How to Get Unstuck — with Adam Alter

24:14Am I interpreting this correctly? Do you want to add it to that at all? A hundred percent. I think that's true. I think when you get to the exploitation phase, it's about not doing the shoulds. It's about figuring out exactly what you want to do. And what you want to do is in service of whatever that goal is that you're heading towards single-mindedly. But it's a privilege to be in that position, right? The ability to say no to the shoulds comes over time with development, seniority, with all sorts of other things. It's a luxury and it's not something that's afforded everyone. But I think you can afford it yourself by giving yourself license to be in the no phase of life.

24:47I'm not exploring now, I'm exploiting. And so to do that, I am going to say no to a lot of the things that fall in the should bucket that I might have said yes to when I was exploring. And tracking careers, thousands of careers is one of the most interesting studies I've ever read. Looking at entrepreneurs, scientists, artists, creators, filmmakers. If you want to know when you're going to hit a hot streak in your career, this great golden period of growth, it is when you have explored and then exploited and doing it in exactly that order and knowing when to switch from one to the other is the key.

25:18And it's that moment when you stop saying yes to the shoulds, you start saying no. So I think a lot about, you know, I love the character Varys. Is that his name? He's like the mentor in Game of Thrones or yes, he says, I serve the realm. And I loved, I saw this clip, I think, of course, on TikTok. And he says that power is an illusion. Like who really holds power in a situation? And it's who the people think has power. It's nothing but a shadow on the wall. And I think about my own struggles when I've been stuck. And a lot of it is illusory or just a shadow on the wall. And that is, and for those of you who don't know, Adam has an appointment in the psychology department is, I think, as much as his domain expertise is as much around psychology as it is around consumer behavior.

26:06but when i've been stuck it's been a function of i'm focused on the immutable i'm focused on the past which i can't change and i beat myself up i get angry at myself i get upset at myself and it paralyzes me because i'm so disappointed in myself i'm so angry about something that is literally immutable and whether it's stoicism or buddhism it says pretty much look boss you know be upset and focus on the things you can control as someone who has domain expertise in psychology What is the link between beating yourself up, depression, anger, things out of your control, and getting stuck? And then what are the practices around self-care and mental wellness to get unstuck?

26:55I mean, a full three chapters, a quarter of the book is about exactly that. It's about the emotional consequences of being stuck. It's about the unhelpful patterns that people have in ruminating over the past of focusing on the wrong things Or focusing on the things they can't change rather than looking forward to the things they can and the reason it's three chapters is because You know people always say what am I going to do? How do I do this thing to get unstuck? But we neglect Traditionally that emotional part of what it is to be stuck. It's an incredible it's universal It makes people feel unbelievably lonely I've had all these interactions with people over the years asking them about the experience of stuckness.

27:32They say a lot of things that sound like what you're describing and looking back and ruminating. But they also say this is such an extreme and central part of my existence that I would pay a vast proportion of my resources and do whatever it takes to get unstuck. I just need to be pointed in the right direction. So I think there is this real struggle that comes for a lot of people with knowing how to cope emotionally at that first stage with the experience of being stuck. so that they can then marshal their resources to actually do the things they need to do to get unstuck. So I agree. The emotional part is a huge thing that you've got to work through before you can start actually doing things and strategizing.

28:10Just being more tactical, but what about being stuck in a relationship? What about not being able to get past hurt or disappointment, or you feel like you're in an unproductive or a bad marriage? Again, all of my learning comes through HBO. I was watching Succession and I'm literally have PTSD from Shiv and Tom's relationship. That was a horrific discussion on the balcony, wasn't it? I mean, people just shouldn't, no relationship is much better than this. People should never be this mean to each other. I just don't, it literally like I had to turn it off. I'm like, people should just not be that way to each other.

28:44Anyways, talk specifically about when you feel like you're stuck in a relationship or something that's unproductive in your personal life. Yeah, well, I mean, I think, you know, there are often discussions that people have about whether to stay in a relationship that's as toxic as the relationships that are depicted on succession. And it's a very good question, especially if there's abuse or something's going on that makes it an untenable situation. But with any of these discussions and decisions, there's always this, the two end points are to quit, to exit, to get out, whatever the thing is that's going on and to do something different, whether it's being single or trying to find a new relationship or to stick with it and to try to improve it.

29:26And that's going to be true whether you're in business. It doesn't matter what the domain is, but that's the key decision. And if you're going to quit, if you're going to leave, that's fine. That's a decision you've made based on the information you have. you still need to slow things down the way Messi did. You can't make that decision rashly. But if you're going to do that, that's fine. If you're not going to quit, then every resource has to be in essentially, and this is a terrible term in this context, but exploiting the relationship in the explore exploit sense. So you have to do everything you can to become kinder, to become a better parent, to become a better mentor, to become a better husband, wife, whatever it is.

30:01And that might mean therapy. It means very different things for different people, obviously, but you should, as you would with a business or with anything else, you've got to pour your whole self into that process of making that thing better. And I mean, we could talk about succession all day. I certainly could. Between succession and messy, we could take up a whole hour. But yeah, I mean, I think there are better ways to do things. And I think humans are not sort of well-wired for those kinds of interactions, the kinds of interactions that happen in relationships and marriage. We screw up a lot of those because we just don't know what we're supposed to be doing.

30:34You need therapy or you need to read something that'll give you a little bit of guidance. And so do that. Be an omnivore. Consume as much as you can. Reading your work, Adam, a lot of it echoes of Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Slow and Fast. That's high praise. I'll take it. Well, just the notion that it's hard to read the label from inside of the bottle. And on important decisions, you want to slow down your thinking. and i like that you when you feel stuck you you said going to this creative cliff making rash decisions feeling like an action orientation is going to solve this can have bad consequences right yeah and also speak to other people yeah the the most valuable resource we have as humans no other animal has this you know the the unhappy anteater doesn't have like 12 other anteaters that can go and commune with and talk about the problems of being an anteater but as humans we are uniquely in this incredible position of having tremendous social resources.

31:32So go talk to people who are like you, but even better, talk to people who are maybe not exactly like you, different expertise, different backgrounds, a different understanding of things. And that has tremendous unsticking properties. If you're unsure about something, that is your greatest resource is the fact that you know other people. You don't live as an island. And so there's an incredible unsticking effect when you're making these really big life decisions in particular that comes from just having a conversation with someone else about them. I love you say in the book that originality is overrated.

32:05And I actually, I agree. I'll let you go and then I have some thoughts. Yeah, no, I'd like to hear what you have to say about it. This is in my experience working with a lot of entrepreneurs and creatives. I've worked with musicians and authors and I'm an author myself. And I think what we all search for, and this is true in business in particular, is novelty. So whether you're an investor in businesses, whether you're a creator of businesses, whether you're just interested in being a creative yourself, we think that novelty and genuine radical originality is the only path to true success. And honestly, that's just, it's a myth.

32:41It's a lie. There is basically no such thing as radical originality. You know, I challenge anyone to come up with a truly radically original novel product that did not stand on the shoulders of either giants or maybe not giants, but certainly other ideas. And so many of the best businesses were not first. They didn't do something that no one else was doing. And it's true about creatives as well. It's true about, I talk about Bob Dylan and a whole lot of other examples of people who we think of as being sort of genuinely original. And I think the liberating thing about that is there are other ways to make successful products and ideas happen.

33:15The best one that I know of is to combine two things that are old in a new way, which is really much easier than coming up with something genuinely original. And so I talk a lot about this art of recombination, of finding ideas. And for the last 20 years, I've had a couple of documents where I collect ideas as they come to me, as they happen to arise. And so now that document is just thousands of ideas deep. And if on a random day, I say, let's look at idea number 27 and idea number 412, and And the task that makes me kind of nimble at this is to say, how could you combine them in a way that hasn't been done before?

33:48And often there's a business, there's a book, there's a new idea. So I think recombination is a better way to go than radical originality. Yeah, I mean, I remember our colleague, Peter Golder, who was at NYU and is now at Dartmouth, is devoted his entire research effort to proving, and he's right, that the original player, whether it's a GUI or mobile phone or streaming, is never the one that captures all the stakeholder value. It's the person that comes in and improves on it. And when I get accused of doing something original, I'm like, no, I find other people's work. I put a different spin on it.

34:25I apply it to a different medium. I maybe say it in more provocative human terms. I don't think of myself as original at all. I think of someone who wants to find other people's work and I reference them and I credit them. I don't plagiarize it, but I mean, this is amazing work. And if you can bring to bear something that's fantastic, but incrementally improve upon it, you know, that's where the sauce is because the truly original breakthroughs to thinking is super important, but it generally doesn't create a lot of value because it's by virtue of being truly original breakthrough, it's a little bit ahead of its time and hard to commercialize.

35:00So it's like, you don't need to be original. You need to have an incredible appreciation for something interesting and then say, what is my view on it? Or is there a different way to communicate it that reaches a broader audience? What about, so when we talk about being unstuck and immediately there's a lot of notion around, and you talk about this and our colleague, Jonathan Haidt talks a lot about this, is that when everyone's barking up the same tree, you get stupid. And you reference that it's important to speak to people outside of your circle to get a different viewpoint. You talk about diversity and crowdsourcing for getting unstuck.

35:39Say more. Yeah. So essentially there are three kinds of people you could consult in general. You can consult people who are a lot like you and that most of the people you spend time with are a lot like you. Maybe they live near you. Maybe they have the same background you have. Maybe they're demographically similar to you in terms of ethnicity, wealth, religion, and so on. we tend to have a lot of people around us who are a lot like us. The problem with only speaking to those people is they amplify our strengths, but also our weaknesses. And so they entrench us. If we're stuck already, we're unlikely to get unstuck by speaking only to those people.

36:13This is also, by the way, a matter of leadership of how you put together teams. So you've got these people who are amplifying you and who are like you, and they're great. It's good to have some of those people around for harmony and whatever else, and you understand each other. And there's a lot of benefit to that. But there are two other kinds of people that are really important. One of them is non-redundant people. Non-redundancy in the literature basically just means that they're different from you. They're non-overlapping. So I remember when I was a grad student, and still this happens at NYU, when recruiters come to campus, they'll often say, I want the smartest Russian literature student, the smartest organic chemistry student, the smartest mathematician, the smartest marketing student, and I'm going to bring them all together.

36:53They can be educated in the area. Let's say it's a hedge fund or a consulting company or whatever it is, but I want them all to think differently and to bring that difference to bear on whatever is going on in this particular case. And so that you've got these people who are like you, people who are different from you, but then you also need a third kind. And Pixar is very well known for doing this with many of its most successful films. You bring in the black sheep. So the black sheep is not just non-redundant. It's someone who says to you, you're wrong. And let me tell you the three flavors of wrong that you are.

37:22And this is, let me break it down for you. So in, you know, in Pixar's case, they've got all these people who are amazing at animation and they'll bring in someone who's a storytelling expert. And that storyteller will say, stop worrying about whether the fur looks like fur and the water looks like water. That's nonsense. No one's going to watch a film because the fur looks like fur. Let's figure out the story. And so they'll push back and that creative tension and the tension in our own lives that we get from people who don't think like us, it's threatening and it can make us feel a little bit unnerved.

37:50But if you embrace it, it is the key to getting unstuck is to having that pushback, that conflict, that sort of productive. You want to be polite about it, but you want to have these people around you as well. So I was late to this because I was interviewing Andrew Osorkin and the two of you actually remind me of each other. Again, I'll take it. Thank you. That's high praise. Well, but you're both sort of the youngest person in that room. You were the youngest, at least at Stern, you were kind of the youngest star. No one ever leaves at Stern. They leave feet first, which creates very little opportunity for younger academics.

38:28But that's another talk show. But you were considered sort of this young star. You're no longer that young. Andrew's no longer that young. And I would just like you in a very open, honest way to speak about what were the attributes that got you so much accelerant so early in your career, looking back on it. And then what are your thoughts around trying to maintain velocity as you're no longer like the young kid on the block? So in my first six months of grad school, this is 20 years ago when I came to the US, I worked entirely, I poured my mind and soul into this one project. And I thought it was going to get published in the best journal and it was going to make me as an academic and I was going to get a job on the back of it as a professor and so on.

39:09and I went into my advisor's office and he said to me, I just want you to know that I've got some bad news. This thing that you have been working on, someone else just published that paper. So we're going to start from scratch. And it was the most devastating news. It felt like six months had been for nothing. And so from there on, and I've continued to do this now, the answer to your question is diversification. You are an index fund of yourself. And if you do 10 different things. Some of them will not work out. There are aspects of my career that went nowhere, but I do as many things as I can, at least initially.

39:44That's the exploring, I guess. And so I write books and I consult and I do legal expert testimony and I do the work that I do with section. And when these opportunities come up, you have to say, yes, you've got to pursue them and figure out if they're right for you. You don't have to keep all of them forever. You've got to exploit at some point for sure. But I think that diversity, especially early on in your career, when you don't know what's going to pan out, you can only go further with the things that you've tried and made a go of. And so that's been my philosophy ever since that 20-year-ago experience of having that sort of profound loss of all that work I'd done.

40:20And then the question about looking forward, I think I am now in an exploitation phase to an extent. I do a lot of what you said about shoulds. I say no to a lot more, and I feel very privileged to be able to do that. But I think if you keep enough doors open and you try enough things and you're voracious and omnivorous, you consume everything. At some point, you can start saying no to things because some of those things that you've tried will work out. And so that's, I think, being a key across time. I just want to go off script a little bit. I'm disturbed, concerned. I'm a bit of a catastrophist in that I'm naturally a pessimistic person.

40:58It strikes me that there is There's this epidemic of loneliness. And I saw this study that just absolutely rattled me. And that is, if you had a choice between a smoker, between being a smoker, smoking a pack of cigarettes a day and having friends and being a non-smoker, but not having friends, you'd live longer smoking a pack a day and having friends. And now one in seven men don't have a single friend. The number of kids who see their friends every day has been cut in half. what are your thoughts on loneliness and as men especially who seem to have a really difficult time forming relationships what are your thoughts on technology you've written about technology irresistible as a parent as as a man as a as a friend and colleague what are your thoughts on technology and loneliness yeah so i mean let's my last book was about technology and screens and And that's still a huge part of my interest.

41:58And I think that the rise of technology, the rise of social media platforms has been a big part of that loneliness, that epidemic of loneliness, because that's where most of our social lives live. And it's just an unfulfilling, impoverished version of what it is to have interactions with other people. But I'll say this as well. I moved out of New York to a suburb about five years ago, and my wife and I sort of independently started to meet. She met women and I met men in the town we're in. and she formed friendships like that. And I think guys are kind of, they have this sort of carapace of invulnerability.

42:32They don't want to interact with each other in a way that's vulnerable. They don't want to. One of the things I love about the way you interact, Scott, is you're very real and open about things that are hard for you and difficulties. And that's really disarming. And there's old research in social psychology that basically shows that to the extent you're willing to give people just a little nugget about yourself, you disclose something about yourself, you're vulnerable, they will do it. back, they'll mutually disclose and do that five times. And you have like effectively a very good friend. And if you do that over and over again, you form friendships.

43:01And so the thing I'm teaching my kids is that it's an illusion that the sort of the alpha person in the group will be the most popular and most liked. That person who's never vulnerable, never forms close relationships. You have to be willing to let it, maybe not all hang out, but a good portion of it hang out. And that's what people really respond to. And when they start to feel close to you. Yeah, it's very strange. As a man, you feel as if you express affection or admiration for someone else that it's a zero-sum game, that you become less masculine or less impressive. I find women are much better complimenting and just saying, oh my gosh, you look so beautiful tonight.

43:37Like a guy would never say, dude, you look so handsome. We just can't say that. there's something that's like, oh, that means we're in less, I don't know. It's very strange that we see compassion and love and affection as a zero-sum game as men. Are there any, you know, given what you've seen evolve over the last years in terms of technology, our society, you know, I always try and focus on what is the message we can have for a younger professional? Do you have any advice to your younger self? And as a function of that advice to younger people who maybe have a decent start, decent job, decent credentialing, but are maybe not feeling stuck.

44:16But I think any ambitious person will have a lot of periods where they feel like they're not accelerating as quickly as they'd like professionally or personally. What would your advice to your younger self be? So I have this research with my colleague, Hal Hirshfield at UCLA. And what we found is that when people have a nine at the end of their age, when they're 29, 39, 49, 59, they have this mini crisis and they say, where am I? I'm looking down the barrel of a new decade. Am I doing the things I should be doing? Is my life meaningful and rich? Do I have the friendships I need? And so you see all sorts of extreme behavior.

44:49You see people who've never run signing up for marathons. There's this big spike in 29 and 39 and 49 year old marathon runners. You see a lot of extramarital affairs. So not so good things. You see a lot of different kinds of behaviors spiking in these ages. But the thing that's interesting to me about that research is it suggests the importance of zooming back and figuring things out in moments that are a little bit quieter. And I don't think we do that. I think we act and we're constantly acting and we're all busy. We have demands on our time and attention. And I think taking one day every three months, devoting that day or at least a few hours to saying to yourself, you know, where am I?

45:26Let's create this sort of metric. I started here. This is where I was, whether depending on how old you were after college or when I left my last job or whatever it is when I started this venture. And this is where I am and this is where I need to be. And then think really carefully about whether you're orienting yourself in the right direction before you're 29, 39, 49. You don't need to wait for these kind of grand moments to do these kinds of audits. And actually, one of the processes I talk about in this book is known as a friction audit, which is about saying, hey, I'm going to take this day in this quieter moment and I'm going to figure out where there's friction in my life and whether I'm pointing in the right direction.

46:02And those are essential because you do that for one day and the next two months and 30 days are pointing in the right direction rather than just like kind of like a rat and a maze running along towards a dead end. So I think we just as a species don't do enough of that really high-level thinking. You've got to build it into your calendar. Put it every three months in your calendar and do it and spend that time and it'll change your life. We'll be right back.

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48:00Algebra of happiness. It's never too late to right a wrong. So in, when was it? I think it was about 20, 20, 22 years ago. I had been kicked off of the board of Red Envelope, the company I started. I got into a war with our venture capitalists, a guy named Mike Moritz from Sequoia Capital. And Mike knew nothing about retail. By the way, I treat my grudges like my plants. I water them, I love them, and I watch them grow. But Mike, who is arguably the most successful venture capitalist in history, came onto the board of Red Envelope and was supporting literally an incompetent CEO. And I just couldn't handle it.

48:42I was young. I was obnoxious. I'd had some success and I couldn't have handled the situation more poorly. And because Mike was a billionaire and I was just some crazy, you know, 34 year old entrepreneur, the board decided to kick me off the board. And that was devastating for me at the time. I remember when they called me and told me they were kicking me off the board. I was on my way to SFO airport and I was in a rental car and I got out of the rental car and I literally couldn't like, I was trying so hard to process what I do next. Do I call shareholders? Do I call people on the board? Do I call a lawyer?

49:19I couldn't even process what had just happened. I remember standing outside of my rental car, just standing there, just like for 10 or 15 minutes, just like paralyzed. Like I didn't even know where the keys were. I didn't know. I couldn't even think about where, like getting my luggage out of the trunk. I was just so literally paralyzed, not with fear, but a situation I just didn't know how to deal with or process. And long story short, actually, let's make this long story even longer. I decided to raise a bunch of capital, become the largest shareholder, and then go back and sweep out the board and kick everyone off the board.

49:57And over the course of the next two or three years, I did that. That's the fun part. And I'd like to say the story ends well, where we went not to be able to billion dollar company, but I was able to take control of the board. And then 2008, the great financial recession, Wells Fargo pulled our credit line. We had a snafu at the port and in one of our warehouses. And we were literally like chapter 11 in like 11 weeks. Story does not end well. Anyway, anyway, when I initially raised money to become the largest shareholder again, a red envelope and sweep out the board, I had a friend put me in contact with some capital sources.

50:34And I immediately raised, I think,$20 or$30 million and became the large shareholder. And I said to him, I said, okay, I'll give you some upside in that$20 or $30 million, and I'll pay you$50 grand. And so I sent him$25 grand and said, I'll pay you another $25 grand in, I don't know, a year. And you get, I don't know, 10 % of the upside. Boom, shake hands, we're done. And then all hell broke loose. The stock dove, eventually chapter 11. I lost a shit ton of money. And he sent me an invoice for the 25 grand, the remaining 25 grand. And I said, boss, I lost so much money here. This was a fucking disaster for everyone.

51:08You made 25 grand. I am not going to send you the second payment. You're the only person here who made money. And he was very upset. And it put a real strain, basically ended our friendship. And we weren't close friends, but we were friends. And I hadn't spoken to this guy in probably 18 or 20 years. And he reached out to me and said, I listen to Prop G. Pot all the time, and I just love it. And I just wanted to say, I hope you're well. And in the back of my mind, it had always weighed on me. It had always just weighed on me that I understand why I didn't pay him, but I never felt right with it.

51:42I never felt right with it, nor as I shouldn't have, right? I agreed to pay the guy. And i've decided as i've gotten older that every person I work with my aspiration is that they believe after spending Time working with me that they think i'm one of the most talented and generous people they have ever worked with And I can't control the former talent is there's a lot of dimensions that come into talent, but you can't control Generosity you can't control their perception of it, but you can control your actions and say what does market? go further than market. Pay people more than market. Be generous in terms of your views of them, in terms of forgiveness, in terms of compensation.

52:20The way I express affection to people, quite frankly, is money, is by paying them a lot or buying them shit. I don't realize how weird that sounds. A lot of virtue signaling going on here. Anyways, I sent him an email saying, I owe you$25 ,000 and it still never sat well with me that I didn't pay it. So I want to pay it. The NASDAQ is up 60 % since whenever it was in the last 18 years. I'm going to give you 40 grand. And I sent it to him. And we just had lunch today. And it wasn't that that repaired the relationship, but it kind of was a signal for reigniting a friendship. And my whole point here is it's never too late.

52:58If you fuck up, if you did something two years ago and you feel bad about it and you never had a chance to apologize, If you have the opportunity to call your dad and say, you know, I really acted like a jerk. If you have a chance to call your ex-husband and say, you know, five years ago, I was very upset. I was very, this is a hard time for me. And I didn't behave in a manner that reflects our relationship or what we had together. And I'm sorry. And the opportunity when you get a little bit older and you become a little bit more comfortable with your emotions, you become a little bit more reasoned in terms of your ego, recognizing your own deficiencies.

53:40When you realize the power of an apology, when you realize the power of honesty, it just feels right as rain. It is never too late. It is never too late to do the right thing. This episode was produced by Caroline Shagrin. Jennifer Sanchez is our associate producer, and Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Prop G pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy, No Malice, as read by George Hahn, and on Monday with our weekly market show.

54:21When daddy's on the nitrous, I totally bond with my hygienists. I find out about their lives, where they come from, and I turn into an extrovert. I should just carry around a gas tank of nitrous wherever I go. Oh my God, genius. Genius. I once went to a bachelor party where someone brought a canister of nitrous. You know, made things better. Made for a good time. Made for a good time.