KF #31. Situational Adaptability Archives - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Pete Mockaitis
Jeff, welcome back!

Jeff DeGraff
Thanks, Pete. Thanks for having me on.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to chat. And I’d love to hear, since we last chatted eight years ago, what’s one of the most fascinating things you’ve discovered about us humans and change in that time?

Jeff DeGraff
One, that we’re hypocrites, starting with me. We know how things work, but it’s sort of like knowing you need to lose a little weight, but we don’t want to do that. And then sort of really using that to our advantage, kind of working through our own resistance to help not only ourselves change, but other people.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. So, we’re hypocrites in the world of change. What’s one of the top ways that we are hypocritical?

Jeff DeGraff
Well, all of us know, because we’re on social media, that facts don’t change minds. And yet, whenever we’re trying to change, what’s the first thing we do? We use facts. So, it’s a paradox. It’s one of the first paradoxes in the book. And the challenge is, even though we know it, we still do it because it’s habitual.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s intriguing. Well, we’re going to go in all kinds of fun directions. But while we’re here, okay, Jeff, lay it on us. If facts don’t change minds, what does?

Jeff DeGraff
Experiences. You know, one of the things I worked on during COVID, I worked on the acquisition process for the COVID vaccine. So, I got a letter of marque from Congress, and one of the few people that was called in to try and work on this. And what was really interesting to me was, when we started looking at the data, and this is not a political comment, this is just a comment about how powerful beliefs are.

It depends on whether you look at the Johns Hopkins data or the Brown University data, the first million people who died, somewhere between 25 and 40% of the people who died had a vaccine available to them. Meaning, people would rather die than change their mind. That’s how powerful that is. I’m not trying to be a provocateur, and I’m not trying to make a political statement. I’m trying to say that’s what belief systems do.

And the whole challenge of that is that the only thing that really changes minds is experiences. Experiences change minds. So, you’ve had something happen, you learned from it, now you have a different point of view. Learning and innovation and change are all sort of inextricably interrelated. So that becomes the big thing, “How do we help people get those experiences?”

What I mean by that is ask your listeners to think about a bell curve. At one end of the bell curve, there’s a crisis, and at the other end of the bell curve there’s exceptional, “Are you doing really well?” Think about when people really change. They lose their job, they lose their health, they get a divorce. And the reason they change at the edge of the bell curve is the risk of trying something radical, and the reward of staying where you’re at is reversed at the edge of a bell curve. The same is true when you’re on a roll.

When everything’s working, you got promoted, you graduated, you’re in love, whatever it is. So, the thing that people get wrong is it’s not the 80-20 rule. That’s a terrible rule for change. It’s the opposite of what change is. It’s the 20-80 rule. And what that means is it’s easier to change 20% of your life 80% than it is to change 80% of your life 20%. Let me repeat that. It’s easier to change 20% of your life 80% than it is to change 80% of your life 20%.

What you have to understand is that change is almost always going to happen when there’s an inflection point, a crisis, or exceptional. And part of the reason that I think people changed during COVID was that 20-80 rule. There was a crisis. They had to, right? When it ended, that everybody went back to their own finger pointing and yelling at each other. But during it, that’s the galvanizing piece, the inflection event.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, and I think that’s interesting when you talk about the crisis is on one side and on a roll is on the other, I’m thinking about how it could also happen in a good way and it’s still an experience. And this is so mundane, but I’ll say it. So, I am all about cold plunging now.

And it used to be when I saw this expensive cold plunge device, like tubs, and all like the hip, sexy Instagram influencers, you know, plugging it, I was like, “Oh, brother, it’s really like, this is something. If it works, maybe, I don’t know. A second, it’s like ancient and we’ve found a way to make this really expensive and monetize it.”

So, I had all kinds of skepticism, but I saw a scientific paper, which sounded very compelling in terms of like dopamine release, whatever. And I did, I had the experience, like, “Well, let’s just put some ice in a bathtub. It doesn’t cost much. See what happens.” And I was like, “Oh, wow, this is amazing.”

Jeff DeGraff
You’ve hit the nail on the head here, Pete, about something really important. The main reason people don’t change is they’re stuck in the planning cycle. The meeting about the meeting, the report about the report. They’re gathering, gathering, gathering, gathering data. They’re getting no real feedback from the world.

So, what you do is you hedge. All you got to do is pay attention to kind of how the COVID vaccine got developed, or anything else. Meaning you give things very little money and very little time and you spread them out and you make them radical. So, you did a radical experiment.

You said, “Let’s go down and get some ice, put it in the bathtub.” It cost you very little money. If it didn’t work, you would have gotten out of the bathtub. It would have been the end of it. And you probably had three or four other experiments after that. You probably tried different kinds of devices, or you talked to people who are athletes and what they did with cold plunge. And you talked to the Finns and how they did it from sauna, right?

So, you probably had some pieces in there before you decided that this was really the thing for you. And that’s how most of us actually do it. The people who say, “Go big or go home,” what I’m delighted about is most of them go home. They’re obnoxious. It doesn’t work that way. And if it did, you got lucky.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so you’re saying, sprinkling a little bit of resource in a lot of places and see where something radical happens. Can you give us a work example of that?

Jeff DeGraff
Yeah. So, let’s say that I was trying to, I’m a nurse and I really want to start a bakery, right? So, what I’m going to do, rather than I’m going to plan for five years and then I’m going to quit being a nurse and try and buy a bakery and then I’m going to fail, you hear these all the time, what I’m going to do is, instead, I’m going to try my Italian grandmother’s, you know, her tiramisu. And I’m going to go to three different kinds of restaurants.

I’m going to go to an Italian restaurant, a Mexican restaurant, and a German restaurant. And I’m going to see if they’ll sell a little bit of this tiramisu. So, I’m going to take the risk of maybe making some of this up.

What I’m going to find out is that the Italian restaurant doesn’t want it. The German restaurant has a different name for it, but they actually like it. And the Mexican restaurant actually really likes it, but they’d like some differences to it. So, in the next round, you get rid of the Italian restaurant. Now you’re trying the other two restaurants, and you stumble onto something that makes your tiramisu radically different.

You put cayenne pepper or something, I don’t know, I’m not a cook. You put something radically different in it and it starts to catch on. So, what happens is think about it like a funnel, right? What you’re trying to do at the top of the funnel is not only see how wide you can go with experiments, but you’re also trying to mitigate risks. You’re trying to manage risks and you’re trying to accelerate failure. And the reason you’re doing that is you’re getting real information from the world and very quickly you’re drawing down.

You don’t have to have money or have a big thing like a COVID vaccine. You could just be trying to sell tiramisu. But you got to hedge at the beginning. You’ve got to get real information from the market before you draw down.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, understood. Well, so in your book, The Art of Change: Transforming Paradoxes into Breakthroughs, you lay out seven paradoxes of change. I’d love to hear a quick rundown of what they are, but first tell us what makes them paradoxes?

Jeff DeGraff
Well, I think most of us in modernity are living in this world where things are either incongruous, antithetical, or, most importantly, ambiguous. And we do know, going back to the ‘40s, there was two very famous scientists, one called E. Paul Torrance, the other called Calvin Wilson, and they started studying highly creative people. And this was really kind of for the Korean War, that kind of period, the Vietnam War.

And what they noticed was very creative people had a high tolerance for ambiguity. And what that meant was that they had a highly adaptive mindset. They were able to kind of make it up as they go along. Well, one of the big challenges in modernity, I believe, Pete, is that strategy is dead. And more and more people are trying to go to futuring. Again, God bless them, but the truth of the matter is events and technology is now moving faster than strategy does.

Ask yourself this, “How many people in their 2019 plan had a pandemic?” Well, pandemics have been around since Thucydides, Herodotus, they were in the Bible, right? How many had that there’d be a Russian invasion of Europe? How many, right? Go down the list of these events and almost no one had them. So, the issue becomes planning has become obsolete.

I’ll give you a perfect example of this. During COVID, all the big tech companies were not prepared for what happened. Remember the first day of COVID, Microsoft Teams collapsed. And yet there was this small company, Zoom, that didn’t have a great strategy, but was highly agile. Does this make sense? And they won the day. So, we’re now in this era of strategic thinking as opposed to just strategic planning, right? And, yes, we have to try and predict the future, but we should all look at the future like it’s Jello.

There’s a lot of things we don’t know about the future. How fast things are moving in the magnitude is an inflection point. People love to talk about that, Pete. They love to say, “This is the greatest period of change, and I’m very skeptical.” You’re living in Europe during the Crusades. They march back through your village in France, and three quarters of your village dies. Or the infidel’s at the door. That’s the human condition.

But we are going through this sort of punctuated piece where…and it’s not, I don’t think it’s going to be AI that drives everybody crazy. I think it’s what AI allows us to do. It’s going to change power generation big time. It’s going to change biology. What’s everybody going to do now that we’ve mapped all 200 million proteins in the genome, right? We’re pretty close to figuring out how to build a person, right?

So, the notion is the whole idea of work that we’ve got to handle on this, I think we have to say we don’t. I think we have to say we’re making it up as we go along.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I think that is so wise. And I think about that as I watch the pundits say what will happen with AI. It’s like, “You don’t know. You don’t know.” And I guess that’s what I find. Here’s my little joke, Jeff. Maybe you could appreciate it. It doesn’t get much, many laughs when I share it with my friends, but here it goes, Jeff, “Obviously, overconfidence is the most destructive force in the universe.”

Okay, thank you. Thank you. But I believe it. We don’t know, we don’t know, but we say we know and because we act with such confidence, when we ought not to, we get ourselves into some trouble.

Jeff DeGraff
We sure do, and that’s particularly true for change, change and innovation. These are what we call convex forms of value, which means they pay in the future, for which we have no data. So, the interesting thing is you got to know who actually knows, and that doesn’t mean you went to school.

If you want to know about raising children, talk to a woman who’s got five of them. You want to know about how to fix your toilet, talk to a plumber. The notion is somebody who has experience with it, somebody who has real trade, what I call trade craft. They understand how things work.

That’s why for my 36 years here Michigan, I’ve always had a very active portfolio of building companies and trying to turn things around. Because theories of practice don’t come from theories. They come from practice. They come from getting dirty. You have to. Otherwise, you don’t really understand.

Surgeons have to do surgery. Engineers have to build machines. Business school professors, my belief, should build businesses. That’s what we do. And it’s kind of vocational. I know it sounds terrible, but it is kind of vocational. It’s a how-to kind of thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Okay. Well, so let’s hear some of these paradoxes.

Jeff DeGraff
So, one of my favorite paradoxes is that we seek to change others but we can only change ourselves. And I start the book with this interesting story. I learned this as a young man. I had a girlfriend in college named Katie.

She was really pretty and really smart and I liked her. And I came to college as a wrestler. So, I’m training all the time. I wasn’t bad, but I wasn’t as good as maybe I could have been. And Katie was a chain smoker. So, every time I would see her, it always felt like my training was being undone, because she just smoked a lot of cigarettes. So, you do the three things that everybody does.

You start out with trying to inform her. So, you show her the surgeon general stuff, you show her the reports. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t work. Next thing you do, you try and be charming. You try and really get Katie to, you know, so I was doing some work in New York City and really invited her to go with me to New York with the caveat that she couldn’t in the hotel room, couldn’t smoke the whole time or I’d have to go out and smoke. She passed. She didn’t want to do that.

And, of course, the third thing you go through is what everybody does, “Well, you know, if you’re going to smoke like this, maybe this relationship isn’t what I think it is.” And you can imagine she dumped me. Right? So, I tried all the things that you try to change another person. None of it worked. Well, there’s a postscript to it. About graduation time, I was in a grocery store and I ran into her. And I noticed she wasn’t smoking. So, I had to ask, Pete, “Why aren’t you smoking?” And she said, “I met a guy.” So, I felt about two inches tall.

And then she said, “He never pressured me. He just really loved me and I started to love myself and so I decided that I would quit smoking. I decided it was really good for me to quit smoking.” Well, here’s the moral of the story. The moral of the story was this guy, who’s obviously quite a bit smarter than I was, had created a situation where he was very supportive to her. And she kind of figured things out for herself, right, because you can’t change other people.

And that’s one of the big things that people do all the time in these change books. They’re about how to use bonuses or how to use fear. Those things don’t last and they don’t really work. So, the question becomes, “How do you get to understand a person in a deep way, understand what they really want, understand how they really function, and put them in a situation where they can correct their own behavior, assuming that you want that to happen?”

And then they have a choice whether they make the change or not. And some changes are really hard to make and some are easy. If you’re talking about skill or things like showing up on time at the office, those are relatively easy. If you’re talking about how people handle stress or whatever, those are harder and those are things that you probably need some professional help for.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Very good. Thank you. So how about the second paradox?

Jeff DeGraff
Well, I think one of the other ones that I really like is we set goals for change, but the goals for change, change with the change. So, people get really upset. We do this big program for the United States Air Force, and one of things that we start out with is to say, “What’s your challenge statement?” It’s usually somebody who’s a commanding officer is given a challenge.

Well, we say, “That’s great. That’s what everybody thinks the problem is now. But the truth of the matter is you’re going to start turning over rocks, talking to people, you’re going start running experiments, and what you’re going to find out very quickly in two weeks, if you’re really going, if you’re really doing this, you’re going to find out that’s not the problem at all. You’re going to find out it’s a different problem.”

Anybody who’s ever worked on their house gets this. You know, there’s a leak in your house. So, you get an Allen wrench and you go up, or you go downstairs, and you turn the wrench and that leak stops and you feel good. And then the next day the leak happens in the bathroom upstairs. And it’s much more active and you’re not sure what that is. So, you try and watch a YouTube video and figure that out.

And then what happens is you figure that out and the next day the pantry is flooded and you have to call a plumber. And everybody who owns a home has had this experience. Well, the challenge is the problem wasn’t the problem. And it almost never is.

It’s the same thing when people, you know, they go to WebMD, and they go to somebody who spent, you know, they spent four years in medical school and have medical certificates, which another four years, they’ll come in and say, “This is what’s wrong with me.” And inevitably, most of the time, it’s just a symptom of something that’s more endemic.

So, the change changes with the change. So that means you have to get rid of X marks the spot. You have to start thinking of yourself like you’re a scout, like you’re constantly looking for disconfirming information, “Where is it that I’ve tried something and it’s not working?”

So, the confirming information doesn’t help. All your friends on Facebook who like you are not going to help you get to the next place. The people who are going to help you get to the next place are people who have different ideas than you do. They have constructive conflict. Constructive is the key word here. Constructive.

They love you. They care about you. They want to help you get there, but they don’t agree with you. Those are the best people in the world to have around you.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we have an overarching theme associated with, you know, be emergent and see what happens and go where the trail is leading you. Find the disconfirming information, solve the real problem and not sort of the upfront stated problem, and change and flow and roll with it. At the same time, we humans sure don’t care for this uncertainty business, Jeff.

Jeff DeGraff
I’m a total hypocrite.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Jeff DeGraff
I hate change. I drive the same car I’ve driven for 15 years. My wife says, “Get a new car. People will think you’re not doing okay.” I’m like, “No, I like this car.” I sit in the same seats in the stadium I’ve sat in for 40 years. I don’t like change. I need your listeners to understand, I don’t like it either. Incidentally, some of the best innovators I know don’t like innovation either.

I don’t buy new stuff. Most the stuff that’s new I look at, and go, “Meh, it doesn’t, really, it’s not a game changer.” So, I’m not that guy. So, the first thing is, nobody likes to change. And there’s two modalities of change. I can tell you how I get through it.

If it becomes, I have to change something that I’ve got, I’m in a reactive position. I don’t like doing that. That’s when you tell somebody about your new idea, but it’s not their new idea, they’re going to tell you everything is wrong with it because you’ve left him in a reactive position. Right?

This is the problem with change. Somebody goes, “I hate your change plan.” And what people forget is the next question should be, “Okay, good point. What would you do?” Because that one question takes you from a reactive position to you now have to participate. You’re not a proactive position. You have to show your hand. So what changes, and this is what I do, is I stop thinking about the past and I start thinking about what I want.

Now, this is important about how people are going to deal with it. Now, one is, how do we do this without being uncomfortable? We don’t. We don’t. We become uncomfortable. You have to make that normative. How do you deal with it at work when there’s conflict? Well, you have to keep the conflict constructive. I want to repeat this. Anybody who’s ever worked on a great team knows everybody doesn’t agree, but you want to be safe. You want to feel safe, right? But the notion is ideas are in play.

So, if you feel safe, you feel comfortable back and forth about ideas, which is important. So, it’s the creative power of constructive conflict, not destructive. It’s hard to keep that in front of you, between the buoys. Now, what’s important about this? People who just kind of make it up as they go along seldom accomplish anything. So, you have to have a North Star.

But what you’re doing is like navigating. You’re constantly correcting to that North Star. And as the North Star maybe looks differently depending on what hemisphere you’re in, etc., you have to make those adjustments. It doesn’t mean that you’re rudderless. It doesn’t mean that you’re going just anywhere. It’s not improvisation. It means that the road to it is going to be circuitous. That’s the first piece.

Second piece. The place in which you almost always want to start your journey is a place where the current situation seems intolerable. And that doesn’t mean it’s difficult. It could be you feel stuck. It could feel in your career like, you know, “I was trained as a doctor. I’m now 50 years old. I’ve been a doctor for X amounts of years. I think I’ve done as much as I can as a doctor. I’m stuck.” So that’s a place where you’re, because risk and reward there is reversed, you’re going to try stuff. You’re going to be willing to try stuff. Remember hedging.

The third thing. Nobody makes the journey alone. I’m so tired of the self-help stuff about, “Here’s how you’re going to do it alone.” Nobody gets there alone. We all get there with other people, and if the other people who are with you all agree with you, you’re probably not going to get there because you’ve added no skill, no wayfinding, nothing that you have on your own. So, you need to find people who follow the same North Star or people really care about you and love you but are different than you. Sort of think about like your mom.

Your mom, hopefully in your life, was very supportive, maybe your dad too, hopefully he was very supportive, really liked the stuff that you did. But didn’t they also provide some real differences in views than you had about things that maybe you needed to do? It doesn’t mean that mom or dad were always right, but it means that they probably had your best interest at heart.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Okay. Good. Thank you. All right. So, it’s just going to be uncomfortable. Just is. And so, we have to learn to deal with that constructive conflict. Any thoughts in terms of our own internal emotional management? Any mantras or practices?

Jeff DeGraff
Yeah, I do. I think that the issue is you have to be able to take a higher point of view about your life. And, again, I am not an evolved being. I have the same problems your listeners are going to have with this. But think about it this way. Think about it like one of the big contemporary issues that we have is the freedom of choice paradox. We can make any, you know, I talk to people all the time. I spend a lot of my year abroad. I’m one of those guys that’s coming up on three million miles on Delta Airlines alone. So, I’m in a lot of different parts of the world.

Well, somebody made a comment to me recently in Asia, and they said, “You know, it’s really funny to me, America is one of the freest places in the world, but nobody acts like they’re free.” And I went, “Yeah, that’s true,” right? Because unlimited freedom to do whatever you think, you know, within morality and within the law is scary, right?

So, the one hand, you like that you have all that freedom, but on the other hand, you don’t want all that freedom because it’s kind of overwhelming the responsibility you have for your life, right? So that becomes kind of a paradox.

So, one of the things I think we have to do in modern life is to take a higher point of view, which would mean, “What’s best for me? What’s best for my family, my community? What’s the balance I’m looking for in here? How do I work through that we’re free? But too much freedom brings too much responsibility and that might be overwhelming to me.”

So, it’s like gauging. It’s like gauging how much sweetness do you want in your coffee? Are you a one Splenda person? Are you a three Splenda person? I don’t know. You have to figure that out.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s just really an intriguing, provocative statement from your friend in Asia there. Americans are so free and yet we don’t act like it. What are some of the top ways that Americans do not take advantage of their freedoms? It’s like, “Hey, you could do this, but you never do. It’d probably be good and wonderful for you.”

Jeff DeGraff
People vote one party, typically vote that party all their life. People belong to one religion, belong to it. People who drive to work, usually take the same route to work. People like a certain type of music seldom move to a different station or to a different streaming service than they like. People have a tendency to want to feel comfortable, which is, of course, part of the human condition, right? But they have the freedom to change all of that.

And often they don’t. And I come back to you have to pay attention to when people change and why they change. And this is an important part about the book. I’m looking at this from a situational standpoint. So, this is not a Myers-Briggs test. I’m an ENTP or an INFJ. Okay, that’s great. It’s important. Isabel Briggs Myers actually is from here in Ann Arbor, right?

But here’s the issue. Think of it like it’s a bull market or a bear market. If it’s a bull market and you’re a bear trader, you’re not going to make any money. If it’s a bear market and you’re a bull trader, you’re going to lose your butt. You have to trade according to what the market is. If you like football, is it a running down, a passing down, or are we playing offensive? Pick whatever it is.

There’s a situation in which a certain skill is optimized. And this is true for all professors too. There are periods of time when being the change and innovation professor is like, “Oh, now everybody calls.” But then what will happen five years from now when everything kind of settles? No one will call. Well, that’s because it’s not – does this make sense? It’s not my situation, right? So, what people have to understand is that they have to fit within the system. Families have it, companies have it, churches have it. Understand who you are and what character you are in that movie.

Pete Mockaitis
And so then, it sounds like you’re not saying, “Hey, find what way the wind is blowing and then rock and roll with it,” so much as, “Accept that this is your time, this is not your time.”

Jeff DeGraff
And adjust to where you can adjust. I think everybody, like companies, they used to, you know, CK Prahalad, the late great CK Prahalad, of course, coined the term core competencies. I think the same is true for people. And CK would famously say, “Is it valuable, rare, difficult to imitate? And are you organized for it?” Right? What do you call the VRIO? Is it valuable, rare, difficult to imitate, and you’re organized for it? I think the same is true for people.

I think most of us have one or two things that we’re really good at. And even though the situation changes, how do we use that one or two things, because they’ll be useful? But how do we use it in that situation? And what frustrates people is they’ll say, “I used to be really great at this and then the situation changed.” I’m like, “Yeah, it does.” And again, that’s outside change. None of us like that. I don’t like it either. The inside change is, “I’ve been doing this for a long time. I want to grow.” And this is the fundamental tension, Pete, below everything.

Just like people, organizations have two states. They have a state of sustainability and they have a state of growth. In an organization, the state of sustainability is basically management. And the state of growth is change and innovation. Change and innovation, by definition, is a form of deviance. Hopefully positive deviance. It’s negative too. I mean, wars create innovation, I’m sorry to say.

But the notion is, the whole idea of being the same and growing is not just a style issue. It’s a fundamental issue about value. So, think of it this way. You have a small company. You’re trying to be really efficient. So, you keep track of everything and you’re really a hawk on top of everything. That’s great.

There’s no resources or no opportunity for somebody to explore a new market because that’s the opposite. You have to have slack resources to do that. You have to have non-accountable resources to do that. And what happens is these small companies will say, “What we’re going to do is we’re going to innovate. And we’re going to innovate under the kind of efficiencies that we normally do.”

And what they get is they get product improvements, etc., and they get left behind by the companies that basically say, “This is a different season now. Now we’re going to try and get into something new.”

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Thank you. Okay. Well, before we hear about some of your favorite things, I’d love it if you have any final top do’s or don’ts when it comes to change.

Jeff DeGraff
Yeah, I think my big top do when it comes to change is, understand the limits of what you actually know, and understand where your blind spots are. Know who does actually know. Stop trying to figure everything out yourself.

Start calling other people. Start bringing other people in that have different ideas than you do. I know I do this all the time because the way in which I build these change teams is they’re very cognitively diverse and they’re different. They’re very diverse in the skillsets that they’ve got. And that’s really important.

Now, people will say, “But we share a common culture.” I’m not even sure that’s required. I think what’s required is you have fond regard for each other and you have a similar goal, right? So, the notion is you’re not trying to destroy anybody or whatever. You’re basically understanding that they have commensurate skills that you have.

The other thing that I think is really very important is that the paradox you’re looking for, the things that seem incongruous to you, it’s not that this is an element of change, it is the change. It is the change. So, think about what’s going on right now globally with AI. Think about this for just a minute. Think about the sustainability paradox.

Here’s the paradox. In order to get to the kind of devices we need to have a low footprint, almost low emissions, we’re going to need a lot of artificial intelligence in all different areas, right? On the other hand, in order to have artificial intelligence, it basically drinks energy. It’s a huge energy. It consumes a large amount of energy. So it’s not that we need a change. The change is in the paradox.

The change is implicit in, “How do we get to the next place without destroying the planet in the next place?” Now let’s bring this down to a listener so it’s not so highfalutin, right? Somebody’s got a company that they’re trying to run. It’s a small company. You’ve got a company that does electrical wiring. And you’ve got a bunch of high schools in your community that you wire. And you keep track of all that’s going on.

And what goes on is you’ve got contracts, but because of federal laws, all of sudden, the cost of the wire that you’re putting everywhere or the, you know, whatever we’re using these days, right? Because of the cost of doing that has gone up exponentially, you’re going to go bankrupt if you keep doing things the way you’re doing it.

So, your paradox is, “How do I keep the business and keep myself at the center of this using new technology and maintaining cost containment? So, I’ve got an innovation piece and I’ve got an efficiency piece that I have to do at the same time.” So, think about this.

So, somebody’s going to find out that there’s devices that basically can move energy in different ways or there’s different ways of routing energy in different ways. And you’ve got to go back to school and maybe hire a couple different people. Maybe you have to lay off a couple people. But it’s in the paradox itself that the success of the change exists. The paradox is not a sidebar, it’s not something along the way, it’s fundamental.

Pete Mockaitis
So, if that’s the case, then what are we doing wrong if we fail to acknowledge that?

Jeff DeGraff
So, the issue becomes, even in our own life, “How do we get to the next place before we’re required to get to the next place?”

And, again, I come back to get out of a reactive position. Once you’re in a reactive position, it’s what you’re trying to not make happen. Get into a proactive position saying, “What should it be? Is this an opportunity for career change? Is this an opportunity to write that novel you wanted? Is this an opportunity to semi-retire?”

There’s a whole bunch of freedom in the middle of this that I think people could take advantage of. And we have to get out of this either/or thinking.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Jeff DeGraff
I love Bertrand Russell’s quote, which we now see everywhere, “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are so certain of themselves. And wiser people so full of doubts.” I hope your listeners are like me, I’m full of doubts. I think that’s the only way to go through life.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Jeff DeGraff
Yeah, I think one my favorite experiments, is going back to sort of a classic one, which is the prison experiment at Stanford and how people, when they’re around other people, have a tendency to defer their moral judgment. And I think there’s a lot of that that goes on in the world.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Jeff DeGraff
I love a book by Henryk Skolimowski, as I think how you say his last name. He wrote a book called The Participatory Mind. And I love the book and it’s kind of weird. It’s almost new age-y.

But what he’s basically saying in the book, which I think is so important, is that our thinking is largely informed by the world around us and we largely inform that as well. And there’s a whole kind of philosophy behind this called emergence philosophy, if your listeners are interested in this whole idea. But it basically means that we can never really transcend our world, we have to live in it.

And we can imagine what the world is like beyond this world or whatever, whatever you believe about the world, but you’re still in the fishbowl. And so, the good news is you’re a fish and you have some agency. The bad news is you’re in a fishbowl and you can’t get out of the fishbowl.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Jeff DeGraff
Yes, napping. Every day after lunch, I lock the door and turn the lights out. And I don’t have to have an alarm or anything, I nap for 20 minutes and I feel completely different.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key nugget you share, a Jeff original that really seems to resonate and connect with folks?

Jeff DeGraff
Yeah, “Nobody cares about your innovation.” They care about you solving their problem. Nobody cares about your innovation, so stop showing it to them. Show it how it solves their problem. Everybody reads their own horoscope first.

Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Jeff DeGraff
Number one, I would go to LinkedIn. So, I’m one of the original LinkedIn influencers. So go to LinkedIn, look up Jeff DeGraff and connect.

The other thing is I would go to TheArtofChange.net, which has all of the stuff about the new book, and I would go to JeffDeGraff.com. That would be probably the easiest way to reach me.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Jeff DeGraff
I do. My final call of action would be what I call the democratization of innovation. And that is, I think we think about our own selves and what we’re doing. I would say apprentice somebody. If you’re an innovator out there, apprentice someone. I’m very much concerned that kind of the way I came up in America, behind these kinds of grizzled old innovators who’d been through the war and all this stuff, we learned to be great that way.

I think we’re missing some of that. We’re missing some of that human connection, somebody who’s got some trade skills, somebody’s got some trade craft about change and innovation. Find somebody who’s the next generation, who’s going to carry the torch beyond your generation, because that’s what matters. It’s what we do to keep us moving forward, all of us moving forward.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Jeff, thank you.

Jeff DeGraff
Pete, thanks for having me on. I appreciate it. Good seeing you again.

Pete Mockaitis
Adam, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Adam Alter
Thanks for having me, Pete. Good to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about your latest book, Anatomy of a Breakthrough: How to Get Unstuck When It Matters Most. But, first, I was really digging your TED Talk about screens, and I’m curious if, in the time that has elapsed, if you’ve discovered any other fun, interesting tactics or approaches to reduce phone time.

Adam Alter
I have been trying to acquire as many physical objects as I can that track my phone, so there are all sorts of interesting little cookie-jar type things that work for phones quite effectively. So, you put a little, that have timers, you could put a countdown on them, and say, “I don’t want to use my phone for the next hour,” and they trap your phone. I didn’t really talk about that in the TED Talk, that was a few years ago now, but I find those physical barriers very effective.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. So, the trap cookie jars, just leaving it elsewhere. I’m curious, so if you’re at a restaurant, where is your go-to hiding spot?

Adam Alter
So, my kids are small, they’re five and seven, so when we go to restaurants, we don’t really have any screens at all. We try to keep our phones either in the car or we try to keep them under the table in a bag somewhere, so I don’t have a great hiding spot for the phone. I certainly don’t bring the cookie jar into the restaurant. That would be a little unorthodox but we’re pretty good about keeping the phones as far away from the table as possible.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s talk about your book, Anatomy of a Breakthrough. I’m curious if there are any particularly surprising or eye-popping discoveries you’ve made while putting together this book.

Adam Alter
That’s a good question. There are a few. One of the really fun things about this book was that I did a huge amount of research into how extremely successful people, A, have got stuck in the past, and, B, how they’ve managed to find breakthroughs. And some of the stories, I found very surprising. Let me just pick one of them.

There’s a fantastic story about Lionel Messi, the soccer player, who I think is the best player today, and he’s one of the greatest players of all time. And the very interesting thing about Messi is that he is known for being extremely anxious, and so much so that early in his career, some of his coaches said to him, “I don’t know if this is going to be right that you’re going to be a professional because you’re obviously struggling with emotional consequences of playing high-stakes matches.”

And what he ended up doing was he established this really, really interesting technique where he would get on the field, and for big matches, for small matches, he spends the first three, four minutes of the game not moving. Basically, he ambles around, he barely moves. All the other players, the other 23, sorry, the other 21 players are darting around, and he’s basically still.

And he spends these minutes doing two things. One, he calms down. He has a sort of series of mantras that calms himself down, but the other thing he’s doing is he’s developing a strategic advantage because he’s watching all the other players in a way that no other player does, and learning how they’re interacting with each other, who seems to have a hidden injury, who’s connecting particularly well with a particular teammate, and then he uses that, he deploys in the remaining 85+ minutes of the game.

And he’s never scored in minutes one and two of any match, but has scored in every minute from three on, which shows you how he’s really, essentially, not a player on the field until minute three or four. And what I found totally fascinating about that is, A, here is the, what I would consider to be the greatest soccer player of the day, who’s stuck, he really was dealing with a major sticking point, but he found a tremendous breakthrough.

And that breakthrough, what’s so interesting about it is that it’s paradoxical. Instead of doing more to get unstuck, most of us kind of flail, he does less. And I found a lot of that kind of Zen-like do more to do less, do less to do more, there were some really interesting ideas that came up as I was researching for the book, and that was one of them.

Pete Mockaitis
That is intriguing. And that practice, it’s so cool in that, well, a lot of times performance anxiety issues boil down to we’re being self-conscious, “Oh, I hope I don’t screw up. I hope I don’t mess this up,” all that kind of chatter inside the head. And when your goal is to see, “All right, what’s the deal here with all these players?” it’s really quite the forcing function of the opposite of thinking about yourself and how you’re operating there.

Adam Alter
Yeah, because I think if he spent those few minutes just thinking about his heart rate, and saying, “Well, how’s my heart beating? Am I sweating? Am I nervous?” that would be counterproductive. But what’s brilliant about that strategy, as you’ve said, is that it’s outwardly focused. It gives him a task, it gives him something to do, and so he’s not just kind of biding his time.

He’s doing something that’s very valuable for the long run, but that also, because of its nature, it’s a little bit more cerebral instead of being something where you move around, it’s something that kind of calms his body down. He’s not really getting his heart rate up the way the other players are earlier on in the game.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, thank you. Well, now, let’s maybe zoom out a bit and hear about the main thesis of Anatomy of a Breakthrough. What do you mean by breakthrough? And what do you mean by unstuck? And what’s the big idea here?

Adam Alter
Yeah, so the kinds of sticking points I’m talking about are protracted ones. These are ones that last often months, years, in some cases, decades, or even entire lifetimes. So, I’m not really interested in the sort of trivial daily frustrations that we all deal with. I’m interested in the bigger sticking points that we actually also happen to deal with pretty much universally.

And I’m especially interested in the ones that are susceptible to strategic intervention. In other words, there’s something we can do about them. There are a lot of things that cause us to be stuck but we don’t have a lot of say in, we don’t have much that we can do about. During the early days of the pandemic, for example, a lot of people felt stuck, but if you were physically stuck in a particular location, and you couldn’t travel because of government regulations, that’s just how it was. There wasn’t much you could do about that, and I don’t think that’s especially psychologically interesting.

What’s interesting to me is that the vast majority of cases of this kind of protracted stuck-ness are cases where there’s something you could if you knew what to do. People sort of say to themselves, “I know there’s a way out of this. I just don’t know which direction to pour my energy.” And so, that’s what this book is. Essentially, it’s a sort of roadmap for what I call finding breakthroughs.

The breakthroughs are essentially what’s on the other side of whatever it is that’s your sticking point, getting over the hurdle, getting past the mire that’s in front of you that’s preventing you from moving forward. That’s what the breakthrough is. It’s the sort of flipside of being stuck.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. All right. Well, so how is it done? Are there some core principles? You mentioned heart, head, and habit.

Adam Alter
Yes, there are. Exactly. So, you’ve just listed the three sections that talk about the interventions. I actually start the book by talking about the idea that it’s surprisingly common for us to get stuck. I say it’s universal, and often people hide how stuck they are from the world, and as a result, we see a lot of success stories that make us feel a little bit inferior.

So, I talk a lot in the beginning stages of the book about licensing ourselves to be stuck in the first place, and that then segues into the first section of interventions that focus on the emotional consequence of being stuck because humans actually are well-designed, well-engineered to get unstuck physically. If you’re stuck or trapped in a particular place, your first instinct is to kind of fight, it’s to flail. And that’s very useful if you’re physically trapped.

There are these really interesting stories every now and again of people finding hysterical strength, is the term for it, when they lift up a car and somehow free themselves. Now, unfortunately, we get confused between that kind of stuck-ness and the stuck-ness that’s emotional or mental, and we give that same kind of flailing response to these situations, and it doesn’t do much good for us.

So, the first thing, really, is to calm down and to accept where you are, and then to start thinking about what the best strategies are. So, the second section starts to deal with those strategies. That’s a section called head, and that’s really about what goes on inside your head as you’re trying to get unstuck, and I suggest a whole range of different sort of strategies that we can use to either find creative breakthroughs, or breakthroughs in financial sticking points, or business sticking points, or relationship sticking points.

And then the last section of the book, which I think is probably the most important, is habit, which is the argument that it’s great to think about emotions and it’s great to think about strategy but, ultimately, you can’t get unstuck if you don’t act. And so, that last section is about action. And, in fact, the last chapter is titled “Action Above All” because I think privileging action when you’re stuck is the most important thing to do.

And I talk about how, when it feels impossible to act, you can act despite that sense that there’s nothing that can be done. So, that’s a sort of roadmap of the roadmap itself.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, could you give us some examples of success stories, interventions that could be particularly helpful for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs? I’m thinking about procrastination. I’m thinking about difficult office relationships. What are some of your faves?

Adam Alter
Yeah, one of my faves is it’s from the last chapter of the book. I was just talking about this idea that action above all is really important, that you’ve got to act. And Jeff Tweedy, the front man of the rock band Wilco, who’s also a writer, sort of all-around renaissance man, has talked a lot about the idea that it’s exhausting being someone who has to be creative and thoughtful every day for decades.

And some days you wake up and you don’t want to do the job. And it doesn’t matter whether your job is as Tweedy’s is, to write music and books, or whether it’s some other thing that requires that you bring your best self to the workplace. And so what he sort of described is if you absolutely have to be creative and you don’t want to be, one of the things you can do is you can lower your threshold as low as possible, right down to the ground.

Normally, we’re perfectionists, we want to do good work. He says the best thing to do when you first start is to say, “Anything is better than nothing.” He thinks of it as pouring out the bad ideas. And so, he says to himself, if he’s writing a particular, say, music track, he might say, “What’s the very worst musical phrase I could write right now?” And then he spends 15 minutes working on the worst musical phrases he can come up with.

Now, because he’s very good at his job, it’s very easy for him to do that. Most of us can do a bad job at the thing we’re good at or the thing that we spend a lot of time at. And even if that action is not itself useful, it’s sort of like moving sideways, it does two things. It shows you that you can move, that you’re not, by definition, stuck if you’re moving, but it also sometimes can grease the wheels for further action. It sort of shows you how to act. It shows you that you can act. It signals that you are someone who is capable of acting.

And, by contrast, if you’re coming up with bad ideas, sometimes that illuminates good ones. And so, he talks often about the fact that those first 15 minutes may be wasted but they often pave the way for many, many hours of much stronger work. He talks about it as though the crystal-clear water of creative ideas has a layer of muck on top of it. And once you pour out the muck, the good crystal-clear water is there, and the ideas pour forth.

And that’s, I think, absolutely true about general sticking points in the workplace. You just have to act, and the best way to act is to lower your expectations and standards, at least temporarily.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. I like that a lot in terms of even if you, sure enough, produce nothing that feels good at all on that day, you’ve at least kept the habit, which I view as an asset in and of itself, alive and moving as oppose to, it’s like, well, getting momentum in the opposite direction, momentum towards nothingness.

Adam Alter
Yeah, and rumination as well, because what ends up happening is, if you’re not acting, you’re thinking. Sometimes thinking is very valuable and, actually, you should think for a long time before you act. But if you’re at the point where, more than anything, thought is not going to rescue you, you really need to do something.

And it’s funny, because people don’t have that instinct. Their instinct is, “If I don’t produce something phenomenal right now, it’s just not going to be good enough.” But very, very often, it’s even mediocre products that end up freeing us. So, when you hear stories, you hear George R.R. Martin who’s writing the Game of Thrones books, or the Song of Ice and Fire books, he’s talked about the fact that he’s sometimes stuck for a decade.

Now, you can imagine how high his standards must be. And, as a result of that, unless he cranks out these passages that rival his best work, he probably continues to feel stuck. And I think if I were going to be his personal consultant, I don’t know if he’d ever want one or if he’d ever take me seriously, the first thing I’d say is, “Write a hundred really terrible pages if you have to, because behind that will be some good stuff,” and that’s what Tweedy and others, and not just Tweedy, many other creatives have found.

Pete Mockaitis
That sounds really cool for creative work. And as I think a little bit about my own experiences there, sometimes I feel, it’s like, “Oh, you know what, young kids and get good sleep, having this or that, I’m just slightly sick,” whatever. It’s like I’m clearly not at my best, and I know it. And I also don’t want to do the thing, so there’s sort of a double whammy there.

And so, it’s very easy for me to delude myself to saying, “Well, you know, it’s probably not going to be worthwhile anyway, so maybe just skip it.” And yet I’ve found that when I really put it to the test, that I have actually had, sometimes, breakthrough excellence above and beyond average in sort of a tired funk state. And I don’t know whether that’s true, how we explain that. Maybe, in some ways, there’s benefit associated with, I don’t know, like slap-happy condition, like when things are hilarious.

It’s like different brain portions are operating, and sometimes that works out better, and sometimes it just unmasks the lie that you’ve been saying to yourself.

Adam Alter
Yeah, one of the key axioms in the book is that if you spend, say, a thousand days doing the same thing, you’re trying to find some sort of nugget of gold, maybe it’s a creative output, maybe it’s a good song, whatever it is, it doesn’t have to be creative work, but let’s say, you do your job for a thousand days. It’s actually very, very hard at the beginning of each day to predict whether it’s going to be a good one.

There’s a lot of research that suggests this. Sometimes this happens in lots of domains. It happens with athletic pursuits as well. You often think, “Oh, I had eight hours of sleep, it’s going to be a good day,” and then it turns out not to be. Other days you had three hours of sleep and you’re hung over, and you produce your best work.

And I give this talk to freshmen at NYU sometimes where I show them the four emails over the last 15 years that changed my professional life. They were these random emails that arrived, that, for example, introduced me to the world of book-writing, or to a kind of consulting that I now do. And with each one, I was convinced that this was a nothing, I was like, “Ah, I don’t have time for this nonsense. I’ve got all these other things that I’m worried about working on.”

And, ultimately, I ended up saying yes, and sending the follow-up email. But alongside those four emails that changed my life, I don’t know, 25,000 that did nothing for me, and you just don’t know when those moments will come up. So, I think you’re right about establishing the habit because you want to be in the game when those good things do happen. It’s like being in the stock market on those few days when there’s a big bump. You don’t want to be out of the game, and I think that’s true for work, in general.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we’ve talked a little bit about procrastination. I’m curious about sort of interpersonal relations that can feel stuck, like, “Oh, my boss or my colleague is a jerk, or I’m not good enough. They criticize everything I do. I just don’t want to be around them. They’re toxic,” kind of fill in the blank. When a relationship feels stuck, any cool stories or tactics there?

Adam Alter
Yeah, it’s a very different kind of situation when it’s a relationship that’s essential. That’s one of those kinds of stuck-ness, it’s where you may not have control over who your boss is. Then you have to try to figure out what you do have control over. And sometimes you have some control, sometimes you have very little control.

What you do have control over often is this question of whether, when things are really dire, this is the right either position for you at that particular company, or that particular organization, or whether perhaps you should jump ship, find something else. That’s always a question that’s worth asking, and certainly it’s worth exploring whether there are other options. If things really are that dire, that’s something worth asking.

But one of the really interesting ideas that, I think, if it’s not a truly toxic relationship, there are just people in the workplace who don’t get along. If it’s a toxic relationship, that’s problematic, and there needs to be a remedy put in place, often distancing or moving to another position, if possible. But when the relationship isn’t quite toxic, but perhaps the interactions are not all that fruitful, there’s some hopeful research that suggests that the kind of creative conflict that you have at work and in other situations is actually very good, or can be very good, as long as it’s not deeply emotionally aversive.

There’s fantastic work, for example, looking at how Pixar has come up with some of its best ideas and its best films, and its Academy Award-winning films, and a lot of them have happened where the producer, the one who’s most famous for this is Brad Bird. He will put someone, sort of a cat amongst the pigeons, he’ll bring someone in to cause creative conflict or general conflict. And you’ll have all the animators in Pixar who are famous for spending a huge amount of time getting the fur just right so it looks like fur, the water just right so it looks like water, and so on.

And these people will be brought in to, say, they’re storytelling experts, they’ll come in and say, “No one cares about the fur and the hair and the water. If the story is not compelling, you’ll lose them in five minutes. They’re not going to go away saying, ‘That story sucked but how about that fur.’ That’s not the way movies work.” And sometimes, these conflicts, if you can reframe it as a kind of challenge and you can rise through it, it could be very productive. But, again, if it’s toxic, that’s obviously not the recipe.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. The fur, boy, I had the exact same thought when I was getting a little too into audio editing, and seeing just what’s possible in terms of removing every errant thump or pop or hiss. And then I saw, I think it was iZotope who’s showing off their audio software, and I was like, “Wow, that is so amazing how they’re able to remove the wind in that scene.” I was like, “What movie is that?” And then I went over to IMDb, and people were just, like, trashing the movie for just being so terrible.

Adam Alter
Trashing the film, right.

Pete Mockaitis
And I was like, “Yeah, but nobody mentioned how they did an amazing job removing the wind sounds in that scene.” So, yeah, fur and wind, that’s exactly true.

Adam Alter
It’s easy to miss the point, right? It’s nice to have those black sheep, and they’re occasionally telling you, “Hey, you’re not paying attention to the right thing.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so I loved your example of Lionel Messi there. Anything else in the zone of people and their emotions, if it’s depression, if it’s anxiety, if it’s just they feel stuck in the sense that it is just hard to handle business with the stress and the emotions and the overload and overwhelm in their lives?

Adam Alter
Yeah, there is an excellent story, and this one is more about being a good leader, although it applies also to just working with other people in general. This is a story about the jazz pianist, the giant Herbie Hancock. And when Hancock was up and coming, he was a young pianist, he was trying out or he’s auditioning for Miles Davis’s band, and Miles Davis was terrifying to other musicians.

He would get on stage and he would shout at them, and he would tell them they weren’t doing the right thing. He was known for being a perfectionist and for knowing exactly what he was looking for. And even if you were very talented but you happened, in that moment, not to be giving him what he wanted, he would tell you, and he would do it publicly sometimes.

So, Hancock went in to an audition at Miles’ house, at Davis’s house, with some of the biggest jazz musicians of all time, I mean, the most prominent, the most impressive, the most technically gifted, and Hancock tells this story of walking into Miles Davis’s house, and all these musicians are there. He’s terrified because of the moment of the whole thing, but he’s also terrified of Davis and the fact that he’s going to shout at him. And he’s a young guy, he’s kind of concerned.

And they start the audition, and about five minutes in, Davis picks up his trumpet and he throws it on the couch, it looks like with disgust, and he goes upstairs, and they don’t see him for the next three days. And Hancock was convinced he’s blown the audition, “If Miles isn’t even there, how could this be going well?” But he starts to loosen up, he’s like, “How many chances in my life am I going to get to play with these giants of the jazz world?”

He starts experimenting, he gets a little bit expansive, played some great stuff, he’s happy with himself. At the end of the third day, Davis comes down the stairs, and he picks up his trumpet and he starts playing with the band again. And Hancock’s kind of confused, and he goes over to Davis at the end of the day, and he says, “I thought I’d lost you. You went upstairs after five minutes.” And Davis said to him, he often had this kind of Zen-like sayings, he basically just said to him, “I was on the intercom, man, and I heard everything, but I knew you wouldn’t play properly if I heard it live.”

So, he knew that. Even though he was this incredible hard ass, he knew that there were times when he has to take the pressure off, and that his musicians wouldn’t give him the best if he was there putting the screws on the whole time. And I think there’s something, obviously being a toxic leader who shouts at people on stage is bad, bad, bad, but the fact that Davis had this ability to recognize in Hancock that kind of nervous energy that could be produced or applied in the right direction under the right circumstances was, I think, something that a lot of leaders miss.

It’s really important to know when to push, and to say, “I expect a lot from you,” and it’s also really important to know when to give people space and safety to expand into their roles, especially when they’re young or when they’re early in a job. And I love that story because I think it’s a very, very powerful idea in terms of how to be a leader.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now, thinking about some of the head stuff, are there any magical mental phrases or reframes that are handy that come up again and again?

Adam Alter
Yeah, I think so. I think one of the things we do is we are often striving for genuine radical originality. That’s true in creative work, it’s true in the workplace, it’s true in businesses. It doesn’t matter what sort of work you do, you’re always trying for something new. And I think we put a big premium on newness, on novelty.

And radical originality is a myth. It’s this idea that there are certain things out there that are really new and different from everything else, and that’s just not true. There are a lot of great examples of this kind of myth. Bob Dylan is often pointed to as the kind of radical original voice of the 20th century, but when you go back, even Dylan himself said, “That’s not true. I was borrowing from all these different traditions.” And you can find the DNA of all sorts of other work in his songs.

It’s just very, very hard in any world to find this genuine originality, and, unfortunately, when we strive for it, it’s a little bit like striving for perfection. It makes us feel stuck because we can’t quite reach that standard. So, a much better thing to do that tends to be quite useful is what is known as recombination. This is when you take two existing things that are themselves not new, and you make some new product by combining them, by bringing them together.

And there are some amazing examples of this in business, in music, in art, in filmmaking. And one of the things I’ve done over the last 15 years or so that I find very useful is, any time I see a good idea, is I’ll put it down in this document that I have that’s now hundreds of lines long, and what I’ll occasionally do, if I’m stuck, I’ll go in and say, “Let’s look at idea 37 and idea 112, and let’s see. Can they be combined in a way that is new?”

And it’s a great exercise because it kind of makes you a little bit creatively limber but, also, if you’re ever stuck, just think about two things that you like that are interesting that haven’t been combined, combine them and you’ve got something that’s new, it’s a recombination. It’s a great way forward.

Pete Mockaitis
So, in your document that’s hundreds of lines long, it’s anything you saw that you thought was cool or a good idea of any domain.

Adam Alter
Yeah, that’s one version.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, can you give us a couple examples, like, you’re in the grocery store, you’re like, “Oh, that looks tasty”? Or, what are some lines?

Adam Alter
Yeah, so here are two lines. One line is I teach a case to my MBA students on a little alarm clock called the Clocky. I don’t know if you know about this clock, but when it rings, to stop you from hitting the snooze button, it’s on wheels and it runs away from you, and it runs around the room. So, you’ve probably heard of this. It’s a clever little alarm clock.

So, when I first heard about this, about maybe 15 or 20 years ago, I thought it was really clever. No, it’s probably 15 years ago. So, I put it in the diary, it’s in that document, and it sat there for a long time. And then a number of years later, I was writing about how we could stop ourselves from binge-watching too much Netflix or too much of whatever video platform is your poison.

And I was wondering, “Could you somehow marry this Clocky idea to the binge-watching that we do?” which, by the way, the way we binge-watch and why we binge-watch, it’s a brilliant piece of product engineering, that the next episode automatically plays, so I thought that was a very clever idea used a little bit nefariously.

And so, I took these two ideas, and one thing that I now do is if I don’t want to binge-watch, I don’t have Clocky because Clocky is a bit random for this purpose, but that kind of same principle of making it hard to hit the snooze button, I will set an alarm, put it in a different room of my house for, say, an hour and a half later. In that way, if I’m watching Netflix, I have two episodes in and I don’t want to watch a third, I timed the alarm to coincide with the end of the second episode. I have to get up and go turn the alarm off to continue watching.

It’s not like I cannot watch anymore, but it’s a good way to minimize the likelihood that I’m just going to sit there in a stupor, not moving and let the next episode play, and that’s been very effective for me. So, that’s just one example, a very personal one.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we have an example, Clocky, like it is necessary to move in order to shut the thing off. So, okay, nifty. So, I guess I’m wondering, in the course of just living life and capturing ideas, it’s just anything you think is clever in any domain?

Adam Alter
Pretty much. I’ve got different versions of the document. So, there’s a document that is called book ideas, and that’s like any idea that I think is interesting enough that, at some point, I might explore it for a book, to write a book about it, and see whether it’s thick enough and interesting enough to form a book. And there are a hundred of ideas in there, and that would be lifetimes of book-writing, so I won’t do many of them but it’s a useful exercise.

I’ve got one for research that I do as an academic, like the kinds of projects I want to do. And then I’ve got this sort of generally cool and interesting ideas document which sometimes comes up in consulting or speaking engagements. I’ll bring some of those in if I think they’re useful. And often they form the basis of case studies for teaching.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. In your book, you’ve got a section called 100 ways to get unstuck. Could you share one or two or three extra fantastic ways to get unstuck that are broadly applicable, highly powerful, provide a good ROI, and that we haven’t covered yet already?

Adam Alter
Yeah, absolutely. I think experimentalism. Experimentalism is a philosophy that makes adults more like children. So, the way this works is, you know, kids ask a million questions. I have a five-year-old and a seven-year-old, they don’t stop asking questions about everything, and they’re learning at an incredible rate because they don’t take anything for granted. No common wisdom is common wisdom to them. Everything has to be pushed and prodded. They’ve got questions for everything.

And we lose that somewhere between childhood and adulthood. We start to assume things are the way they are for a good reason, or at least we don’t really question it. Experimentalism is this philosophy, the sort of child-like philosophy of saying, “Is this really the best way things could be?” And what you find is many of the most successful people in all sorts of domains are chronic experimentalists. They question everything, or if there’s a particular area that matters to them, they specifically and sharply question all sorts of assumptions in that domain.

A really good example of this was an Olympic swimmer named Dave Berkoff who swam for the US in the ’88 and ’92 Olympic games. He was a backstroke swimmer but he wasn’t as tall or as broad shouldered as a lot of the backstroke swimmers. He didn’t have the same kind of natural talents as some of the other swimmers did. But what he did have was he was an experimentalist. He was incredibly curious.

He tried a whole lot of different techniques, a whole lot of tweaks, and his coach encouraged that in him. He ended up discovering a special technique that became known as the Berkoff blastoff, where he would go under water and stay under water for almost a full lap of the pool. And it turned out that that made him about 85% faster. And he broke world records that way until other swimmers caught on. He still ended up winning other medals because he was continuing to experiment.

But it’s a great illustration of how we take so much for granted, and often it’s deviating from the herd by experimenting that produces really interesting insights.

Pete Mockaitis
I dig it. Okay, experimentalism. What else?

Adam Alter
I think I also really like the idea of exploring and exploiting, as these two basic approaches to growth and change. So, exploration is this period of time, where, let’s use sort of the hunter-gatherer approach. Imagine you’re on the plains, you’re a prehistoric person, you’re trying to find food. Exploring is when you say, “I don’t know where to even begin. I’m just going to try all sorts of different areas of the pasture in front of me. I’m going to go far. I’m going to go close. I’m going to go left. I’m going to go right. I’m going to try everything.”

After you do that for a while though, you might decide to say, “Well, there’s a little patch over here that seems promising. I’m going to spend all my time on that patch now. I’m going to exploit that patch for all it’s worth.” And that’s a really good metaphor for what we can do in the workplace. So, exploration, if you think about a painter like Jackson Pollock, Pollock became very well known for a certain style of painting – drip painting.

But before he did that, he tried five or six or seven other techniques for about five years, and then he hit on this drip technique, and he was like, “This is me. This is for me. This is my thing.” After exploring those other options, he switched into exploit mode, said no to anything that wasn’t about drip painting, and became an absolute expert in this one thing that he owned.

And it’s a great lesson, and actually, it turns out that when you look at the best periods in people’s careers, they almost always follow a period of exploration, followed by a period of exploitation. So, go broad and wide, say yes to everything, be an omnivore, consume whatever you can consume, try everything. But then at a certain point, you’ve got to say, “Well, what was the best of that?” And then you go deep in that thing and say no to everything else. You are single-minded. You say no to almost everything. And that is the recipe for the best creative and really professional outcomes, in general.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Any others?

Adam Alter
Yeah, there are plenty of others, there are hundreds. Let me try and pick which one I like best to hit off. All right, here’s a good one. I really like this one. There is an idea known as the creative cliff illusion. The creative cliff illusion is this illusion that our creative ideas are best when they first arrive. So, for example, if I say to you, “Come up with ten slogans for this particular company. Here’s a product, give me your best slogans for the product. Imagine we’re trying to sell as many as we can.”

You ask people, “Are your first five slogans going to be best or are your 15th to 20th slogan that you come up is going to be best or better?” And almost everyone has this instinct that the good stuff is easy to come by, which is the first stuff, it just kind of stumbles out. And then it gets hard, and then it’s probably kind of clunky and it’s not very good.

It turns out that that’s the illusion, that there’s a creative cliff, that our creative ideas fall off a cliff. The early stuff turns out to be trite and boring and that’s what everyone else is thinking, too. If you can push against the difficulty of that next phase when it stops being easy, that’s when you start to have divergent thinking. When you get a little bit idiosyncratic, you think about things in a way that makes you different from everyone else.

And so, the quality of ideas gets better if you can sit with that discomfort with further attempts. And so, that, I think, is a really profound idea because we often associate hardship with badness. But, in this case, it’s the hardship that signals or heralds the good things that are about to come.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Adam, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Adam Alter
I’ll say one more thing. There’s a really interesting idea called teleoanticipation. Teleoanticipation is very important when we think about long-range goals, which is when we tend to get stuck, something that you’re doing for a long time, whether it’s a physical pursuit, like a marathon, or whether it’s something at work, like a project that takes six months or a year or five years to complete, or a long artwork that you’re working on that takes a long time to complete, or whatever it is.

Teleoanticipation is a term that basically means forecasting the end. And it’s a really important skill because it means that proportioning your energy, your creative energy, your physical energy, such that you have just enough to reach the final point. The best way to run a marathon is to collapse right after the finish line because then you’ve put everything in. Sometimes people put in too much a little bit early, and then they collapse before the finish line.

One of the best skills we can learn is to be better at teleoanticipation, to knowing how to proportion our energy so we don’t come out the starting blocks too fast either physically, when we’re doing a marathon, but also intellectually and creatively, when we’re doing creative tasks. It’s very, very important to know how to pace yourself. And it’s a skill that’s worth learning.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Adam Alter
I think, because so much of what we’ve discussed has been about creativity, I like the idea, this goes back to Henry Ford, the idea that instead of thinking about how to create a better horse and buggy. I can’t remember the quote itself, but we need to think about creating something altogether different, and that’s where the car comes in.

So, instead of trying to perfect something and make these little tweaks to it along the way, think about whether there’s a completely different alternative altogether. And that’s what the car did. It, essentially, changed the way we travelled altogether. So, even an inferior car was better than the best horse and buggy you could come up with.

And that goes a long way to that experimentalism idea that I mentioned earlier, that sometimes the very best version of what everyone else is doing is not as good as this new thing you could be doing. Even in its infancy as it’s half-formed, it could be a better way to do things. And so, I think that’s quite powerful.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Adam Alter
One of the pieces of research that I really love is this anthropological work that Bruce Feiler, a writer, he’s done, where he went around the United States and interviewed people about change, and found that on average, every roughly five to ten years we experience what he calls a life quake.

A life quake is a massive change. It can be something we invite into our lives. It could be something that we have no control over. It can be good. It can be bad. Things like birth of a child, death of a loved one, divorce, change of job, change of career, moving to a new country, and so on. And because those are universal, we all tend to have five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten of them in our lifetimes. It suggests that we need to be very nimble in the face of these changes.

And that’s why you essentially need a roadmap for these moments when you feel stuck in the face of this kind of change, because what you were doing in the past perhaps won’t serve you quite as well in the future.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Adam Alter
It’s summer, and every summer I read Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth. It’s a book that sort of explores the idea of good times, and the transience of good times, like a summer. That’s my favorite time of the year. And the book is essentially about this period in a young guy’s life that is bounded. It ends when the summer ends, and he goes back to college.

And I think one of the really nice insights there is that it’s so important to kind of leach out the very best from these periods, and make sure that you capitalize on them to the extent possible. I think we often look back on periods of our lives, and say, “Well, that was amazing, and I really miss it.” But one of the things that I do a lot in my research, and what a lot of my research focuses on, is on, “How do you, in the moment, extract as much juice as you can from that particular situation rather than looking back in the future and saying, ‘Oh, that was really nice. I wish I could have more of it’?”

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Adam Alter
A favorite tool I would say is, I travel a huge amount, and I have a digital notepad. It’s called a Remarkable, and it goes everywhere with me. If I only have one thing with me when I travel, which happens sometimes, it’s my Remarkable because that’s where all those ideas go. I’m constantly hoovering up ideas and trying to make sure I don’t forget them.

I always worry about this, actually. I do a lot of my thinking when I’m running. And then when I get home, I’ve forgotten what I’ve thought about. But the Remarkable is a great tool because it goes everywhere. It seems like an endless capacity, and I use it constantly.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Adam Alter
A favorite habit is running, I would say, four times to five times a week for 30 or more miles a week. I’ve been doing that for long enough now that I can call it a habit.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote it back to you often?

Adam Alter
Yeah, one of the things that I talk about a bit is the question of how we should structure the work week, which is obviously very relevant to work. And some of the first research I did that made me interested in what I do is in whether we should have a five-day eight-hour-a-day work week of 40 hours, a four-day ten-hour-a-day work week of 40 hours, or a three-day 13-hour-and-20-minute work week, which is also 40 hours.

And the research that I did suggests that three-day work week is the best one. And I think a lot of people find that a little surprising. They imagine 13 hours of work, and they’re overwhelmed by it. But, also, that gives you four days of the week when you can do other things. And that’s something that I hear talked about quite a lot.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Adam Alter
They can find me on LinkedIn, they can find me on Twitter, and they can find a lot of information at my website, AdamAlterAuthor.com.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Adam Alter
Yeah, I think action above all. I think do something ASAP, I would say today, tomorrow, whenever you can carve out a few minutes. If there’s something that’s been making you feel stuck, where you haven’t been able to make as much headway as you’d like, lower your threshold down, say, “It doesn’t matter whether I do a really bad job at this,” liberate yourself to do a poor job, but just do something in the general direction of the thing that you’re trying to achieve. And I think you’ll find that just that feedback you get from having done that is itself good medicine, and it pushes you in the right direction as you move forward.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Adam, this has been a treat. Thank you. I wish you much luck and many fun breakthroughs.

Adam Alter
Thanks so much for having me, Pete.