Getting Unstuck

Everyone experiences moments in their lives when they feel stuck or in a rut. There are insights and strategies to help you get past that stuckness and dig out from the rut.

What I listened to: “You 2.0: How to Break Out of a Rut” by Hidden Brain hosted by Shankar Vedantam.

Sometimes I listen to a podcast that immediately seems relevant to everyone. This podcast from Hidden Brain with host Shankar Vedantam is one such podcast. Anyone who engages in any type of meaningful work or creative endeavor has experienced the rut, the stuckness, discussed in the podcast.

At 50 minutes in episode length, there’s a lot I could cover in this post. But let me highlight just a few important points and I’ll leave it to you to listen to the entire podcast if you want. I guarantee you’ll get something out of it if you do. It’s excellent.

Vedantam interviews Adam Alter, a New York University’s School of Business Professor of Marketing who is also affiliated with the same university’s Psychology Department. Alter is the author of Anatomy of a Breakthrough: How to Get Unstuck When It Matters Most. Alter based much of his book on research he’s conducted on why we get stuck and how we can break free.

At the top of the show, Vedantam brings up the popular television series, Games of Thrones – specifically the writer of the series, George R. R. Martin. Evidently as Martin proceeded through the writing of his incredibly successful book series the television is based on, the gaps between the writing of those books grew longer over time. Martin described his situation, his stuckness, his rut, as profound writer’s block and his frustration in not being able to produce the next installment in the series. Martin was befuddled by his lack of ability to write and create.

Martin’s situation is something nearly everyone experiences in some form in their lives, at least from time to time.

One of the first helpful insights discussed is the phenomenon that when a goal comes closer into view, we proceed toward that goal more quickly. Researchers describe this as the “goal gradient,” the feeling that as we get closer to a goal the process seems like an easier downhill path.

However, additional research has shown that the goal gradient process is a bit more complicated than simply speeding up as the goal is in sight. In reality, we typically slow down dramatically in the middle between the start and end of an endeavor. Lots of motivation as we start. We slow down in the middle. Then when we start to see the end in sight, we speed up again.

There's lots of evidence that the goal gradient effect plays a powerful role in many dimensions of our lives.

Alter contends that this slowing down in the middle phenomenon is due in part to a lack of referenceable landmarks along the way. Using the sailing of a ship away from a port as an example, we see landmarks in our rear view so we know we’re moving and how fast. But then we’re in the middle of the ocean and we have no points of reference to act as external cues to tell us how far or fast we’re moving. That long period of lacking external cues before we see the land of our destination can be demotivating and slow us down. Then we see land and speed up again because our goal is in sight, we have an external cue that prompts more action.

There are ways to create landmarks, external cues, along the way during that long middle portion of a process. The concept of creating sub-goals, smaller chunks of the larger overall goal, is one tactic we can use to help us get unstuck.

I use a strategy in my own life much like this that I refer to as “Living Life 5 at a Time”.

Life can be challenging for many of us when viewed through the lens of needing to remain sharply focused for extended periods of time. It ends up being more of a roadblock than helpful. For those who can maintain such focus, great. We do what works for us.

For me, all day long I think of life 5 at a time and it keeps me moving ahead. It reduces the pressure I can otherwise feel when I assume something might be a long, protracted project.

Being a writer, I was particularly interested when Alter explained how this atomization of larger goals into smaller goals gives us a jolt of motivation that can help the writing process.

I struggle with long form, book-length writing. Always have. I’ve written books, but I’ve currently got a few books on my laptop now in various stages of draft completion, and there they sit, unfinished. Yet, I can churn out smaller articles, essays, or stories relatively easily. My guess is my struggle is a clear demonstration of the goal gradient effect in action.

The nice thing about writing a book is it's broken naturally into chapters. So already, you've shrunk those middles down. Let's say there are 12 chapters in a book that you're writing. You've taken that large goal and you've made sure that the middle is smaller by having these 12 sub-goals that fall under that larger umbrella.

But even within a chapter, people will say every 100 words is my goal and I've often used that tactic especially as the process of writing becomes difficult or when you're entering a difficult part of a story or a study that you're trying to describe. What I find is that the goal for me shrinks as I am struggling more, as I become more stuck, and it grows again as the process of writing feels a bit easier. And I find that that shrinking and expanding happens constantly as I'm writing the book.

Vedantam mentions that Alter sometimes sets a time on his watch for 60 seconds with the aim to write until the timer goes off. That’s a lot like my “5 at a time” approach. I often set a timer for 5 minutes and then remain heads-down writing until the timer goes off.

The focus of these tactics is to get the ball rolling, so to speak. Once we have some momentum, the process seems easier. Whatever tricks we can use to foster that momentum we should employ and often that’s smaller micro goals that when cobbled together in a string of effort bring us to our final destination.

I’ve only covered a smidgen of the entire podcast’s content. It’s a superb discussion that I think everyone will get something out of because we all struggle with this stuckness problem.

In the rest of the podcast they discuss things like the negative grip of perfectionism, the fetishizing of goals (what a great phrase), that we regularly plateau and need to change up approaches rather than doing the same thing over and over, and that life is never a linear path. The non-linear path is something I recently wrote about in “Our Crooked Path.”

Alter also mentions that sometimes goal attainment is seen in “moral” terms. This alludes to an essentially moral assessment we make that people who succeed are more moral than those who fail, especially in the United States where we’ve had the “hard work equals success” mantra drummed into us because of the American Dream mythos. This results in there being a moral dimension to not succeeding. Humans are often completionists. So we feel morally compelled in some way to finish what we start.

When we turn ordinary goals into moral causes, we switch from being what social scientists called Satisficers to Maximizers. Instead of asking if what we have accomplished is good enough, we adopt all or nothing thinking.

There is so much good stuff in this podcast, but I’ll leave you with something that really struck home for me. Many of us tend to focus on our own struggles while believing that others have it much easier than we do. We imagine we’re the only people dealing with the struggles with which we’re faced. Other people’s stuckness (which everyone experiences) is hidden from our view so we imagine that it’s just us facing those challenges. This can lead to us getting stuck.

One of the points made is that social media contributes to our sense of others having fewer struggles than we do. I’m certainly guilty of posting many of my successes and few of my failures on social media despite my life containing a steady stream of failures amid the successes. We like to project a positive image of ourselves on social media.

What people are doing on social media is they are sharing their very best 1% of their lives and keeping the 99%, the part that's complicated or messy or that involves stuckness or whatever they've termed failure, from social media for obvious reasons. But what you end up experiencing if you're spending one or two or three hours a day on these platforms is you're experiencing everyone else's successes and that throws into stark relief how different your life is where the other 99% is real and present and concrete to you and that doesn't involve success all the time.

Listen to this podcast. I promise you’ll get something out of it. It describes in a certain sense a general human condition rather than an exception to how we function as human beings.

You can use this link to access all my writings and social media and ways to support my work.