How to Get Out of a Creative Rut

0:00When someone comes to my door, I know, because I'm using SimpliSafe. I get an alert straight to my phone and I can see, is this someone I should unlock the door for because I know them? Or is it someone I need to tell to get lost? But here's the thing I love most about SimpliSafe. It works when I am not looking at my phone too, because when I'm not keeping an eye out, SimpliSafe is. SimpliSafe is proactive with a double layer of defense that stops crimes before they start. First, AI-powered cameras spot potential threats outside. And then live agents step in, talking to the person through the camera and letting them know they're on video and police will be dispatched if they don't leave.

0:45They can even trigger a loud siren or spotlight. That's how you help stop a crime before it starts. And SimpliSafe makes it easy to use. There are no long-term contracts, no hidden fees. You can cancel at any time. It was named Best Home Security Systems by U.S. News and World Report for five years running. It offers a 60-day money-back guarantee, so you can try it and see the difference for yourself. This month only, take 50 % off any new system. This is one of the best prices you will ever see for SimpliSafe, so don't miss it. Just go to simplisafe.com slash problem solvers. Again, that is SimpliSafe, S-I-M-P-L-I-S-A-F-E, simplisafe.com slash Problem Solvers and lock in your discount.

1:33There's no safe like SimpliSafe. From Entrepreneur Media, this is Problem Solvers, a show that solves entrepreneurs' toughest problems. I'm Jason Pfeiffer, Editor-in-Chief of Entrepreneur Magazine, and each week I take a problem that you're probably dealing with and get tactical solutions from people who have been there and solved that. So, let's get solving. Have you ever found yourself in a creative rut? You just can't find inspiration, can't solve the big problem. You're looking and looking and trying and trying, and you just don't get anywhere interesting. Well, you are not alone. It's never a straight line.

2:12It's never like someone has an idea. They go and seamlessly and smoothly execute it and everything just goes perfectly well. We know that. We know there are twists and turns and fumbles and false starts. And there are those moments where you really feel like you're stuck. That is Scott. I'm Scott Anthony, clinical professor of strategy at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. And author of a new book called Epic Disruptions, 11 Innovations That Shaped Our Modern World. So the basic idea of the book is to interrogate the idea of disruptive change by looking at 11 stories. The first one starts in 142.

2:47That's gunpowder. The last one kind of ends in 2007. That is the Apple iPhone. And inside of this history, Scott says, there is a lot of creative rut. Thousands of years of people facing creative ruts. And to me, the story that illustrates it the best is probably the story that people don't see coming. That's the story of Julia Child. Oh, interesting. I did not see that coming at all. Well, if you go back to before, before 1961, when Mastering the Art of French Cooking came out, if you wanted to enjoy great French food and you lived in the United States, your best option was to hop on a plane and go to France.

3:27Because there weren't restaurants, it wasn't easy to cook in your own home. It was complicated and expensive. And in classic disruptive fashion, that book and everything else Julia Child did with her other books and with her TV show took something that was complicated and expensive and made it simple and affordable, the essence of disruptive innovation. And her story is a pretty fascinating one in addition to that. Right. People may know this because there was a TV show or a movie or something about her recently, but when she got on camera and started cooking, it was completely different from what anybody else had ever seen on television.

4:07And people thought it was, what, inappropriate, never going to work. It took a long time for her to establish herself as an actual trusted voice. All of those things. And she was no spring chicken, pardon the pun, when she did this. So the first time she went on TV, she was 52 years old. In fact, she didn't really become a chef until she was in her 40s. It took her a long time to find her calling, to find her passion, and really to perfect it. And the thing she did on camera, she looked directly on camera. When she made a mistake, it wasn't let's stop and start over. It's let's roll with it. She would look on camera and kind of wink and bring the viewer into it.

4:45some people said she might have had a couple drinks when she was doing some of her cooking too. I have no idea, but there certainly is a really deep humanity in her. You can see in those videos. And now draw out how that is tied to getting out of a creative rut. Is that rooted in that thing that you said about her ability to make things really simple? You know, there's a few things that are really clear things that Julia Child did that connect into just about every story that you see of, again, an epic disruptor succeeding. She was intensely curious. So she was always trying to understand why things work.

5:22One example of this, when she's working on recipes for fish, a fish in France is different than a fish in the United States, is different from a fish in the UK, et cetera, et cetera. So what do you do? Well, she talked to the Department of Fisheries in the different countries to really understand what was going on. She experimented when she was working on a recipe for French bread for Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 2, 284 pounds of flour, 30 separate ways to create a puff of smoke to create the texture on the bread. Those behaviors are the things that anyone can do when they're stuck.

5:57You go and interrogate, you go and try something, they can get you unstuck, they can show you new paths to success. Oh, I love that. Why don't we do that? That sounds very simple. It does. I think the biggest thing that holds us back, and I was just talking to my 14-year-old son about this. The biggest thing that holds us back is we're worried. We're worried about the downside. We're worried about looking stupid. We're worried about the pain that comes when things don't go right. My 14-year-old, he plays basketball. And I said, Harry, my observation is you're playing because you're worried about making a mistake.

6:29You're playing not to lose. And what you really have to do is play to win. And you do that, you just relax and all of a sudden things open up. But so much of our lives, our fists clenched, We're leaning back. We're worried that something's not going to work, forgetting that the only way you ultimately succeed is by fumbling and failing. The only way. But we're worried about that. But that's just the start. When we're talking about how to get out of a creative rut, Scott has, like I said, thousands of years of history to pull from. And he will, believe me, in this conversation, along with great insights into business and psychology.

7:04This is an episode for anyone who needs a jolt, who needs a shakeup, who is ready for a creative reboot. So if you are in a rut, you will not be any longer. Coming up after the break. all right we're back i'm talking to scott anthony author of the new book epic disruptions and just before the break he was talking about finding this new kind of flow state where we become better performers when we stop trying so hard and i said to him you know scott that reminds me of a fascinating thing that i keep experiencing in work and when i'm just having fun so what you're reminding me of and i'm blanking on the psychological term but perhaps you have it in your head is that I also perform poorly at basketball.

7:54I perform poorly at basketball no matter what, let's be clear. But I perform most poorly at basketball when I am focused. I have a pop-a-shot in my basement. So for those who don't know, like a picture of the basketball thing at an arcade, right? Where it's a little, let's just whatever. The balls just roll towards you and you just keep shooting. I have one of those in my basement. and that is how I relax at the end of the day. I go down there and I have found that if I am really trying to make baskets, I do not make baskets. But if I put on music that I love, which is all because I'm an old man now, so it's all just music that I loved when I was a teenager in the 90s.

8:34If I put on Green Day and I'm like singing along to Green Day and I'm shooting, suddenly I shoot significantly better than I otherwise did. And I looked into this and as it turns out, and here again is the psychological term that I cannot remember, that it turns out that there is a kind of optimal balance between focus and relaxation that improves our performance. And if we are too focused or too relaxed, then we do not actually perform very well. And I imagine that can apply itself pretty well to getting out of a creative rut, because a lot of people, when they're in a creative rut, will just sit there staring at a blank page on a computer, or they'll just try to figure out the problem by obsessing over the problem.

9:20And what you're saying is that actually what to do here is what Julia Child did, which was to just start looking around, like looking around to the problem, giving yourself new inputs and new things to engage with. And that is how you untie the knot. Jason, I really associate with that both the Papa shot, which is in the room over there. And I suffer from the exact same thing. I don't know the psychological term. Dartmouth's presidency on Bailock Wood, because she wrote the book Choke, which is all about this, all about how we get lost in our own thoughts too much. I associate with it more from my work as a writer.

9:53I've written books, and I get stuck all the time, like every writer does. The worst thing to do when you get stuck is try to power through it. What I've found is I stop. It might be in the middle of the sentence. That's what Ernest Hemingway recommended writers do. Now, he might have stopped because he passed out drunk. Who knows? But you stop and you walk away, and you expose yourself to completely different stimuli. lie, and your unconscious does its magic work. You get back and all of a sudden you see past that you didn't see before. Or when I'm deeply in writing, I'm also deeply in reading and I'm consciously reading different things.

10:24So I'll have a business book that I'm reading. I'll have a narrative audio book I'm listening to, and then a throwaway fiction book. And sometimes it's the throwaway fiction book where I say, oh, I see a connection I didn't see before. It's stepping away from the problem that allows you to see the answer to the problem every time. Yeah, it's the uncommon connection when you see something that you just didn't expect, you didn't see coming. And you don't always go directly into the writing, but it's just that you have that kind of loose end and the combination of the two shows you something you hadn't seen before.

10:54So it's funny, Scott, because I do the same thing, except I actually don't generally even have the work-related material queued up. I looked it up, by the way. So it was called the Yerkes-Dodson Law. The Yerkes-Dodson Law from 1908, in which two psychologists, you can guess their names were Yerkes and Dodson, created what is now thought of as basically the Goldilocks theory of performance. The language that they use is performance and arousal. But in any case, yeah, that's the thing that everyone should be striving for is this perfect balance between the two. How would we apply this? Maybe if you can dream up a scenario here in which an entrepreneur is stuck in a creative rut and something that they might do.

11:36Maybe you can think of somebody that you've worked with or something that you've done yourself to try to get out of feeling stuck. I will go back to writing again. And this connects to what you were talking about, Papa Shot and music. When I really get stuck on writing, I change place. So I have to go somewhere different than where I had been writing. And I change tonality. So just pick a different Spotify playlist to listen to. And with that, with a different place and with a different soundtrack, it's just something that jars me off whatever track I was stuck on and gets me into a different one.

12:09The other thing that I think a lot about, if you go back to Julia Child, Julia Child is the name that people associate with this great French chef. But, of course, her first book had two co-authors. Her husband, Paul Child, was an indispensable collaborator with a lot of her experiments. She had many chefs that she worked with on her TV show. That's another way to get out of a rut. You follow the time-tested innovation principle and you get to an intersection. You collaborate with somebody. You work with somebody who's going to look at your problem in a very different way. They can see something that you're stuck on and just say, oh, the answer is this versus that.

12:46And that's something that Julia Child was really good at doing. And again, a really persistent theme that a lot of breakthroughs come when different disciplines intersect. So if you get yourself to that intersection, you're going to see something magical. Yeah, that reminds me of another psychological term. This one I'm actually going to be able to conjure in my head in real time. It is the false consensus effect, the false consensus effect. So the false consensus effect is the belief that other people think like us. And because we think that other people think like us, we don't turn to other people to see what they're thinking.

13:17And as it turns out, they have totally different ways of approaching problems, of thinking through solutions. And just being open to turning to them instead of trying to do something solo is a number one way of fast tracking yourself through a problem. And it's funny, I am exhibiting a version of that right now at Entrepreneurs. We're going through changing some of the structures of things. And so the president of the company, whose name is Bill, just recently told me, he's like, this is yours. Just come up with a plan and tell me what it is and then execute it. And I said, okay, but give me a little time because the first thing I'm going to do is not come up with a plan.

14:02The first thing I'm going to do is just talk to a ton of people. That's what I'm going to do. I could come up with a plan, but I don't know if it's a good plan. And so I don't want to come up with a plan. I actually don't want this to be on me. What I want to do is I want to go on a listening tour and talk to a lot of people internally and externally, And then I'm going to come up with a plan. And that is how I just always approach things. I don't know if other people think like this or not. This is just how I think. But I tend to think that my skill is not creating or developing ideas. My skill is processing lots of information.

14:37That's my skill. So the more access I have to information, and therefore the more people who are providing that information, the better I can do the thing that I do, which is to actually just digest a ton of things and then turn it into a simple output. And so that's how I approach the world is let me just gather a ton of stuff and I can make a decision, but I don't want to make a decision until I feel like I have enough that I can match patterns with. Jason, you said a lot there that I'm keying off of a couple of things that I wanted to say. First, this idea of saying, let's get a bunch of people together and really beat up an idea and really try and look at things from lots of different angles.

15:18That was a core thing that happened when Ken Iverson and his team at Nucor made the non-obvious decision to go into the steel production business back in 1968. They were doing a range of different things. Nucor, it was originally the nuclear instrument company. It made things like the Centillion processor. This is apparently a real thing. and had this one part of the business where they were selling steel joists. And that part of the business was doing pretty well, but it had real trouble having defined inputs all the time. And they'd get inputs of various quality and it would cost a lot of money sometimes, et cetera.

15:52So they had an offsite where they spent a couple of days just going over every possible thing they could do. And the idea emerged that we could actually go and produce our own steel. And we don't have to invest hundreds of millions of dollars to do that. There's this new production format called a steel mini mill, which is incredibly economical that we can go and use as a way to provide input into this part of our business. That ultimately, of course, became the core of the business. It disrupted major steel manufacturers, et cetera. So this idea of saying, let's have some what Linda Hill at Harvard Business School would call creative abrasion, where we are purposefully going to have different people go and spar and fight and look at things from different areas, that is a very powerful way to spark new ideas.

16:36You need that abrasion. You need that tension to see different things. The other thought that I then had is that one of the great tools we now have at our disposal, of course, is generative AI. And one of the things that is a real superpower of generative AI is being able to take on different personas. So one of the things I do in a class that I teach is I say, okay, we have assembled a virtual dragon's den. We've got people who are moonshot visionaries. We've got very practical people. We've even got Clay Christensen and Steve Jobs as people we can turn to. Let's pick a few of the dragons. Let's give them our idea, see what they say, and then click the button that says, make it better.

17:13And what comes out the other side sometimes is a little bit ludicrous, but always we learn something from that process because we're looking at an idea from multiple angles. This used to be a pretty difficult thing to do. Now it is an idiot, simple thing to do. And it's a superpower for every entrepreneur, I think, if you use it in the right way. And who doesn't love an idiot simple thing to do? Here's, Scott, another thing that you said a little while ago that I wanted to double click on was you have used in our conversation multiple times the word experiment. And whenever I hear the word experiment, I flash back to a conversation that I had with Katie Milkman at Wharton.

17:53And she, who wrote a book called How to Change, I believe. And I had asked her in a conversation how to know what change to make. You are standing at the precipice of multiple options. How do you know which is the right one? And she said this very interesting thing to me, which she said, the thing that tends to hold us back from making a decision is the fear that it is permanent, that we will have to commit to whatever action that we take. But if you were to just think about things in terms of being experiments, that I will go down this path for three to six months, let's say, and it is an experiment and I will learn something.

18:35And I don't know exactly what I will learn, but whatever it is, it's going to inform the ultimate decision that I make. Then suddenly you've lowered the bar pretty significantly to what you do. And, you know, I kept thinking about the word experiment and I realized what a beautiful word because when a scientist runs an experiment, the point is not for it to succeed, right? People don't do experiments for the purpose of them succeeding. They do experiments for the purpose of finding out what happens. And if you do it and it works, that's great. But if you do it and it doesn't work, then you've learned something.

19:08You've learned how not to do it, which can help you then get to doing it. There's some famous Thomas Edison quote about having discovered 10 ,000 ways not to build a light bulb, which is how he actually built the light bulb. And so I think about that a lot for myself now, Scott, is that when I'm stuck on something or unsure what to do, or I'm not sure if I should try this thing that has been put in front of me, that if I just reframe it as an experiment in my mind, then suddenly it becomes a lot less scary. And there's a purpose to whatever action I take. So it's not now succeed or fail. It is go and learn.

19:47And go and learn is a pretty wide open opportunity. I fully agree with that. And I will add on top of that, some advice that I learned at a conference about 10 years ago. I was speaking at this event in London and on the schedule right after me was Will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas. I'm like, cool, he's going to perform for us. He did not. Instead, he gave a talk that really reframed the way that I think about this. He was talking about how he was doing all these entrepreneurial entrepreneurial ventures. And someone from the audience asked him, what happens if they don't work? Have you thought about that?

20:16William said, yeah, of course, I've thought about it. I said, what is the worst thing that could happen? What if everything fails? What if I fail? What if I end up in the ghetto? I started in the ghetto and I got out before. If I get back there, I wouldn't be happy about it, but I could get out better. I could get out faster. That question, what's the worst that could happen? In business language, you would call this a pre-mortem where before you do something, you do the thought experiment of what is the worst downside of what you're doing. In most cases, the things that you're doing are indeed reversible.

20:47As long as you don't do something really stupid in the experiment, there's not going to be a catastrophic downside from it. So the worst that happens is you might have some scars because you thought something was a good idea. It turns out it wasn't. But as you said, a good scientist views this as nothing more than learning. So that question, what's the worst that could happen, I think really opens up possibility. Yeah, it's great to stare that down. And I've heard that question come out from a number of different people. Tim Ferriss is also often attributed to that kind of thinking because there's loss aversion theory.

21:21There's a loss aversion theory that our human brains are programmed to protect against loss more than to seek gain, which means that we will make decisions based on trying to avoid losses instead of trying to pursue gains. And so we're really afraid of that loss. But in asking what's the worst that can happen, what we do is we force ourselves to engage with the idea of that loss and really take into account what that loss would look like and feel like. And because it's often not nearly as bad as we imagine it to be, then we can override in some way this loss aversion theory that we have because the loss that we're trying to avoid isn't actually that huge.

22:08And again, that's, yeah, that's not to dismiss loss. There is loss. I don't like losing. I don't like losing money. I don't like losing anything. I don't want to lose anything, but I also have, and it turned out okay. And the more in which we know that the more in which we give ourselves the freedom to actually pursue. And this is the thing. We have the ability to reframe. That is the human superpower to be able to see, yes, I understand that I might have naturally this bias. Yes, I might have this blind spot. But if I think and act in the right way, I can choose to interpret stimuli in a different way.

22:45And I, for my 14-year-old son, Harry, and for my students and for executives that I work with, I relentlessly repeat what Roger Federer told the graduating class of 2024 for Dartmouth College. He said, I have won, or when I was playing, I won 80%, ate 0 % of my singles matches, but only 54 % of my points. So the most important thing if you're a champion is to recognize it's just a point. You will lose, you will lose, you will lose again. And what makes the great ones great is not that they win every point, it's that they know it's just a point. They cry it out, they get over it, and they come back to play the next one.

23:25That's great. Hey, Scott, how can people do whatever you want them to do? Get in touch, get the book, tell us. So epicdisruptions.com is the website that has all the information about the book. It is plural, Epic Disruptions. I live social media-wise on LinkedIn. So if you look for Scott Anthony Tuck, because there are more than one Scott Anthony's out there, including one who wrote the great book, Profit from the Pie, about growing your pizza business. I know nothing about growing pizza businesses I know a lot about disruptive innovation. That's fantastic. I hope that the pizza guy has a similar kind of outro as you do about how he doesn't know anything about history.

24:06I now feel like I should reach out to him so we can trade notes and make sure that we get some kind of, I don't know, lead generation fee by sending people to the right Scott Anthony. That is your next partnership. It's all about connecting with other people. Scott, this is really fantastic. So appreciate your time. Thank you very much, Jason. Enjoyed the conversation. And that's our episode. Now let's keep the conversation going. I write a newsletter called One Thing Better, where each week I offer one new way to be successful and satisfied and build a career or company you love. You can find it at onethingbetter.email.

24:42That's a web address, just plug it into a browser, onethingbetter.email. And if you get one of those emails and reply, it goes straight to my inbox and I will get back to you. Problem Solvers comes out every Monday morning, so make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss an episode. The show is produced by Emily Holmes and Money News Network. My name is Jason Pfeiffer. See you next week.