for him, was the process, that was why he went to work, and why he kept doing what he was doing. And so, you know, I- if I thought about being stuck in something and not making meaningful progress, objectively, for 30 years, the idea drives me crazy. But for his dad, for Malcolm's dad, that- that was something that was really appealing. He- he really enjoyed that process. And so I think a lot of- of dealing with being stuck, at first, is getting your head around what it means to be stuck and figuring out that usually it's not as big a deal as it seems it might be. And once you come to grips with the emotional part of it, you can usually bring some sort of strategies and actions to bear and- and to start to move yourself. I'm convinced of that, and that's- that's why I write the book, 'cause I think

12. 25:39 – 29:34

    What's the difference between being stuck and quitting?

    1. AAAdam Alter25:39

       there is a way to get unstuck in almost every case.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett25:42

       What is the, in your view, the relationship between perseverance, becoming unstuck or knowing when to quit?

    3. AAAdam Alter25:47

       Yeah. I mean, there's a- there's an amazing cottage industry on both sides of that spectrum, of books that are being written that I think are excellent books that make the case for- for both of those ends of the spectrum. You've got Angela Duckworth's Grit, which is all about sticking through and- and continuing on, and I think Anatomy of a Breakthrough leans in that direction. And then you've got Annie Duke who wrote the book Quit, which is about quitting, the fact that we've got so many options all the time, most of us, why would you keep doing the thing you're doing if it's not working out for you? You should probably do something else. Now they're both very sophisticated thinkers. They wouldn't say you should always persevere or always quit. But it's a great question. How do you know when you are stuck that it's time to persevere versus time to quit? And I- I think it's worth thinking about A, the opportunity cost. So what are you leaving behind? Is there something else that's very obvious that would be an easy thing to jump to that would require leaving behind the thing that's making you stuck? And if that idea seems really appealing, as it did for me when I was doing actuarial science and wanted to jump away from that, then you should probably consider moving on. But the- the research basically shows that almost always it's a good idea to persevere beyond the point where you say, "This is hard and it's not feeling good and I feel stuck." How long you should do that is another question. I think one of the- the guides that should- should be useful in determining that is to ask yourself if there's an end state that I'm trying to approach, am I getting closer to it across time? You know, if I'm- I'm learning a new skill, is the delta between where I am and where I'd like to be shrinking over time, the- the gap between those two shrinking? Or is it staying the same or is it even getting larger? And if it's staying the same or getting larger, then I'm probably not getting closer, and that's- that's a good s- a good indication that I should probably quit. It's time to move on.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett27:28

       I've thought a lot about this, and in my last book I wrote a chapter about quitting and I was trying to figure out why I- I appear to be quite a good quitter.

    5. AAAdam Alter27:36

       Mm-hmm.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett27:36

       I'm well known for quitting school, my first company, my second company, um, university after one lecture, and this is the quitting framework I tried to draw- draw up.

    7. AAAdam Alter27:46

       Okay.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett27:46

       So I'm gonna just slide it across the- the desk.

    9. AAAdam Alter27:48

       Yeah, yeah.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett27:48

        And please ask me if you've got any questions, and then I'll... (laughs)

    11. AAAdam Alter27:51

        Okay.

    12. SBSteven Bartlett27:51

        So there's two kind of routes you can go down the quitting framework. Is it, are you thinking of quitting 'cause it's hard? You're running a marathon, it's the last mile-

    13. AAAdam Alter27:57

        Yeah.

    14. SBSteven Bartlett27:57

        ... of the race. It's hard, but it's worth it.

    15. AAAdam Alter27:58

        Yup.

    16. SBSteven Bartlett27:59

        So if it's hard and it's not worth it, quit.

    17. AAAdam Alter28:01

        Mm-hmm.

    18. SBSteven Bartlett28:01

        If it's hard and it's worth it, stay the course. Um, going down the other side of the sucks. That could be a relationship, a place you're living, the job you have as an actor or whatever.

    19. AAAdam Alter28:09

        Yeah.

    20. SBSteven Bartlett28:09

        Um...

    21. AAAdam Alter28:11

        So- so this- this framework seems to me unassailable. In other words, there's nothing, I can't imagine that anything here could be disagreed with, 'cause it makes total sense.

    22. SBSteven Bartlett28:19

        And it's nice and broad. (laughs)

    23. AAAdam Alter28:20

        It's- it's nice and broad, right. Yeah, you can imagine any situation being folded into it. I, the other thing I quite like about it is that, uh, this distinction between it's just hard and it sucks is- is very central to a lot of the ideas in- in my book. And I think if something sucks, it's emotionally unrewarding and you hate it and you're grinding through it, most of the time you should quit. And- and you have here this one limb to your model that says if you can make it suck less, continue on. Very often-

    24. SBSteven Bartlett28:46

        Marriage counseling.

    25. AAAdam Alter28:47

        Yeah, right.

    26. SBSteven Bartlett28:48

        Speaking to your boss.

    27. AAAdam Alter28:48

        Right, exactly. And so there's- there's great value in asking that question. But, uh, the "it's just hard" part I'm focusing on because a huge part of this book is about how hardship is the first step in making something good.

    28. SBSteven Bartlett29:01

        Yeah.

    29. AAAdam Alter29:02

        Good stuff happens when things are hard, and because we're human and we have been evolutionarily, I don't know, penned into this situation where hardship is seen as a problem, like we're using too many resources, don't do something that's harder than it needs to be, we're very used to that. That's not true about everything we do, but it's true about enough things that we misinterpret hardship or hardness for being a problem. Whereas in many domains, the good stuff only happens almost every time after it gets hard.

    30. SBSteven Bartlett29:31

        Mm.
13. 29:34 – 31:37

    More failures correlate with more success

    1. AAAdam Alter29:34

       for human growth and- and otherwise.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett29:36

       In your book you talk about how, you know, you kind of debunk the idea that young people, um, start the best, most culturally valuable companies. We tend to think that it's like 21-year-olds in their bedroom that are starting all the great tech companies, for example. But you show that a couple of failures is actually seems to correlate with success.

    3. AAAdam Alter29:58

       Yeah.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett29:59

       And there's a, you know, that whole section felt like a bit of a narrative shift.

    5. AAAdam Alter30:04

       Yeah. I mean it was, it was a, it was a big thing for me that, um...You know, o- one of the ideas that's very prominent in my field is this availability heuristic. It's this idea that you pay a lot of attention to what's most available in the world. This is an old idea from, uh, from Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky, behavioral decision researchers. And, um, the thing that we see a lot of is very successful young people, because they're interesting. They're fascinating stories. So you, you, you're interested in them, and a lot of the biggest companies, I think, are run, especially tech companies, by quite young CEOs or people who began when they were young. And so, we fixate on them, and they're available in our minds. We see documentaries about them. We read about them all the time. But they're, they're vanishingly rare. And so what you find is that the, the age to begin a company, if you want to maximize success, if you look at the age of the CEOs who tend to be very, very successful, we're talking, like, mid-40s. That's the sweet spot. Mid-40s, even into 50s. And th- the thing that distinguishes a 22-year-old from a 45-year-old is, as you said, partly failure, that by the time you are 45, you've doubled how long you've been alive. You've had a lot of time to fail and to come back from that. And so if you're still creating companies, you've learned something along the way. But also, your life is deeply rich at that point in a way that it isn't necessarily as a 22-year-old. You've got a lot of other stuff going on. Good stuff and bad stuff maybe, and maybe complicated stuff. But all of it is kind of adding a spice to the mix that I think makes your ideas thicker in some way, and, and makes you, I think, better at making certain calculations that maybe when you're younger you don't have

14. 31:37 – 36:36

    Why curiosity is a superpower

    1. AAAdam Alter31:37

       all the information for. And so that's what you find.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett31:40

       Who's more creative, young people or middle-aged people or old people?

    3. AAAdam Alter31:43

       It's interesting. So, eh, young people ... A- and I'm thinking especially about kids, 'cause I have a five-year-old and a seven-year-old. Um, they are phenomenally creative, and in part they're creative 'cause they don't accept anything.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett31:57

       (laughs)

    5. AAAdam Alter31:57

       They're c- curious about everything. My kids will not ask a question without a follow-up, or five, or 10, or 20 follow-ups, right? Nothing is okay until we've explored it to the ends of the earth. And that's amazing, and that's why kids learn so much so quickly. They take nothing for granted. There's no such thing as common wisdom to a kid, right? You can say, "Everyone does it this way," and they'll be like, "Why?" But you say that to an adult, most of us say, "Oh, okay." We assume that what's the done thing, the, the way the herd is behaving is that way for a reason, even though often it's just accidental, or it's just the easiest thing, or whatever. And so I think very, very young people are tremendously creative because they push back a lot. But one of the really interesting things for me w- in this book is that I found people from young adulthood all the way through to m- very old adulthood, um, very later in their lives, who are experimentalists by nature. They take nothing for granted, and they constantly question. And so they are way more creative because they ask more questions. But then they, then they say, "Okay, so here are 10 options. How do I know which one's the best? I'm gonna inhabit each one for two months, and then, you know, in, in two years I'll know the answer." And they, they do this serially. And some of them become Olympic athletes, even if they don't physically have the stature for it, 'cause they're so good at finding new techniques. I talk about one of them in the book. Some of them become business titans because they say that, "Everyone else is doing this thing and assuming it's right. Here's a different thing that's way better, and I know that 'cause I've tried all the other options." And, and they, they end up being really successful because that curiosity that you have in childhood, when you carry it over into adulthood, it's kind of like a superpower. And so I, I think, um, it's more about the, the questions you ask than your age.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett33:40

       I, I couldn't agree more, and it's one of the most ... the things I, I constantly am trying to figure out how to get my team When you said to me that there's a group of ... there's a certain type of person that just continues to keep asking why as they age, I was like, "Can you introduce me?"

    7. AAAdam Alter33:52

       Yeah. (laughs)

    8. SBSteven Bartlett33:53

       Because I'd love to hire them.

    9. AAAdam Alter33:54

       Yeah.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett33:54

        Because that's exactly ... You think about what innovation is at its core, and it's that, that reject, that kind of rejection of convention.

    11. AAAdam Alter34:00

        Yeah.

    12. SBSteven Bartlett34:01

        And that harder road, which is to try and reason up from first principles, per se.

    13. AAAdam Alter34:06

        Yeah.

    14. SBSteven Bartlett34:07

        Um, you mentioned an athlete.

    15. AAAdam Alter34:09

        Yeah.

    16. SBSteven Bartlett34:09

        Who were you referring to?

    17. AAAdam Alter34:11

        Yes. There's an athlete named Dave Berkoff. He was a, an Olympic athlete in the 1988 and '92 games. Uh, '88 in Seoul and '92 in Barcelona. He's a, uh, a backstroke swimmer. He swims the 100-meter brack- backstroke, and then some of the medley races. And, uh, I spoke to him for a while on the phone to understand his experiences because he, um, he, he doesn't look like a lot of other backstroke swimmers. They tend to be very, very tall. The average world record-holder is 6'3" to 6'4", so quite tall. He's about 5'10", which is a big difference in, in professional avenues if you're thinking about, uh, Olympic athletes. And, um, when he was, when he was a student in the mid-'80s, he was at Harvard, which is not a place you really go if you're gonna be a champion swimmer. It's a place you go for intellectual experiences, but it's not the best athletic school, generally speaking. But he had a coach there who encouraged him to be curious, to ask a lot of questions. And Berkoff was naturally like this. So he, he would say to his coach, "Why would I ... Why do I need to swim that way? Like, why don't I try, like, 10 other ways to swim? Let's tweak my technique in all these different ways and see what works best." And what he ended up doing was he discovered that you swim about 80 ... I think it's like 88% faster when you're fully submerged under the water than when half of your body is above the water and half is below, which makes total sense from a physics perspective. But most backstroke swimmers, the way they swim is they push off the wall, and the minute they do that, their body starts to fight for oxygen because they're under the water. And so your instinct is to pop up as quickly as possible. But if you can train yourself to deal with the oxygen dep- deprivation, you stay under water for longer and you swim much faster. So Berkoff developed this technique called the Berkoff Blast-off, it was known as, where he would swim underwater for the first 40 meters of 100-meter race, so 40% of the race, almost half of the ... uh, almost a full lap of the Olympic pool. And then he would come up for air and then he would keep swimming. And he broke world records. He wasn't the best swimmer in terms of his physique, but he was the best swimmer strategically. And he had spent years experimenting to find this technique.And then, of course, all the other athletes saw the same thing, and they started doing the same thing. And so it became more competitive. But in the interim, he won gold medals at- at two Olympic games. He won, um, a bronze. He was the world record holder multiple times. So, you know, th- that questioning led someone who, in certain respects, at least physically, shouldn't have

15. 36:36 – 45:55

    How do we make people more curious?

    1. AAAdam Alter36:36

       been the world record holder, to be just that.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett36:38

       The question I ask is, how do you teach someone to be that kind of person? How do you teach someone to be more experimental, and to m- be more curious, and to ask why more? Because just from my observation, from what I've seen over the last, I don't know, 10 years in business, when I think about all the teams I've had and all the people we've hired, which is more than a thousand, some people just have it.

    3. AAAdam Alter36:59

       Yeah.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett36:59

       Some people just have a, almost like a cognitive b- default towards being curious about a- the possibility of a better way. And then some people, regardless of how many times you s- you- you ask for that behavior, or you might write it on the wall, or you might say that it's our values, they just don't naturally demonstrate that curiosity.

    5. AAAdam Alter37:19

       Yeah. I mean, there's an individual difference variable that you're describing that's real. And- and with every construct, when we talk about a desirable human trait, there's gonna be variance, right? Creativity, uh, addictive personality, and so on. All of these things are gonna vary on a spectrum. Some things that are educable, you can- you can sort of teach them, you can make people better at them. So, if you're at a 3 out of 10, you could become a 6 out of 10, or maybe even a 7 out of 10. Uh, this curiosity question though, I think... And I say this as an educator, I think it can be taught. And I- I think that's essentially what we try to do a lot of the time. That's... My course, I teach a marketing course, it's maybe three months long. If you only come out of that course with one thing, it's to know the right questions to ask. You know, if you're in a business and you're trying to promote a product, or an idea, or to create a new product, I want you- not necessarily to know the answer, but at least to know what the questions should be. And so I think it's the job of educators, the job of books, the job of whatever information you get in the world, to train you in that direction. And so if I were gonna say there's one thing we should train people in a business context, you know, if you have a new employee, it's certainly the on the- on the job stuff is important, you know, like learn the skills that are important to the specific job if there are technical skills. But the most important general skill, know the right questions to ask and constantly ask. So here's one way you do that, is you say, "I want you to- to look at this thing," whatever this thing is. Um, it could be, it could be your framework that you showed me, the quitting framework. I would take everyone who I'm considering hiring and, as a diagnostic tool, I'd have them look at it and say, "Tell me one thing that's not right with the framework, or that you think could be improved. Do it again now. Give me a second thing. What about a third thing?" And if they can't do it the first time, coach them through it. Work- work through it with them. But don't just do it with your framework, do it with... Find 10 ad campaigns. Say, "Imagine you're the chief marketing officer at this company. What's one thing you could do differently that maybe isn't better, but at least is worth asking? Let's ask that question." And- and if you do that enough times, everyone becomes more curious. It becomes the habit. It's the way you interact with the world. So I think it, to a large extent, can be taught.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett39:28

       That's the, that's kind of the thing I- I was reflecting on is, do you have to even tell someone to look at the framework and then find something better? 'Cause I'm in search of the person that looks at the framework and goes, "Steve, I found something better."

    7. AAAdam Alter39:39

       I th- those people are amazing. They-

    8. SBSteven Bartlett39:41

       They are. They do exist.

    9. AAAdam Alter39:42

       They do exist. And I- I found some of them. And that- that's- that's Dave Berkoff, right?

    10. SBSteven Bartlett39:46

        Mm-hmm.

    11. AAAdam Alter39:46

        No one said to him, "You have to question whether e- the way everyone swims, the backstroke, is the best way." Uh, and I found a few people like that. But they are vanishingly rare. There aren't that many of them who really make that their kind of life's philosophy-

    12. SBSteven Bartlett39:59

        Hmm.

    13. AAAdam Alter39:59

        ... experimentalism as a philosophy. But there are some. A lot of them actually end up going into academia and into science because they want to know-

    14. SBSteven Bartlett40:07

        They want to know.

    15. AAAdam Alter40:07

        ... the answers.

    16. SBSteven Bartlett40:07

        Yeah. Yeah.

    17. AAAdam Alter40:08

        They w- they just want to know. They're curious to the ends of the earth. But for the rest, the other 99% of people who aren't like that, I think you can lift them all up from a 3 out of 10, 4 out of 10, to a 7 or an 8.

    18. SBSteven Bartlett40:20

        Mm-hmm.

    19. AAAdam Alter40:20

        Maybe not a 9 or a 10. But if your whole workforce is people who are a 7 or an 8 out of 10 on curiosity, it's much better than having them mostly at a 3. So I think you can move the needle a little bit.

    20. SBSteven Bartlett40:31

        And those, that small minority tend to l- provide so much value for the less experimental majority.

    21. AAAdam Alter40:41

        Yeah.

    22. SBSteven Bartlett40:41

        You know? Like, 'cause I- I think about we have this gr- group in all of my companies called Ever-Changing Landscape.

    23. AAAdam Alter40:46

        Mm-hmm.

    24. SBSteven Bartlett40:47

        And the whole point of the group is, when we see something changing in the world or, you know, might be a new update to a platform, or something within our industry has changed, it could be an update or a feature, or whatever, take it from where you've seen it and just share it with the rest of the company. And you see in these groups that we have that it's really a small cohort educating everybody else. So let's say there was a hundred people in the Slack channel-

    25. AAAdam Alter41:09

        Yeah.

    26. SBSteven Bartlett41:09

        ... I'd say there'd be five people that were super prolific, and there'd be 15 that were k- kind of, you know-

    27. AAAdam Alter41:17

        Yeah.

    28. SBSteven Bartlett41:18

        ... kind of doing it. And then, you know, then there'd be another 30, f- 25% that do it sometimes. And then there's kind of a silent 50% that don't ever do it, and they don't s- seem to have that sort of natural curiosity. And I always think, as a CEO, I need to like find more of that 5%. Because the- the disproportionate value they can add by finding, as I said to you before recording this podcast, just a tiny tweak that changes our trajectory-

    29. AAAdam Alter41:42

        Yeah.

    30. SBSteven Bartlett41:42

        ... is profound.
16. 45:55 – 50:23

    Experimenters vs satisfiers

    1. AAAdam Alter45:55

       'cause you don't get there from zero.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett45:57

       You talk about maximizing and satisficing.

    3. AAAdam Alter46:00

       Mm-hmm.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett46:01

       You believe there are two outlooks on success. This is part two of your busine- um, your book, the- the heart section, and it, there seems to be some kind of through line between experimenters and non-experimenters and maximizers and satisficing?

    5. AAAdam Alter46:16

       Yeah.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett46:16

       Is that the, did I pronounce it-

    7. AAAdam Alter46:17

       Satisficing, yeah, that's right. Yeah, so, th- this- this idea, it's an old idea. It's about 70 years old now, but it's the idea that, um, broadly speaking, when you make decisions or make choices, you can be either a maximizer on one end of the spectrum or a satisficer. A maximizer is someone who says, about everything, "I need the very best. I need to spend a lot of time and energy figuring out the best. I need to produce the best. If I'm choosing what food to eat or what job to have or whatever, everything's gotta be the very, very best. I'm gonna maximize. I'm gonna make it as good as it can possibly be, and I'm gonna bring the resources required to make that happen." Satisficers are people who say, "You know, there's a- a level that's good enough. It's not perfect, but it- it gets over the bar, and it's gonna be a different bar for different things. If it's an important thing, the bar gets raised, and it'll l- it's lowered for less important things. But as soon as I find an option that's good enough, I'm gonna take it and then move on with my life." And then there are people who are kind of in the middle who say, "About some things, like my partner that I choose, or if I'm gonna choose what job to have or which- which country to live in, those are im- really important, whether to have kids, those are important questions. I'm gonna maximize on those. Everything else, not that important, at least relatively speaking. I'm gonna just find a good enough option." And what you find is that people who satisfice tend to be much happier.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett47:37

       Oh, fuck.

    9. AAAdam Alter47:39

       Not, uh, no, the- the key is to... I mean, if you maximize on everything, I think it's paralyzing. The key is to know when to maximize. And so if you satisfice a lot of the time and say, "Let's be honest. I don't need to satisf- to- to maximize on everything," then- then you're, that's the way to do it, is to know, t- to be able to distinguish between the two. So if you're a chronic maximizer about absolutely everything, there's a lot of evidence that you're likely to get stuck on small, unimportant things.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett48:06

        Depression? Is that, um, a trait-

    11. AAAdam Alter48:08

        Yeah.

    12. SBSteven Bartlett48:08

        ... of maximizers?

    13. AAAdam Alter48:09

        Yeah, absolutely.

    14. SBSteven Bartlett48:10

        High achieving?

    15. AAAdam Alter48:12

        Yeah. I mean, so what- what ends up happening is it's the same as perfectionism. That's basically what it is. It's the, it's the choice-based version of perfectionism, where you never live up to your own standards, which on the one hand produces very good things, 'cause you're always looking upward and trying to get better. On the other hand-It's paralyzing and exhausting. And to live your entire life that way, in every aspect of your life, is problematic.

    16. SBSteven Bartlett48:37

        Mo Gawdat, who came on this podcast, talked about how we're happy when our expectations are met, and we're unhappy when our expectations are unmet. And from what I ascertained from what you said there, maximizers have such high expectations that they're often unmet, which causes unhappiness.

    17. AAAdam Alter48:52

        Yeah.

    18. SBSteven Bartlett48:52

        Is that accurate?

    19. AAAdam Alter48:53

        100%. Yeah, that's exactly right. I, my thesis, my, um, PhD thesis was on expectations and on, on how important it is when expectations deviate from, or when, when reality deviates from expectations. It's almost never about the objective thing. You know, like two people could have exactly the same thing and feel totally happy. One could feel totally happy with it, the other could be devastated by it. It's all about what you're used to, what you expect, how high your standards are, so I, I think that's, that's a, a very powerful human element in, in these, uh, calculations.

    20. SBSteven Bartlett49:25

        When you were talking about experimenters, these are people that go in search of nuances and ask why. Are experimenters typically maximizers?

    21. AAAdam Alter49:33

        Mm-hmm.

    22. SBSteven Bartlett49:33

        Because on the other side of the coin, satisficers, um, they kind of accept it. So they might be the people that would accept convention. The convention's answer for, as being, "Yeah, I'll just do what has always been done."

    23. AAAdam Alter49:45

        Yeah, I think so. I think there's some overlap, but, uh, the thing about the people that I found were experimentalists, constantly asking questions, it was rarely about trivial things.

    24. SBSteven Bartlett49:57

        Oh.

    25. AAAdam Alter49:57

        It's not like they went and said, "I'm gonna go to the supermarket today and get a chocolate, and I wanna experiment. I wanna, I wanna eat every chocolate in the supermarket over the next year so that I know for the future which one's the best." They don't do that. They say, "Hey, I'm a swimmer, I wanna be an Olympian. How do I get to be an Olympian? I'm gonna maximize the hell out of that." And so, it's, it's about finding something that's really important to you where it's worth being an experimentalist. But it would be paralyzing to do that with every aspect of your life,

17. 50:23 – 55:56

    When you hit a life crisis

    1. AAAdam Alter50:23

       I, I think. It certainly wouldn't work for me.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett50:26

       Life crises. Um, we were talking about age a second ago, and, uh, I've got a fr- I've got two friends. I've got one friend that's 29 (laughs) and another friend that's 39, and they're going through what appears to be, on the surface, a crisis.

    3. AAAdam Alter50:39

       Yeah.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett50:39

       And when I read your book about how, you call it the non-ending crisis-

    5. AAAdam Alter50:44

       Yeah.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett50:44

       ... it all made sense. What is that?

    7. AAAdam Alter50:47

       Yeah, so (laughs) this, this is some research with a colleague of mine, Hal Herschfield, who's also a very good friend, at UCLA. And when we were... He was at NYU at the time. We, we went and we were sitting in his office, and I said to him, "You know, um, I ran a marathon when I was 29. Uh, I've never nu- run another one, I, but I ran one at 29, and I remember thinking, 'I have to show myself as I approach 30 that there's meaning to my life and purpose. I need a big goal, I need to train for something.'" And I thought that was a really interesting human instinct, like, th- it was a very productive one. I ran a marathon, which was not a bad thing, but we, we were talking about it, and he said to me, "It seems like maybe at these ages where there's a nine at the end of your age, and you're looking down the specter of a new decade, that it pushes you to, to kind of audit your life." You ask yourself, "Is my life meaningful? Is it what I want it to be? Are there gaps that I need to fill? Is there something I need to do?" And so we, we started to find these big data sets that had some evidence where we could see what ages people were at when looking at their decisions, and we found all sorts of really interesting behaviors when people were 29, 39, 49, 59. You get this big rise in marathon running, so I wasn't the only one. There's an overrepresentation of marathon runners, especially first-time marathon runners, who have a nine at the end of their age. If you were already a marathon runner, you run your fastest marathons, in general, when you have a nine at the end of your age. Um, there's also some stuff that's not so good. So you see a massive rise in infidelity. So we, we found evidence that there's a m- an overrepresentation of people at those ages who are seeking out extramarital affairs. You even see a rise in suicide. So, that doesn't mean everyone who's got a nine end at their a- uh, a, a nine, uh, ending age is at risk of that, but it shows in general that we, we s- we sort of hunt for meaning. And so the midlife crisis idea, that maybe when you approach 40 there's gonna be a big crisis there, that may be true, but we also found this kind of cyclical decade, every decade you get this, this sort of miniature non-ending crisis.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett52:51

       I was the, in the best shape I've ever been in my life when I was 29. That was the year. That was the year I got closest to having all eight abs.

    9. AAAdam Alter52:58

       (laughs)

    10. SBSteven Bartlett52:59

        30, uh, has it been great? Not as great. (laughs)

    11. AAAdam Alter53:02

        Uh-huh. (laughs)

    12. SBSteven Bartlett53:03

        So I was wondering, as you said that, if, uh, what happens when the year after? You know, 29 is often some of our most productive achievements or affairs.

    13. AAAdam Alter53:12

        Yeah.

    14. SBSteven Bartlett53:13

        Does that mean 30, 40, 50, is when we, we chill a little bit? (laughs)

    15. AAAdam Alter53:16

        It varies a little. It's funny, uh, so i- what you see is it's sort of like a wave, and the peak of the wave is at nine, but there are some people who it only dawns on them when they actually hit the zero ending age. Some people it starts at the eight ending age. It's really when you get to, like, 34, 35, 36, 44, 45, 46, right in the middle of the decade, when you see the, the trough for all of these kinds of behaviors.

    16. SBSteven Bartlett53:39

        Ah.

    17. AAAdam Alter53:39

        We're sort of most in our lives and doing our thing, and not really questioning as much. Which, and we, we found that fascinating that, that just the accident that w- we happened to count using a base 10 system means that every 10 years, we, we zoom back and audit our lives in this way.

    18. SBSteven Bartlett53:55

        It's such an inter- 'cause it doesn't r- uh, the number is such a, an i- an irrelevant thing in the context of your physiological health, your metabolic health, but symbols, symbols matter. And you talk about symbols in your first book as well.

    19. AAAdam Alter54:08

        Yeah.

    20. SBSteven Bartlett54:09

        And, uh, we don't appreciate how much symbols sway our life in fundamental ways, do we?

    21. AAAdam Alter54:14

        Yeah. No, that's right, that's true. And, and, uh, I think, you know, even these numbers are symbolic. They have symbolic meaning for us. Uh, they're, it, it's something when you say, "I'm in my 30s," it's different from saying, "I'm 28 or 29," even if it's just a year apart or even a few days apart. And it's the same with what it means to be in your 40s. It's symbolic for a time of life and, uh, and certain expectations about what that time of your life is supposed to be. And so I think that's what happens. We talked about expectations, that you, you're suddenly in your 40s or your 50s or your 60s, and then you say, "What does that mean?" And...... where, here is where my expectations are. I should have the following things, maybe a certain amount of money, a certain career status, maybe a partner, maybe kids. And then do you have those things? And if you don't, then you get this kind of acting out behavior. Some of it productive, that tries to remedy the problem. Perhaps you try to get fit and run a marathon. But sometimes for some people, it's not very productive behavior.

    22. SBSteven Bartlett55:10

        I know this more than most, because I started in business at 18, and you can imagine, um, when I was on BBC Newsnight, and they introduce you, "And he's only 18 years old."

    23. AAAdam Alter55:22

        (laughs)

    24. SBSteven Bartlett55:22

        My business is making zero money.

    25. AAAdam Alter55:24

        Yeah. (laughs)

    26. SBSteven Bartlett55:24

        But they were just blown away because of expectation of what an 18-year-old should be doing. And then, I had that throughout my career, "And he's only 25 and he's got 1,000, and he's only 20 s- and then he's only 29, and then it's-"

    27. AAAdam Alter55:36

        And then it stops. (laughs)

    28. SBSteven Bartlett55:36

        ... Steven Bartlett is (laughs) an entrepreneur. (laughs)

    29. AAAdam Alter55:39

        (laughs)

    30. SBSteven Bartlett55:40

        And I'm like, "Listen, one day has changed and suddenly no one's introducing me by my age."
18. 55:56 – 58:56

    The power of symbols

    1. SBSteven Bartlett55:56

       mention his age.

    2. AAAdam Alter55:56

       I, I'm in my early 40s, and it's the same thing. I, as an academic, you know, if you're a professor in your 30s, that's, you're young. And then-

    3. SBSteven Bartlett56:03

       Mm-hmm.

    4. AAAdam Alter56:03

       ... you hit suddenly one day you're 40, and they're like, "Eh."

    5. SBSteven Bartlett56:05

       Yeah. (laughs)

    6. AAAdam Alter56:06

       "Eh, you're a professor. Whatever."

    7. SBSteven Bartlett56:08

       When you wrote about symbols in your first book, what were some of the most sort of surprising things in terms of how powerful and inspirational they are with us, to us, without us even knowing?

    8. AAAdam Alter56:17

       Uh, well, you know, as a marketing professor, I'm very, very interested in how symbols play a role in branding and in conveying ideas really succinctly. I think the, the, the simplest way to convey a, an idea is with an image, and the images that are the most powerful are often in symbolic form. A lot of them are very negative images that we get from symbols. They're associated with ideals that we don't like, for example. Um, you know, like, uh, something like a swastika is a, it's a terrible symbol the way it's used, um, or has been used for the last almost 100 years now. Um, but the amount of meaning that's conveyed in those symbols is, is tremendous. Um, and so it's, there's a, there's a sort of terrible power to symbols. They can shape behavior in all sorts of ways. One of the studies I did, um, looked at people who were religious versus not religious, and then showed them a religious symbol, and then asked them to do a behavior that was either gonna be done honestly or dishonestly. We were essentially measuring whether they were gonna behave honestly. And for those religious people, seeing that symbol kind of clicked something for them, and they became much more honest. So in general, they might have had an honesty level of 50%, but you show them that symbol even subtly in the environment around them, and suddenly they become much more honest. So these, these things are constantly swimming around us and, and gently nudging our behavior in different directions.

    9. SBSteven Bartlett57:37

       It almost reminded me a little bit of the, um, the thing you wrote about in that book, about how when people are shown a picture of eyeballs at, like, a free snack bar where they can take what they want, they're much more honest about their decisions, 'cause eyes, again, in a way, are a symbol.

    10. AAAdam Alter57:52

        Yeah.

    11. SBSteven Bartlett57:52

        They're a symbol of the tribe, maybe?

    12. AAAdam Alter57:54

        Yeah, of being watched, of, of feeling like you're being watched. Uh, there's, um, there's some really interesting evidence from this, uh, looking at, um, using eyeballs to get people to behave better. So if you have an image of a pair of eyes looking at you, just disembodied, just the eyes, you don't see any of the rest of the face, you find that people behave much more honestly. They're much less likely to steal something. You see shoplifting rates go down. The, the, the best use of it though, I think, is if you, say you're a chocoholic, you love chocolate, but you don't wanna be eating it, but you also wanna have a little bit around f- every now and again. One thing you can do is you can have a little cupboard in your, in your kitchen, where the inside of the cupboard you put a mirror.

    13. SBSteven Bartlett58:36

        Hmm.

    14. AAAdam Alter58:36

        And that's where the chocolate lives. So you open it up, and every time you reach for the chocolate, you have to stare into your own soul.

    15. SBSteven Bartlett58:41

        (laughs)

    16. AAAdam Alter58:42

        And so the eyeballs, uh, whether they're yours or somebody else's, just l- just having to look at yourself, not just metaphorically, but literally as you do something, it brings out your better angels. And there's a lot of evidence for that in, in various psychological studies.

19. 58:56 – 1:08:36

    The importance of acceptance

    1. AAAdam Alter58:57

    2. SBSteven Bartlett58:57

       One of the things that stands in the way of acceptance is this question, which a lot of people ask when they get stuck, which is, or when they have a life quake, which is, "Why me?"

    3. AAAdam Alter59:05

       Yeah.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett59:05

       "Why did this happen to me?"

    5. AAAdam Alter59:06

       Yeah.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett59:07

       And that relinquishes our sense of personal responsibility. It makes us a victim to, to the situation, um, which we might objectively be a victim, however you want to define it-

    7. AAAdam Alter59:18

       Right.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett59:18

       ... to a situation, but it doesn't seem to be conducive with, um, getting out of it.

    9. AAAdam Alter59:23

       No, it doesn't. And, uh, you know, the interesting thing is if you go to people who are at the end of their lives, they're on their deathbeds, and they know that their end is near, and you say to them, "Did you ever have a why me situation? Did it, did something happen in your life at any point where you had cause, whether you did or not, you had cause to say, 'Why me?' You know, this felt unfair," 100% of them will say yes. That's another case where we feel isolated in those moments. We're like, "Why me?" The implication of that is, "It's me, but not someone else." Their turn will come. We will all have these moments that are really hard to deal with. Some of us have had them already. Some of us will have more of them in the future, but they are universal. And so the, the best thing you can do, I think, in those moments is to just kind of recognize that it's okay to be sad and pissed off and to struggle with them. But also, there's some comfort in knowing that actually this is just what it is to be human. Everyone has these moments. You're not unique in responding that way, and you're not unique in exper- in experiencing that situation in the first place.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett1:00:19

        It's privileged as well, as you write about in your book. It's a privileged response to have-

    11. AAAdam Alter1:00:23

        Yeah.

    12. SBSteven Bartlett1:00:23

        ... that you don't see across other cultures as readily.

    13. AAAdam Alter1:00:26

        Yeah, it's privilege, and it also, I think, reflects the sense of agency we've got from becoming essentially masters of our worlds in ways that were not true for most of human history. You know, we, as science and medicine goes, we are living longer. We are generally a stronger species. We can do a lot of incredible things. We can move spacecraft to other planets. You know, it's, it's ridiculous the number of things we can do.And so as a result of that, we kind of assume that that's the kind of control we should have over every aspect of our lives. If we can do big things that are amazing, why can't we do small things that are amazing? And, uh, that's not the way the world works, and we mistake that general sense of human control over the world, especially as we move away from religion and become more sis- more secular. We develop that sense of privilege, and I- I think cu- cultures that- that don't have that to the same extent or that still hue to religion more strongly, you have much more of a recognition that, hey, to some extent I'm kind of at the mercy of whether it's the gods or however you want to describe it. Um, and that makes you more open to the idea that you don't have control.

    14. SBSteven Bartlett1:01:29

        Is that less westernized cultures, so cultures with less money?

    15. AAAdam Alter1:01:32

        Yes. That's what, that's why the privilege aspect comes into it, 'cause I think the West where we are more-

    16. SBSteven Bartlett1:01:40

        It's expectations again, isn't it?

    17. AAAdam Alter1:01:41

        It's- it comes back to almost everything, yeah. It's a huge, huge part of the human experience.

    18. SBSteven Bartlett1:01:48

        We all need to lower our expectations.

    19. AAAdam Alter1:01:50

        (laughs) Or have realistic ones.

    20. SBSteven Bartlett1:01:52

        Yeah.

    21. AAAdam Alter1:01:52

        (laughs) Yeah.

    22. SBSteven Bartlett1:01:54

        I- there's gonna be so many people that are listening that are- that realize that, you know, they objectively realize that life comes in seasons, and- but the- the difficulty comes is when one of those seasons ends-

    23. AAAdam Alter1:02:06

        Yeah.

    24. SBSteven Bartlett1:02:06

        ... and we kind of resist it ending. And a lot of people, I think, will feel stuck when a season or a chapter of life, one of those lifequakes, you know, I guess, the start of a lifequake, I guess, is when one of those seasons ends. Knowing from a intellectual, from a strategy standpoint how to deal with it in that moment, 'cause when a- a season of life ends, there's so much uncertainty and fear and-

    25. AAAdam Alter1:02:28

        Yeah.

    26. SBSteven Bartlett1:02:28

        ... and you- you can't always see the season to come, um, and that's where a lot of those feelings come from. You talked about acceptance-

    27. AAAdam Alter1:02:36

        Yeah.

    28. SBSteven Bartlett1:02:36

        ... being a key, um, path forward, but is there anything else? I really wanna make sure I- we've completed that. Is there anything else that we can do to ex- to be better at transitioning from one season of life to the other?

    29. AAAdam Alter1:02:50

        Yeah, I- so I love this philosophy from, uh, the- the rock musician Jeff Tweedy, the front man of the band Wilco, who is also a writer. He- he writes, he does music, he's- he's a renaissance man. Um, he talks about that- that feeling of being stuck and- and sometimes it's in transitions, but also it's- it's when you're chronically being forced to come up with new ideas if you're a creative, and I think this applies to- to transitions, to new periods as well. He talks about this idea that, you know, for decades he has had to wake up and his bread and butter is to come up with creative songs and to write good passages that will then become part of a book. That is asking a lot of people, but what he does is he recognizes that above all else, action is gonna move him forward. When you feel stuck, action, even if it's slightly sideways, it may not be exactly where you wanna go, but the mere fact that you're acting gives you feedback that you're not stuck, that you're moving in the right direction. And so he talks about low- at least temporarily lowing- lowering your expectations to the ground, and so he talks about pouring out the bad ideas. If he's writing a song, he'll say, "What's the worst musical phrase I could write right now?" Or, "What's the worst line for this book? Let me come up with three of the worst lines ever." And that's easy to do 'cause you- you have no expectations. It's not maximizing or satisficing, it's just like the bare minimum. And when you do that, you get the ball rolling, you show yourself that you're not stuck, and so then what follows that, as he describes it, is the good stuff. That's when you get your good ideas 'cause the- you- you know, the- the wheels are being greased and you're moving forward. And I think that's true in transition periods, that we spend a lot of time agonizing, there's a lot of dealing with the emotions, which is fair, there's a lot of time stra- strategizing, but just acting is tremendously liberating, even if the action itself doesn't bring measurable rewards in the short term.

    30. SBSteven Bartlett1:04:39

        I was thinking as you were saying that the cont- within the context of dating. So you've just come out of a horrific divorce, you're sat at home on your own, you can't even remember how to date-
20. 1:08:36 – 1:16:33

    The best way to get unstuck

    1. AAAdam Alter1:08:36

       work, and do I wanna retain?"

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:08:38

       The best way to get unstuck is to simplify the problem as much as possible. That way, you can identify what the sticking points are. I call this simplifying of the complex a friction audit.

Episode duration: 1:37:14