 So some of our coaching clients and certainly some of our show fans don't even know that they're stuck. So I know that the book, you know, basically starts from recognizing that you're stuck and having a breakthrough. But I'm curious if you're open to share a little bit about how we can recognize we're stuck in the first place. Yeah. I mean, I think there are two kinds of stuck broadly speaking. There's the stuck where you know immediately that something's not right. And then there's the malaise that comes from just living the same sort of path every day. I think often it's an external change that kind of illuminates something that you hadn't noticed before. You know, if things don't change, if they stay the same, I think humans are creatures of inertia. We just tend to do the same thing over and over again. And something has to push us to change or to recognize that something might even need to change. And so that can be the right kind of friend. It can be training yourself to be curious and to question everything and to question orthodoxy. Like why do we all do something a particular way? There's no good reason for it, it turns out. And so let's figure out an alternative. So some people are very good at that. And I talk about them in my book. But most of us, once we're no longer children, just stop questioning. And so that instinct just evaporates at some point between childhood and adulthood. And it's not great for us, but it does happen. And your latest book, Anatomy of a Breakthrough, we're excited to talk about today. Johnny and I are both curious how you got interested in the science of breakthroughs, what was going on behind the scenes, maybe even for you personally that led to this book. I've discovered over the last probably 15 years, maybe even 20 years now that everyone in some respect feels stuck almost all the time in at least one way. And so if you ask people, just stop for a minute and think about your life and think about whether there's an area where you might be stuck or where you feel things have stagnated and they're not going in the direction you'd like. Within 15 to 20 seconds of asking that question, I find that most people are pretty articulate about saying, yep, that's true. Here is how I'm stuck. They can tell you about it. They can tell you that it doesn't feel very good, that they're willing to pay a fair amount of money to solve the problem. And so I spent a lot of my academic career studying various forms of being stuck and what we can do about it. And given how common a problem it is, it seemed like exactly the sort of thing that demanded a book. And so this book is essentially a kind of roadmap to getting unstuck from all sorts of different situations and contexts. Well, the other thing about it as well is for a lot of people, when they do become stuck, they end up submitting and surrendering to those cycles. But those who have a lot of reach, who are striving for something that have goals, they recognize that being stuck as a hurdle to getting what they want. So they're looking to break those cycles. And it's certainly universal that we all get stuck, but there is a difference in the people who are willing to admit that they are stuck and those who are just surrendering due to where they are in life. I think there are people who don't know they're stuck and something illuminates that for them. It shows them that they're stuck. I think there are people who know they're stuck but can't admit it or don't want to admit it and don't want to engage with it. That's also very common. And then there are people where the stuckness is such that they don't have a choice but to engage with it. And they're not always sure what to do. I'm speaking to all of these people. I'm interested in helping all of them. But they come to the book from different perspectives. And I think once they get over that first hurdle of saying, yeah, I guess I am stuck. And in fact, the beginning of the book is an attempt to normalize stuckness because I think a lot of us feel that it's a bit taboo. It's not the sort of polished image you want to present to the world in this Instagram manicured era. And so that's the sort of first starting point for the book, is to license people to engage with the topic. Yeah, what I enjoyed the most about the book were the stories about people that you wouldn't necessarily even assume were stuck. And I think when we look at our heroes, when we look at some of the examples you have in the book, it's very easy to see them with their success or at the end destination or where we want to be and think, well, their path was effortless. They made it look easy. And they're not open in sharing all those moments where they did feel stuck or plateaued and felt like, oh man, that goal is unreachable. But yet we look up to them as heroes. So it's really great that you're normalizing this understanding of stuck and recognizing that it happens to even the best of us. Olympians can get stuck. Yeah, that's exactly the point. That's the beginning of the book right there. That if you think about the 10 most successful artists, filmmakers, writers, soccer players, rugby players, it doesn't matter what you're talking about. It doesn't matter what domain. The initial impression is that they're incredibly good at what they do. And it was probably easier for them than it would be for me if I were to attempt whatever they're doing. But when there's a biography written about them, or when they write a memoir, or when someone delves into their past, it's inevitable that essentially the road from wherever they began to where they ended up and what you see as that polished end product is littered with one sticking point after another, one hurdle after another. And eventually, if you're looking for that pattern, you realize that it's absolutely universal. There is no one, no business, no entity, no matter what it is, no person in any field that doesn't get there through a really long series of hurdles. And I think that's really nice to understand that even the people who are the very best at what they do didn't get there just by coasting. And we tend to assume that's true a lot of the time. And so that can discourage us when we find that we're personally quite stuck. Now, in that explanation, there were sort of two groups that stood out to me. There was the creatives, and then there was the physical athletes, the physical feats. So is there a difference in the way that we get stuck depending on the context? What I've found is that it's really idiosyncratic. In other words, everyone experiences his or her own version of stuckness. And it can vary dramatically. There's this interesting work looking at careers and looking at the golden period in careers. Almost every career has at least one hot streak, one golden period, which is really nice to know. But it's incredibly difficult to predict whether it's going to happen at the beginning of the career, so-called springtime careers at the end of the career or winter career, or in the middle of the career, a summertime career, or in some cases a perennial career, where there are many of these kinds of hot streaks. The question is, how do you engineer those? How do you inject them into your career, those hot streaks? The point of that research is essentially that there is no one size fits all. There's always this work saying, and this makes total sense, that over time you develop certain faculties and skills that make you better equipped as you get older and as you get more senior to deal with whatever kerbals arrive, and so you're going to be better at things the more senior you are. Then there's other research that says, actually, it's really just about being a bit of a sort of young prodigy, that the best people in whatever pursuit it is are just really good at it from the start. I think the fact that these two different literatures that contradict each other exist suggests that there is no one size fits all. I definitely feel, in a lot of the science that you unpack in the book, that there is a lot of counterintuitive science to what we classically hold as ways to get unstuck, so to speak. What really stood out to you as the most outside of the box thinking or really counterintuitive science in your research? I think one of the ideas is this paradoxical idea that the people who are best at slowing down are the ones who make the most progress consistently. On a certain level, that's not surprising, I think. We know that you're supposed to look before you leap, but in the moment, actually, being a person who says, this is a 90-minute soccer game, and I'm playing this game, the whistle is just gone, and what should I do first? I should do nothing. No one does that. The only person who seems to do that is Lionel Messi, who is the best soccer player in the world right now. I talk about him and how he has used this slowing down process in the first few minutes of the game to improve the other 85-plus minutes of the game, but no one can do that except Messi. If you trace the path of each soccer player on the field, on every field in the world, everyone but Messi is running around like a headless chicken from the minute the whistle goes off. You know, they really are moving around a huge amount. Messi ambles around, often he doesn't even move. There are sometimes cameras that sit on him because he's interesting to look at, and he's just standing there with his legs kind of apart, just standing there, just kind of looking at the game, and it's totally fascinating. And again, this idea that the people who make the most progress are often the people doing the least, I find it totally fascinating. So I was fortunate or unfortunate enough to see one of Messi's last games in Paris, and it was incredibly boring as a spectator. You're so excited to see him perform, and yet here he is barely moving on the pitch, and he's earned that right because of his skill level, his feats. He's legendary, one of the best ever, but many professional soccer players, their coaches would pull him off the field in the first 10 minutes if they did what he was doing. So there is that not only internal, I have to rush through this, I have to move fast, everyone else around me is moving fast, I have to move fast and break things, and then there is that external force too that's like, well, you should be moving fast, I'm your boss, you need to be working harder, you need to be more productive. So the internal and external are both pressuring us to move faster, yet counterintuitively we need to slow down to have the breakthrough. What can we do to manage both of those pressures that we're feeling in those moments? Yeah, that's an excellent point. I think the Messi example is one that I put in the book because I just find it so fascinating because whenever you find a person who is as skilled as he is doing something that no one else is doing, that's worth paying attention to. That doesn't mean we can all stand on the soccer field and do nothing. As a soccer player or as a former soccer player, I could never have got away with that. I'm not Messi. But I think the principle is useful that this idea of slowing down, even if it's a private experience, and a lot of stuckness is very private and lonely and isolating, in those moments you should slow down too. You don't have to be on the soccer field to do it. The other thing I think the book is about and that that example is about is about leadership because the story begins with one of Messi's coaches. He is from Diego Maradona, another Argentinian giant who many say is the best of all time among the top few. Maradona saw Messi and said, this guy is never going to succeed. He's too nervous. He's not going to be great. And I thought that was fascinating. And it took a coach to say, actually, you're wrong, Diego. You may be a giant of the game, but you're wrong because he's great and he's got incredible talent. And we just have to figure out a way to deal with his nerves. And so this coach basically came in as the leader and said, Lionel, I want you to get on the field, but do nothing for three minutes and see how that makes you feel and see if that calms you down. And instead, survey the territory, look at the landscape. So a lot of the book is about leadership and it's about how to be the right kind of person who has people in your charge and can guide them in a way that will bring out the best for them. And part of that is licensing people to A, fail, and B, to slow down. So inside of that, it sounds a lot of this breakthrough is happening behind the scenes. So maybe at work, when all that pressure is on, you can't really slow down. But then in the off time, taking a weekend or maybe taking a vacation, creating that space in your life to slow down outside of those moments creates that opportunity for your mind to catch up with everything else that's going on around it. Yeah, I think that's right. I think when you have a discretion over it, when you have discretionary time, time that you can spend the way you'd like to slowing down is very valuable. If at work, it's not feasible that you're going to slow down and so be it. You may be one of those people who's lucky enough to have a manager or a boss, or you may be a manager or a boss who has the chance to license that slowing down in the people around you. And I think that's part of the message as well, that a lot of this change happens from the top. And so a lot of the people who've read the book or that I've heard from have been these kinds of people who say, how do I assemble a team for unsticking and breakthroughs? What should I do to maximize the likelihood that this team does actually stumble on a breakthrough? And then one of the messages is, let them fail and let them do it slowly. Which we've heard the famous Silicon Valley move fast and break things adage. And a lot of companies have adopted that mindset. You look at Uber's massive growth, you look at Facebook, and everyone's looking around saying, hey, we want to get that lightning that they had in a bottle. And it seems like everything is moving at a rapid pace. In fact, some of our listeners are watching this in 60 second clips instead of the full hour long conversation. So with all of those external forces getting us to move fast seems like there's a lot of psychological traps that we fall into around being stuck that we don't even recognize. Yeah. Well, let me say, let me amend move fast and break things. I love break things because break things implies failure is okay. I don't like move fast. I think it's move slow and break things. So be deliberate and deliberative and certainly make mistakes all the time. I have no problem with that. But I think it's really important that you license people to do that at a pace that makes sense. And so a lot of the book is about laying the foundation before you act. As humans, when we feel stuck, we rush to act immediately. Managers push us to move faster. Coaches tell us we should be constantly going. You have the Silicon Valley move fast and break things idea. Going against the grain there and slowing down and focusing on emotion and strategy before you get to action, I think, is really, really important. And so that's one of the critical messages in this book is that there's a series of steps that you've got to take before you do whatever the thing is to get unstuck. And that foundation is essential if you're going to move in a direction that's fruitful. So how can our mind play tricks on us around being stuck? Because part of that I think you hit on is this pressure that we feel this discomfort of knowing that we're stuck and wanting change so desperately, but yet at the same time feeling like it's further and further away or we've plateaued. Yeah. So the book is structured with three primary sections. Heart, then head, then habit. And heart is basically about dealing with the emotional consequences of feeling stuck. Head is about the strategies, the mental strategies we can use to get unstuck and then habit is actually acting. So habit is the last thing. Doing the thing is the last thing. And I think having a checklist is part of what's valuable. In fact, the last thing in the book is an epilogue that's titled 100 Ways to Get Unstuck, which is a sort of digest of everything that's written in the book. And the idea is that checklists are valuable in part because they force you to go through a series of steps to ask a certain set of questions. Now, I think for me, education is generally about giving people the right questions to ask rather than giving them all the answers. And so that's what the book is designed to do. It's designed to say, when you're stuck, that one of the key traps you'll fall into is this trap where you feel the need to move, you flail, you feel like you're hemmed in. And so the human instinct is to just kind of flail, whether it's emotional, whether it's mental or whether it's a physical flailing. That's almost never going to help you. So that's the first thing that we fall into. And so by slowing down and going through those steps, you counteract that general intuitive tendency to do something right now, even if it's not the best thing to be doing. For a lot of people, that flailing aspect is usually, that's the first automatic response due to being stuck. You can only flail for so long before you tire out. That flailing is the fight or flight mechanism coming in. Then after that, you're tired. So you get frustrated. And then your inner dialogue, your inner critic now has plenty of opportunity to beat you while you're down. And I still don't think people recognize that how they are feeling is the exhaustion that they have felt due to being stuck. It's only after hitting that place multiple times that they start to recognize a pattern that is going on, that is putting them in that place. Once that pattern is recognized, then it's like, oh, okay, I see what's going on here. I've been in this position enough times to know that something else is going on that I have to take a look at. This is now the symptom of the problem. But by that time, we already have a large subset of people who have already surrendered to those patterns and that defeat. For those people who have the goals and a lot of who want to achieve a lot in their lives, that's when they get angry. Because now they're not going to be defeated by this problem. And they are going to look for a way out. And of course, as you mentioned earlier, those are the people who are willing to not only spend time and effort to figure it out, but also money. Let's just get out of this and move on. I'm tired of being in this place. So how do we get those people to recognize that what they are feeling, that those moments of life beating them down, is due to being stuck. And that being stuck will certainly have it because they're missing out on skills that are allowing them to get them over that hurdle. And because they don't have those skills or they're perceiving it wrong, that hurdle is too much to overcome. And if they don't figure that out, that hurdle is only going to be represented in other places in their life because they haven't beaten it in this area. Yeah. I think a lot of it is figuring out what those traps are that get you into that situation in the first place. So one of my favorite and most interesting examples is the creative cliff illusion, which is this idea that we have this illusion that creativity is kind of the product of some sort of ethereal insight. It just kind of lands on you. You get this inspiration that comes from nowhere and no one knows where it comes from. That's one lens for thinking about creativity, but another lens is a productivity lens where the more you work at something, the more good stuff comes. And that's true of creativity as well. So when you ask people, for example, imagine I asked you to come up with as many creative uses as you can for a paper clip. Do you think your best responses will be among the first 10 you give me or the 11th to 20th? And almost everyone when you ask that question says, oh yeah, the first few responses will be the best ones and then it'll get really hard and then they won't be interesting after that. And they're almost always wrong. So as it gets harder and harder, as you get to idea five, six, seven and it starts to become difficult to do, we tend to think that because it's difficult, the ideas are not as good. And so a lot of us quit at that point and say, right, I'm done here. I'm falling off this creative cliff and my creativity is plummeted. So there's no point in continuing. But that's the problem right there. If you get people to continue, they realize, oh yeah, it's hard to come up with ideas 11 to 20. But because you're diverging from what's obvious, you're diverging from common sense, you're diverging from the herd. That's where the interesting ideas lie. And if you can get people to do that and to reveal to themselves that trying hard even in the face of that mental difficulty is fruitful, then they stop saying, oh, I guess my best ideas come early. So a lot of it is in the instruction that comes from seeing that if you push against those little traps, that you can free yourself from it. And actually, there are products there that are valuable and that reinforce the idea that you should behave differently. So I think that's the most useful thing. I think for a lot of us when we're learning something new or experiencing something new, the early leaps tend to be the most gratifying. And then over time, as we start to hit that plateau, it gets tougher and tougher without consistency and discipline and resilience to push through to then have another big leap. And we often just quit at that point. We see the classic meme of the guy digging and then just beyond is the diamond and the other guy digging a little bit further and getting the diamond. But at the same time, when you're in that moment and you're in a plateau and it feels like you put all of this work in and it just continues to flatline for you in terms of progress, it can be difficult in that moment to channel all of your courage and energy to keep pushing through. So even sometimes when we recognize that there are these traps, there's a resilience piece to this that I think has to be discussed. And some of us haven't really faced many hardships in other areas. So we work with a lot of top performers. And when things come easy in other facets of our life, then this plateau and this one thing that we really want can really be that roadblock to our success. Yeah, I think what's really useful is to kind of take the decision away from the person and say something like instead of going for as long as you think you should go, you should always add 10 or 20 or 50%. So that way you've got a rule of thumb, a kind of algorithm that guides your behavior. So if you think this thing that you're doing is worthwhile, if you've decided that it's worthwhile enough to spend time on, then it needs to be worthwhile enough to spend 150% more time or 50% more time than you originally thought. And then if it is, you should go to the point where you think to yourself, my intuition is telling me I'm done and then continue again for another 50%. And if you're then still not finding that you're getting anywhere, if it feels like you're diverging from where you want to be or you're not getting any closer, you're not converging on some goal, then leave it behind because there are a lot of things we could be doing without time. But don't leave it behind before you've added that extra 50% because often that's where the magic happens for many of us much of the time. And so I think that kind of algorithm or rule that guides your behavior is really liberating sort of constraining yourself by that rule is liberating because it takes the decision away from you means you don't have to make this discretionary decision every time you're deciding how to spend your time and effort. And so I find that's really useful for a lot of people. Yeah, I love that. And I feel like it's really rewarding on the other end of it to sort of know, okay, if I put in the extra 50, then I feel then I know outside of whatever internal dialogue that I'm having that I gave it a really good effort, right? Because oftentimes we have that governor internally that says, you can't run mile 13 this marathon, half marathon, you can't get to 26 miles, don't put your shoes on. But in actuality, we can go a lot further than our mind will let us. It's funny, this is a totally different application. But I think, you know, I've heard so many people say to me, you know, I was in this relationship that didn't work out, I just wish I hadn't spent so much time being in that before I realized it was time to leave, or I spent so much time in this career, I wish I hadn't spent all that time before I left. But that extra time that you took to figure it out that it was time to go is critical because that's how you get to the point where you aren't questioning it anymore. You know that you kind of explored it to the ends of what it could be, whether it was a relationship or a career move or whatever it was. So I think that extra 50% is partly a kind of form of reassurance that liberates you to do the next thing if it happened not to work out. So it's got the value of maximizing the chance of success. But if there is no success there, it liberates you to pursue whatever comes next. And we often diminish that wisdom. And we don't realize we've received that wisdom. On the flip side, many of us, if we're getting the wisdom from a coach or a third party, we'll still want to work through it ourselves. We still want to put it into action. So that wisdom, when you've gained it, you've unlocked it. Instead of the outside perspective, it's even more valuable for all the rest of the decisions you'll make in your life versus picking up another book on decision making or watching another podcast on decision making. Yeah, I think that's right. I think living through that experience is critical. I think there are some things you can be told. But for most things that are important to us, we need to experience them to feel that we know the answer to that question. So I'd love to dive into the heart because I know emotions and we tend to work mostly with men, a lot of lone wolves, who tend to tamp down those emotions or label them as negative, not want to confront them or deal with them. But they are a big hurdle to us finding that success we're looking for and oftentimes leading us to feel stuck. So what insights does science give us around managing the emotions piece of the equation? Yeah, I think the first big thing is even just paying attention to emotions and realizing that being stuck is incredibly anxiety-provoking and that that's okay and inhabiting that place in your life is an acceptable thing to do, that before you can move on with strategy and with behavior, you need to be comfortable where you are or at least accept where you are, even if it's not comfortable. Also kind of realizing that taking the pressure off is really valuable. One of my favorite examples is of Miles Davis when Herbie Hancock, who the great jazz pianist, started auditioning with Davis and his band. Hancock was absolutely overwhelmed because he was playing with some of the best jazz musicians of the age and he just felt totally overwhelmed by the experience and he started playing with Miles and the band at Miles' house and Miles, a couple of minutes after they started jamming, Miles threw his trumpet down on the couch and went upstairs and they didn't see him for three days. But over the three days, Herbie Hancock, he relaxed, he started to play more expansively, he started to kind of noodle around a little bit and he sort of said to him, so he describes this in this great YouTube video where he says, I realized that this might be the only time I'd ever get to play with people of this stature and I just wanted to inhabit it and enjoy it and really experience it. And then Miles, at the end of the third day, Miles comes back downstairs, picks up the trumpet and starts jamming with the band again and Herbie is surprised to see him there. And at the end of the day, Miles says to Herbie, that was great. Are you ready to play with the band? Will you join us next week? And Herbie says to him, you kind of left after five minutes. I just thought I'd bombed the audition. I thought that was it. You had disgusted with me. Miles said, no, I have a really good sense of when I need to be out of the room. I know that as a leader, part of my role is to turn down the pressure because I know from seasoned musicians I can pressure them as much as I like. They're still going to perform. You were not performing because I was in the room and he recognized that. And so he was known for being an absolute hard ass. He would shout at people on stage, but having that ability to recognize when to turn down the temperature, whether you're a leader or whether you're someone who's pressuring yourself is really critical. So I think that's one of the most important lessons about heart is that it's okay to feel bad in the situation that you find yourself in, especially when you're stuck. And that's sort of a first step before you can start to move forward is to recognize that and turn down the temperature a little bit. And one of our program is called Unstoppable, which is all about getting people unstuck. We want them to understand what it feels like to be in a heightened emotional state because without identifying that, or at least having an understanding of when you're going into that, it's difficult then to navigate once you're already in the heightened emotional state. And once you're in the heightened emotional state, that state is driving your actions. So it's difficult to think clearly to understand, to be able to slow things down and to create space and to look from different perspectives because that heightened emotional state is what's driving everything. It's such a pace that it's certainly difficult then to get unstuck. And that's as what I was saying earlier, this is where the frustration starts to settle in. So in order to recognize that, and this goes with having that connection with those emotions so that you understand what those triggers are so that you can navigate them. You can understand them before you walk into something such as a rehearsal room with Miles Davis and his band. There's also another story with Miles and Herbie, and I can't remember where they were performing, but they were performing live. So it's in the moment. And as somebody who's performing live, you're so in the moment, anything else makes you self-conscious in that moment. So you want to just let go and just do your thing and be the music. Well, Herbie, and being a young man that he was, clanked some awful notes in a section that Miles was coming in afterwards. And of course, Miles understood what was happening and he had to change up his arrangement in order to make Herbie look okay and the performance not to completely turn into a train wreck. And Herbie recognized that Miles had changed up the notes, which alerted him to, oh, he probably did that because I probably made those mistakes. And Miles' own intimidating and keeping everyone walking around on eggshells didn't let Herbie know that he knew that Herbie messed up until I think it was maybe a day later or something where Herbie started to get a little bit cocky about the performance or whatnot. And Miles let him know that the only reason we were in that position was because I fixed it because of you clanking around on these bad notes. But again, when you're in those moments, your emotions are carrying that performance, they're carrying your actions. And so it's incredibly important to know what those triggers are when you're in a heightened emotional state, what you can do to avoid a heightened emotional state if it's not going to be beneficial for you to be in it in order to grow. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I think in general, this idea of sort of preparing when you're in a cold state for those hot states, you know, the moments you're on stage is so important. And that's why that's why checklists are so great. Even if the checklist itself is not a particularly great checklist, the act of having steps, you know, even this is even true in sort of combat situations, Navy SEALs, Air Force pilots, they all have things are moving fast, but they have like, I have to do these four things. And they're so ingrained in me. They're often four things, by the way, a lot of these little models are, there's the Uda loop, which has four steps, there are all these, all these different steps that all these different models that have four steps. And I think they're all designed to do that they're designed to take these very hot states and and turn down the temperature. And I think that's what, what Miles did so well in the example that you're describing and in the one where Herbie was auditioning was he, he figured out exactly what the right temperature was and it was less than what it was before he turned it down. In that hot state, it's also very hard to channel your focus because you're feeling not only the emotions, the tension, everything else going on. And oftentimes, failure in those states feels much more terrifying and frustrating than in the beginner stage when you recognize that I'm going to fail often and it's going to be okay. But in those moments where the pressure is on and failure has a real consequence, whether realistically or just intrinsically for yourself, it can be difficult for you to manage that focus. And whether it's four steps that are clearly articulated that you know, you can zoom your mind in on to slow things down, to slow down that pace. Because along with the emotion comes even more of that speed that we are talking about that works against us. Yeah, I think that's true. You know, one of the things that's very useful is to imagine before you do whatever the thing is where you're worried about failing, whether it's a musical performance or you're an athlete, you're going to be on, you know, some important race or meat or something like that is to imagine the worst case scenario. So what if I bomb? What if I'm a 100 meter runner and I've tripped over on the first step or I false start? What if I'm a swimmer and I don't swim as fast as I'd like or something goes wrong off the block? I play the wrong notes and everyone laughs at me. How about is that is it revocable? Is it something you can overcome? Almost always the answer is that things are more fixable or they are revocable in ways you don't imagine until you fully inhabit that failure. And we spent so long trying to distance ourselves from failure that we never let ourselves even imagine what it might be like. But there's something incredibly liberating about saying, what's the worst case scenario? Let me spend just 10 minutes inhabiting that world, which is a world that I hope never to have to live in. But in thinking about it, in dealing with it, in imagining it, I kind of soften a little bit. And it means that when I do get to performing, I know that even the worst case scenario is not as bad as I thought it was. So you, again, are turning down the temperature on that very hot state. Yeah, and that negative visualization, oftentimes we just focus on the positive, right? We want to succeed in thinking about positive things happening to us. But what we found in working with our clients dealing with social anxiety is oftentimes that negative visualization doesn't come to fruition in reality. So whether it's approaching that executive at the networking event that you're excited to talk to and tripping over your words or freezing up, or it's a beautiful person across the restaurant from you that you want to talk to and freezing up, and then actually being in that moment versus the visualization of everyone's looking at me or laughing or that person's going to ignore me. That's so rarely happens, but we hold on to the negative visualization because we're like, well, this has to happen because all of our internal focus is on ourselves. And we often think those around us have that same focus on us when in actuality we don't. So I love that having a positive visualization is helpful, but I'm also thinking like, what are the absolute worst case scenarios, feeling it, seeing it, and then recognizing that you're going to end up in between. Oftentimes there's no perfection. So that's where life is. It's in between those two things. And you've basically created an opportunity for you to succeed in that versus getting so hung up on the visualization of the absolute negative and freezing up in those moments. You can even do the thing that you're worried about and see that it's not that bad. So there's this really great assignment that a lot of people in social psychology classes do. And I've done this with some of my students before, and it's based on an old experiment that was run in New York City in the 70s, where you're supposed to get on the New York City subway and ask someone for their seat, which you never do. That is a massive violation of all sorts of norms. And the act of asking someone to do that, it's hard to imagine this, but if you get on the subway and you're in the moment and you're about to ask someone for their seat, it is so overwhelmingly terrifying for most people, for most sane people to do that, that they sweat, they feel horrible about it. They do it. The person gets up usually because they're like, is this person something not right with this person? I'm not going to challenge them. But the act of doing that and going through that process and dealing with the discomfort of it all is so liberating that after the fact people say, I feel like I can do pretty much anything. You go through that state of hardship because it reveals to you that you got through that there are a lot of other things you can get through. It's about sort of imagining the worst case, but also it's sometimes about putting yourself in that situation of discomfort to make the rest of what you do feel just that bit lighter. Yeah. We call those comfort zone challenges and we have a variety of them inside of unstoppable. One of our favorites is a lie down challenge. So pick a high traffic area anywhere and just lie down. And oftentimes the thought of, oh my God, I'm going to be impeding people, people are going to point at me, I'm going to be flush bright red. And exactly that, after completing the challenge where no one bats an eye, you feel invincible and you feel like, wow, what else can I conquer in all these other areas that I'm feeling discomfort is holding me back. So lowering the stakes, but feeling discomfort can often create opportunities for you to move towards discomfort in higher stakes environments. Right. Exactly. So you have a story in the book about timid guppies. And I know some of our listeners tend to be a little timid. So I'm really curious for you to share how looking at timid guppies can influence the idea of the long game and what we can learn from them. Yeah. So this is an old study that looked at these guppies. Guppies are these tiny little fish. And they are the prey of a lot of bigger fish, including the sunfish and a number of other fish. And this study was done in these big tanks where you have a whole lot of guppies. Some of them are more timid. Some of them are a little bit more brash and more curious. And so the researcher wanted to know if there's a big predator fish and the guppies have never seen this fish before, who's going to survive? Is it the ones who kind of puff themselves up and go over and they're like, let me check this out. Or is it the timid guppies who sit in the corner and say, I'm going to let that brash one do the work. And then we'll figure out the next steps from there. And he documents this over a period of days that all of these curious guppies who are not timid, they have all the traits that we think of as kind of alpha. They're out there to kind of preen. They're curious. Nothing's going to hold me back. They all get eaten one after another. They're curious and they get eaten. The timid ones are like, okay, I've got all the information I need and they hide. And that doesn't mean you should always hide. You shouldn't always be the timid guppy, right? But in certain situations, there is a tremendous amount of value in not being first. And that's kind of the broader lesson you can draw from this, that waiting is often very valuable. If someone is, if the worst case scenario is happening that you're essentially getting eaten, then it's better not to be eaten. But if it's not about being eaten, and it's just a matter of waiting for someone else to let whatever happens unfold, you can watch the way it's happening there, and then you can tweak what happened for that person and make the better version. So if you have a business, watch someone else fail or do whatever they're doing, just make three tweaks that then bring out the very best version of that thing. And I talk in the book a lot about this idea that you've got to be the first to market and everything. You've got to be the first person with every idea. Almost never true. Almost always it's the third or the fifth or the case of Google, the 22nd search engine. If you do the best version of the thing, often that's when you attract the most interest in the most money. So I think the lesson from the timid guppies is just that very often being first is fetishized as this is kind of great aim, and very often it's just not the right way to go. Well, the other thing that you can take from that is that everything has been done. So if you're stuck at something, you have to understand that you're not the first one who's been stuck at this point. Do a little research. We have everything at our fingertips now to figure out how others before you have gotten through that and start taking some pages from their books of how they accomplished that. And through a few trial and error, you're going to figure it out. Now the obvious is we're going to fail. And a lot of times those failures can feel like massive setbacks and can be reasons to quit when we feel stuck. So what does science show us as a way through failure to use failure to our advantage in these situations? Yeah. So the two end points here are every time you fail, you should quit because there are a million other things you could be doing with your life. And why life's too short, just move on. And there are books written about this idea. And I think they're very interesting. They basically say that our menu of options is so great that if you're really struggling, if it feels hard, if you're experiencing discomfort, why do that to yourself? It's not necessary. But then the other side of the spectrum, and there are lots of books written about this, is you should never fail. You should never quit. Sorry. You always keep going. You keep going to the end of whatever the thing is. And I think a sort of smart position is somewhere in the middle, which is to say when you fail, there are kinds of failure that are good and kinds of failure that are not productive. And if you're consistently failing and not getting closer to some goal that's desired, that's probably when it's time to move on. So when you fail, you should do a little audit and say to yourself, is this a failure that's getting smaller than the failure that came before it? If I'm trying to learn a language and whatever the metric I'm using to judge my success, I'm not meeting that metric, but I'm getting closer, well, then there's some value there. But if I'm trying to learn this language and I haven't made any progress, my brain can't hold any more vocab, I'm forgetting all the grammar, maybe it's time to give that language a miss, move on to the next thing. And so I think a lot of it is just sort of working out, am I converging on whatever desired goal I'm looking at? Or am I not getting closer? Or sometimes you even get further over time from that goal. And then I think that's a good lesson. It's time to move on. You mentioned earlier hot streaks. And some of us in hearing that might be a little worried that we had our one hot streak and looking at our career moving forward. What can we do to create another hot streak? Yeah, so it's at least one. Most careers have at least one, many have more. So that's the good news that if you've had a hot streak, there's another one around the corner, but you can manufacture them basically. And what this research is really fascinating. It looked at painters and filmmakers and people in a number of scientists as well, people in all sorts of different domains. And it basically described these two processes that come from evolutionary biology known as exploitation and exploration. Exploration is when imagine you kind of turn a corner and this is hunter-gatherer era. You're looking for food, you turn a corner and there's this huge landscape. A hundred acres in front of you, you have no idea where the food is. You don't know where the animals are. You don't know where the berries are. You can kind of rove around and roam around, try and find patches that might look fruitful. But you can't also be digging really deep, many layers deep into the soil and going into caves and whatever. You have to either use this strategy of exploration where you go broad, or you can use the opposite strategy, which is exploitation, which is where you say, hey, there's a fruitful patch over there. I'm going to explore it to the ends of the earth. I'm going to dig really deep. It looks like there might be some berries there, but I really want to make sure. Or there's a cave there. There might be some animals there that I'm interested in. I need to spend a bit of time exploring. Exploration is going broad. Exploitation is going deep, but you can only do one of them at a time. To find a hot streak, the suggestion is that if things are going really well, you should keep exploiting. But if you feel like you keep hitting roadblocks, it's time to explore again. One of the nice rules of thumb in working out whether you're exploring or exploiting is if an opportunity lands on your lap, do you say yes or do you say no? During periods of exploration, everything should be a yes. You're voracious, you're hungry, you're omnivorous, you eat everything, you say yes to everything. I want to try everything. I actually, I give a talk to Freshman at NYU, and that's what we talk about. So you say yes to everything, and that's what college should be. But then at some point, if you say yes to everything, you're never going to really explore the thing that you're doing, and you're never going to hit that hot streak. So if you look at people like Jackson Pollock, the painter, he became very well known for his drip technique, this one technique that he pioneered that was different from anything anyone else was doing. But if you look at his work five years before he hit that period, he was doing everything under the sun. He was trying 100 different techniques. It's kind of fascinating how diverse his work was before he hit that hot streak period. And so the key is to jump between exploring and exploiting. That whenever you hit a roadblock, you go back to exploring, you wait till you hit sort of a fruitful patch, or you say I'm going to explore for six months, or a year or two years, and then move back to exploitation. Or four days of the week, I'm going to explore the fifth days for exploitation or whatever you want to do. But those two, explore then exploit. That's the route to hot streaks in careers. That's what a lot of the research shows. Yeah, it's so impactful, not only in your career, but also for the work we do with your social life is recognizing when to cut bait and move on from a group, maybe even move to a new town, city location versus when to really exploit and things are going your way. And I think in so many domains in life, we get so caught up in the exploration because of all these algorithms vying for our attention and all the different pieces of information. And sometimes we'll get to this analysis paralysis. And for us, part of doing this podcast is taking these insights and making them actionable. And all the coaching we do is about taking action. I know many of our listeners are very cerebral, excited to read your book, but we know breaking through requires action. We can't think our way out of being stuck. So are there some hard and fast rules or some habits we can build that create the action in our life that leads to us getting unstuck? Yeah, so the exploration, exploitation divide is really an important one. That tells you how to act, what kinds of actions are fruitful at different times. I also think there's something about a curiosity mindset. This mindset, it's interesting if you find successful people, particularly people in fields where everyone's been doing something a particular way for a long time, but then they do something different. And I was on a hunt for these people. I found an Olympian who did this with the backstroke. There are a number of examples in athletics, but there are also examples in business and in art and in other domains. And to do that, you have to be curious and you have to push back against orthodoxy. And kids are good at that. Every kid does that. That's how kids learn so fast, but adults don't do it. And so the question is, how do you become an adult who does that instinctively? Or if not instinctively, you learn to do that over time. You become the kind of person who pushes back on everything, at least internally. And you ask, why does that make sense? And what that does is it forces you to become an experimentalist. It's adopting a philosophy of basically a scientist where you say, hey, look, I can imagine three different ways to go about whatever it is, three ways to interact with other people to maximize the chance that I'm going to form a good bond with them, or three ways to do this thing in business where I'm more likely to make the money I'm looking to make, or three ways to try this athletic pursuit. And then actually try them out. Be curious about them. Experiment. Give yourself a week with each one or a month with each one and then see which one works best. And so adopting that experimental mindset is incredibly powerful. And then the last chapter in the book is titled, Action Above All. And the idea is that, yes, it's important to slow down. You've got to pause. You've got to think about the emotions and strategy and all of that. But you will never get unstuck if you don't act. And so the Action Above All chapter talks about the fact that often we are trying to maximize everything we do. Like you're acting and you're looking for great success for perfection, essentially. But the best outcomes often happen when you do what's known as satisfying instead of maximizing. Satisficing is when you say there's a sort of good enough. And I can hit the good enough. And then next time, I might get a little bit better. And I know I don't have to invest every single resource in acting right now for the very best outcome in this particular situation. And Jeff Tweedy, the songwriter for Willco, the band Willco, talks about this idea that being a creative is exhausting. You wake up some days and you don't want to be creative. So what he does is he begins by kind of pouring out the bad ideas. He'll spend 20 minutes just thinking about bad music. How would I write a really bad, boring song now? How do I write a sentence that's boring and trite and that's not interesting? Because the act of doing that, which is really easy because you've lowered the threshold, kind of prepares you to do the good stuff that comes later on. And so very often just acting, even if that action is a kind of sideways action, it doesn't get you exactly where you want to be, lubricates the wheels and then pushes you in the right direction in the long run. So I think acting above all is a really sort of important basic final message from the book. It gets difficult for a lot of people because the result that they're always looking for is perfection, right? They want it to be great. They want it to be perfect. They want it to be acceptable and approved by other people. And if you start to create through a lens of having other people accept it and approve of it, you're already putting yourself into a difficult situation because you don't have control over those people. You have control over yourself and what you're putting out and your happiness and pursuit of whatever that is. And getting to a place where you can just write badly or play guitar badly or paint badly for the sake of that pursuit, to then be able to craft something, that's the challenge of it. I mean, for a lot of our clients, when they are doing new things for the first time, and you used the word license earlier, it's like AJ and I give them license to do so many of these things terribly so that we can look at them and talk about them and find out where we can improve on these areas. We've gotten into a place where social media and certainly things like Instagram just shows that everyone's Picasso, right? It shows everyone's perfect vacations. They're perfect work. And again, we're discussing Jackson Pollock. We don't see all of the work that took to some of these final prints, these final projects. So learning to do things badly is going to be incredibly helpful. It's like, you don't need to think of it as failing. You just need to think of it as that's the action that you're taking in order to gain some momentum. And I think a big part is stacking skills. So oftentimes we get so hung up and maximizing and being the best at one skill. We don't realize how much of an unlock it is to satisfy three skills, but stack them on top of each other to really have that breakthrough. You don't have to be the world's greatest songwriter. But if you can stack songwriting with lead guitar with then being a great tour manager, all of those skills stacked together are going to allow you to leap forward when everyone else is getting bogged down and maximizing one skill. Exactly. Yeah. I think that's exactly right. I think that we often assume that getting from 90 to 100 is what we should be pouring our attention and energy into. But very often being at a 90 on three things is a much more efficient use of your time and energy if you're looking to ultimately maximize. So great to have you with us, Adam. We love asking every guest of ours what their unique X factor is. What do you think makes you extraordinary? I love the idea that I'm extraordinary. I'm going to just assume that that's true for a minute because you guys have given me that label. So I'm going to take it and run with it. But what I would say is that being easily bored and being someone who cultivates variety has been for me incredibly valuable and it's unlocked a lot of ideas and options and avenues for me. One of the things I do in my life in general is to try to cultivate as much variety as possible so that I'm constantly trying new things, different things that my work involves a whole lot of different elements. And I think being an academic who writes books and consults and speaks and does all sorts of other stuff is a sort of perfect career for someone like that. So I think there's some great value in cultivating variety in your life in general. And that for me has always been, I think, a sort of unlocker because if something isn't going well, you've got three or four other things that you can turn to. And that's always been a great kind of cushion for me when I'm bouncing around trying to figure out what to do next. Well, your dynamism has definitely come through on the podcast here and in your book. Where can our audience find out more about the work that you do? I guess I'm most active on LinkedIn. I do sometimes post on Twitter slash X. I don't know what we're calling it these days, but I do post there as well. I've got a website. My NYU webpage has all my contact details. It's a thing about academics. Everything's public. And I also have a homepage where I post my latest writing and thinking. Awesome. Thank you for joining us, Adam. Thank you, Adam. Thanks so much for having me.