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

Author:Adam Alter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2023-05-16T00:00:00+00:00

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When you combine two ideas to form a new one, you need to relax the boundaries that surround those preexisting ideas. If you think of them too rigidly, only in terms of their original purpose, you’ll overlook how they might interact. The easiest way to understand this mental nimbleness is to borrow a metaphor from the world of golf.

I play golf seldom (and poorly), but the one piece of advice that made the biggest difference to my game comes from Sam Snead. Snead was an American golfer who dominated the game for several decades, between the 1930s and 1970s. Snead’s swing was a sublime combination of grace and power. Jack Nicklaus described it as “perfect,” and Gary Player said it was “the greatest golf swing of any human who ever lived.” When asked for his secret, Snead said it was all in the grip: “You should be holding the golf club with the same pressure you would hold a small bird. Tight enough so it doesn’t fly away, but soft enough so you don’t crush it.” I’ve never held a small bird in my hand, but I imagine one sitting there every time I swing a golf club, and my game, such as it is, has improved for that image.

Snead’s advice isn’t just useful in the domain of golf. It’s also valuable if you’re trying to get unstuck. When Arlene Harris decided to sell technology to older adults, and Bob Dylan left behind his electric guitar for an acoustic Gibson, both were showing the kind of nimbleness that comes from cradling your ideas as you might a small bird—firmly, but gently. In continuing to design and sell tech products, Harris stuck to what she knew, but in abandoning the dogma that tech was for the young, she was holding that knowledge lightly. She was willing to be flexible in the face of fresh insights, just as Dylan was willing to try something new after sampling from the new world of acoustic folk.

Put broadly, cradling a small bird gently prepares you to pivot. Pivoting is a critical cognitive skill when you’re trying to avoid inertia. To pivot you have to be willing to sacrifice moving forward today for the possibility of making great leaps in a new direction tomorrow. To find that new direction, you have to be open to the idea that the path you’ve been treading may not be the best path forward.

One of the most striking examples of pivoting—of holding beloved ideas like a small bird—comes from chemist David Brown. In the early 1990s, Brown worked at a large drug company. For eight years, his team searched for a new heart drug. Eight years is a long time to work toward a single outcome, but for a chemist like Brown little is more important than discovering a drug that saves thousands of lives. Unfortunately, the search was going nowhere. Brown knew one of two things was about to happen: his team would either produce a breakthrough or be disbanded.

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