
Anatomy of a Breakthrough
How to Get Unstuck When It Matters Most
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Narrated by:
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Adam Alter
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By:
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Adam Alter
About this listen
A “captivating…constructive” (Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again) guide to breaking free from the thoughts, habits, jobs, relationships, and even business models that prevent us from achieving our full potential.
Almost everyone feels stuck in some way. Whether you’re muddling through a midlife crisis, wrestling with 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 “deeply researched and compelling” (Cal Newport, New York Times bestselling author of Digital Minimalism) roadmap we all need to escape our inertia and flourish in the face of friction.
Adam Alter has spent the past two decades studying how people become stuck and how they free themselves to thrive. Here, he reveals the formula he and other researchers have uncovered. The solution rests on a process that 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).
Despite the ubiquity of friction, there are many great “unstickers” hidden in plain sight among us and Alter shines a light on some exceptional stories to share their valuable lessons with us. He tells us about the sub-elite swimmer who unstuck himself twice to win two Olympic gold medals, the actor who faced countless rejections before gaining worldwide fame, the renowned painter who became paralyzed and had to relearn to paint with a brush strapped to his wrist, and Alter’s own story of getting unstuck from a college degree that made him deeply unhappy.
Artfully weaving together scientific studies, anecdotes, and interviews, Alter teaches us that getting stuck is a feature rather than a glitch on the road to thriving, but with the right tweaks and corrections, we can reach even our loftiest targets.
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Story
Today, burnout and depression are at record levels, driven by a combination of intense workplace competition, oppressively ubiquitous social media encouraging comparisons with others, the quest for elite credentials, and helicopter parenting. Society continually broadcasts the need to want more, and to be perfect. Gathering a wide range of contemporary evidence, Curran calls for both introspection and broader, societal change. He shows what we can do as individuals to resist the modern-day pressure to be perfect, and in so doing, win for ourselves a more purposeful and contented life.
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The Answers I Didn’t Know I Needed
- By John on 08-14-23
By: Thomas Curran
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The Right Kind of Wrong
- By: Amy C. Edmondson
- Narrated by: Kathe Mazur
- Length: 11 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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We used to think of failure as the opposite of success. Now, we’re often torn between two “failure cultures”: one that says to avoid failure at all costs, the other that says fail fast, fail often. The trouble is that both approaches lack the crucial distinctions to help us separate good failure from bad. As a result, we miss the opportunity to fail well. After decades of award-winning research, Amy Edmondson is here to upend our understanding of failure and make it work for us. In Right Kind of Wrong, Edmondson provides the framework to think, discuss, and practice failure wisely.
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Very pop psy
- By Student-prime on 09-28-23
By: Amy C. Edmondson
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Indistractable
- How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life
- By: Nir Eyal, Julie Li
- Narrated by: Nir Eyal
- Length: 5 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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In Indistractable, Eyal reveals the hidden psychology driving us to distraction. He describes why solving the problem is not as simple as swearing off our devices: Abstinence is impractical and often makes us want more. Eyal lays bare the secret of finally doing what you say you will do with a four-step, research-backed model. Indistractable reveals the key to getting the best out of technology, without letting it get the best of us.
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Nothing new...
- By Erica on 12-24-19
By: Nir Eyal, and others
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Chatter
- The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It
- By: Ethan Kross
- Narrated by: Ethan Kross
- Length: 5 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Tell a stranger that you talk to yourself, and you’re likely to get written off as eccentric. But the truth is that we all have a voice in our head. When we talk to ourselves, we often hope to tap into our inner coach but find our inner critic instead. When we’re facing a tough task, our inner coach can buoy us up: Focus - you can do this. But, just as often, our inner critic sinks us entirely: I’m going to fail. They’ll all laugh at me. What’s the use?
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Chatter is Great
- By Mark on 02-13-21
By: Ethan Kross
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The Talent Code
- Greatness Isn't Born. It's Grown. Here's How.
- By: Daniel Coyle
- Narrated by: John Farrell
- Length: 6 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Drawing on cutting-edge neurology and firsthand research gathered on journeys to nine of the world’s talent hotbeds - from the baseball fields of the Caribbean to a classical-music academy in upstate New York - Coyle identifies the three key elements that will allow you to develop your gifts and optimize your performance in sports, art, music, math, or just about anything.
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Okay read. Won’t read a second time
- By Chad J Guidry on 08-18-20
By: Daniel Coyle
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Hidden Potential
- The Science of Achieving Greater Things
- By: Adam Grant
- Narrated by: Adam Grant, Maurice Ashley, R. A. Dickey, and others
- Length: 7 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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We live in a world that’s obsessed with talent. We celebrate gifted students in school, natural athletes in sports, and child prodigies in music. But admiring people who start out with innate advantages leads us to overlook the distance we ourselves can travel. We underestimate the range of skills that we can learn and how good we can become. We can all improve at improving. And when opportunity doesn’t knock, there are ways to build a door.
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Nope
- By Anna OConnor-McClure on 10-27-23
By: Adam Grant
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Quit
- The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away
- By: Annie Duke
- Narrated by: Annie Duke
- Length: 7 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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In Quit, Duke teaches you how to get good at quitting. Drawing on stories from elite athletes like Mount Everest climbers, founders of leading companies like Stewart Butterfield, the CEO of Slack, and top entertainers like Dave Chappelle, Duke explains why quitting is integral to success, as well as strategies for determining when to hold 'em, and when to fold 'em, that will save you time, energy, and money.
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LOTS of FILLER and the message sometimes gets lost
- By JLSeattle on 12-04-22
By: Annie Duke
Actionable Ideas
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La solución propuesta por el autor se basa en un proceso que él llama: auditoría de fricción, un procedimiento sistemático para entender por qué una persona u organización está estancada y cómo avanzar superando tres fuentes de fricción: las emociones inútiles, los patrones de pensamiento inútiles y los comportamientos inútiles.
El autor entrelaza ingeniosamente estudios científicos, anécdotas y entrevistas para explicar que las adversidades son parte de la vida y sentirse atascado es una característica más que un problema en el camino hacia el éxito. Afortunadamente, podemos superar el estancamiento y alcanzar nuestros objetivos más elevados implementando los ajustes y correcciones adecuados.
Esta es una lectura que cambia vidas y que recomiendo ampliamente y sin reservas.
Alter, A. (2023). Anatomy of a Breakthrough: How to Get Unstuck When It Matters Most. New York, NY, USA: Simon & Schuster.
A life changing read (in spanish)
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Brilliantly Specific and Concise
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Good review of how humans can wind in up stuck
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great, Practical read
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really helpful
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I will listen to this again.
Thoroughly enjoyed this book
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Love every chapter
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One of the best of its kind
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The narrators did a good job, tho they switching for the last two chapters appeared odd at the beginning but I get used to the 'new voice's after half chapter.
Intriguing, excellent storytelling back by science
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