Adam Alter, Ph.D. and David Epstein: Anatomy of a Breakthrough

Almost everyone feels stuck in some way. Whether you’re muddling through a midlife crisis, wrestling writer’s block, trapped in a thankless job, or trying to remedy a fraying friendship, the resulting emotion is usually a mix of anxiety, uncertainty, fear, anger, and numbness. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Anatomy of a Breakthrough is the roadmap we all need to escape our inertia and flourish in the face of friction.

Adam Alter, Ph.D., a professor of marketing and psychology at New York University’s Stern School of Business and the Stansky Teaching Excellence Faculty Fellow, has spent the past two decades studying how people become stuck and how they free themselves to thrive. In his new book, Anatomy of a Breakthrough: How to Get Unstuck When It Matters Most, Alter reveals that the solution rests on a process he calls a friction audit—a systematic procedure that uncovers why a person or organization is stuck, and then suggests a path to progress. The friction audit states that people and organizations get unstuck when they overcome three sources of friction: HEART (unhelpful emotions); HEAD (unhelpful patterns of thought); and HABIT (unhelpful behaviors).

Alter is the author of the 2017 book Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked, and has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, WIRED, Slate, Huffington Post, and Popular Science, among other publications.

Alter will be in conversation with David Epstein (FAN ’16 and ’20), a science writer and author of the New York Times bestsellers Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, and The Sports Gene. Epstein was previously an investigative reporter at ProPublica, and prior to that a senior writer at Sports Illustrated. His two TED Talks on human development and performance have been viewed 12 million times.