Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. We'll wrap up today's show with a relevant guest to calls from you if you feel stuck. Listeners, how many of you currently feel stuck in life or have felt stuck in life in the past? 212-433-WNYC. What do I mean by stuck? Why do I ask this now? Well, here we are on January 31st. You've gotten through dry January, if you've been doing that, what are you going to do tomorrow? If that was your only New Year's resolution or your main New Year's resolution, we're not even talking about you, because often the new year brings upon everybody a time of reflection and a desire to change really big things in our lives. Maybe for some of you, that is alcohol. How have you been doing on those biggest life changing New Year's resolutions? 212-433-WNYC. What situation or aspect of your life is making you feel stuck?

Our guest, who will further explain why we're inviting you to call in on this in particular, is Adam Alter, professor of marketing at NYU Stern School of Business, and affiliated professor of psychology as well at NYU, and author of the book Anatomy of a Breakthrough: How to Get Unstuck When It Matters Most.

Professor Alter, welcome to WNYC. Thank you for joining us.

Adam Alter: Thanks so much for having me, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Help me invite the listeners in. What kind of stuckness do you concentrate on in the book, and who would you like to hear from today?

Adam Alter: It's a good question because there are a lot of ways of thinking about what stuckness is. I'm really interested in the kind of stuckness that's protracted. I'm not talking about momentary or daily frustrations. I'm talking about things that plague us across long stretches of time, sometimes for months, years or even decades of our lives. I'm not so much focused on stuckness that is intractable, that we can't fix, but more on the kinds of stuckness that are susceptible to our interventions. The reason I wrote this book was to try to give a roadmap for getting unstuck in all sorts of different situations. It really is these cases where you're stuck for a long time, you think you might be able to do something about it, but you're not sure what your steps should be.

Brian Lehrer: Tell us a story. Tell us a one person's story.

Adam Alter: Oh, there are so many stories. I'll give you one example. This is an athlete who ended up winning gold for the United States in the 100-meter backstroke event, was a tremendous Olympic swimmer in the 1988 and 1992 Olympic games, but was, at least physically speaking, very different from the other athletes, was not a world record breaking athlete by appearance alone. In fact, when a lot of the coaches saw him, they said, "You're about six inches shorter than the average elite swimmer."

He was a very good swimmer, but he wasn't quite elite. His stuckness was such that he needed to do something a little bit different, and what he ended up doing was spending his years at Harvard where he went to school as an undergrad with a coach who encouraged him to experiment, to try all sorts of new techniques and approaches. This flavor of experimentalism, where you treat your life as a long extended experiment of trying different techniques, turned out to be very helpful for the swimmer.

His name is Dave Berkoff. He pioneered a completely new technique for swimming the backstroke. He broke multiple world records and won multiple Olympic gold medals. Although that's an Olympic athlete, the same basic technique applies to many of us in our everyday much more mundane aspects of our lives as well.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, the reason, listeners, that this got on our radar, I should have said this at the very beginning, is a New York Times piece from just the other day, the 25th, that maybe you saw called Feeling Stuck? Here Are Five Ways to Jumpstart Your Life. It very prominently quotes my guest Adam Alter and tells a little bit of his story. Why don't you tell yours a little bit? The article by Christina Caron says, "At 28, he had earned a doctorate in psychology from Princeton, and soon afterward, landed a job as a tenure track professor at NYU, but he felt stuck."

Adam Alter: I think it's a very good question. The important point about being stuck is that it's a subjective experience. I spoke to someone who told me that his father was a mathematician who worked on the same problem for 30 years and didn't make much meaningful progress, but loved every minute of it and never felt stuck. I was in the situation of being blessed with an incredible period of my life of great objective success. Things were going exactly as I wanted, but I wasn't sure that I was on the right career track.

I really missed my family. My family was in Australia. They were a long way from where I was living. I just wasn't sure if I was moving in the right direction. I felt mired and stuck in a way that was puzzling from the outside. I needed to figure out what was the best way to move forward to make sure that I had made peace with the direction my life was taking. I think stuckness can often be puzzling to people from the outside, but from the inside, if you're experiencing it, that's really what matters. How do you feel in the moment, and do you feel like you can move forward or do you feel a little bit burdened by friction or uncertainty?

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call. Josh in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Josh.

Josh: I think that's me. Am I on?

Brian Lehrer: That is you. You are on.

Josh: Hi, Brian. I called before actually. Your segment was about spouses that had separated, but might still stand together. That's one way that I'm stuck. I'm actually calling to talk about some of this probably fairly generally. I have a job. It's okay, but I feel stuck. It's not satisfying in particular. The money is okay. I'm older now, but in the past, what I've done is either there have been layoffs or I just resigned, and then I get organized around a job search and find something that's more satisfying and interesting. I'm a little bit anxious about doing that now.

I guess the question for your guest would be, for people that feel like they could get organized around making a substantive change in any area, really, but feel with the responsibilities of daily life, how do you take a step back and clear your desk and make psychic space and time in order to make a big change? What commitment is required? Do you just need to muster up the courage to quit and find something better and take that risk, or how would you speak briefly about how to approach something like that where some important things are at stake?

Brian Lehrer: Professor Alter, got anything for Josh?

Adam Alter: Yes, absolutely. This is probably the most common kind of stuckness that I hear about. I've interviewed thousands of people all over the world, and this general stuckness where life is okay, but you think there might be better options out there, whether it's professionally or otherwise, it's a very common kind of stuckness.

The first thing I think it's really important is to treat your life in some sense like a science experiment where there have to be different options, different conditions in order to know what the options are before you can decide to make a change. You need to know what am I leaving on the table. If I continue on with the current path, what are the other options that I'm leaving behind.

In the career context, what I advise a lot of people to do is to know what the options are. Before you actually make any substantive changes, one thing to do is to assemble the choice set, know that your marketability is such that there are six or seven other possible jobs out there for you, and start to explore them, figure out whether they might be appealing, figure out what the salary might be, what the job conditions are, do they let you work from home, do you have to be in the office and so on. When you have a choice set, you're in a much better position to decide whether to actually make that leap.

The other thing about assembling a choice, that is it does what I think is a very important first step in getting unstuck, which is you do something. You make some change, some movement. Overcoming inertia is a really big part of getting unstuck. I think figuring out what that first step is, is very important. In this context, I think it is really assembling a viable choice set of alternatives, so you can then go through the pros and cons and weigh them up and decide whether to move forward.

Brian Lehrer: Josh, I hope that's helpful. The first step in The New York Times article that quoted you had you saying, "Do a friction audit." I thought that might be interesting as a term for you to define for our listeners, a friction audit.

Adam Alter: A friction audit, it's this really interesting idea that I think really begins in tech companies when they create products for us. One of the questions they have is, "How do we get people to use these products for hours and hours on end?" The thing that stops you from using a product is usually a sense of friction, like time is passing and I need to do something else. One thing they've done over time is they've made their products as friction free or frictionless as possible by finding the areas where if you look at millions of users, they seem to run into a little roadblock, and then that pushes them off the product.

Now, the same approach is true in our everyday lives, that when you look at your life, there are certain areas of life that feel either overwhelming, maybe they scare you a little bit, maybe they're just uncomfortable. There are areas where there's natural friction, where when you have to do that thing, it always feels like it's the hardest part of the day, or it's the most daunting part of the day, or the most unappealing. Those are friction points. I think to live a good, fulfilling life, one of the best things you can do, one of the easiest and first things you can do is to say where is the friction.

Is there a way for me to either sand it down or to eradicate that aspect of my life altogether? Try to take it out like a weed from the roots and remove that from your life. Because when you take these friction points away or sand them down, what's left is a life that's generally a lot more fluid that allows you the time and space to breathe and to consider questions like, is there a better job out there for me. I think a friction audit is a very helpful first step.

Brian Lehrer: Michael in Jersey, in Chester, you're on WNYC. Hi, Michael.

Michael: Hi. Thanks for taking my call, Brian. What I was telling your screener is that I'm the father of two young children. I have a two-and-a-half-year-old and a six-month-old infant. I have a very demanding job that's fortunately remote, but what it leaves is very little time for myself. To paraphrase the Michael Keaton movie, Multiplicity, for me, my family comes first, my job comes second, and I am a very distant third.

I'm always trying to look for more ways to invest in my own personal growth outside of my identities as a father and as an employee. It's just incredibly difficult for me to find the time to invest and do that without sacrificing sleep. I think that's the easiest way to be able to do those things. I cannot function without getting sleep. I find myself stuck between a choice of taking care of all of these personal obligations and finding the time to become a better man or a different man.

Brian Lehrer: Professor Alter, do you get this one much? Do you have anything for Michael?

Professor Alter: Yes. I have to say, when you have a two-year-old and a six-month-old, this is a borderline universal experience. I'm a couple of years removed from that myself. I had a very similar experience of that period of my life. I think one really useful thing to do there is to basically sketch out what the average 24 hours looks like in your day. Fill in that 24-hour block with the things that are essential, and then if you think of it like almost a financial budget, what's discretionary? What's left over at the end?

In terms of time, you might say eight hours of sleep is non-negotiable, and then I have work, and maybe that's 7 or 8 or 9 or 10 hours of the day, whatever it might be, maybe including a commute on the days when you aren't working from home, if that's the case. Taking care of the kids, maybe it's non-negotiable that you spend dinner time with them, and so on. What you'll end up having is an unfortunately fairly thin sliver of time that's left over that is discretionary. Then the question is, what do you do with that time? Now, what most of us do when we're exhausted is we turn to our phones and we scroll for those few hours, and leave very little else left. It's not very enriching. At the end of the day, you have the response that we just heard, which is that I don't have much time for myself.

I think to purposefully and mindfully carve out of that what discretionary time is left, things that are really important and meaningful to you, whether it's a phone call with someone you love and makes you feel good, or time spent with friends having a drink, or not even a drink, a coffee, whatever it might be. Whether it's a particular hobby or pursuit, whether it's moving your body fitness, whatever really matters to you. Everyone has a different answer.

Brian Lehrer: Carve out some time. Maybe if you haven't already done this, if you're parenting with a partner, make a deal where maybe each of you has certain times of the week that really are off time or time for you and the way you define it. Also, Michael, if it helps, in a few years, given the age of your kids right now, it is going to get easier. It is.

Michael: That's true.

Brian Lehrer: Let me get one more in here that's really different. Bob in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Bob, I apologize, we've got about 30 seconds for you.

Bob: Sure. Thank you. I am a retired teacher. At age 30, I realized I wasn't cut out to be a musician, freelance, and I kept on playing, I kept on recording, I kept on writing. Here I am ready to go out there and play again. I am friction. The friction part really rang with me. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: You mean you can't get back into playing an instrument?

Bob: I'm still playing. I'm still playing a lot. I just can't get myself to record or perform. I just doing something with it.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. We have about a minute left, Professor Alter, and I will note, though, I think your article and our first few callers have been in relatively younger stages of life. The guy with two young kids, the other one wanting to make a career change. A number of the people calling in are older, they're retirees. Most of the major life decisions have been made, but they still feel stuck because they're still friction as pertains to the future. Give us 30 seconds for Bob and for them.

Adam Alter: The 30 seconds. It's not that different from something I've said earlier, which is that you need to make the first step. If it's about overcoming the emotional friction of playing in front of other people, think about what the most atomic tiny step might be. Whether it's playing in front of one person or playing in front of yourself and imagining being in front of other people, or calling a particular bar down the road and saying, "Is there an opening here?" Whatever that first step might be. Make it as small as possible and take that step. That'll go a long way to getting you, getting the ball rolling, getting you to move.

Brian Lehrer: Taking that first step has to be the last step for today. Adam Alter, author of Anatomy of a Breakthrough: How to Get Unstuck. He teaches at NYU, and was profiled in The New York Times the other day. Thank you. This was really wonderful. Thank you very much.

Adam Alter: Thanks, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: That's The Brian Lehrer Show for today. Stay tuned for Alison.

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