Moment 136: 3 VITAL Questions To Ask Yourself If You're Feeling Trapped In Life (Relationships, Work & Financially): Adam Alter

In this moment, professor of marketing and best-selling author, Adam Alter discusses how to become unstuck in life, work and relationships. The first thing is to understand what it actually means to become stuck, this often means judging whether to keep going with a particular path or to quit. In these instances Adam thinks it is best to think about the opportunity cost of leaving a goal behind, especially as research shows that it is nearly always a good idea to keep going beyond the point where it starts becoming hard as this is where growth happens. However, too often we quit as we view any sort of difficultly as a problem. One of the key ways that Adam thinks we can become unstuck is by simplifying a problem as much as possible, we can do this through what he calls a friction audit. This means knowing what is and isn’t important, what’s getting in the way, and how you can subtract it. Listen to the full episode here - https://g2ul0.app.link/GZHEMyQyMEb Watch the Episodes On Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos James: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMb0O2CdPBNi-QqPk5T3gsQ https://www.jameshoffmann.co.uk/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  People are actually stuck in relationships, in jobs, financially stuck, becoming much lonelier as a species, but there is a way to get unstuck.

• 0:07Steven Bartlett?

  And we're going to find out right now.

• 0:13Steven Bartlett?

  Can you give me, you know, the most popular examples of being stuck that my listeners now could relate to?

• 0:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, I've been running this survey for about five years on people all around the world, asking them with that definition of stuckness, are you stuck in some way? And I find that people usually within about 15 seconds start typing a response, which means that stuckness is very top of mind. And their responses vary, so some of them are financially stuck. They want to be able to save or they want to be able to earn more money. Some of them are stuck in relationships, some are stuck in jobs. A lot of them are stuck quite narrowly in creative pursuits. Like, I'm trying to learn this piano piece, I'm trying to learn this new art technique. I'm a filmmaker and I can't come up with creative ideas. I'm a business person and I can't figure out what my next venture should be. So there's a, there's a very broad range. And I find that almost everyone in at least one respect with a bit of time comes up with something.

• 1:06Speaker 00

  They say, I'm stuck in this way, and then they can express it.

• 1:09Steven Bartlett?

  What does it feel like when someone is stuck? So how do I know if I'm stuck? Is there an emotional sort of, you know, sensation?

• 1:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's an interesting question. So it's, it's subjective. You know if you're stuck, you can feel it because you could be in the same situation and not feel stuck. I'll give you a good example of this. I had a conversation with Malcolm Gladwell, who was telling me about his dad, who was a math professor. And his dad was trying to solve a math conundrum for 30 years. By external definitions, he was stuck for 30 years because he couldn't solve this math puzzle, which is a common experience for, for math professors, I imagine. But he loved it. He didn't think of himself as being stuck. That for him was the process, that was why he went to work and why he kept doing what he was doing. And so, you know, if I thought about being stuck in something and not making meaningful progress objectively for 30 years, the idea drives me crazy.

• 2:01Speaker 00

  But for his dad, for Malcolm's dad, that, that was something that was really appealing. He, he really enjoyed that process. And so I think a lot of, of dealing with being stuck at first is getting your head around what it means to be stuck and figuring out that usually it's not as big a deal as it seems it might be. And once you come to grips with the emotional part of it, you can usually bring some sort of strategies and actions to bear and to start to move yourself. I'm convinced of that, and that's, that's why I wrote the book, because I think there is a way to get unstuck in almost every case.

• 2:31Steven Bartlett?

  What is the, in your view, the relationship between perseverance, becoming unstuck, or knowing when to quit?

• 2:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, there's a, there's an amazing cottage industry on both sides of that spectrum of books that are being written that I think are excellent books that make the case for, for both of those ends of the spectrum. You've got Angela Duckworth's Grit, which is all about sticking through and, and continuing on, and I think Anatomy of a Breakthrough leans in that direction. And then you've got Annie Duke, who wrote the book Quit, which is about quitting, the fact that we've got so many options all the time, most of us. Why would you keep doing the thing you're doing if it's not working out for you? You should probably do something else. Now, they're both very sophisticated thinkers. They wouldn't say you should always persevere or always quit. But it's a great question. How do you know when you are stuck that it's time to persevere versus time to quit? And I, I think it's worth thinking about, A, the opportunity cost. So what are you leaving behind?

• 3:21Speaker 00

  Is there something else that's very obvious that would be an easy thing to jump to that would require leaving behind the thing that's making you stuck? And if that idea seems really appealing, as it did for me when I was doing actuarial science and wanted to jump away from that, then you should probably consider moving on. But the, the research basically shows that almost always it's a good idea to persevere beyond the point where you say, this is hard and it's not feeling good and I feel stuck. How long you should do that is another question. I think one of the, the guides that should, should be useful in determining that is to ask yourself, if there's an end state that I'm trying to approach, am I getting closer to it across time? You know, if I'm, I'm learning a new skill, is the delta between where I am and where

• 4:04Speaker 00

  I'd like to be shrinking over time, the, the gap between those two shrinking, or is it staying the same or is it even getting larger? And if it's staying the same or getting larger, then I'm probably not getting closer. And that's, that's a good, a good indication that I should probably quit. It's time to move on.

• 4:18Steven Bartlett?

  I've thought a lot about this, and in my last book, I wrote a chapter about quitting. And I was trying to figure out why I, I appear to be quite a good quitter. I'm well known for quitting school, my first company, my second company, university after one lecture. And this is the quitting framework I tried to draw, draw up. So I'm gonna just slide it across the desk and please ask me if you've got any questions and then I'll.

• 4:41Steven Bartlett?

  So there's two kind of routes you can go down the quitting framework. Is it, are you thinking of quitting because it's hard? You're running a marathon, it's the last mile of the race. It's hard, but it's worth it.

• 4:48Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 4:48Steven Bartlett?

  So if it's hard and it's not worth it, quit. If it's hard and it's worth it, stay the course. Going down the other side, it sucks. That could be a relationship, a place you're living, the job you have as an actor, whatever.

• 4:58Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, so this, this framework seems to me unassailable. In other words, there's nothing, I can't imagine that anything here could be disagreed with because it makes total sense.

• 5:09Steven Bartlett?

  And it's nice and broad.

• 5:09Speaker 00

  It's, it's nice and broad, right? Yeah, you can imagine any situation being folded into it. The other thing I quite like about it is that this distinction between it's just hard and it sucks is, is very central to a lot of the ideas in, in my book. And I think if something sucks, it's emotionally unrewarding and you hate it and you're grinding through it, most of the time you should quit. And, and you have here this one limb to your model that says, if you can make it suck less, continue on.

• 5:35Steven Bartlett?

  Marriage counselling.

• 5:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, right.

• 5:37Steven Bartlett?

  Speaking to your boss.

• 5:38Speaker 00

  Right, exactly. And so there's, there's great value in asking that question. But the, it's just hard part I'm focusing on because a huge part of this book is about how hardship is the first step in making something good.

• 5:50Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 5:51Speaker 00

  Good stuff happens when things are hard. And because we're human and we have been evolutionarily, I don't know, penned into the situation where hardship is seen as a problem, like we're using too many resources, don't do something that's harder than it needs to be. We're very used to that. It's not true about everything we do, but it's true about enough things that we misinterpret hardship or hardness for being a problem. Whereas in many domains, the good stuff only happens almost every time after it gets hard.

• 6:21Steven Bartlett?

  Hmm.

• 6:22Speaker 00

  In, in many domains for human growth and, and otherwise.

• 6:25Steven Bartlett?

  The best way to get unstuck is to simplify the problem as much as possible. That way you can identify what the sticking points are. I call this simplifying of the complex, a friction audit. What did you mean by that?

• 6:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, so over the years, I've I've met people who need much less time to make sense of complicated situations, knowing what's not important. It's good to know what's important, but I think a lot of us can do that. What's really hard is being able to say, subtract that, subtract that, subtract that. This is the thing. This is the nugget, the kernel. This is what I should be focusing on. And so that's that's the idea of of kind of the importance of subtracting. And there's a great book called Subtract by Leidy Klotz that's on this exact topic. The friction audit itself is a sort of philosophical version of that idea.

• 7:19Speaker 00

  Where in business in particular, I do a lot of business consulting that works on on this this friction audit process. And I spent a long time with companies that asked the question, how do we? How do we sweeten the deal? Now, how do we make the product better, more attractive? How do we stand above the crowd? And I started to realize that the return on investment to doing that is often minimal, and it's expensive to do that, and it's really hard to do that in a competitive marketplace where everyone's doing the same thing. But where you get your massive return is not by focusing on making the carrot more attractive. It's by removing the stick that stops people from doing what you'd like them to do. Maybe it's interacting with a customer service rep, maybe it's buying, maybe it's making a particular choice. Maybe it's understanding information.

• 8:02Speaker 00

  Whatever it is, if you weed those out, you sand them down, so there's no longer friction there. You see tremendous rises in conversion, often for almost no cost. It's just a matter of asking that particular frame of question and going through that friction audit process.

• 8:17Steven Bartlett?

  And that friction audit process, I guess it starts with that question, which is like, what what's getting in the way?

• 8:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:22Steven Bartlett?

  You can ask yourself that, you can ask your team that question.

• 8:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:26Steven Bartlett?

  We probably don't ask ask our teams that question enough, just generally in business, which is because we're always thinking about, you know, things we can add, maybe

• 8:36Steven Bartlett?

  something we can buy.

• 8:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:38Steven Bartlett?

  A equipment we we could buy, someone we could hire.

• 8:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, when I think about this, certainly for teams, it works really well. I also think for individual lives, everyone, if you ask them, this is really liberating. I like to do this sometimes. What are the three things in your life right now that cause you the most friction? It could be interactions with a certain person. It could be commuting if you're traveling a lot. Everyone's got a different answer to the question. But imagine that those three things you could just eradicate from your life right now. How much better would your life be? And people often say, like, what, like a hundred percent better? It'd be, my life would be double as good as it is now. And so the next thing is to say, well, that's a massive return on investment. If you can't eradicate them, that's fine, but at least sand them down, minimize them, shrink them to the extent possible.

• 9:26Speaker 00

  That's where you should devote your resources. It's a really, really powerful intervention for individual lives, but I think also, as you said, in the workplace as well.

• 9:34Steven Bartlett?

  Such a good habit to have, asking that question frequently, not just to yourself, but also just to the people you work with.

• 9:38Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 9:39Steven Bartlett?

  Because you get such surprising answers when you ask these questions.

• 9:42Speaker 00

  Also to your partner or to your friends, your close friends, there's nothing better than being asked that question. If someone asks you that, the degree of caring, if they actually seem like they want to be able to help, that will melt any barriers between you and another person. If you genuinely say, what are the three things right now that feel like they're the hardest, most unpleasant things, and how can I help you fix them? Is a tremendously uplifting, connecting experience.