Epidose 296 - Adam Alter: The Anatomy of a Breakthrough

22:03Find times to enjoy what you've been doing. Enjoy the journey, much like this mathematical professor enjoyed the fact that every day he did not cross that finish line, but he still enjoyed the journey nonetheless. And I think that's really a worthwhile philosophy. Do you think our culture sometimes convinces ourselves that labor does lead to more contentment? Yeah. And I think there's something to that. I think being busy in a particular way is really valuable. There's a kind of busyness that I think is really richly rewarding. If you can find for you what that math puzzle was to that professor for 30 years, you're going to lead a very happy life.

22:37You're going to spend hours and hours working every day and enjoying those hours to a large extent. No one enjoys every working hour, but the more you can enjoy the better. And so I think that busyness for busyness sake is not a goal. It's not an aim. It's not something you should strive for, but busyness in the service of something that brings you meaning, or even an act that you enjoy sufficiently that it brings you meaning while perhaps also earning you an income, bringing you closer to friends and family and so on. There's huge value in that. Yes, I think our culture prizes busyness. We're very proud to tell other people how busy we are.

23:11I couldn't possibly meet with you. I'm absolutely slammed at the moment. That's the kind of thing that a lot of people are proud to say, but it's a stand-in for something else, for importance. And I don't think that doesn't make a lot of sense to me. How do lifequakes interact with the search for contentment? I think what they do is they force you to make a change. A lot of people get stuck when they experience a lifequake because whatever they were doing in the past isn't going to continue working in exactly the same way. They've got to pivot. They've got to do something differently. If you're searching for contentment, sometimes a lifequake brings you contentment.

23:43Sometimes that change is welcomed. It's good for you. At other times, it's something that's sort of a hardship that you have to grapple with. And so it can get in the way of contentment temporarily. I think some people are really adaptive and malleable, and they're really good at dealing with these lifequakes, and they come up with ways to work around them really fast. They turn them to their advantage to the extent they can. But I think in general, they frustrate our contentment initially. But if you deal with them the right way, you often are able to get unstuck. Is there something we can do to prepare for these inevitable lifequakes?

24:15This seems maybe superficial, but I think a huge part of it is just knowing that they're going to come and not being blindsided by them. And also recognizing that there will be a period where if they're not positive things, you're going to be unhappy. You're going to have to grapple with them. You may have to mourn. You may have to deal with the fact that they're introducing a hardship into your life and that's okay. And to anticipate that as well. In anticipation, before it even happens, you could say, hey, when that lifequake comes, I'm going to give myself the license to spend X amount of time just dealing with it and being okay with being sad or having to pivot and being frustrated that I'm not yet making the right moves.

24:52So I think a lot of it is in the preparation. And there's some really interesting evidence that in particular in East Asian countries, places like Japan, Korea, China, people anticipate change much more than they do in the West. So part of our belief system is that things just progress. They get better, things improve, there's a linearity to life. We acquire skills, we get more wise, we get stronger and better and more impressive in all sorts of different ways. And that drives a lot of our decision-making, drives a lot of the ideas we consume as well about mastery and all that stuff. If you look at the way the philosophies, particularly the religious philosophies of East Asia work, a lot of them suggest that there is balance in the world.

25:32There's the yin and the yang, the day, the night, the hardship, and then the ease and so on. And if you adhere to that philosophy, when things get hard, you're like, well, that's just part of the cycle. But if you think that life's always progressing and it's always getting better and everything is essentially like the stock market across time going in one direction, then you're going to be blindsided when you have these blips. That preparation and anticipation is a big part of dealing with these hardships. The title of your book, Anatomy of a Breakthrough, we've talked about stuckness, but what is a breakthrough?

26:02A breakthrough is the other side of stuckness. So it depends what you're looking for, but it's what happens after you're no longer stuck. And so this is, I call it the anatomy of a breakthrough because the way I break it down is into heart, head, and habit. These are bodily terms or bodily action terms. The idea is that when people get stuck, they feel blindsided. It feels like a very personal affront. It's unpleasant. They often don't really know how to grapple with it. They flail. Instead of being thoughtful, they often do things rashly to just break out of the problem. It's a roadmap. In fact, the last part of the book, I titled the epilogue 100 Ways to Get Unstuck.

26:39It's essentially a summary of the book. So it really is a roadmap. It's like, if you're stuck, check off these 100 things on this list and you'll be unstuck, basically, in most cases. So that's what a breakthrough is, is when you've done all of that and you've come through the other side, you're no longer stuck and you've found a breakthrough. Can you talk a little bit more about the heart, head, and habit? I think a lot of people jump to the third of those. Habit is action. And when you are stuck, your first instinct is to act. There's a part of what it is to be human that deals very, very well with being physically stuck.

27:10There are these interesting cases of what is known as hysterical strength, where maybe someone's trapped under a car and you go over and you lift the car and you free them. And then when you interview people, they say, I don't know where that came from. I don't normally have the ability to lift a car, but adrenaline helped me do that. And that's incredibly useful in that situation, that physical stuckness. But that flailing behavior that's very useful physically is completely counterproductive in terms of action. If you just flail and you act, you're often acting in the wrong direction. You're not doing something helpful.

27:40So habit is action, but it's got to come after heart and head. Heart is the first thing. It's dealing emotionally with being stuck, figuring out the best next step to make, grappling with what it feels like to be in that position. And a lot of people overlook that. They don't think much about the emotions. They're already thinking about strategy and action. Once you deal with the emotional component of being stuck, there's head, which is the strategies, the approaches you can use to get unstuck. And then the actual action comes in the last part, habit. So that's those three sections. How does creativity interact with a breakthrough?

28:14Often in a lot of the domains that I look at that I'm very interested in, whether they're business-based or creativity-based or in the arts, in music, in film and so on, creativity is what the breakthrough is all about. That's the stuff of breakthroughs. The theory here is that if what you were doing is working, in other words, if you don't need to be creative, then you wouldn't be stuck. You just keep doing the thing that was working before. But if you're stuck, by definition, whatever's been happening in the past isn't doing the job. And the way forward has to be an act of creativity, where creativity is just defined as something different from the default, from the way you would think about doing things normally or naturally.

28:50A lot of getting unstuck, it doesn't have to be incredible creativity. We're not talking about writing a screenplay that wins an Oscar. We're just talking about doing something a bit different and doing it in a different way that liberates you from whatever it is that's been miring you because of the way you've been doing things in the past. You gave a practical piece of advice in the book, and I'm curious if you're still doing it, where you had a document that's got years of ideas in this document. And when you get stuck, you'll often refer back to that document for, I guess, inspiration or ideas.

29:21Is that true? It's true. It's not just one document. It's a few documents. There are a few for different purposes, but yes, absolutely. So I have one very broad, these are just good ideas document. I have research ideas. It's much more about my work and my academic work. So I have a document, it's probably 250 research projects long. So that's several careers worth of ideas that could be tested in the lab and I'll never get to them. But I like writing them down because if I ever get to a point where, say, a new student comes to NYU, it says, I want to work with you. What can we work on? I go read those 250 ideas, pick out five that seem like they mesh with what the student's background is and ideas are.

29:59And then we can talk about them and say, hey, let's whittle this down. I absolutely still do that. In fact, I'd say the most recent time I opened that document was two days ago. It's always open. How important is persistence in creativity? Well, there are two ideas that people bring to understanding creativity. The one is known as the insight lens. The insight lens suggests that creativity is essentially just waiting for ideas to fall from the sky. There's something mystical about the process. It's almost religious. the idea drops on you from above and you're just lucky and just you're there to receive it.

30:35You catch it as it falls. And that's that eureka effect where you don't see the origin of your good ideas. That's one way to think of creativity. And certainly some creative ideas do seem to just drop from the sky. That's not quite true. They're often the product of all sorts of background work, but they do feel like they fall from the sky. But the alternative is a productivity lens where creativity is essentially the result of a lot of hard work. I adhere to that belief. I think it's easy to fall into the trap of saying we don't fully understand something. It seems a bit mystical, so let's just assume it happens in a way that can't be explained by science and hard work and grit.

31:07But I actually think a lot of creativity, there's a lot of evidence for this. Creativity often does come from application, from failing many, many times, but failing in an ever more valuable way where you're moving closer to or converging on the goal. And there's a lot of evidence for this. There's this really interesting effect known as the creativity cliff illusion. and what it suggests is that when you ask people, you give them a task. Say you say to them, you have a new business. It doesn't matter what the business does, but you're selling a product. You tell them what the product is and then you say, I want you to come up with 20 different names for this company.

31:42That's our creative brief is to come up with 20 names. And then you say to them, do you think the best names you come up with, the most creative names will be among the first five or the last five of those 20? Will they be within ideas one to five or in ideas 16 to 20. Almost universally, people say, well, if I think about it, the first few tumble out, they feel like the product of great inspiration. They're easy to access, but then it gets kind of hard. And I associate in general, something that's difficult with a lack of proficiency. So they assume that those ideas 16 to 20, that's so far down the line, those are going to be hard to come by.

32:16They're not going to be very good. So what they say is that my creativity is going to hit a cliff and that's going to drop. So I think my best ideas will come up front. That's the instinct a lot of us have. But actually, when you get people to do this task, the first five ideas are trite and boring, and they look a lot like what everyone else is coming up with. There's a reason we're all swimming through the same cultural soup that's inspiring those obvious ideas that tumble out of our heads. What happens by the time you get to 16 to 20, those ideas down the line is you've diverged from the way you normally think of the world because you've been forced to.

32:48That difficulty you're experiencing is a sign that you're diverging from the herd and from the way you'd normally approach the problem. And that's where the magic happens. A lot of people quit too early, but if you persist, say 50 % beyond where you thought you needed to, the good stuff will flow at that point. And a lot of us are blindsided by that. My dad always used to say, and still says, that success comes when opportunity meets preparation. I was thinking about that as you were talking just now. On that line of thought though, can you talk about the role of luck in breakthroughs? I think what your dad was suggesting there is exactly right.

33:21That luck is a big part of that, right? That you could be the perfect person to found a massive company that's going to be worth billions of dollars. But unfortunately, you were born in the year 1312. So turns out you were about 700 years too early. That's unfortunate. That's bad luck. The idea here is that time matters a huge amount. That's an intractable stuckness. If you imagine the internet in the year 1312, unfortunately, there's no way you're going to be able to make that happen. You're probably a very interesting, unusual person, maybe burned at the stake for some of your ideas, but you're born at the wrong time.

33:55There's nothing you can do about that. Maybe you can turn that to other good use. But in a more narrow sense, in a more local sense, luck is a huge part of breakthroughs because you kind of have to be available to capture the serendipities that arrive. the unplanned good things that happen that make something possible. And so that idea here is that you're essentially throwing a lot of darts at the dartboard. A lot of the times we fail, and there's a lot of evidence for this. It doesn't matter what you do, whether you're an actor going for auditions, whether you're a painter trying to find a new style, whether you're an entrepreneur who's founded 27 companies and the 28th one happens to be the hit, you're going to fail a huge amount.

34:34But in order to win, you've got to be in the game. And so essentially luck is about, the idea we have is that luck is this mystical thing again, a little bit like creativity, but actually luck is just about how long you're playing the game. Because across a lifespan, if you keep applying yourself, there will be moments where luck works out, where the timing is right, where serendipity arrives. But if you're out of the game, it's a little bit like being out of the stock market on certain golden days. You're going to miss out on those really big returns. So luck is essentially, I think of it as just being in the game, being ready for it, being receptive to it.

35:05And that's often where really big unplanned breakthroughs happen. Another thing my dad says is you make your own luck. That's it. Yep. You've got to be in the game to make it. What's the random impact rule? I think that's in the context of careers. I think there's this work that focuses on when in our careers we have a hot streak, when our work is going to be most effective, when we're going to hit these golden periods of our working lives. It's this interesting idea that most of us during our working lives have at least one hot streak. We have at least one golden moment. Some of us have more than one, but actually the way those are distributed across time varies pretty dramatically.

35:48So some people have what's known as a springtime career where the hottest period in their careers is early on. Some people have a winter career where the end of their career is the best period. And most people have a summertime career where it's somewhere in the middle. And then there are people who have these recurring hot streaks over and over again. The question is, what exactly is it that produces these cases where you have a career, where you have multiple hot streaks? And the thing that seems to predict the best, according to a lot of research, is if you engage in two processes in order.

36:17And the processes are, first one is known as exploration. And exploration is where you essentially say, I'm going to spend a little bit of time gathering as much intel as I can, trying different approaches. So in the context of, say, a career of an artist, the artist Jackson Pollock spent about seven years trying every imaginable art style. He tried expressionism and fauvism and cubism and surrealism. And if you look at his works during that time, it was an absolute hodgepodge of different styles. And one day he tried the drip technique that ended up becoming what he became best known for. It made him one of the wealthiest artists of his time as well.

36:54He was successful in commercial respects, in critical respects as well. And so what happened was he was doing this exploration and then he moved, as soon as he found a style that seemed to work pretty well, he moved to exploitation where he became one track focused on just this style. So you see him almost schizophrenically jumping around from style to style. And then he says, done, I know what I'm looking for. And he spends this seven year period just doing this one thing over and over again, a thousand times. Now you can't do just one of those things. You can't always be the person who's like, I'm going to try 15 different hobbies and I'm going to try 27 careers, and then I'm going to wake up one day and realize I didn't actually get deep on any of them.

37:32But you also can't be the person who says, I think what I'm going to do is spend the rest of my life on this one thing without having any idea what the alternatives are. So there's a balance there. And these people who have these recurring hot streaks across time are the people who go broad, and then they go very narrow. They go broad, and they go very narrow. That cycle seems to predict great productivity in our working lives and otherwise creativity as well. Can you talk about the practical difference between striving for excellence and for perfection? Every now and again, you'll come upon an idea that just changes dramatically how you think about major aspects of life.

38:08And I think this was one of them. If you're a perfectionist by nature, you're the kind of person who wants to be the best at everything you do, or you want to be your best version at everything. You're incredibly driven. The question is, how do you do that? How do you do that also without burning out? How do you do it in a way that's sustainable across time. The nice thing about this difference between excellence and perfection is that perfection is an incredibly demotivating, unrealistic ideal. It's not something you can sustain over time. It's probably not something you can ever reach. By definition, it's unattainable in most instances.

38:39Sure, you can get 100 out of 100 on a math test. What really matters is not whether you get 100 out of 100 on a math test, but there are domains where perfection is unattainable, and that's what really, really matters, I think, in a lot of our lives. That's the stuff that matters the most. If you try to be perfect at everything, it's demotivating because you'll never quite reach that goal. And you might always feel a little bit less than what that goal implies. Excellence is a much better alternative because excellence recognizes that there is room between excellence and perfection, that you can on any one day be excellent without being perfect.

39:11And in fact, excellence, the nice thing about it is that it bobs up and down on the water. And on a really good day, you might wake up and excellence is 99 % the way towards perfection. On another day, you're exhausted, you're overwhelmed, you're overworked, too many things are going on. Excellence today is just getting through the day. It's 50%. So excellence is a much more flexible, malleable target to aim for. And it recognizes that humans are human, whereas perfection is by definition kind of superhuman. And it's not a valuable way to think about your striving and your approach to goals. Similar theme to the mathematician anecdote.

39:46I totally agree. He was not perfect in solving this problem, but he was excellent every day. I was just thinking about your book and I want to go back to your list that you have in terms of inspiring for creativity. And I remember in your book, you talked about how trying to do something completely new can actually be a recipe for paralysis. Can you expand on that? Yeah, this is the originality trap that in our culture, we prize radical originality, this idea that you've got to do something completely new. And that's true of say businesses, that your business has to be your product, your idea has to be completely new.

40:21Your approach to some problem has to be just radically different from anything that's come before. If you're an artist, a musician, a filmmaker, it doesn't matter what you do, you've got to come up with something really radically new. First of all, it's a fiction. It's not even a real thing. This idea of radical originality doesn't exist in the real world. That really almost everything is evolution rather than revolution. And that's an important thing to understand because it changes how you try to manufacture these new things, recognizing that they're not radically new. In the book, I talk about some examples.

40:52One of them that's always been interesting to me is Bob Dylan, that in the 20th century, looking back and thinking about Western music, when you ask musical experts, who is a true original of the 20th century, someone who is unlike anyone else? There are lots of responses to that. The single most common response is Bob Dylan. People talk about his songwriting, the way he sang, the way he played the guitar, everything that he did, they have a way of thinking of what he did as being truly original. But actually, when you go back, you look at the DNA and look at what filtered through his work and where he was inspired and by what, you find that actually it's just not true.

41:26Even he was quick to admit that he was inspired by several genres. He mashed them all together in a way that was unique. Certainly, the product was unique. No one else was Bob Dylan, but he was basically the product of a whole lot of different building blocks. And so what's important about the difference between this radical originality idea and what Bob Dylan was, is that he wasn't radically original. He was just a radically original combination of old building blocks, of existing building blocks. And that's what most creativity and originality and newness actually is. It's not radically new.

41:57It's not something that we've never seen the likes of before. It's the natural consequence of taking these old things and moving them together and putting the jigsaw together in a radically new way. And when you know that, you asked me earlier about this document of ideas I have. This document of ideas is essentially in the service of combinatorial newness, taking these old things, recombining them in new ways and finding something new. And so if you want to write a book, do you want to write a book that's radically original? Maybe, maybe that's what you're trying to do. But it turns out that most radically original books stand on the shoulders of lots of other books.

42:33And so if you have a really big list of ideas to draw on and then you mash them together in new ways, you'll find something great. The nice thing about that practically is if you're stuck, trying to find something radically new is How do you even begin to do that? I don't even know how you do. You just sit down and bang your head against the desk. If you say to yourself, what I'm trying to do is find new ways to take old things and move them in ways that fits them together, you can actually do something with that. There are steps you can take. And so I think it's really liberating, but also a truer way of thinking of what originality and newness actually is.

43:06That rhymes with the history of technological progress. It's the same pattern. Can being stuck actually be a sign of progress? I think so. One of the reasons it can be a sign of progress is because there's an effect that's pretty robust across lots of different areas known as the plateau effect. The plateau effect suggests that for a while you will make progress doing a certain set of things with a certain strategy, and then you'll hit a plateau where your progress stops, where you get stuck. And this seems to be true in lots of domains. There's a lot of evidence for this in physical pursuits.

43:37So athletes who always train the same way, no matter how effective that training technique is when they begin, eventually it stops paying dividends. It's not just this linear, endless growth chart where you just keep doing well and keep getting better and better and better. What eventually happens is you hit a plateau, you've got to change things, you've got to move things. So I think stuckness in this sense, it implies if you've been making progress in the past that you've made so much progress that you now need to do something a little bit different to make further progress. This is true, by the way, not just of athletic pursuits, but also of learning, say new languages or new skills, that if you keep using the same tactics to learn, you will eventually get stuck and you'll need to do something different.

44:15You may have alluded to this earlier, but what are the risks of being incapable of reaching the pinnacle of your own definition of success? This gets at a couple of questions. One is, is your definition of success a realistic one, or is it perfectionism? Is it unrealistic? If it's realistic and you're not reaching those goals, You're not reaching the place you'd like to reach. There are a lot of very productive things I think you can do. You can pivot. You can change the goal. You can lower your standards briefly. I talk in the book a lot about the idea that stuckness is essentially just having standards that are too high in the local sense.

44:50If you're having a really rough day and you're a writer and you just can't quite write the 500 words you plan to write before breakfast, then maybe what you need to do is say, hey, that's too stringent a requirement today. Excellence for me today is not 500 words. It's 20 words, something like that. you can be flexible with your goals. But systematically not reaching the standards you set for yourself is obviously incredibly demotivating. It suggests that perhaps your standards are too high, or perhaps you need to look in a different domain for inspiration, or maybe you should be doing something different with your time.

45:20And what you get when you consistently don't reach those heights is I think a lot like what you get when you have that nine ending age situation. You say to yourself, is my life meaningful? Are things working out the way I'd like them to. And I think consistently not achieving your goals is likely to inspire maladaptive responses. So you're going to be finding other ways to cultivate meaning that might be a little bit counterproductive in the same way that some of the responses people have to being say 39, 49, 59 are themselves counterproductive ways of trying to generate meaning. So obviously not a good feeling to be a human who just never achieves his or her goals.

45:55It must interact on some level with how much you enjoy the process of trying to achieve that possibly unattainable goal, like the mathematician example. It also sort of reveals for me one of the key problems with goal setting. I don't think there's anything wrong with knowing this is where I'm trying to get to. In a grand sense, this is my lodestar. This is where I'm heading. I'm going in this particular direction as much as I can. I think that's fine to orient your action in a certain direction. There's nothing wrong with that. But the problem with goal pursuit is there's a fundamental illogicality to it because what you're doing is you're saying, I think the goal is, say it's writing 100 ,000 words, you're writing a book.

46:35If your only goal is to write 100 ,000 words, you are in a failure state until you achieve 100 ,000 words. But as someone who's written books, there's nothing more demoralizing than finishing the book, feeling like you reached that goal and then saying, but it doesn't feel how I thought it would feel. I thought it was going to be amazing. There's even this incredible case of the long jumper, Bob Beeman, who in 1968 jumped eight meters 90, which was just way two feet further than anyone had jumped before, 60 centimeters further than the next best jump. It was the absolute peak of success in what he had been doing.

47:09It was the goal. No one had even imagined the goal could be eight meters 90. And he spent many years after that just feeling lost and aimless and saying like, what comes next? I don't know what to do next. I'm lost in my success. It's demotivated me and left me wondering what I'm supposed to do with my life. So he actually left athletics behind to a large extent. So I think better than goals is a system of behavior that is productive. It's the mathematician going to work for 30 years, doing something he loved and not paying attention to the goal as much as he paid attention to the system of working towards that goal very loosely.

47:42It wasn't about progress. It was about the journey. And I think that's a much more productive way of thinking about our lives, especially our working lives, is that every day I'm going to bring my most excellent self. in what I can bring today to work. And I'm going to do it for a certain number of hours. And my system is to do these following things. This is how I'll know I've succeeded on this day. And I'm not going to pay attention to these extraneous goals as much. Maybe in the long run, it's worth keeping them in mind, but I'm going to just keep doing this thing that seems to be working for me in general, that makes me feel like I'm generally making progress in my world.

48:14I don't remember the academic terms for it, but I know I've read a paper on post-goal attainment pleasure versus progress pleasure and the progress being more enjoyable generally and the post goal attainment being short-lived. That's exactly the idea. Yeah. It's the journey that keeps bringing returns, but the goal itself, humans are just not wired to achieve those goals. It leaves you wondering what's the next goal. You get goal escalation. The next one becomes more unattainable. You're on this treadmill that gets faster and faster and faster across time. As you can master that speed, you set a higher speed for yourself.

48:44Eventually you or the treadmill or both are going to break down. It's just not a sustainable way to conduct our lives. So you can have a fuzzy big picture of objective, but then a system that might allow you to attain that and you have to enjoy the system. How should people process or think about the success that they observe other people having? I actually start the book talking about this idea that success is really visible and a lot of struggle is invisible. And there are lots of reasons for that. I think one of the reasons is that we live in a social media age where what everyone shares is the very best 1 % of their lives.

49:19And we also look at the accounts that are most successful. We all sort of follow the same basic accounts. Those are the accounts of the wealthy, the famous, the successful, the people who have teams that are doing their very best to make that person's life look as manicured and as impressive as possible. So by contrast, if you're sitting on the toilet scrolling through Instagram, your life in that moment is probably less exciting than everything you're looking at on Instagram. That's just not going to be the way to make yourself feel good about what you're doing with your time. And so I think social media is a really big part of it.

49:52The other part of it is just the way our culture prizes success and makes a taboo out of failure. Whatever we do, we're very quick to share successes. And there are good reasons for that. They bring us promotions and they bring us fame and wealth and all this other stuff and acclaim from our friends and so on. But actually, when you find these cases of people who are transparent about their failures, It's very disarming and it's unusual and it's hugely heartening. In the book, I opened the book actually with the case of Brie Larson, the actress who posted this two-part YouTube video talking about her failures.

50:23And it's an amazing video because she's achieved both kinds of success in Hollywood. She has roles that have made her fabulously wealthy. She's also won an Academy Award for Best Actress. The highest kinds of objective metrics you can think of in the acting world. but she talks in these videos about having failed by her accounting 98 to 99 % of the time. She goes through just film after film after film where either she didn't get a call back, or she didn't even get to the interview, or she got to the interview second round, but didn't make it. And you look at that and you're like, here is the most successful person in this field failing 99 % of the time.

50:58And the only way we know that from the outside, the only way we get beyond the Academy Award and the fame and the wealth and the Captain Marvel and all of this stuff, it's because she's making this video that tells us this. Now, that's true of every life that you see out there. Most people aren't making videos about their failures. She's an exception. And I think it's a really useful idea that the very best people at what they do are still failing most of the time. And most of that is hidden from us. Our final question for you, Adam, how do you define success in your life? I define success as, I think there are a few different aspects, but for me, one of the biggest things is money as much as command over time.

51:35If I think about my days, the days when I have the most control over what I'm doing with the moments within that day, those feel like successful days. That doesn't mean they're easy and I'm lying on a beach and I'm sipping a cocktail. That's not what I'm talking about. I mean, in general, that I'm like the mathematician striving for that problem where at the end of the day, I look back and say, I can't imagine having spent my working day in a better way, a way that made me feel more enriched, gave my life more meaning. I'm very lucky. I spend a lot of my days feeling that. I have a lot of variety in my life.

52:06And so I think of that as success. I also think success has to be about more than you as the individual. Success is also going to be about having people around you who are enriched for your presence, for the fact that you exist. I think it's a really good way to measure your success. Not just do I have all the things I want, but also is the fact that I exist in this world a good thing to other people, other people who benefit from my existence. I think that's true success. That's a beautiful answer. Adam, this has been an incredible hour. Thank you for coming on. Thanks so much for having me. Well, thank you.

52:39I've appreciated it. It's been fun.