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

lectures. One of the rules I was taught early is “After the

100 WAYS TO GET UNSTUCK

Empty yourself of bad ideas and unskilled actions and you’ll learn to recognize their productive counterparts—and learn to be less judgmental as you progress from sticking point to breakthrough.

You can learn by accumulating information, or you can learn by doing.

In this sense, action unsticks at the level of populations just as it unsticks individuals.

The simple rule is that you should allow yourself to think and act “badly,” “wrongly,” and “poorly,” particularly if lowering the bar gives you permission to think and act more fluently and reliably than you otherwise might. There’s nothing wrong with being wrong if wrongness reliably predicts the arrival of rightness.

Quantity and quality may be related because both rely to a large extent on your ability to lower your filters and inhibitions.

Entertaining bad ideas is likely to produce good ideas in time by showing you what doesn’t work.

This “emptying” is a kind of unsticking magic because it achieves two things that are difficult when you’re stuck: it frees you to act with little emotional or mental baggage, and it puts no demands on