Summary of Anatomy of a Breakthrough By Adam Alter: How to Get Unstuck When It Matters Most

By Willie M. Joseph

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This book does not in any capacity mean to replace the original book but to serve as a vast summary of the original book.

Summary of Anatomy of a Breakthrough By Adam Alter: How to Get Unstuck When It Matters Most

 

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Adam Alter's Anatomy of a Breakthrough is a guide to breaking free from the thoughts, habits, jobs, relationships, and business models that prevent us from achieving our full potential. The friction audit is a systematic procedure that uncovers why a person or organization is stuck and suggests a path to progress. Alter teaches us that getting stuck is a feature rather than a glitch on the road to thriving, but with the right tweaks and corrections we can reach even our loftiest targets.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Willie M. Joseph
• Release date: May 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223764007

Willie M. Joseph

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Book preview

THE FIRST RULE IS THAT YOU WILL GET STUCK

Brianne Desaulniers was born in 1989 and homeschooled by her French-Canadian father and American mother. At age six, she enrolled at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater and won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in Room. Three years later, she won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in Marvel’s Captain Marvel. Larson is different from most A-list actors in that she is transparent about her struggles. The headwinds/tailwinds asymmetry, a psychological phenomenon, suggests that we pay more attention to our barriers than our blessings, leading us to believe that we face more opposition than we actually do.

Additionally, the media devotes more time to titanic success stories than to the billions of strugglers, and our social media accounts are cluttered with the most glossy and popular accounts. Airbnb was born of necessity, and its three cofounders, Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharczyk, were worth more than $13 billion each. Air Bed and Breakfast was founded by Joe Chesky and Nathan Blecharczyk in 2007. They had no money to pay rent, so Airbnb was founded in 2009 and has since grown to become one of the most successful travel companies in the world. Despite its many hiccups, most people focus on the company's successful destination rather than the barriers that hampered its journey.

Amazon's CEO Je Bezos faced the same hurdles when he joined in 1999, when all corporate employees were shipped to fulfillment centers to pack boxes for 6 weeks. Je Wilke, who had a background in manufacturing, saved the growing company from itself. By the early 2000s, alt-Amazon was receiving hundreds of thousands of online book orders and its fulfillment team was forced to work twenty-plus hours a day. The bottom line is that entrepreneurial struggles are hard to see regardless of whether a business succeeds or fails. Fred Astaire, Walt Disney, Chuck Close, and Harper Lee are just a few examples of people who have experienced chronic writer's block.

George R. R. Martin, the author of the A Song of Ice and Fire book series, has been struggling with writer's block for more than a decade. Experts argue that writer's block is not real, but it can be caused by procrastination, poor planning, or the absence of good ideas. An online survey revealed that 78% of people had been stuck for years or decades, and 79% felt very or extremely negative emotions when thinking about the situation. People don't realize how common it is to be stuck, and many feel lonely and isolated. Externally imposed constraints can be intractable, while internally imposed constraints can be intractable.

The survey found that the diverse instances of being stuck described fall into two categories: those imposed from outside and those that originate within the individual. The most important details in this text are the instances of inertia that people face, such as the lack of willpower to save money, the plateauing on the road to learning a new skill, the fear of leaping from a stable but uninspiring job to a risky business venture, and the grinding through a period of creative block. To address these internal roadblocks, intervention is needed, and people are willing to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to get unstuck. Anatomy of a Breakthrough is a strategic guide in the war against stuckness, which demystifies the experience of being stuck and questions why it is a natural default state. It also focuses on the emotional consequences of stuckness, which can be painful, anxiety-provoking, and lonely. Before you can start working on your heart, head, and habits, you need to understand what it means to be stuck, why it is so common, and when you're most likely to get stuck.

PART I

HELP

WHY GETTING STUCK IS INEVITABLE

Clark Hull spent his academic career studying rats in mazes, which was poetic because his youth was littered with dead ends. He spent three decades as a professor at Yale, where he studied maze running in rats. He saw the same pattern: the rats moved quickly when they neared the end of the maze, but moved slowly or stopped altogether at its beginning and middle. He called this pattern the goal gradient effect, and psychologists have shown that it applies to people, too. In one experiment, researchers tracked how quickly customers bought ten cups of coffee on the way to a free eleventh cup.

The goal gradient effect has been studied for more than twenty years, and it has been found to be true in people as well. In one experiment, people who visited a music-rating website were forty times more likely to quit early than closer to the goal, and they were slower and more likely to stop the farther they were from the goal. This pattern of quick-slow-quick movement is also seen in people, such as students who proofread nine essays for typos being 20 percent slower to find typos in the fifth essay than in the second and eighth essays. As researchers continue to monitor goal progress in other domains, the goal gradient effect keeps appearing. People tend to slow down or stop midway through tasks and speed up when they think they are approaching the goal.

This is especially true when people are stuck in the middle of a task, such as deciding how much to give to charitable appeals, how much credit card debt to pay, how loyal to businesses, and how quickly to walk toward a product. This can lead to unethical behavior or compromise of morals, and can be remedied by shrinking or eliminating the middle altogether. Narrow