Adam Alter
Appearances
Something You Should Know
How to Get Unstuck & A New Approach to Longevity - SYSK Choice
you're looking for people who are non-redundant but then the third thing you're looking for is to go even one step further and that's to find deliberate black sheep these are people who go against the grain and pixar has a number of executives who use this approach so they'll assemble a team of writers of artists of cartoonists and so on and then they'll go out and find someone who disagrees with the way that team is functioning and they'll bring them in and they'll say all right cat amongst the pigeons
Something You Should Know
How to Get Unstuck & A New Approach to Longevity - SYSK Choice
Be our agent of chaos and tell us what we should be doing completely differently. And it's been really, really effective. In fact, a lot of their Academy Awards have come on the back of these films that have been created with the help of this black sheep, someone who's talented but basically disagrees with the rest of the team.
Something You Should Know
How to Get Unstuck & A New Approach to Longevity - SYSK Choice
That's a really important clarification point that essentially before you begin, you want to slow down, you want to take a pause. And that could be for all sorts of different reasons.
Something You Should Know
How to Get Unstuck & A New Approach to Longevity - SYSK Choice
And there are some great examples of, for example, athletes who are stuck in the process of some sort of competitive sport and they pause, they take a beat before they do anything, and then they find that they perform much more effectively. One classic example of this is the soccer player Lionel Messi, I think the greatest player of all time.
Something You Should Know
How to Get Unstuck & A New Approach to Longevity - SYSK Choice
He spends the first five, roughly three to five minutes of every match he plays ambling around the center of the field, watching all the other players and not really committing to the game. And what he's effectively doing there is he's taking those few minutes to calm down emotionally because he gets quite anxious.
Something You Should Know
How to Get Unstuck & A New Approach to Longevity - SYSK Choice
But also he's taking that time to develop a strategy that will be useful for the remaining 85 minutes. And so what you're suggesting about, you know, if you're in a creative pursuit and arguably the game of soccer, there are a million different things you could do. You have to be creative. you do want to have lots of different ideas. You want to try lots of different things.
Something You Should Know
How to Get Unstuck & A New Approach to Longevity - SYSK Choice
And by pausing for those few minutes, he's setting himself up to be able to do that. So I think you're right that after that pause, you want to basically do something, anything. And by definition, you're not stuck if you're moving. And so to move, even if it's not exactly in the right direction you want to be going in, is quite valuable because it unsticks you.
Something You Should Know
How to Get Unstuck & A New Approach to Longevity - SYSK Choice
It gets you oriented in the right direction. One of my favorite examples of this is... Jeff Tweedy, the front man for Wilco, and he's also a writer. He talks about the process of writing books and also the process of writing songs. And he says it's difficult. Most people who are very good at this say that it's difficult. And what he does is he'll wake up in the morning and he'll sort of pour out.
Something You Should Know
How to Get Unstuck & A New Approach to Longevity - SYSK Choice
This is how he describes it. He says, I'm going to pour out all my bad ideas. And so what he's doing is he's not writing stuff that's great necessarily. A lot of it won't be used. But he kind of, I don't know, oils the gears and moves in the right direction by just pouring out the bad stuff that's sitting at the top. That's how he thinks of it.
Something You Should Know
How to Get Unstuck & A New Approach to Longevity - SYSK Choice
And then all the good stuff that's underneath, that's a couple of layers below, is then free to emerge. But you have to go through that process first of pouring out all the bad stuff, all the stuff that's not particularly interesting.
Something You Should Know
How to Get Unstuck & A New Approach to Longevity - SYSK Choice
I think that's right. I think one of the most profound insights about stuckness is that every single person is in at least one respect stuck. It doesn't take most people very long to think of an instance or an area of their lives in which they feel a little bit stuck, at least a little bit stuck. I ran a survey that I had mentioned on hundreds and hundreds of people around the world, and
Something You Should Know
How to Get Unstuck & A New Approach to Longevity - SYSK Choice
Within about 10 seconds, almost all of them could come up with an area of their lives in which they felt to some extent stuck. And what's really interesting about being stuck is that it also feels lonely, despite the fact that it's this universal human experience. And that loneliness, that sense that you're alone in that process is very isolating.
Something You Should Know
How to Get Unstuck & A New Approach to Longevity - SYSK Choice
And so you have this weird paradox where people say, I'm stuck. Everyone else says they're stuck, but we all feel isolated in that process. But I think you're right. I think stuckness is absolutely inevitable.
Something You Should Know
How to Get Unstuck & A New Approach to Longevity - SYSK Choice
Yeah, I think that's a really profound and important insight that... Well, thank you. Yeah, sure. So when you're subjectively stuck, that doesn't mean you're stuck in a sense that requires activation or action or anything in particular. It might just require just resting with that stuckness. That's part of what I meant by the psychological response of feeling like you have to do something.
Something You Should Know
How to Get Unstuck & A New Approach to Longevity - SYSK Choice
It's really important to pause. And part of that process of pausing and taking a beat is to say... do I need to act? And if I do, in which direction should that action be pointed? And very often the answer is no, you don't need to act. You can sit with that for a little while, as uncomfortable as it may be, and it might resolve itself. And if it doesn't, then you've given it a bit more time
Something You Should Know
How to Get Unstuck & A New Approach to Longevity - SYSK Choice
you probably learn something more about that experience of stuckness from that time, which will make you more effective in dealing with it later on. So I think that pause, that beat at the beginning before you do anything is really, really critical in marshalling your resources in a productive direction.
Something You Should Know
How to Get Unstuck & A New Approach to Longevity - SYSK Choice
It's very much a cultural thing, how we think of stuckness and of change in general. So in the West, in the United States, in Australia, where I'm originally from, in Canada, in the UK, we tend to think of things as being fairly consistent across time. And when they change, we find that a little bit surprising, even though we say change is inevitable.
Something You Should Know
How to Get Unstuck & A New Approach to Longevity - SYSK Choice
In the East, in East Asia, in particular in Japan, Korea, China, That's the opposite. They anticipate things changing. So one of the studies I did was I gave people a pattern of days where there had been either sun or rain for three days in a row. And then I said, tell me what's going to happen on day four. Now, in the US, we say things like, oh, it's a sort of warm streak and it's a warm period.
Something You Should Know
How to Get Unstuck & A New Approach to Longevity - SYSK Choice
And so the fourth day is probably going to be sunny as well. Or if it's rainy, we're in the middle of a rainy patch. It's probably going to be rainy. In East Asia, people say, oh, no, change is around the corner. If it's been three days of rain, tomorrow is going to be sunny.
Something You Should Know
How to Get Unstuck & A New Approach to Longevity - SYSK Choice
So East Asians tend to be better prepared for change and therefore for getting unstuck and for seeing that stuckness is just sort of a part of life. You will always be experiencing change. Whereas you're right, in the West, we see it as a journey and stuckness is the sort of frustrating thing that intervenes and makes that journey more complicated than we'd like it to be.
Something You Should Know
How to Get Unstuck & A New Approach to Longevity - SYSK Choice
And so I think when you can change your mindset and adopt the sort of Eastern way of seeing change as inevitable and as just a necessary part of life that you should always be anticipating, you're much better at coping with that.
Something You Should Know
How to Get Unstuck & A New Approach to Longevity - SYSK Choice
today on something you should know some things that can dehydrate you without you even knowing it then getting stuck i'm sure you have felt stuck in a job a relationship on a project something i ran this survey on hundreds and hundreds of people around the world and within about 10 seconds almost all of them could come up with an area of their lives in which they felt stuck and what's really interesting about being stuck is that it also feels lonely despite the fact that it's this universal human experience
Something You Should Know
How to Get Unstuck & A New Approach to Longevity - SYSK Choice
Yeah, it's a good question. And, you know, there's the kind of stuck that we all felt early in the pandemic where you may have wanted to travel, but
Something You Should Know
How to Get Unstuck & A New Approach to Longevity - SYSK Choice
government regulations meant that you couldn't there was nothing much you could do about that i don't think that's particularly psychologically interesting or worth exploring it's just the way the world works some things you want you can't have but then there's a kind of stuckness that i actually found in my research is much more common which is the kind of stuckness that is to some extent within your control
Something You Should Know
How to Get Unstuck & A New Approach to Longevity - SYSK Choice
where if you behave the right way, act the right way, learn the right things, do the right things, think the right way, you are likely to move in the direction of getting unstuck. And that's true about all sorts of different things. It's true about what you do at work, what you do at home, your relationships, creative tasks. It's true across a whole lot of different domains.
Something You Should Know
How to Get Unstuck & A New Approach to Longevity - SYSK Choice
And so that's the kind of stuckness that I'm really interested in, the kind that you can act on.
Something You Should Know
How to Get Unstuck & A New Approach to Longevity - SYSK Choice
Doing research, one of the things I did early on was I wanted to understand the various species of stuckness. And so I sent out a survey to hundreds and hundreds of people. Some of them were very, very talented, experienced. Some were struggling in all sorts of different ways, but all of them were stuck in at least one respect. The stuckness varies. For some, it's financial.
Something You Should Know
How to Get Unstuck & A New Approach to Longevity - SYSK Choice
For some, it's creativity based. For some, it's relationships, interpersonal things. It's a pretty diverse concept, but there are a lot of commonalities that unite these different instances of being stuck.
Something You Should Know
How to Get Unstuck & A New Approach to Longevity - SYSK Choice
We're extremely good at being physically stuck and getting unstuck. We're sort of well engineered for that in a biological and evolutionary sense. So if you stick a human in a position where he or she is physically entrapped, we marshal all sorts of resources. And every now and again, you'll read these stories of what is known as hysterical strength, which is where people lift cars to...
Something You Should Know
How to Get Unstuck & A New Approach to Longevity - SYSK Choice
remove themselves from difficult situations, physical entrapment. But unfortunately, the same instincts that make us so effective at dealing with those circumstances actually paralyze us when we're emotionally or psychologically stuck. So the first thing you've got to do when you feel stuck is to really deal with those emotional responses. And there are a number of things you can do.
Something You Should Know
How to Get Unstuck & A New Approach to Longevity - SYSK Choice
One of the sort of paradoxical things is to often slow down at the beginning. So your body will tell you and your brain will tell you to speed up, to act, to do anything to get unstuck. But without planning a proper strategy, you're going to fail.
Something You Should Know
How to Get Unstuck & A New Approach to Longevity - SYSK Choice
And so very often the first thing you need to do is to slow down, to exhale, to sort of remove some of the pressure that will immediately feel as though it's upon you. Once you've done that, you can start to form some strategies for getting unstuck. You can... simplify the problem. There are a whole lot of different ways of doing that.
Something You Should Know
How to Get Unstuck & A New Approach to Longevity - SYSK Choice
You can also, one I think very useful thing when you're trying to come up with new ideas for something, if you're trying to come up with creative solutions, for example, is to dial down how creative or novel the idea needs to be. So a lot of us seek something that's truly, wholly, radically original. And that's really paralyzing. And actually, there's very little true originality in the world.
Something You Should Know
How to Get Unstuck & A New Approach to Longevity - SYSK Choice
And the best place to begin is to just tweak existing things that exist in the world. This is often a matter of taking two existing ideas and recombining them in novel ways, which is known as recombination.
Something You Should Know
How to Get Unstuck & A New Approach to Longevity - SYSK Choice
One of the really good examples of this is Bob Dylan. When you ask a lot of really great talented musicians who is the most original voice or the most original songwriter of the 20th century, it's surprising that a lot of them say Bob Dylan is that person. Maybe it's not surprising, but what's surprising is how much they agree on that.
Something You Should Know
How to Get Unstuck & A New Approach to Longevity - SYSK Choice
But when you actually look at the origin of Dylan's songwriting and the basis for his early music, a lot of it ended up being small tweaks on existing ideas. You know, he'd met certain musicians, particularly folk musicians in the early part of his career in the 60s. And those folk musicians influenced him in ways that were profound.
Something You Should Know
How to Get Unstuck & A New Approach to Longevity - SYSK Choice
And when he was later asked about the influence of those musicians on his work, he said, oh, absolutely. I tweaked what they had done. I recombined what they had done with some of what I'd heard in rock and roll. And I had created this kind of newish version that was really a recombination of existing ideas. And you find this in all sorts of different areas.
Something You Should Know
How to Get Unstuck & A New Approach to Longevity - SYSK Choice
From the outside, these people might look like true originals. But in fact, when you look more closely, you find that there's a sort of recombination of these existing ideas to form a sort of novel version of whatever those existing ideas were.
Something You Should Know
How to Get Unstuck & A New Approach to Longevity - SYSK Choice
No, I actually don't. I think most of the time what happens is it's not purposeful. And I think creativity for a lot of people is kind of mystical. We're not very purposeful about it. It's a difficult thing to be creative. And by definition, that's true because if it were easy, you'd be following the herd and what you were doing wouldn't be particularly novel or interesting.
Something You Should Know
How to Get Unstuck & A New Approach to Longevity - SYSK Choice
But it turns out with creativity, as with many things, once you understand it, you realize there are some very deliberate algorithmic strategies that help you be more creative. And one of them is exactly this process of recombining. One of my favorite examples of this is a woman named Arlene Harris. who has made a business of combining existing ideas in new ways.
Something You Should Know
How to Get Unstuck & A New Approach to Longevity - SYSK Choice
She basically took the cell phone industry in about 2007, 2008, which was essentially designed for young adults. If you think about the original iPhone, It was really, really hard for older adults to use. It was very different from what they'd been used to. They couldn't type very easily. A lot of them complained about what it was like to use the iPhone.
Something You Should Know
How to Get Unstuck & A New Approach to Longevity - SYSK Choice
And Harris came in and said, well, look, we've got this product that's tremendously successful for young adults. We have older adults who want some versions of that, but they also want some versions of old phones, of traditional phones, of flip phones, phones with buttons. And she created a sort of hybrid in a phone known as the Jitterbug and ended up selling that business for a billion dollars.
Something You Should Know
How to Get Unstuck & A New Approach to Longevity - SYSK Choice
So what she basically did there was she said, yeah, this is not novel. It's not new. It's not sexy. It's not original. But what it is, it's taking an existing market and an existing product, finding a new market that wants something slightly different and bolting these concepts together to form something that is tremendously successful but isn't really in any sense completely radically original.
Something You Should Know
How to Get Unstuck & A New Approach to Longevity - SYSK Choice
Well, I think some people stumble on this, right? And it's interesting when you're in the business of creativity of whether it's art, music, writing, doesn't really matter the genre you're in, you naturally hoover up information, you hoover up the different strategies that other people in your field use. And without even realizing it, you become a sort of accidental plagiarist.
Something You Should Know
How to Get Unstuck & A New Approach to Longevity - SYSK Choice
And when you ask people, where did these ideas come from? Naturally, those ideas, whatever their latest idea is, is going to be the product of everything they've ever consumed before. But humans are really bad at pinpointing the origin of new ideas and really the origin of pretty much anything that they think of.
Something You Should Know
How to Get Unstuck & A New Approach to Longevity - SYSK Choice
And so when you try to backward engineer what we do when we do new things, a lot of what we're doing is just taking things whatever we've been exposed to, creating a sort of Frankenstein's monster out of it. And that's what our original product ends up being.
Something You Should Know
How to Get Unstuck & A New Approach to Longevity - SYSK Choice
But once you understand that insight, it's incredibly valuable when you're stuck because it turns the mystical process of creativity into something quite deliberate and algorithmic. And I think a lot of people who understand this have become much more successful and generative as a result of that.
Something You Should Know
How to Get Unstuck & A New Approach to Longevity - SYSK Choice
I think that's, on its face, that's excellent advice. The thing that most of us do instinctively though is we ask the wrong people. Our friends, colleagues who are trusted, they tend to be people who are a lot like us, demographically, in background, in attitude, in values. And, you know, there are really three kinds of people you can get advice from.
Something You Should Know
How to Get Unstuck & A New Approach to Longevity - SYSK Choice
You can get advice from people who you really like, who you trust, who are often a mirror image of yourself in certain important ways. And the simpatico that you feel with them, the connection you feel with them is a good thing in every respect except if you're trying to find something new and creative and different and to get unstuck.
Something You Should Know
How to Get Unstuck & A New Approach to Longevity - SYSK Choice
So you can start with them, but you also have to think of the other two kinds of people. One of those is known as a non-redundant person. This is just someone whose ideas are different from your own. They don't have to be wildly different or in opposition, but they're just different in some respect.
Something You Should Know
How to Get Unstuck & A New Approach to Longevity - SYSK Choice
There's a lot of evidence, for example, that in the creation of TV shows, there's some work that was done on the TV show Doctor Who, which is the longest running TV show of all time. It began in, I think, the 50s or 60s.
Something You Should Know
How to Get Unstuck & A New Approach to Longevity - SYSK Choice
that when the team that was working on each episode of Doctor Who involved people who didn't know each other or who'd never worked together or who were otherwise non-redundant, in other words, they had different backgrounds, those episodes were rated by fans of the show as by far the most innovative, interesting, and memorable.