Breaking Through When You Feel Stuck

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 16 May 2023

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

You don’t have to be a famous author to suffer from writer’s block. We all can get stuck in our thought processes and mired in our actions. That's true for leaders and managers as well, explains Adam Alter, a marketing professor at the NYU Stern School of Business. He has studied how people hit plateaus or roadblocks in their work and careers. And he shares different methods for breaking free, including one proven tactic that seems very wrong: doing nothing. Alter wrote the new book Anatomy of a Breakthrough: How to Get Unstuck When It Matters Most.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Are you trying to bring your leadership skills to the next level?
0:04.0	I want to suggest HBR's new podcast feed, HBR Unleadership.
0:09.0	HBR editors like me hand select the best leadership case studies and conversations
0:15.0	from across HBR's podcasts, videos, and beyond.
0:18.0	Listen for free to HBR Unleadership, wherever you get your podcasts.
0:24.0	New episodes every Wednesday.
0:30.0	Welcome to the HBR ID a cast from Harvard Business Review.
0:41.0	I'm Kurt Nickiff.
0:49.0	Have you ever lost your way on something important to you?
0:52.0	When I was in grad school, I set out to write my master's thesis
0:56.0	on how America was portrayed in East German radio drama.
1:00.0	I spent weeks in archives in Berlin, long enjoyable days in the stacks in the library,
1:06.0	and when I began writing I was immersed.
1:09.0	It really was all I could think about at almost any hour of the day.
1:14.0	And then I went away for a long weekend, a music festival with friends.
1:20.0	Right when I got back, my parents came to visit.
1:23.0	My brain turned to other things.
1:26.0	And my writing stopped.
1:28.0	Months went by, a year.
1:31.0	It wasn't until my advisor very kindly coaxed me back into the work that I got going again.
1:37.0	And I didn't finish until I was done.
1:39.0	I was not going to let that happen again.
	...

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