The Psychology Master: The Colour That Makes You Attractive, How Your Name Determines Your Success & How To Become UNSTUCK In Your Marriage, Job, or Life!

Adam is a Professor of Marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business, his research focuses on judgment, decision-making and social psychology, as well as the impact of subtle cues in the environment on human behaviour. He is the bestselling author of the books: ‘Drunk Tank Pink’, ‘Irresistible’, and most recently ‘Anatomy of a Breakthrough: How to get unstuck and unlock your potential’. He has also written for the New York Times, New Yorker, Washington Post, Atlantic, WIRED, Slate, Huffington Post, and Popular Science. You can purchase Adam’s newest book, ‘Anatomy of a Breakthrough: How to get unstuck and unlock your potential’, here: https://amzn.to/3QzyWXx Follow Adam: Twitter - https://bit.ly/44i0BSs Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo 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. And we're going to find out right now.

• 0:09Speaker 01

  Adam Alter. A New York Times bestselling author and psychologist.

• 0:13Speaker 00

  This episode is for people who are stuck in their careers, relationship or any aspect of life.

• 0:18Speaker 01

  And how to become unstuck.

• 0:20Speaker 00

  The career model for how we live our lives professionally is broken. As you specialize, you have less variety in what you do. There's a massive rise in loneliness and depression and anxiety. And part of the reason for that is we don't share our stuckness. And they also have no idea how common it is.

• 0:35Steven Bartlett?

  So what is the relationship between perseverance or knowing when to quit?

• 0:38Speaker 00

  Research basically shows that it's a good idea to persevere beyond the point where you say, this is hard and I feel stuck. How long you should do that is another question. And the best example of this is an idea known as the creative cliff illusion. And it's this illusion where you that's when the good stuff comes, if you persevere.

• 0:54Steven Bartlett?

  How do you teach someone to be that kind of person?

• 0:56Speaker 00

  There are two things. One thing is

• 0:59Steven Bartlett?

  I remember reading about the studies where people would rather take an electric shock than to sit idly on their own.

• 1:05Speaker 00

  It's a brilliant study. They've tried it already, so they know it hurts. But it's so aversive to just sit with our own thoughts for even half an hour. Two thirds of them go and start playing with this machine. So what we found is that we don't pay enough attention to what will be good for us. And that's often when we get stuck.

• 1:19Steven Bartlett?

  What do we need to do then?

• 1:20Speaker 00

  If you want to be able to get unstuck quickly, the best thing you can do is

• 1:25Steven Bartlett?

  Have you ever been stuck? Are you stuck in an area of your life right now? I think you are. And I say that because I think to some degree, we all are. Some of us more than others. And that is exactly why I had to have this conversation with Adam Alter, the guy that literally wrote the book about being stuck and how to know if you are. And maybe most importantly of all, how to get unstuck. Adam is a master of what he calls the art of the breakthrough, which is really looking at why some people fail, why they get stuck, and why others don't. He's also a genius when it comes to marketing and psychology. He's the professor of marketing and psychology at one of the top schools in America.

• 2:08Steven Bartlett?

  He kind of just knows why people do what they do and how to help them do something else. How do we know if the decisions we're making in our life right now, in all the areas of our life, are the right decisions? Or the wrong decisions. Adam has scientifically backed answers to all of these questions. He is refreshing, he is positive, and he is full of just as many important questions as he is valuable, life-changing answers. I feel so much richer for having this conversation with Adam, and I know you will too. Enjoy.

• 2:49Steven Bartlett?

  Adam.

• 2:51Steven Bartlett?

  From an academic standpoint, who are you?

• 2:55Speaker 00

  I am a professor of marketing and psychology, so I'm very interested in business, but also interested in the psychological side of it. So how do consumers behave? How do they think? What do they buy? How do they spend their time and money and other resources?

• 3:08Steven Bartlett?

  I'm incredibly interested and curious about all of your books. Specifically, this book here, Anatomy of a Breakthrough, and also your first book, Drunk Tank Pink. Because this book helps people to get unstuck. Why did you decide to write a book called Anatomy of a Breakthrough? And you know, writing books takes a huge amount of time and effort. And you're a man that has many things he could be doing. So why was this so important that you chose to write about it?

• 3:40Speaker 00

  It's something that I've been thinking about in some form or another for years. Literally, I'd say 25 years. I've been stuck a lot in my life. And so even before I became intellectually interested in the topic, it was a factor that had had a big effect on the way I was living my life. And I wanted to understand whether there was maybe a roadmap that I could present to other people that would help them get unstuck. But I think the real answer is there was some research that I was doing in, I think this would have been in about 2005. And I found this really interesting cultural difference in how people anticipate or expect change in the world. And so what we found is that people in the West, people in places like the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, they tend to be blindsided by change. So if you give them...

• 4:23Speaker 00

  Five days in a row and you show that it's been rainy for five days or sunny for five days, they anticipate that that's going to continue. And they they think the same about the stock market and other other variables that can shift or stay the same. But if you do that with people in East Asia, Japan, South Korea, China, when they see a pattern that's gone a particular way for a while, they think that it's about to change. And what that does is it means that they're much more nimble in the face of change, whereas in the West, people tend to be blindsided by it. And it makes us especially slow at coming to grips with the idea that the world's changed and we need to pivot in order to get unstuck.

• 4:57Steven Bartlett?

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

• 5:06Speaker 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 fifteen 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.

• 5:50Speaker 00

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

• 5:53Steven Bartlett?

  Is there a trend in who's getting stuck more often?

• 5:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I have a pet theory. I think the kind of career model for for how we live our lives professionally is broken for most people. I think what happens is as you specialize, you're supposed to get more and more narrow in what you do, and you have less variety in what you do. And that's how you get stuck, is by doing the same thing every day. And there's a huge amount of evidence for that in all sorts of different areas. Actuarial science, for me at least, very quickly put me into that little pigeonhole spot where I felt I was getting trapped and it was only going to increase. And so the the thing I've done ever since is to try to create as much variety in my professional life as possible. Because then if you don't like aspect number one, but you have nine other aspects to your job. You can go and do that for a little while. And so bouncing around, I think, is critical for getting unstuck.

• 6:41Speaker 00

  Often, very smart people get very, very interested in very narrow topics. And that's essentially the definition of a PhD, is you spend a huge amount of time becoming an expert in a very narrow area. And I think that's fine for a PhD itself. But if you're going to make a whole life out of doing that, I think if you're a restless, intellectually curious person, you're going to get stuck really fast.

• 7:03Steven Bartlett?

  You almost become a victim to being good at something in life, don't you? Because you get promoted and promoted and promoted up in that direction. And your label, whatever it is, doctor, dentist, lawyer, becomes reinforced by your own success at that thing. And you can get 10 years down the line at something and go, how the fuck am I living next to the office? I'm a lawyer, it's doing law 14 hours a day. What happened to that violin I used to play? And you're right, we've become really narrow individuals. And when you think about what a human is, we're so multifaceted, especially when we're younger.

• 7:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:35Steven Bartlett?

  We're doing all of these things. It's a real shame.

• 7:37Speaker 00

  I also think what happens is you get promoted, and it does get narrow, but it also changes. So the thing that you were really good at is no longer the thing that you're doing. And a lot of what happens in promotion, especially professionally, is you become a manager and you manage people who do the thing you love instead of doing the thing you love. And so that's how you get stuck as well, is by being promoted out of the thing that got you passionate about what you were doing and being told, no, instead you're going to watch other people do the thing you love. Now you suddenly have to be a people manager, which some people like doing, but a lot don't. And so that's also inherent in the kind of professional models that we have in hierarchical organizations.

• 8:13Steven Bartlett?

  This happens by, I guess in part by being a bit unconscious about what you want.

• 8:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:20Steven Bartlett?

  And you just kind of take what you're given. So you take the promotion and you take this and you take the relocation to this place. And how do we prevent that happening?

• 8:28Speaker 00

  I think that's the job of people who write about these subjects, right? And that's kind of what I saw as the mission for this book, was to try to say, you know, if you don't want to be stuck or if you want to be able to get unstuck quickly, there's a set of questions you can ask yourself. And let me just lay them out for you. Here they are. In fact, the last thing in the book is 100 ways to get unstuck. It's just a digestion of all these ideas. And I think those are questions that people don't often ask themselves. You're right, there's a sort of accidental. Way that we live our lives and we take what's given and if someone says here's a promotion, you hear that word and you grab on to it and you you write it as far as you can. But um I I think it's it's easy to be a little bit mindless about where your life takes you. And and sometimes that's fine, but in a lot of cases it's not.

• 9:12Speaker 00

  And the book tries, in in the book, I try to distinguish those cases from from each other. Like, when should you let life lead you and when should you be a little more purposeful?

• 9:22Steven Bartlett?

  On on that exact point, I've I've mulled over the last couple of weeks this idea that there's kind of two narratives that prevail in our lives, kind of two instructors. One of them is this external narrative, it could come from your parents or society's expectation of you taking that promotion. Or thinking that that job is a admirable job for you to take, so you take it, that's the external narrative. And the other narrative, if I can call it that, is how you feel.

• 9:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:49Steven Bartlett?

  And I think we're we're conditioned to care more about that external narrative because the rewards seem to be more aligned with the external narrative than like how you feel. Because if people really were orientated by how they felt in that job, in that relationship, in that city, whatever, in that course at university.

• 10:08Steven Bartlett?

  They would make significantly different decisions, but we always, it's almost like we've tuned out of that.

• 10:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, I I I think the problem is that humans don't know how they feel in isolation as well. If I took you and put you in a room for a week and said you can have food and water and you can have your thoughts. And I took you out of after a week and said, so what are you thinking? Like, what's real, what's not real, what do you believe, what are your preferences and values? You'd struggle. It's there's a lot of really interesting evidence that if you isolate humans, they don't really know what to do with themselves. So tho- those external forces, there there's a kind of permeability between what I'm feeling inside my head and thinking. And what these other forces are suggesting to me. So I I think I think it's totally true that we don't pay enough attention to what will be good for us. Separate from what other people think we should be doing.

• 10:54Speaker 00

  But I also don't even think many of us know the answers to those questions, not all the time, but about a lot of things. Like, I know. Deep somewhere, I know that I love to draw, that I'm at peace when I'm drawing and painting. I haven't done that for a really long time. I'm too busy, to your point of being too focused. But I know that that's something that, preference wise, I love doing. But then the question, should I make my career and my life about that? The only way I knew how to answer that was by speaking to lots of people who said it's very difficult to become an artist. Here's the path. It's probably going to be hard to make any money. So keep it as a hobby. But knowing just based on my feelings what to do, I wouldn't have known what to do as a young person. And so I think that's part of the problem is that it's not just that we're

• 11:40Speaker 00

  silly for kind of paying attention to others. It's also that I don't even know if we know in isolation without those inputs, what the right kinds of paths are.

• 11:48Steven Bartlett?

  You said about putting me in a room and leaving me with my thoughts. That sounded like hell.

• 11:51Speaker 00

  It does, yeah.

• 11:52Steven Bartlett?

  And I remember reading about the studies where people would rather take an electric shock than to sit idly on their own.

• 12:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:00Steven Bartlett?

  And they tested people and they said, would you rather take an electric shock or sit here for a couple of minutes on your own? And people took the.

• 12:07Speaker 00

  It's a brilliant study. I mean, the way they set it up is brilliant because they get you to sit in this room. And they do it with men and women, mostly college undergrads. And they say to them, you're just going to be sitting here for half an hour. There's a little machine in the corner. It delivers electric shocks. They've tried it already, so they know it hurts. It doesn't feel good. And they're told, you know, you can sit with your thoughts or, you know, the machine's there if you want to go and use it, which is a bizarre thing to say to people. And they sit there for a while and time passes. And the vast majority of them go, I think it's two thirds of them go and start playing with this machine. It's so aversive to just sit with our own thoughts for even half an hour, that we need stimulation, even if it's negative stimulation.

• 12:47Steven Bartlett?

  And you wrote a book about this, this subject matter about addiction and screens and all of these things. This sort of incessant need for distraction that we seem to have developed. What was your biggest sort of takeaway and learning from that process of putting that book together?

• 13:00Speaker 00

  I think the biggest thing for me was I don't always imagine that addiction and the need for this kind of stimulation was a sort of. Personality thing, like you, you either have that personality or you don't. But I became absolutely convinced by, not only by the book and what I was researching, but by understanding how many of us fall prey to these devices, that this is universal. It's just about being human, that if you know how to push the right buttons in a human, you can turn that human, as you can with rats and monkeys and other animals, into, into a bit of a fiend for whatever the thing is that it needs. And the people who design the platforms that we use are so good at that job, and they have so much data to, to perfect what they've done, that ultimately the platforms they design for us are, are like crack. They're very, very difficult for us to resist.

• 13:44Steven Bartlett?

  You talk about in drunk, tank, pink, how people behave differently when they're in the presence of others. And I found that really, really curious. Could you just give me a flavour of the, some of the studies and insights you gained from that? Because that kind of links to what you were saying there about how living behind screens might decay our humanity a little bit.

• 14:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I think part of it is just that the best versions of ourselves come out when we're around other people. We are much, much more likely to be civil and decent to other people when they're around, when we see them and when we spend time around them. That kind of shared social space is really important. It, it's also really interesting, when we're around other people, we, we tend to default to the thing that we are most like, likely to do in any moment. So there's a lot of good evidence with this, like if you, if you take a champion cyclist, you put him or her on a bike, a stationary bike, that person will go faster in the presence of other people than alone. And there's something about this kind of, they call it latent energy. This is a very old psychological study.

• 14:47Speaker 00

  It talks about latent energy that is liberated from us when we're in the presence of other people. So if you're trying to learn something new, you know, you imagine you're in class at school and there's a teacher who's staring over your shoulder, that's terrible. Because we don't really know how to take on board new information. We're just overwhelmed by the cognitive load of that experience. But if it's something you're good at, you will be extra good at it in front of other people. There's something about being energised by others.

• 15:11Steven Bartlett?

  So if I work out with someone that I'm more likely to?

• 15:14Speaker 00

  You'll lift more, you'll run faster and so on. Yeah, pretty reliably.

• 15:19Steven Bartlett?

  In that book as well, before we get on to being unstuck, there were some other things that I found really curious that I was keen to ask you about. This is your, that was your first book, Drunk Tank Pink. You say how our names have a huge bearing on our outcomes across various facets of our life.

• 15:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:36Steven Bartlett?

  That's quite, it's quite shocking to me because our name is something that we don't choose and it seems to be so simple and slightly irrelevant.

• 15:42Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, it's, it's true. I mean, there are lots of different ways names influence us. One of these little demonstrations that I do when I give talks on this subject is I'll, I'll present the letters of the Roman alphabet, the 26 letters that we, we understand to be the letters in the English language. And I'll ask people to think about their three favorite letters. And then I say, now, put your hand up in the room if one of those at least was the first letter of your first name, middle name, or last name. And almost every hand goes up. So these are letters. Who has preferences for letters? It's a bizarre thing to have to answer. But we do. And it's because there's, that these letters are such a strong expression of who we are. It's a, it's a part of our ego that's contained in the letters of our name. And so even that alone shows the power

• 16:26Speaker 00

  of names over us, that they are such a strong reflection of who we are and our, our identity. So that's the first thing. And you find interesting effects from this, actually. If you look at the hurricanes that we name in the US, or that you name around the world in other places, you get much more donation aid if the hurricane name matches your initial. So they found that when Hurricane Katrina came through and devastated New Orleans, people whose names began with a K donated way more than people whose names didn't begin with a K. The same for a whole lot of other hurricanes with other initials. The other big thing is the ease with which people can pronounce your name. So that seems to have a really big effect on all sorts of outcomes. If people can pronounce your name, there's this kind of sense of familiarity. If that's, the, the breaking of the ice happens over

• 17:10Speaker 00

  that first pronunciation of your name, obviously, the easier it is to say the name, the less anxiety you have about it. I guess the more smoothly that breaking of the ice goes. And there's a lot of evidence from some of my own research. We looked, for example, at how quickly people rise up through law firm hierarchies. How quickly do they become partners? And there's a period in the middle of careers, in like the about the 10th to the 20th year of a career for a lawyer, where there's a premium, you are much more likely to become a partner, several percent more likely to become a partner earlier if your name is pronounceable. And I think what's what's happening there is if I'm a partner at a firm and there are a whole lot of young associates and I'm trying to put together a team, if there's someone with a name that's easy to pronounce and someone whose name I'm anxious about pronouncing,

• 17:55Speaker 00

  I don't know how to pronounce it, I will default to the one who's easy to pronounce. I'm not trying to be rude about it, but in that moment, it just seems easier. It's the path of least resistance and that's how humans act much of the time.

• 18:06Steven Bartlett?

  Is there not an element of discrimination and prejudice associated with that? Because I think if a name was easier to pronounce, it's probably familiar, it's therefore probably culturally popular, they're probably like me, you know, like a Jack or like a Steven. But if it's a a name that I've not seen, trying to figure out causality here, it could be because they're foreign. You know, my mother, I always think about this, my mother's from Nigeria and she could have given me like a traditional Nigerian name.

• 18:35Speaker 00

  Right.

• 18:36Steven Bartlett?

  But she called me Steven. And I think, you know, I was also born in Botswana in Africa. I think had she called me something else, my life probably would have been quite different in all honesty. And I worked for four years on on phones doing like telesales.

• 18:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:52Steven Bartlett?

  And when you call up and your name is Steven in the UK and you sound like I do.

• 18:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:58Steven Bartlett?

  I think any prejudice someone might have had because of the color of my skin or where I'm from, um, vanishes. Is there any evidence to support that?

• 19:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, so there are two things. One thing is absolutely the prejudice that goes along with having a foreign sounding name. Uh, and there's evidence, for example, in the United States, there's a study where thousands of CVs were mailed out and applications for jobs, either with a traditionally white name or a traditionally black name, as we think of them in the United States, based on the demographic. Naming trends and especially for the ones that were kind of in the middle of the pack, not especially strong and not especially weak, there's a huge premium to having the traditionally white name. So there's a lot of prejudice that goes on with naming. But also in the studies we did, we wanted to partial out this specific effect of fluency of how easy it was to pronounce. So we restricted our analysis in the one case to just white lawyers who were born in that

• 19:50Speaker 00

  particular country. And so you find the same effect even there, that the white lawyers with white names that were easier to pronounce tended to do a little bit better. But you're right, I think a huge part of it is prejudice and discrimination.

• 20:02Steven Bartlett?

  What about our environment, our surroundings? How does that have an impact on how we're feeling and our behaviour from, from what you learned writing your first book?

• 20:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I focused a lot on physical environments, things like natural environments, the power of nature to, to replenish us in general, which, which sounds like a kind of non-scientific idea, but there's a huge amount of science to this idea that if you happen to spend a lot of time in urban environments and then you go to a place where you have, say, a running stream or wind through the leaves on a tree or something like that, it's deeply replenishing. It, it, it has all sorts of amazing psychological and emotional effects. I, I was also very, very interested in the effects of, of the weather and of colours around us and how those shape our, our experiences of the world. So there's a, some of it's not all that surprising, but you, you see even in baseball matches in the United States, when

• 20:53Speaker 00

  the game is being played on a warmer night, there is more aggressive behaviour. You see huge rises in crime, things like that on hot nights. And then with colours, you know, that's really the centrepiece of the book. I'm colourblind, so I've always been fascinated by colour. But the title of the book, Drunk Tank Pink, is specifically about this colour that is used to paint the inside of jail cells in some places. And it's a colour that's supposed to pacify people. It's like this bright bubblegum pink colour. And they've found quite a lot of evidence for the last thirty or forty years now, that there's something about this colour that does seem to calm people down, at least initially.

• 21:28Steven Bartlett?

  Pink?

• 21:29Speaker 00

  It's bright bubblegum pink, yeah.

• 21:32Steven Bartlett?

  And it sedates people?

• 21:33Speaker 00

  Briefly, and then they go, then there's a backlash effect, but yeah.

• 21:36Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, really?

• 21:37Speaker 00

  Yeah. They've found that if you leave people in there for too long, apparently there's a backlash, yeah.

• 21:42Steven Bartlett?

  Hitchhikers should wear red.

• 21:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is, this is research looking at how, how essentially attractive we are to other people, depending on the colors we're wearing. And the, the early studies were done on online dating platforms where you have the same picture of a person and you, you photoshop the shirt they're wearing. This is true for men and women, and it doesn't matter whether they're trying to attract men or women. But there's something about the color red in particular that's really attractive to humans and actually to other animals too. And when you see the color red, it, it inspires a kind of approach oriented behavior. So where you might have passed that person by, if you're thinking about dating apps and you're swiping, there's something about the color red that's, that slows you down and attracts you. And in the context of hitchhiking, it has a similar effect, especially when you, you

• 22:27Speaker 00

  have a heterosexual male driving and you have a woman wearing a red shirt, you get a very strong effect.

• 22:33Steven Bartlett?

  So if I'm trying to find a girlfriend or a boyfriend, you're saying?

• 22:38Speaker 00

  Make sure they're not wearing red.

• 22:40Steven Bartlett?

  Make sure they're not wearing red.

• 22:41Speaker 00

  Well, if they're wearing red, you've got to ask yourself, am I attracted to the red shirt or am I attracted to the person? Whereas if they're wearing another color, it's much more likely to be an unbiased, unvarnished opinion of them.

• 22:51Steven Bartlett?

  But if I want to attract the opposite sex?

• 22:52Speaker 00

  If you want to attract, wear red, yeah.

• 22:55Steven Bartlett?

  Okay. That's useful to know.

• 22:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:58Steven Bartlett?

  I am not single, but, but if I ever happen to be.

• 23:02Speaker 00

  If one.

• 23:03Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, but even for your partner, this is probably why Conor McGregor has this famous saying where he says, it's red panty night.

• 23:08Speaker 00

  All right.

• 23:09Steven Bartlett?

  So when he wins a fight, he, I think he said it on the microphone to Joe Rogan. He said, oh, it's red panty night tonight, which means that him and his wife are going to be intimate tonight.

• 23:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 23:16Steven Bartlett?

  But red is always, for whatever reason, in society been seductive, hasn't it? It's always been, as it relates to lingerie. I wonder if lingerie sales are more in red than others.

• 23:27Steven Bartlett?

  So getting, getting to the topic of being unstuck then, which is what the anatomy of a breakthrough is all about. 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?

• 23:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's an interesting question. So it's, it's subjective. You, 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, 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 thirty years because he couldn't solve this math puzzle, which is a common experience 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

• 24:22Speaker 00

  progress objectively for thirty years, the idea drives me crazy. But for his dad, for Malcolm's dad, that was something that was really appealing. He really enjoyed that process. And so I think a lot 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 why I wrote the book, because I think there is a way to get unstuck in almost every case.

• 24:55Steven Bartlett?

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

• 25:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, 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 both of those ends of the spectrum. You've got Angela Duckworth's Grit, which is all about sticking through 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 think it's worth thinking about, A, the opportunity costs. So what are you leaving behind?

• 25:45Speaker 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 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 I'd like to be shrinking over time?

• 26:30Speaker 00

  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.

• 26:42Steven 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 up. So I'm gonna just slide it across the desk, and please ask me if you've got any questions.

• 27:05Steven 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.

• 27:12Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 27:13Steven 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.

• 27:23Speaker 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.

• 27:33Steven Bartlett?

  And it's nice and broad.

• 27:34Speaker 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.

• 28:00Steven Bartlett?

  Marriage counselling.

• 28:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, right.

• 28:01Steven Bartlett?

  Speaking to your boss.

• 28:02Speaker 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.

• 28:15Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 28:15Speaker 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.

• 28:45Steven Bartlett?

  Hmm.

• 28:46Speaker 00

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

• 28:50Steven Bartlett?

  In your book, you talk about how, you know, you kind of debunk the idea that young people start the best, most culturally valuable companies. We tend to think that it's like 21 year olds in their bedroom that are starting all the great tech companies, for example, but you show that a couple of failures is actually seems to be correlate with success.

• 29:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:13Steven Bartlett?

  And there's a, you know, that whole section felt like a bit of a narrative shift.

• 29:18Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, it was, it was a, it was a big thing for me that, um, you know, one of the ideas that's very prominent in my field is this availability heuristic. It's this idea that you pay a lot of attention to what's most available in the world. This is an old idea from, uh, from Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky, behavioral decision researchers. And, um, the thing that we see a lot of is very successful young people because they're interesting. They're fascinating stories. So you, you, you're interested in them and a lot of the biggest companies, I think, are run, especially tech companies, by quite young CEOs or people who began when they were young. And so we fixate on them and they're available in our minds. We see documentaries about them. We read about them all the time. But they're, they're vanishingly rare. And so what you find is that the, the age to

• 30:03Speaker 00

  begin a company, if you want to maximize success, if you look at the age of the CEOs who tend to be very, very successful, we're talking like mid 40s. That's the sweet spot. Mid 40s, even into 50s. And the, the thing that distinguishes a 22 year old from a 45 year old is, as you said, partly failure, that by the time you're 45, you've doubled how long you've been alive. You've had a lot of time to fail and to come back from that. And so if you're still creating companies, you've learned something along the way. But also, your life is deeply rich at that point in a way that it isn't necessarily as a twenty-two-year-old. You've got a lot of other stuff going on, good stuff and bad stuff maybe, and maybe complicated stuff. But all of it is kind of adding a spice to the mix that I think makes your ideas thicker in some way.

• 30:45Speaker 00

  And and makes you, I think, better at making certain calculations that maybe when you're younger, you don't have all the information for. And so that's what you find.

• 30:53Steven Bartlett?

  Who's more creative, young people or middle-aged people or old people?

• 30:57Speaker 00

  It's interesting. So

• 31:00Speaker 00

  young people, and I'm thinking especially about kids, because I have a five-year-old and a seven-year-old. Um, they are phenomenally creative and in part they're creative because they don't accept anything. They're curious about everything. My kids will not ask a question without a follow-up or five or ten or twenty follow-ups, right? Nothing is okay until we've explored it to the ends of the earth, and that's amazing. And that's why kids learn so much so quickly. They take nothing for granted. There's no such thing as common wisdom to a kid, right? You can say, everyone does it this way, and they'll be like, why? But you say that to an adult, most of us say, oh, okay. We assume that what's the done thing, the way the herd is behaving is that way for a reason. Even though often it's just accidental or it's just the easiest thing or whatever.

• 31:44Speaker 00

  And so I think very, very young people are tremendously creative because they push back a lot. But one of the really interesting things for me in this book is that I found people from young adulthood all the way through to very old adulthood. Very later in their lives, who are experimentalists by nature. They take nothing for granted and they constantly question. And so they are way more creative because they ask more questions. But then they then they say, okay, so here are ten options. How do I know which one's the best? I'm going to inhabit each one for two months and then, you know, in in two years I'll know the answer. And they they do this serially, and some of them become Olympic athletes, even if they don't physically have the stature for it. Because they're so good at finding new techniques. I talk about one of them in the book.

• 32:30Speaker 00

  Some of them become business titans because they say that everyone else is doing this thing and assuming it's right. Here's a different thing that's way better, and I know that because I've tried all the other options. And and they they end up being really successful because that curiosity that you have in childhood, when you carry it over into adulthood, it's kind of like a superpower. And so I I think um it's more about the the questions you ask than your age.

• 32:53Steven Bartlett?

  I couldn't agree more. And it's one of the most, the things I constantly am trying to figure out how to get my team. When you said to me that there's a group, there's a certain type of person that just continues to keep asking, why is the age? I was like, can you introduce me? Because I'd love to hire them. Because that's exactly, you think about what innovation is at its core, and it's that, that reject, that kind of rejection of convention.

• 33:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:15Steven Bartlett?

  And that harder road, which is to try and reason up from first principles, per se.

• 33:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:21Steven Bartlett?

  You mentioned an athlete.

• 33:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:23Steven Bartlett?

  Who are you referring to?

• 33:24Speaker 00

  It's this athlete named Dave Berkoff. He was an Olympic athlete in the 1988 and 92 Games, 88 in Seoul and 92 in Barcelona. He's a backstroke swimmer. He swims 100 meter backstroke and then some of the medley races. And I spoke to him for a while on the phone to understand his experiences because he, he doesn't look like a lot of other backstroke swimmers. They tend to be very, very tall. The average world record holder is 6'3 to 6'4, so quite tall. He's about 5'10", which is a big difference in professional avenues, if you're thinking about Olympic athletes. And when he was, when he was a student in the mid 80s, he was at Harvard,

• 34:06Speaker 00

  which is not a place you really go if you're going to be a champion swimmer. It's a place you go for intellectual experiences, but it's not the best athletic school, generally speaking. But he had a coach there who encouraged him to be curious, to ask a lot of questions. And Berkoff was naturally like this. So he would say to his coach, why would I, why do I need to swim that way? Like, why don't I try like 10 other ways to swim? Let's tweak my technique in all these different ways and see what works best. And what he ended up doing was he discovered that you swim about 80, I think it's like 88% faster when you're fully submerged under the water than when half of your body is above the water and half is below, which makes total sense from a physics perspective. But most backstroke swimmers, the way they swim is they push off the wall. And the minute they do that, their body starts

• 34:51Speaker 00

  to fight for oxygen because they're under the water. And so your instinct is to pop up as quickly as possible. But if you can train yourself to deal with the oxygen deprivation. You stay underwater for longer and you swim much faster. So Berkhoff developed this technique called the Berkhoff blast off, it was known as, where he would swim underwater for the first forty meters of a hundred meter race. So forty percent of the race, almost half of the, almost a full lap of the Olympic pool. And then he would come up for air and then he would keep swimming. And he broke world records. He wasn't the best swimmer in terms of his physique, but he was the best swimmer strategically. And he had spent years experimenting to find this technique. And then, of course, all the other athletes saw the same thing and they started doing the same thing. And so it became more competitive.

• 35:35Speaker 00

  But in the interim, he won gold medals at two Olympic Games. He won a bronze, he was the world record holder multiple times. So, you know, that questioning led someone who, in certain respects, at least physically, shouldn't have been the world record holder, to be just that.

• 35:52Steven Bartlett?

  The question I ask is, how do you teach someone to be that kind of person? How do you teach someone to be more experimental and to be more curious and to ask why more? Because just from my observation, from what I've seen over the last, I don't know, ten years in business, and I think about all the teams I've had and all the people we've hired, which is more than a thousand, some people just have it.

• 36:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:13Steven Bartlett?

  Some people just have almost like a cognitive but default towards being curious about the possibility of a better way. And then some people, regardless of how many times you you ask for that behavior, or you might write it on the wall, or you might say that it's our values, they just don't naturally demonstrate that curiosity?

• 36:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, there's an individual difference variable that you're describing that's real. And and with every construct, when we talk about a desirable human trait, there's going to be variance, right? Creativity, addictive personality and so on. All of these things are going to vary on a spectrum. Some things are educable, you can you can sort of teach them, you can make people better at them. So if you're at a three out of ten, you can become a six out of ten, or maybe even a seven out of ten. This curiosity question, though, I think. And I say this as an educator, I think it can be taught. And I think that's essentially what we try to do a lot of the time. That's my course, I teach a marketing course. It's maybe three months long. If you only come out of that course with one thing, it's to know the right questions to ask.

• 37:15Speaker 00

  You know, if you're in a business and you're trying to promote a product or an idea or to create a new product. I want you not necessarily to know the answer, but at least to know what the questions should be. And so I think it's the job of educators, the job of books, the job of whatever information you get in the world to train you in that direction. And so if I were going to say, there's one thing we should train people in a business context, you know, if you have a new employee. It's certainly the on the job stuff is important, you know, like learn the skills that are important to this specific job. If there are technical skills, but the most important general skill. Know the right questions to ask and constantly ask. So here's one way you do that is you say, I want you to to look at this thing, whatever this thing is. It could be, it could be your framework that you showed me, the quitting framework.

• 38:01Speaker 00

  I would take everyone who I'm considering hiring. And as a diagnostic tool, I'd have them look at it and say, tell me one thing that's not right with the framework or that you think could be improved. Do it again now, give me a second thing, what about a third thing? And if they can't do it the first time, coach them through it, work, work through it with them. But don't just do it with your framework, do it with, find 10 ad campaigns. Say, imagine you're the chief marketing officer at this company. What's one thing you could do differently that maybe isn't better, but at least is worth asking? Let's ask that question. And, and if you do that enough times, everyone becomes more curious. It becomes the habit, it's the way you interact with the world. So I think it to a large extent can be taught.

• 38:41Steven Bartlett?

  That's the, that's kind of the thing I was reflecting on is do you have to even tell someone to look at the framework and then find something better? Cause I'm in search of the person that looks at the framework and goes, Steve, I found something better.

• 38:53Speaker 00

  I, those people are amazing.

• 38:54Steven Bartlett?

  They are, they do exist.

• 38:56Speaker 00

  They do exist and I found some of them and that's, that's Dave Berkoff, right? No one said to him, you have to question whether the way everyone swims the backstroke is the best way. Uh, and I found a few people like that, but they are vanishingly rare. There aren't that many of them who really make that their kind of life's philosophy. Experimentalism as a philosophy. But there are some, a lot of them actually end up going into academia and into science because they want to know.

• 39:20Steven Bartlett?

  They want to know.

• 39:21Speaker 00

  The answers.

• 39:21Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 39:21Speaker 00

  They just want to know, they're curious to the ends of the earth. But. For the rest, the other ninety nine percent of people who aren't like that, I think you can lift them all up from a three out of ten, four out of ten, to a seven or an eight, maybe not a nine or a ten. But if your whole workforce is people who are a seven or an eight out of ten on curiosity, it's much better than having them mostly at a three. So I think you can move the needle a little bit.

• 39:45Steven Bartlett?

  And those, that small minority tend to

• 39:50Steven Bartlett?

  provide so much value for the less experimental majority.

• 39:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:55Steven Bartlett?

  You know, like, cause I, I think about, we have this group in all of my companies called Ever Changing Landscape. And the whole point of the group is when we see something changing in the world, or, you know, might be a new update to a platform or something within our industry has changed, it could be an update or a feature or whatever. Take it from where you've seen it and just share it with the rest of the company. And you see in these groups that we have, that it's really a small cohort educating everybody else. So let's say there was a hundred people in the Slack channel.

• 40:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:23Steven Bartlett?

  I'd say there'd be five people that were super prolific and there'd be fifteen that were kind of, you know,

• 40:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:31Steven Bartlett?

  Kind of doing it. And then, you know, then there'd be another thirty, twenty five percent that do it sometimes. And then there's kind of a silent fifty percent that don't ever do it. And they don't seem to have that sort of natural curiosity. And I always think as a CEO, I need to like, find more of that five percent because the, the disproportionate value they can add by finding, as I said to you before recording this podcast, just a tiny tweak that changes our trajectory is profound.

• 40:56Speaker 00

  Here's, here's my advice on that. I think, I think you're exactly right about the distribution and we see this in a lot of cases. I talk in the book about the eighty twenty rule, the Pareto principle, that most of the gains come from the small minority and so on. And we know that, like, if you're a business, often the vast majority of your sales come from the tiny minority of customers and so on. So we know this is true. And in the case here where you say fifty percent of people are not doing the work on the Slack channel, you could break that fifty percent down into, I think, two broad groups. There's one group that's just, the way that kind of person approaches life is to just not be very motivated and there's nothing, there's not much you can do about that part. Right? If they come to work because they see it entirely as an extrinsic

• 41:39Speaker 00

  reward for their time, that they come and they get paid and that's just what they're doing and it's a day job. You're never going to teach them to be curious. But there is a group of people in that 50%, and I, I, I think it's probably sizable, especially at a company like one of your companies.

• 41:56Speaker 00

  Those people want to be better. They wanna do a better job at this. They maybe don't have the skills today, but if you show them, they will latch on to it and they will get better at it. And it's the, the most important thing you can do as a, as a leader in organizations is to not just find the people who are talented versus not talented, but to find the people who don't yet have whatever you would consider to be the talent and to separate them into those who really wanna be the talented ones and those who just actually don't care that much. They're just there to do the bare minimum. And that's where I think you're pouring your, your attention and education into that, that first set of people who are motivated is key.

• 42:35Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think you can teach someone to be curious about something? Because I, I wonder, you know, people go home and they choose what they watch on YouTube and what they read about and what they consume on Netflix. That kinda seems to be the purest indication of what they're actually curious about, the stuff they, they dealt, lean into in their free time. So we've got some people in our team even here that are, you know, here now that when they go home, they're learning about cameras and how to shoot video, video and all those kinds of things. Um, and then you might have someone in the same team that goes home and just wants to watch Keeping Up With Kardashians. It, you know, it's, it's off, it's quite obvious and I think everyone could agree that the, the first person who has a natural curiosity towards the subject matter outside of their professional pursuits is gonna achieve more in their professional pursuits. So could you, and, and, you know, I have to, I have to provide some nuance here, that

• 43:19Steven Bartlett?

  it doesn't matter if someone goes home and watches Keeping Up With Kardashians. They'll be useful in other ways because they'll be getting sort of creative insights outside of the industry, like you said. But I do believe that those that are curious about the thing they do professionally will, will go the furthest.

• 43:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I think with curiosity in general, if you, like if I, I don't know much about cameras, I just have my phone and I use it as a camera. That's about all I know. I just push buttons. And so I'm not that curious about them. But if you give me, let's say the most educated camera consumer in the world is at 100%. If you take me from 0% where I am now to 10 or 15%, I then know enough to start to develop curiosity. Part of the problem with being a novice is you don't even know what's interesting about the thing. Like if you, if you don't drink red wine. And then you, at some point, you start drinking it, you're like, oh, there are different varietals. That's interesting. Oh, even within that varietal, it turns out there's a difference between Napa and Burgundy, or whatever.

• 44:18Speaker 00

  And as you get more knowledgeable about the subject, the nuances become interesting to you because they mean something. Like, I, I, this happens with music all the time. Like, if you love a kind of music, especially if it's a kind of music that most people don't listen to, you try to show someone else that music and you play your two favorite songs, they'll be like, they both sound the same. It's the most frustrating thing as, as someone who likes something a lot, who's really passionate. And it's true for art and movies and whatever else. Everyone's like, yeah, whatever. It's like, it's same, same. It's all just part of the genre. But once you develop a taste for it and you get curious and you get into it, that's when you start to see the real life of it. And so I think you're, the job of someone who wants others to be curious about a topic or to develop curiosities is to make them not the zero percent,

• 45:04Speaker 00

  to make them at the ten or fifteen or twentieth percent that then prompts them to wanna figure out the rest. Cause you don't get there from zero.

• 45:11Steven Bartlett?

  You talk about maximizing and satisficing. You believe there are two outlooks on success. This is part two of your business, um, your book, the, the heart section. And it, there seems to be some kind of through line between experimenters and non-experimenters and maximizers and satisficing?

• 45:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, satisficing, yeah, that's right. Yeah, so this, this idea, it's an old idea, it's about seventy years old now, but it's the idea that, um, broadly speaking, when you make decisions or make choices, you can be either a maximizer on one end of the spectrum or a satisficer. A maximizer is someone who says about everything, I need the very best. I need to spend a lot of time and energy figuring out the best. I need to produce the best. If I'm choosing what food to eat or what job to have or whatever, everything's gotta be the very, very best. I'm gonna maximize, I'm gonna make it as good as it can possibly be, and I'm gonna bring the resources required to make that happen. Satisficers are people who say,

• 46:10Speaker 00

  You know, there's a level that's good enough. It's not perfect, but it it gets over the bar and it's going to be a different bar for different things. If it's an important thing, the bar gets raised and it's lowered for less important things. But as soon as I find an option that's good enough, I'm going to take it and then move on with my life. And then there are people who are kind of in the middle who say about some things like my partner that I choose, or if I'm going to choose what job to have, or which which country to live in. Those are really important, whether to have kids. Those are important questions. I'm going to maximize on those. Everything else, not that important, at least relatively speaking, I'm going to just find a good enough option. And what you find is that people who satisfice tend to be much happier.

• 46:51Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, fuck.

• 46:52Speaker 00

  Not, no, the the key is to, I mean, if you maximize on everything, I think it's paralyzing. The key is to know when to maximize. And so if you satisfice a lot of the time and say, let's be honest, I don't need to satisfy, to to maximize on everything, then then you're, that's the way to do it, is to know, to be able to distinguish between the two. So if you're a chronic maximizer about absolutely everything, there's a lot of evidence that you're likely to get stuck on small, unimportant things.

• 47:20Steven Bartlett?

  Depression, is that a trait of maximizers?

• 47:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 47:24Steven Bartlett?

  High achieving?

• 47:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, so what what ends up happening is it's the same as perfectionism. That's basically what it is. It's the, it's the choice based version of perfectionism where you never live up to your own standards, which on the one hand produces very good things because you're always looking upward and trying to get better. On the other hand, it's paralyzing and exhausting and to live your entire life that way in every aspect of your life is problematic.

• 47:50Steven Bartlett?

  Mo Gouda, who came on this podcast, talked about how we're happy when our expectations are met and we're unhappy when our expectations are unmet. And from what I Ascertain from what you said there, maximizers have such high expectations that they're often unmet, which causes unhappiness. Is that accurate?

• 48:07Speaker 00

  A hundred percent. Yeah, that's exactly right. My thesis, my PhD thesis was on expectations and on how important it is when expectations deviate from, or when when reality deviates from expectations. It's almost never about the objective thing. You know, like, two people could have exactly the same thing and feel totally happy. One could feel totally happy with it. The other could be devastated by it. It's all about what you're used to, what you expect, how high your standards are. So I think that's that's a very powerful human element in these calculations.

• 48:39Steven Bartlett?

  When you're talking about experimenters, these are people that go in search of new answers and ask why. Our experimenters typically maximizes because on the other side of the coin, satisficers, they kind of accept it. So they might be the people that would accept convention, conventions answer as being, yeah, I'll just do what has always been done.

• 48:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think so. I think there's some overlap, but the thing about the people that I found were experimentalists, constantly asking questions. It was rarely about trivial things. It's not like they went and said, I'm going to go to the supermarket today and get a chocolate. And I want to experiment. I want to I want to eat every chocolate in the supermarket over the next year so that I know for the future which one's the best. They don't do that. They say, hey, I'm a swimmer. I want to be an Olympian. How do I get to be an Olympian? I'm going to maximize the hell out of that. And so it's it's about finding something that's really important to you where it's worth being an experimentalist. But it would be paralyzing to do that with every aspect of your life. I I think it certainly wouldn't work for me.

• 49:39Steven Bartlett?

  Life crises. We're talking about ages second ago, and I've got I've got two friends. I've got one friend that's twenty nine and another friend that's thirty nine, and they're going through what appears to be on the surface of crisis.

• 49:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:53Steven Bartlett?

  And when I read your book about how you call it the nine ending crisis.

• 49:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:58Steven Bartlett?

  It all made sense. What is that?

• 50:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, so this this is some research with a colleague of mine, Hal Hirschfield, who's also a very good friend at UCLA. And when we were, he was at NYU at the time, we we went, we were sitting in his office and I said to him, you know,

• 50:15Speaker 00

  I ran a marathon when I was twenty nine. I've never run another one, but I ran one at twenty nine. And I remember thinking, I have to show myself as I approach thirty that there's meaning to my life and purpose. I need a big goal. I need to train for something. And I thought that was a really interesting human instinct, like it was a very productive one. I ran a marathon, which was not a bad thing. But we were talking about, and he said to me, it seems like maybe at these ages where there's a nine at the end of your age and you're looking down the specter of a new decade, that it pushes you to to kind of audit your life. You ask yourself, is my life meaningful? Is it what I want it to be? Are there gaps that I need to fill? Is there something I need to do?

• 50:58Speaker 00

  And so we started to find these big data sets that had some evidence where we could see what ages people were at and looking at their decisions. And we found all sorts of really interesting behaviours when people were twenty nine, thirty nine, forty nine, fifty nine. You get this big rise in marathon running. So I wasn't the only one. There's an overrepresentation of marathon runners, especially first time marathon runners who have a nine at the end of their age. If you were already a marathon runner, you run your fastest marathons in general when you have a nine at the end of your age. There's also some stuff that's not so good. So you see a massive rise in infidelity. So we found evidence that there's an overrepresentation of people at those ages who are seeking out extramarital affairs. You even see a rise in suicide.

• 51:41Speaker 00

  So that doesn't mean everyone who's got a nine end at their a nine ending age is at risk of that, but it shows in general that we we sort of hunt for meaning. And so the midlife crisis idea that maybe when you approach forty, there's going to be a big crisis there, that may be true, but we also found this kind of cyclical decade. Every decade you get this this sort of miniature nine ending crisis.

• 52:04Steven Bartlett?

  I was in the best shape I've ever been in my life when I was twenty nine. That was the year. That was the year I got closest to having all eight abs. Thirty, has it been great? Not as great. So I was wondering, as you said that, if, uh, what happens when the year after? You know, twenty nine is often some of our most productive achievements or affairs.

• 52:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:26Steven Bartlett?

  Does that mean thirty, forty, fifty is when we we chill a little bit?

• 52:30Speaker 00

  It varies a little. It's funny. So what you see is it's sort of like a wave and the peak of the wave is at nine. But there are some people who it only dawns on them when they actually hit the zero ending age. Some people it starts at the eight ending age. It's really when you get to like thirty four, thirty five, thirty six, forty four, forty five, forty six, right in the middle of the decade. When you see the the trough for all of these kinds of behaviours. We're sort of most in our lives and doing our thing and not really questioning as much. Which, I mean, we found that fascinating, that that just the accident that we happen to count using a base ten system means that every ten years we we zoom back and order our lives in this way.

• 53:09Steven Bartlett?

  It's such an interesting, because it doesn't, the number is such a, in a, in a relevant thing in the context of your physiological health, your metabolic health. But symbols, symbols matter. And you talk about symbols in your first book as well.

• 53:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:23Steven Bartlett?

  And we don't appreciate how much symbols sway our life in fundamental ways, do we?

• 53:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, that's right. That's true. And and I think, you know, even these numbers are symbolic. They have symbolic meaning for us. It it's something when you say I'm in my thirties, it's different from saying I'm twenty eight or twenty nine. Even if it's just a year apart or even a few days apart. And it's the same with what it means to be in your forties. It's symbolic for a time of life and and certain expectations about what that time of your life is supposed to be. And so I think that's what happens. We talked about expectations. That you you're suddenly in your forties or your fifties or your sixties and then you say, what does that mean? And where here is where my expectations are. I should have the following things. Maybe a certain amount of money, a certain career status, maybe a partner, maybe kids.

• 54:10Speaker 00

  And then do you have those things? And if you don't, then you get this kind of acting out behaviour. Some of it productive that tries to remedy the problem. Perhaps you try to get fit and run a marathon, but sometimes for some people, it's not very productive behaviour.

• 54:24Steven Bartlett?

  I know this more than most because I started in business at eighteen and you can imagine. When I was on BBC Newsnight.

• 54:33Steven Bartlett?

  And they introduce you and he's only 18 years old. My business is making zero money.

• 54:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:38Steven Bartlett?

  But they were just blown away because of expectation of what an 18 year old should be doing. And then I had that throughout my career and he's only 25 and he's got a thousand and he's only 20 and then he's only 29.

• 54:49Speaker 00

  And then it stops.

• 54:50Steven Bartlett?

  Steven Bartlett is an entrepreneur.

• 54:54Steven Bartlett?

  And I'm like, listen, one day has changed and suddenly no one's introducing me by my age.

• 54:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:58Steven Bartlett?

  Because 29 and 30, the expectations of a 29 year old running a business and how big that business might be and how many team members and revenue versus a 30 year old, you go eh, he better be a billionaire or else we're not going to mention his age.

• 55:10Speaker 00

  I'm in my early 40s and it's the same thing. I, as an academic, you know, if you're a professor in your 30s, that's, you're young. And then you hit suddenly one day you're 40 and they're like eh, eh, you're a professor, whatever.

• 55:22Steven Bartlett?

  When you wrote about symbols in your first book, what were some of the most sort of surprising things in terms of how powerful and inspirational they are with us, to us, without us even knowing?

• 55:31Speaker 00

  Well, you know, as a marketing professor, I'm very, very interested in how symbols play a role in branding and in conveying ideas really succinctly. I think that the simplest way to convey an idea is with an image and the images that are the most powerful are often in symbolic form. A lot of them are very negative images that we get from symbols. They're associated with ideals that we don't like, for example. You know, like something like a swastika is a, it's a terrible symbol, the way it's used or has been used for the last almost 100 years now.

• 56:03Speaker 00

  But the amount of meaning that's conveyed in those symbols is, is tremendous. And so it's, there's a, there's a sort of terrible power to symbols. They can shape behaviour in all sorts of ways. One of the studies I did, looked at people who were religious versus not religious and then showed them a religious symbol and then asked them to do a behaviour that was either going to be done honestly or dishonestly. We were essentially measuring whether they were going to behave honestly. And for those religious people, seeing that symbol kind of clicked something for them and they became much more honest. So in general, they might've had an honesty level of 50%, but you show them that symbol even subtly in the environment around them and suddenly they become much more honest. So these, these things are constantly swimming around us and gently nudging our behaviour in different directions.

• 56:50Steven Bartlett?

  It almost reminded me a little bit of the thing you wrote about in that book, about how when people are shown a picture of eyeballs at like a free snack bar, where they can take what they want, they're much more honest about their decisions. Because eyes, again, in a way, are a symbol.

• 57:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:06Steven Bartlett?

  They're a symbol of the tribe, maybe?

• 57:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, of being watched, of feeling like you're being watched. There's some really interesting evidence from this, looking at using eyeballs to get people to behave better. So if you have an image of a pair of eyes looking at you, just disembodied, just the eyes, you don't see any of the rest of the face, you find that people behave much more honestly. They're much less likely to steal something, you see shoplifting rates go down. The best use of it, though, I think, is if you, say you're a chocoholic, you love chocolate, but you don't want to be eating it. But you also want to have a little bit around every now and again. One thing you can do is you can have a little cupboard in your kitchen, where the inside of the cupboard, you put a mirror.

• 57:49Steven Bartlett?

  Hmm.

• 57:50Speaker 00

  And that's where the chocolate lives. So you open it up, and every time you reach for the chocolate, you have to stare into your own soul. And so the eyeballs, whether they're yours or somebody else's, just having to look at yourself, not just metaphorically, but literally as you do something, it brings out your better angels. And there's a lot of evidence for that in various psychological studies.

• 58:10Steven Bartlett?

  One of the things that stands in the way of acceptance is this question, which a lot of people ask when they get stuck, which is, or when they have a life quake, which is, why me? Why did this happen to me?

• 58:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:21Steven Bartlett?

  And that relinquishes our sense of personal responsibility. It makes us a victim to the situation, which we might objectively be a victim, however you want to define it, to a situation. But it doesn't seem to be conducive with getting out of it.

• 58:36Speaker 00

  No, it doesn't. And you know, the interesting thing is if you go to people who are at the end of their lives, they're on their deathbeds, and they know that the end is near, and you say to them, did you ever have a why me situation? Did something happen in your life at any point where you had cause, whether you did or not, you had cause to say, why me? You know, this felt unfair. Hundred percent of them will say yes. That's another case where we feel isolated in those moments. We're like, why me? The implication of that is it's me, but not someone else. Their turn will come. We will all have these moments that are really hard to deal with. Some of us have had them already. Some of us will have more of them in the future, but they are universal. And so the the best thing you can do, I think, in those moments is to just kind of recognize that it's okay to be sad and pissed off and to struggle with them.

• 59:21Speaker 00

  But also there's some comfort in knowing that actually this is just what it is to be human. Everyone has these moments. You're not unique in responding that way and you're not unique in experiencing that situation in the first place.

• 59:33Steven Bartlett?

  It's privileged as well, as you write about in your book. It's a privileged response to have.

• 59:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:37Steven Bartlett?

  That you don't see across other cultures as readily.

• 59:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's privileged and it also, I think, reflects the sense of agency we've got from becoming essentially masters of our worlds in ways that were not true for most of human history. You know, we, as science and medicine goes, we're living longer, we are generally a stronger species, we can do a lot of incredible things, we can move spacecraft to other planets. You know, it's ridiculous, the number of things we can do. And so as a result of that, we kind of assume that that's the kind of control we should have over every aspect of our lives. If we can do big things that are amazing, why can't we do small things that are amazing? And that's not the way the world works. And we mistake that general sense of human control over the world, especially as we move away from religion and become more secular.

• 1:00:24Speaker 00

  We develop that sense of privilege. And I think cultures that that don't have that to the same extent, or that still hew to religion more strongly, you have much more of a recognition that, hey, to some extent, I'm kind of at the mercy of whether it's the gods or however you want to describe it. And that makes you more open to the idea that you don't have control.

• 1:00:43Steven Bartlett?

  Is that less westernized culture, so cultures with less money?

• 1:00:46Speaker 00

  Yes, that's why the privilege aspect comes into it, because I think the West, where we are more.

• 1:00:53Steven Bartlett?

  It's expectations again, isn't it?

• 1:00:55Speaker 00

  It comes back to almost everything. Yeah, it's a huge, huge part of the human experience.

• 1:01:02Steven Bartlett?

  We will need to lower our expectations.

• 1:01:04Speaker 00

  Or have realistic ones.

• 1:01:05Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:08Steven Bartlett?

  There's going to be so many people that are listening that are, that realise that, you know, they objectively realise that life comes in seasons. And, but the, the difficulty comes is when one of those seasons ends.

• 1:01:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:20Steven Bartlett?

  And we kind of resist it ending. And a lot of people, I think, will feel stuck when a season or a chapter of life, one of those life quakes, you know, I guess the start of a life quake, I guess, is when, when one of those seasons ends. Knowing from a intellectual, from a strategy standpoint, how to deal with it in that moment. Cause when a season of life ends, there's so much uncertainty and fear and, and you, you can't always see the season to come. And that's where a lot of those feelings come from. He talked about acceptance being a key path forward. But is there anything else? I really wanna make sure that we've completed that. Is there anything else that we can do to, to be better at transitioning from one season of life to the other?

• 1:02:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, so I love this philosophy from the, the rock musician Jeff Tweedy, the frontman of the band Wilco, who's also a writer. He, he writes, he does music, he's, he's a renaissance man.

• 1:02:16Speaker 00

  He talks about that, that feeling of being stuck and, and sometimes it's in transitions, but also it's, it's when you're chronically being forced to come up with new ideas if you're a creative. And I think this applies to, to transitions to new periods as well. He talks about this idea that, you know, for decades he has had to wake up and his bread and butter is to come up with creative songs and to write good passages that will then become part of a book. That is asking a lot of people, but what he does is he recognises that above all else, action is going to move him forward. When you feel stuck, action, even if it's slightly sideways. It may not be exactly where you wanna go, but the mere fact that you're acting gives you feedback that you're not stuck, that you're moving in the right direction.

• 1:02:57Speaker 00

  And so he talks about, at least temporarily, lowering, lowering your expectations to the ground. And so he talks about pouring out the bad ideas. If he's writing a song, he'll say, what's the worst musical phrase I could write right now? Or what's the worst line for this book? Let me come up with three of the worst lines ever. And that's easy to do, cause you, you have no expectations. It's not maximising or satisficing, it's just like the bare minimum. And when you do that, you get the ball rolling, you show yourself that you're not stuck. And so then what follows that, as he describes it, is the good stuff. That's when you get your good ideas, because the, you know, the wheels have been greased and you're moving forward. And I think that's true in transition periods, that we spend a lot of time agonizing.

• 1:03:40Speaker 00

  There's a lot of dealing with the emotions, which is fair. There's a lot of time strategizing. But just acting is tremendously liberating, even if the action itself doesn't bring measurable rewards in the short term.

• 1:03:52Steven Bartlett?

  I was thinking, as you were saying that, the context, within the context of dating. So you've just come out of a horrific divorce, you're sat at home on your own, you can't even remember how to date.

• 1:04:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:02Steven Bartlett?

  And you're going to try and find someone that is as appealing as the person that's just dumped you or divorced you. And they're hard to find, so you just procrastinate, you kind of sit in the misery, and that's where you feel stuck.

• 1:04:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:14Steven Bartlett?

  If I apply the philosophy you've just said to bad ideas first, what I'd actually do is I'd just go on a date.

• 1:04:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:20Steven Bartlett?

  And I'd say, listen, this is not going to be the husband, but we're going to start getting some practice. And we're going to just start getting out there and putting my makeup back on and whatever, and getting out there into the market. And you'd take, you'd take a bad date just to get the ball rolling. Is that accurate?

• 1:04:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, and a lot of people do that. That's, that's the philosophy of the rebound, right? That, uh, yeah. But, but I think that's right. I mean, I think from the perspective of the person who's been dumped. The re, we always think about the rebound from the perspective of the person who suddenly discovers they're the next, the next option.

• 1:04:45Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:04:46Speaker 00

  You know, that's not a good sign.

• 1:04:47Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:48Speaker 00

  But if you are the person who's trying to get back out there, I think that's a really great thing to do. And it doesn't have to be a romantic date. It's just like, go do something. You know, you're gonna, you'll wallow for a little bit, which is fine. But the best thing you can do is to, as I said, move sideways. Moving forwards might be going on more dates to try and find the next person. It's not time for that yet. It's time to just go and go to a movie, go and see a rock band, like do whatever it is you like doing, just so you're not doing nothing. Just act. And action, one of the great things it does, especially when you're, you're ruminating and you're thinking about how bad and tough things are, is action is a phenomenal distraction. Like when you're acting, you're not thinking as much. And so it's, it's worth doing just to be doing something.

• 1:05:33Steven Bartlett?

  That's why people rebound, isn't it? But it also gives us a sense of meaning and purpose, which is often the thing that the rejection has robbed us of. So me going out and having a one night stand, I don't advise it, I'm not against it, but I don't advise it. I have no opinion on one night stands. Going out and having a one night stand, maybe the reason I feel rejection is because I'm telling myself a story that I'm unlovable or unwanted and going out and getting evidence that someone is interested in me can help with the pain of the rejection. And it's the same within work. If you've been fired from a job, maybe you're telling yourself a story about your self-worth and just going out there and doing some work, even if it's volunteering somewhere, could be, help ease the rejection.

• 1:06:17Steven Bartlett?

  Because the rejection often is just a story, isn't it?

• 1:06:19Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, I think that's right. I also think the human experience is essentially bouncing like a ping pong ball from one thing to the next, where the next thing you do is trying to capture whatever feels like it's missing from the last thing. And actually, a lot of relationships, when people jump from relationship to relationship, are about exactly that. It's like, when a relationship ends, you think about what was the thing that was missing in that one? Like, why didn't it work? And you fixate on that with the next person. Now, there may have been some great things about the last person. You forget to focus on retaining those in the next person. And so then you're missing something different in the next person that you go to after that. And so this is what we do in jobs, this is what we do in how we spend our time, in pursuits, in dating.

• 1:07:04Speaker 00

  We're constantly trying to create the thing that feels like it's missing, because humans by nature just focus on deficits, on losses, on the negatives. And so that sort of propels us forward.

• 1:07:14Steven Bartlett?

  What's a better approach?

• 1:07:15Speaker 00

  I mean, you know, the explicit one is the sort of gratitude approach in saying, what's working? Like, that's the flip side of this, is to say, whether it's about a relationship or a job, what were the best five things about that relationship that I would want to retain in future? If you don't ask yourself that question, it biases the decisions you make thereafter. And I think it biases them in a way that's really unproductive. It's going to be true if you jump to a new job, move to a new country or city or town, any change, it's worth asking, not only what didn't work and do I want to fix, but also what did work and do I want to retain?

• 1:07:52Steven 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?

• 1:08:05Speaker 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 Klutz that's on this exact topic. The friction audit itself is a sort of philosophical version of that idea.

• 1:08:45Speaker 00

  Where in business in particular, I do a lot of business consulting that works on on this this friction order 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, whatever it is.

• 1:09:30Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:09:44Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:09:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:09:48Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:09:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:09:52Steven 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

• 1:10:03Steven Bartlett?

  something we can buy.

• 1:10:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:10:04Steven Bartlett?

  Equipment we could buy, someone we could hire.

• 1:10:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, when I think about this, certainly for teams that 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.

• 1:10:52Speaker 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.

• 1:11:00Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:11:05Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:11:05Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:11:08Speaker 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.

• 1:11:36Steven Bartlett?

  It made me reflect, as you were saying that on that, is it the sixty-one rule in aviation? Have you heard that?

• 1:11:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think I know what you mean.

• 1:11:43Steven Bartlett?

  Where if you're one degree off for every X amount of miles you travel, you'll miss the airport by sixty miles or something like that. So just one degree in deviation from the path, which could be anything that's causing friction in your relationship at work and whatever you're doing, means that you'll miss the airport by sixty miles for every hundred miles you travel or something like that.

• 1:12:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:06Steven Bartlett?

  And it kind of shows how one small unaddressed friction point in your life could make you miss, miss the target in such a significant way. And by checking in, by doing the friction audit frequently, hopefully we can make sure we stay on course in our lives. I think about that a lot with my relationship because, quite honestly, if I'm away on business or I'm just getting caught up in my life and I don't do a bit of a friction audit in our relationship, you know, you get a couple of weeks in and I look over at her in the kitchen and something's wrong.

• 1:12:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:34Steven Bartlett?

  I don't know what's wrong.

• 1:12:36Steven Bartlett?

  But something's wrong and it's always because I haven't done, we haven't had like a conversation in a while about like something.

• 1:12:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:42Steven Bartlett?

  We haven't checked in.

• 1:12:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it's it's huge. I actually talk about this in the book, that sixty one idea.

• 1:12:49Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, so you know what it is? I like destroyed it.

• 1:12:52Speaker 00

  No, no, no, no, no. So I don't talk about it as the sixty one, but I talk about the the Y two K bug that people were worried about around the turn of the century to two thousand. There was this concern that all these computers would crash because they all had the two digit number associated with the year. So in nineteen ninety nine, it said ninety nine. But when we ticked over to two thousand, it went zero, zero, and a lot of computers would think it was nineteen hundred instead of two thousand. This was a concern that planes would fall out of the sky and nuclear power plants would explode and all this. But they they first identified this problem in the in the sixties. It was a guy at IBM named Bob Bema. And I think it's Bema or Beamer. Who um, who was like, hey, we should figure this out like it's not a big deal yet, but I think computers are going to be big. There are going to be a lot of them around by the year two thousand.

• 1:13:37Speaker 00

  Let's deal with this in the sixties where it's easy to reprogram the few computers we have. Let's make it a four digit number or do whatever we need to do. In the end, governments in the nineties spent billions of dollars because that one degree off in nineteen sixty that no one bothered to correct ended up being the sixty by the time we got to the year two thousand. So these these little things that niggle that we don't deal with end up getting worse and worse and worse. And it's so true about relationships.

• 1:14:04Steven Bartlett?

  They compound negatively against us. My the first, my favorite book I ever read when I started reading more was, I think it's, I think it's called Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge. He talks exactly about that, how about the things that are easy not to do.

• 1:14:18Steven Bartlett?

  Like saving five pounds or brushing your teeth. Other things that end up compounding against us or for us in our lives and having the most significant impact. Because we ignore those things. We don't think they're important.

• 1:14:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:14:31Steven Bartlett?

  And that's why I think a friction order, it's not, it's not. A waste of time. It's often sweating the smallest things that gone is the biggest results. Career hot streaks.

• 1:14:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, this I I love this research. These these researchers who are asking this question, is there something if we look at the course of thousands of careers in different areas, creatives, business people and so on, scientists, can you predict when we're going to have the best periods in our careers? That's basically what they're asking. They call this a hot streak. You know, like when you if you're an academic and you publish your five most high impact papers, or if you're a filmmaker and you have five films that are seen as your canon, when is that going to happen? Can we predict that? Is there a way to manufacture that if I'm a filmmaker or a scientist? And they they identify these two processes that need to happen in precisely this order. One of them is is known as exploration. And in exploration,

• 1:15:24Speaker 00

  you go far and wide. You basically you have a default of yes, which means that when someone comes to you with an opportunity, you're like, yeah, sure, why not? I give a talk to freshmen at NYU, and they should, as freshmen, that time in your life, you should be an explorer. You don't know what you're going to end up doing with your life. You could stumble on something wonderful. You should say yes to everything. And during this phase, you know, they they talk about Jackson Pollock, the artist who ended up developing his drip technique that he became famous for. Before he did that, he spent a number of years trying five or six different other techniques. Peter Jackson, who made the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films and became, you know, a titan for those films, he was doing horror and all sorts of other

• 1:16:03Speaker 00

  stuff before that. These were their exploratory periods. But at some point, that yes default has to become a no default, where you say, hey, I've been trying these different things. I've been exploring. It's time to exploit. That's the second phase. And during that phase, you say, hey, of those five or six things I was exploring, this one looks like it has the most promise. I'm gonna pour my heart and soul into that thing for a little while and see what comes of it. So for Jackson Pollock, it was the drip painting. For Peter Jackson, it's these big epic fantasy films. And what happens then is you've considered the options, you pick the best one, and then you make the absolute most you can make of it. You squeeze all the juice out of the orange.

• 1:16:45Speaker 00

  And that's when those successful hot streak periods arise, when you go broad and then you go really narrow. And then when you feel stuck again, you go broad again, and then you go narrow. And you expand and you contract throughout your life professionally and I think personally as well. That's, that's, I think, a path to a good life.

• 1:17:05Steven Bartlett?

  So people that might have been doing the same thing for a couple of decades or a decade are probably not gonna stumble across a career hot streak because then they're missing that experimentation and that exploration.

• 1:17:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that's right. And, you know, the best evidence for this, for me at least personally, was when I give this talk to the freshmen, I show them the four emails that I've got in the last twenty years that changed my life. And my instinct, I actually show them, I redact some of the information, but I show them the images of these emails that arrived in my inbox. And I remember with each one, when they arrived, I was like, I'm so busy, I, there's no way I can do this. It would be an email from someone saying, for example, before I wrote my first book, an agent reached out and said, I just read a piece about some of your research. I think there might be a book in this. What do you think? My first, my first instinct was like, I don't have time for this. I, I'm so busy. I'm a first year professor.

• 1:17:59Speaker 00

  But I was in this exploratory period, so I ended up saying yes. Totally changed my professional life. I have a few others that are like that. And those four are sitting in a pool with thousands that went nowhere. But if you don't have that yes default for a certain period of time, you're never gonna find those four gold nuggets in that, that otherwise kind of silty mess. And so I think it's a really important default to have at certain times in your life.

• 1:18:24Steven Bartlett?

  We talked before we started recording about some of the subject matter you love talking about and creativity was one of them. When we think about creativity, a lot of people think about this, the process of coming up with a new idea. And by trial and error, I've tried to figure out the conditions which allow me to come up with my best ideas. What I've, I mean, I've got a couple of hypotheses around when I'm, you know, when I'm at the gym, I seem to come up with all my best ideas or when I have space.

• 1:18:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:18:52Steven Bartlett?

  But, but the process of coming up with an idea, if I was to, if you were advising me as a consultant on how to get my teams to think of better ideas or to come up with our best ideas, what would you, what would you advise us to do?

• 1:19:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, so here's a long-term strategy that I think is really valuable, that I've used and I've found very helpful. I have several documents that are about 20 years old. One of them is called research ideas. One is called book ideas. One is called teaching ideas. And every time I see anything that's even remotely interesting to me that's related to one of those, I put it in one of those documents, depending on what it is. Like for teaching ideas, it'll be a great ad campaign that I want to share with my students. If you do that for 20 years, that document gets really, really long. And so my documents now, those are, some of them are, I think, like 40 or 50 pages long, just line after line of links and ideas and short descriptions of things that I've come across that are useful. If I go back to that, it does two things.

• 1:19:52Speaker 00

  One thing is it shows me over time what I'm interested in, because sometimes it's hard in the moment to say, I don't know what am I generally interested in, but I have a 20 year record of what I'm interested in. The other thing it does is it allows you to do what I think of as the best, the single best reproducible process for coming up with creative ideas, which is called recombination. So we have this illusion that the best ideas are radically original, that they stand on their own. They're different from anything that came before, they are paradigm shifts, everything changes. But even when you, when you look at those ideas that seem that way, you interrogate them and you trace them back far enough, they are almost always a combination of old ideas or a recombination. So the, the best example of this that I came across, and I talk about this in the book,

• 1:20:36Speaker 00

  is when you ask musicians, who was the most original musician of the 20th century? One of the most common responses is Bob Dylan. But if you look deeply. Dylan certainly had a lot of elements that seemed like they were different from what other people were doing. But he himself has said, oh yeah, I was borrowing from this tradition and that tradition and the folk tradition and this artist and that artist. And then when you look at the DNA of his music, there's so much evidence for what came before. It's true in business ideas as well. One of the things I ask my students to do is come up with a radically original idea in business that you've seen. Tell me about a company that's doing something radically original. And then I'll say, they'll come up with something and then I'll say, all right, tell me what is similar to that that came before it.

• 1:21:20Speaker 00

  And they can always come up with something. So is it radically original or was it just a new combination of elements that existed before? And I think that if you have this long document, randomly pick idea three and idea 12 and see if you can combine them and there you might have a business or an idea that's useful.

• 1:21:37Steven Bartlett?

  We could also do that collectively, I guess, as a, as a team and as a company. We can create a, an internal ideas document which everyone can kind of contribute to in terms of, we're thinking, you know, ways to make, ways to make this podcast or one of my businesses more successful, just dumping in ideas that we're kind of on the someday shelf.

• 1:21:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:21:58Steven Bartlett?

  We, then when we revisit that document in the future, we can go, okay, so we were trying to find a way to get listeners to share the podcast more. And oh, someone found a tool over here that does something else for this part of the business. Maybe we could combine these two things and use that to share the podcast more.

• 1:22:12Speaker 00

  Here's a tweak to that. I think that's a great idea, but if you make it a collective document, people are going to feel like the ideas have to be a certain level of goodness to share them.

• 1:22:19Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:22:20Speaker 00

  So start alone. Everyone has their own document and then you combine it at some point.

• 1:22:23Steven Bartlett?

  Ah, nice.

• 1:22:24Speaker 00

  That's much better for, in general, that idea of brainstorming as the first step. Great if you do it on your own. You never want to start by thinking in a group. You always want to start alone. Yeah.

• 1:22:34Steven Bartlett?

  People converge, they're scared.

• 1:22:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:22:36Steven Bartlett?

  One of those things. Do you do much of that? Do you do much of sort of corporate consulting?

• 1:22:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, quite a lot.

• 1:22:42Steven Bartlett?

  What typically tends to be the symptoms or the challenge that corporations are typically stuck with?

• 1:22:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I mean, not all the consulting I do is about being stuck specifically, but that's often a way of framing why you would get a consultant in, right? There's something you want to change and you want to fix it. So very, very often, it's a company that's experienced a change in situation. Like, the cost of our raw materials has gone up, what do we do now? Or there's a thing that we needed and we can't get that anymore. Or the legislation has changed and the government now doesn't let us do this key part of what we used to do. So a lot of it ends up being quite operational when it's about stuckness. It's like, how do we pivot? How do we figure out a way around this situation?

• 1:23:27Speaker 00

  But the consulting briefs are incredibly broad and varied, which is again, why I love it so much. Because no two gigs is the same.

• 1:23:34Steven Bartlett?

  Pivoting then.

• 1:23:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a lot of pivoting and a lot of figuring out how to change and also what doesn't need to change. I think often the instinct is, yeah, I did some work with a company that makes denim jeans. And they were like, well, cotton's just gone up dramatically in price. And so as a result, it's more expensive to make our jeans. What do we do? And they're like, we need to just overhaul the whole process. I was like, I don't know, I don't think you do. I think what you need to do is frame the rise in price in a way that people don't balk and run away. You know, you've got a long, strong, strong relationship with a lot of customers over time. You have a strong brand identity and so on. So no, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Let's just figure out how we can sell the idea that maybe things are just a bit more expensive now. And against a backdrop where everything's more expensive now.

• 1:24:17Speaker 00

  So often it's about minimizing change.

• 1:24:21Steven Bartlett?

  As it relates to these hundred, hundred ways to get unstuck, do you have any, any that are your, your favorite? Or that people are seen to be most receptive to that are maybe more on the original side of things?

• 1:24:33Speaker 00

  Some of them are very narrow and specific, like case studies that I talk about. But a lot of them are sort of concepts, like the idea that when things get hard, that's when creativity begins. Like you've got to let things get hard. And we're not creative until we struggle. Is is really important. It's very liberating because the what it does is it takes the naive theory of what it is to struggle to be creative, turns it on its head and says, hey, you you're going in exactly the right direction. It's the hardship that heralds the good stuff. So if it's not hard yet, that's the problem. You've got to keep going till it gets there. And I a lot of people find that quite liberating.

• 1:25:06Steven Bartlett?

  I've been playing around in the notes of my phone with this idea. I was trying to find a way to put it on my stories over the last two days. And like I'd got to this point about how the the rarity of the amount of people that overcome the challenge is a directly correlates to the rarity of the rewards behind the door. So when you when something is sorry, the level of difficulty is a signal of how many people gave up at that exact moment.

• 1:25:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:25:27Steven Bartlett?

  And then logically, if you pursue and overcome the difficulty or get through that door, fewer people got the rewards behind that door. And you're saying a very, very similar thing.

• 1:25:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:25:37Steven Bartlett?

  You're right, helps you reframe what difficulty is. Difficulty isn't a a signal to to turn back. It's a signal that if you keep going, the rewards just got greater.

• 1:25:47Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I also think it's a question of how difficult is this for other people? Right? So being creative is hard. It's it's hard for everyone, even really good good creatives are. They get to a point where it's kind of gets gets difficult because you're trying to come up with something out of whole cloth that's new.

• 1:26:02Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:02Speaker 00

  And so that's not easy for anyone.

• 1:26:04Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:05Speaker 00

  If there's something that most people can do really easily and you're struggling with it, that's very different from doing something that's hard and persevering through that hardship. So I think it's always important to ask in the background, am I by finding this hard, is that just like part of the course of doing this thing? Or am I finding it hard because I should be putting my mind and attention elsewhere? Maybe I'm just not very good at this thing. And I would be better spending my time doing something else.

• 1:26:31Steven Bartlett?

  Is there anything else in your work? Because you're you're such a multifaceted guy. I mean, you've written about a variety of different subject matters from how screens are harming us and our addiction to these mobile devices to your first book, which sent a lot on sort of cognitive biases and psychology. And then this book about getting unstuck and all the psychology around that. Is there anything else that? We should have talked about that you think is valuable to my audience. My audience are a group of people that are trying to get better in their lives. They're trying to get unstuck, trying to get closer to their potential.

• 1:27:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'll say one thing. I've been doing a lot of research lately on nostalgia, on the concept of nostalgia. I think in many ways, it's the most powerful backward facing emotion we have. That as you get older, you you start to miss things that are no longer existing in your life, that you loved at the time and that you think back on really fondly. And sometimes you even misremember them and you think of them as better than they actually were at the time. But it's an incredibly powerful emotion. And one of the things we've been finding in this research is that the things that make you nostalgic are often at the time what you think of as kind of mundane routines. Like, I really miss grad school. I went to Princeton and loved it and had a great five years there.

• 1:27:47Speaker 00

  But I don't miss the like momentous events. I don't miss graduation. I don't miss ceremonies. I don't miss these big culminations. I miss the really mundane stuff. I miss walking this one path that I used to take in the summer between my dorm room and the office. And I did it hundreds of times. If I could just do that walk one more time. And so I think there's a kind of message there that we often mistake these momentous things that we go through for being like what life is really about. But actually, a lot of it is the kind of mundane routine stuff that's every day. And the reason I like that idea so much is because it suggests that you can wring tremendous value out of things that might seem

• 1:28:30Speaker 00

  trivial or not that important if you recognize that. Like, it's changed the way I live my life. I cultivate so many little routines out of every day because I know when I look back, that's the stuff that's going to really feel full of reward and meaning. I think we try too hard sometimes to make everything bigger and better and more kind of emotionally explosive. And so that's, I've always found that, at least since discovering that, it's been a really powerful idea for me.

• 1:28:56Steven Bartlett?

  I think about that, you were just saying about nostalgia, relationships I've had, companies we've been in and, you know, worked in for many, many years. And you look back at the, the early days and you go, oh, I wish we could have that again. But it's, but you can't, I can't quite easily put my finger on exactly what, what it was, other than a bit of excitement.

• 1:29:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:29:16Steven Bartlett?

  You know, a couple of moments where I have flashbacks of good moments we had, but there's nothing to say we can't create those little good moments of celebrating together in a bar.

• 1:29:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:29:26Steven Bartlett?

  Now, and.

• 1:29:27Speaker 00

  I mean, there are three components to wellbeing. There's anticipation before something happens. There's momentary when it's happening. And then there's retrospection after it's happened. Think about a trip you take. If you're really excited for a trip, I'm going to Europe this summer and I'm very excited about it. A particular trip that I'm going to be taking. And I think our job as humans in sort of respect of all the time and energy we put into living our lives is try to maximize across those three kinds of wellbeing, the sum of those three. So the fun stuff, book it in as early as possible. So you start enjoying it today before it's happened. And then in the moment, which tends to be very brief, right? The moments themselves are brief. Most of the value comes in thinking back for the hopefully decades that come afterwards.

• 1:30:09Steven Bartlett?

  So you're saying get your phones out?

• 1:30:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. Just spend every minute on your phone.

• 1:30:14Steven Bartlett?

  Take a photo of everything.

• 1:30:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:30:16Steven Bartlett?

  Spend the whole time at Coachella just videoing.

• 1:30:18Speaker 00

  Just videoing it. You, you don't actually want to experience it. You just want to look back on it. Yeah.

• 1:30:23Steven Bartlett?

  That's fantastic advice. Thank you, Adam, so much for your time. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're going to be leaving it for. I don't get to see it until I open the book.

• 1:30:38Steven Bartlett?

  The question that's been left for you is, what is one belief or behaviour that has positively impacted your life in the past 12 months?

• 1:30:55Speaker 00

  So I've spent a lot of time over the last few years critiquing tech. And that's what a lot of my work has been about because I think it's it's it technology generally and screen based tech, we spend a lot of our time on it. And I don't think it always brings us the rewards we'd hope.

• 1:31:13Speaker 00

  And my instinct when I first discovered generative AI, ChatGPT and and the other models that are proliferating was similar, it was sort of this this negativity, it's going to steal jobs, it's going to be problematic. But I I sort of adopted a more experimental mindset and I've started using it more. And I've started using it more than anything as a kind of brainstorming partner. It's like, instead of having a brain trust of ten very smart friends who all think a bit differently about something. ChatGPT is like billions of people all thinking differently about things. And you can keep asking it, hey, give me another idea, give me another idea, imagine that one's wrong, let's tweak that. So I think what's changed for me is I'm trying to embrace

• 1:31:55Speaker 00

  these external things that are changing around us a little bit more. Because my natural instinct is to say, let's preserve what's so special about being humans and try to stave off all of that infringing effect that comes from from from these changes. But I I'm finding that very rewarding because I'm finding the good. I can still say no to the bad, but I'm finding a lot of good.

• 1:32:16Steven Bartlett?

  I think there's a bit of a hangover from the social media era.

• 1:32:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:32:22Steven Bartlett?

  And how that played out where there was this new technology. We all rushed into it thinking it was all positive. And as the experiment played out, we realized that there were there are unintended consequences.

• 1:32:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:32:34Steven Bartlett?

  So I think we've come into this real next technological shift with the unintended consequences mindset.

• 1:32:40Speaker 00

  I think that's right. I think that's exactly right. And and I think the the pendulum shifts. I remember when I was was talking to people about the last book, Irresistible, about screens. And a lot of them were like, this is two thousand thirteen fourteen. They were saying things like, but everyone loves tech, like, why would we even consider the problems? Why would you write a book about that? It's a storm in a teacup. The idea that people were not criticizing tech ten years ago in the way they are now, especially screen tech, surprises a lot of people, but I had way more pushback early on. And then in the, say, three or four years that followed, the pendulum swung the other way to to critiquing. And I think now, hopefully, we're kind of. Leveling out a little bit, but I think you're right. There is a hangover from the the social media era.

• 1:33:25Steven Bartlett?

  Think I'm quite scared about AI. I mean, we use it in our businesses, but um I think the social media era has has maybe rightly made us think before we go all in about consequences. And it's funny seeing the debates in Congress and with the CEOs taking place before a lot of this stuff has been built and deployed now.

• 1:33:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:33:45Steven Bartlett?

  Whereas with social media, we got ten years in or fifteen years in and we were like, oh, my God, so let's do the run the studies now and see the impact it's having. It's interesting. We're gonna see how that plays out.

• 1:33:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:33:53Steven Bartlett?

  You writing another book? You thinking about a subject?

• 1:33:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm always thinking about stuff. Um I, as I said, I've got this document with like a hundred book ideas. I'd need to live a hundred lives to to write them all. But uh I'm I'm pretty focused on this one now and some other things, but I will I will start thinking about the next book proposal soon.

• 1:34:10Steven Bartlett?

  Adam, thank you. Thank you for writing such an incredible book. And if you do end up writing another book, I'll be I'll be the first to buy it because this book is phenomenal. All your books are phenomenal because they're so accessible, but they're confronting subject matter that is so, as you say, has such broad appeal. Um where there doesn't appear to be solid, clear answers yet. And I also love authors like yourself that don't take a binary approach to things because life isn't binary in any in any regard. And so being nuanced in um and personalized, I think, is is what you do so well. But um is what it's also what people love so much. And you're a fantastic talker. You're fantastic at conveying ideas. So if you ever want to start a podcast. You know.

• 1:34:50Speaker 00

  Thanks, mate.

• 1:34:50Steven Bartlett?

  I'd certainly download it. Thank you so much, Adam. It's an honour to meet you.

• 1:34:53Speaker 00

  Thanks, Stephen. It's been great. Thank you.