Adam Alter

INSIDE THE BIG IDEAS

Anatomy of a Breakthrough: How to Get
Unstuck and Thrive When It Matters Most
Adam Alter
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adam Alter is a professor of marketing and the Stansky Teaching Excellence

Faculty Fellow at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He also
holds an affiliated professorship in social psychology at NYU’s psychology
department. In 2020, he was voted Professor of the Year by the faculty and
student body at NYU’s Stern School of Business and was among the Poets
and Quants 40 Best Professors Under 40 in 2017. Alter is the New York Times
bestselling author of Drunk Tank Pink and Irresistible.

INTRODUCTION
Almost twenty years ago, Adam Alter was working toward a Ph.D. in social
and cognitive psychology when he stumbled upon a fascinating cultural dif-
ference that separated people in the West from those in the East. Westerners
tend to believe that progress is linear, that life gets better over time for both
individuals and societies, and that self-improvement is a relatively smooth
process. In the East, though, people tend to believe that progress is far lumpier,
and that life is filled with obstacles that cause us to get stuck for months, years,
and sometimes even decades. These ideas reflected the tenets of Buddhism,
Taoism, and the balancing forces of the Yin and Yang.

As it turns out, the Easterners were right. Sticking points are a normal and
natural part of what it means to be human. If you look for them, you’ll find
these sticking points everywhere. And if you’re like the thousands of people
Alter surveyed from around the world, you’re probably stuck in at least one
major respect right now.

Even the most successful athletes, entrepreneurs, actors, musicians, artists, and
scientists find themselves stuck much of the time. Where Easterners are gen-
erally prepared to battle against these obstacles as they arise, those in the West
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are disadvantaged by a relative lack of emotional and mental preparation. The

myth of unbroken progress is a source of comfort until you find yourself stuck.

Since that original discovery, Alter has pursued answers to the question of why
some people generally conjure breakthroughs more readily than others. Is there a
formula or set of steps that the rest of us might emulate on our own quests to get
unstuck as we hunt for breakthroughs? The answer, Alter’s research has revealed,
is a resounding “yes.”

As you dive into Anatomy of a Breakthrough, expect to encounter a range of

thought-provoking concepts and narratives that will change your perspective on
creativity and innovation. The stories range from historical breakthroughs that have
shaped our world to lesser-known yet equally fascinating instances of creativity in
action. Anatomy of a Breakthrough is a step-by-step roadmap for getting unstuck,
built on over one hundred scientifically-supported techniques and insights.

Read on for 10 Big Ideas from Anatomy of a Breakthrough. And be sure to visit the
Next Big Idea App to take our audio e-course taught by author Adam Alter.

10 BIG IDEAS
1. Being Stuck Is Lonely
A few years ago, Alter distributed an online survey to hundreds of people from
a range of backgrounds and industries asking about the experience of getting
stuck. To his surprise, every single person said that they were stuck in at least one
respect at that moment. Some were stuck in bad relationships, some in stagnant
careers. Some were struggling to start a new business, apply to school, pay off
loans, or save for their futures. Some sought creative solutions to enduring prob-
lems; others felt the solution was obvious but they were “frozen on the spot.”

What the respondents often failed to realize was just how common it is to be
stuck. Many of them said they felt lonely and isolated, imagining that the rest of
the world was making progress while they were fixed in place. They described a
mixture of anxiety, uncertainty, fear, anger, and numbness.

The reason we feel so isolated when stuck is that our own struggles occupy so
much of our attention, whereas the struggles of others escape unnoticed. To
illustrate this asymmetry, social psychologists Shai Davidai and Tom Gilovich
have described the case of a Scrabble player who draws unfavorable letters.
Imagine getting the tiles U, U, I, I, I, Q, and W. Each time you try to make a
word, you’ll ruminate over your bad luck, whereas helpful tiles leave your tray as
soon as they arrive. The same is true in other contexts. If you’re driving in heavy
traffic and happen to pick the slower of two lanes, you’ll watch with frustration
as dozens of cars zip by in the other lane; whereas if you were one of the cars
zipping by, you’d be focusing on the road.

It’s also difficult to see others’ struggles. People tend to wrestle their demons
privately, either behind closed doors or within their own heads, and what we
ultimately see is the polished outcome of that process. We’re more drawn to titanic
success stories—Roger Federer and Serena Williams; Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuck-
erberg; Meryl Streep and Daniel Day-Lewis—than to the billions of strugglers
who are more typical and therefore less interesting. Our social media accounts are
similarly cluttered with the most polished and popular accounts, and even the mi-
cro-influencers we follow share glossy versions of their lives that highlight the best
moments and leave the wrinkles behind. Struggle is harder to see in other people’s
lives, so we mistakenly believe it troubles us more than it does them.

2. We Almost Always Quit Too Soon

Pop music in the 1980s was dominated by a combination of glistening synths
and electronic drums—two elements that came together perfectly on the track
“Take On Me” by Norwegian trio a-ha. In October 1985, “Take On Me” reached
the number one spot on the Billboard Charts in the U.S., and stayed on the
charts for twenty-seven weeks. It sold around ten million copies worldwide,
making it one of the best-selling singles of all time.

The breeziness of “Take On Me” is misleading, though, because the track took an
arduous fifteen-year journey before finding popular success. It began as a catchy
twenty-seven-note melody that lived in frontman Magne Furuholmen’s head
for years before he shared it with his bandmates. Even then, a-ha had to record
several versions of the track set to forgettable videos before it attracted funding
from a savvy group of music execs at Warner’s main U.S. office, who bankrolled
the semi-animated music video that attracted six MTV music video awards and
drove the song’s mainstream success.

a-ha were dogged even as the track seemed to falter, but most people most of
the time quit too soon in the face of adversity. This is particularly true in creative
domains, where it often seems increasingly difficult to generate new ideas as time
passes. According to the so-called “creative cliff illusion,” coined by psychologists
Brian Lucas and Loran Nordgren, people mistakenly believe their ideas become
less creative over time, whereas in fact, their creativity improves over time as the
task becomes more difficult. In one study, Lucas and Nordgren found that sketch
comedians—experts in manufacturing humor—believed their comedic ideas
would diminish over a writing session, whereas in fact the quality of their ideas
remained consistent and in some cases even improved.

As Lucas explained to Alter, we mistake the difficulty of persisting across time

for failure. In fact, as the task becomes more difficult, your ideas are more likely
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to diverge from the herd—to become more interesting, unusual, divergent, and
inspiring. The problem is that most of us quit too soon, as soon as the task begins
to feel difficult. The solution is to spend longer on the task than intuition dictates.
It’s those final bursts of creative energy that tend to produce our brightest ideas.

3. To Speed Up, Slow Down

Soccer player Lionel Messi and tennis player Andre Agassi are among the
most decorated professional athletes of the past half-century. Messi has won
more Ballon D’Or trophies awarded to the best player of the year than any
other player. He has scored more goals in a calendar year than any other living
player, is the top all-time scorer in Spain’s La Liga, and led Argentina to the
2022 FIFA World Cup. Agassi’s long career was patchier than Messi’s, but at
its close, Agassi was the only male tennis player to have achieved the so-called
Super Slam, winning all six of the biggest tennis tournaments: The Australian
Open, Roland-Garros (French Open), Wimbledon, US Open, ATP finals, and
Olympic Games.

Athletes are known for acting quickly, decisively, and explosively, but Messi and
Agassi are brilliant in large part because they build slow, deliberative pauses into
their respective sports. Messi, famously anxious as a young player, has learned
to walk for the first five minutes of every game. During this time, he settles into
the game mentally, and surveys the landscape for competitive insights that might
serve him during the game’s remaining eighty-five-plus minutes. Pep Guardiola,
one of his coaches, has said, “He smells who is the weak point of the back four.
After five, ten minutes, he has the map. He knows if I move here, I will have
more space to attack.”

Agassi similarly sniffed out insights that escaped less engaged competitors.
Agassi lost his first three matches against Germany’s Boris Becker, struggling
to return Becker’s unconventional and unusually powerful serve. During their
fourth match, Agassi stopped playing Becker’s serve for a few points to inspect
Becker’s service motion for insights. Soon, he noticed a “tell” in Becker’s service
action. “I started to realize he had this weird tic with his tongue,” Agassi remem-
bered. “Just as he was about to toss the ball, he would stick his tongue out, and
it would either be right in the middle of his lip or to the left corner of his lip
[signaling where he was going to serve.]” From this point on, Agassi dominated
Becker, winning nine of their next eleven matches. After both players retired,
Agassi shared his insight with Becker, who “just about fell off his chair.”

Whether you’re a professional athlete or not, the lesson is clear: when you’re
stuck, pause. Slow down. Prepare. Messi sacrifices the first few minutes of each
game, and Agassi sacrificed a couple of service returns to glean information that
would repay them both many times over. Sometimes getting unstuck is about
slowing down, rather than speeding up.
4. Hardship Inoculation
In 2016, Alter spoke to dozens of coaches at the Australian Institute of Sport.
One of the questions discussed was whether athletes tended to respond better
to relatively easy or relatively difficult training sessions. On the one hand, easy
training sessions build confidence and skills, but on the other hand, difficult
training sessions steel athletes for the rigors of competition. Different coaches
had different ideas, and so Alter embarked on a series of studies designed to
examine the relationship between practice difficulty and success.

In one study, with colleagues Heather Barry Kappes, Griffin Edwards, and
Dave Berri, Alter analyzed the results of hundreds of NCAA college basketball
matches across a twelve-year period. Consistently, year after year, they found that
teams with relatively challenging pre-season schedules outperformed those with
relatively gentle pre-season schedules. Like a vaccine that steels the body against
future viruses, hardship during practice seems to inoculate athletes against hard-
ship during competition.

Golfer Phil Mickelson seems to know this. For years, Mickelson used to train by
playing not one but three or four rounds of golf each day. “I’m making more and
more progress by trying to elongate my focus,” Mickelson has said. “I might try
to play thirty-six, forty-five holes in a day and try to focus on each shot so that
when I go out and play eighteen, it doesn’t feel like it’s that much.” If Mickelson
trains himself to hit two hundred shots without losing focus, he should be able
to manage the seventy-odd shots he’ll hit during a standard day of champion-
ship golf. “I’m trying to use my mind like a muscle and just expand it,” he said.

Hardship inoculation works beyond athletic pursuits, too. Humans have been
playing the Chinese board game Go for thousands of years, and for several
decades, until 2016, our performance as a species had stagnated. We just weren’t
improving much from year to year. Then, in 2016, a new artificially intelli-
gent Go engine surpassed the ability of even the strongest human players, and
suddenly the entire field of Go players seemed to improve. They made better
moves and achieved higher scores on the most commonly used rating scale. The
hardship of facing a superior machine liberated a reservoir of ability that most
Go players couldn’t tap earlier in their careers.

Whether your chosen pursuit is athletic, intellectual, or creative, the best way to
improve is to persevere through moderately difficult practice sessions that strike a
perfect balance between too-easy-to-inspire-ingenuity and too-difficult-to-foster-
growth. How do you know if you’ve struck this balance perfectly? If you’re exhaust-
ed, unmotivated, and losing confidence, you’re pushing too hard; if you’re bored,
going through the motions, and rarely failing, you’re not pushing hard enough.

5. Simplify and Simplify and Simplify Again

New York City’s Dr. Thomas Bolte is sometimes called the Real Dr. House, after
the TV doctor played by Hugh Laurie who diagnosed exceptionally complex
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medical cases. Bolte is an expert diagnostician—a practitioner of last resort for

patients who have been diagnosed and misdiagnosed many times over by Bolte’s
overmatched colleagues.

Bolte’s secret sauce is a thirty-two-page questionnaire that all patients fill out
before they meet Bolte. The human body is complex, but Bolte believes that
diagnosing medical conditions should be algorithmic—a matter of applying a
set of simple principles that eliminate red herring diagnoses one by one. Bolte’s
process isn’t quick, but it gets the job done. “In mainstream medicine, there’s an
expression: ‘When you hear hooves, don’t initially look for zebras,’” says Robert
Scully, who has worked alongside Bolte. “As a result, zebras are missed all the
time. Tom’s a zebra hunter.”

Simplifying sounds like a simple process, but to simplify is deceptively difficult.

You have to push back against the human instinct to complicate. In one study, for
example, engineering academic Leidy Klotz asked people to bolster a teetering
tower of Lego blocks. Klotz’s young son quickly recognized that the smart move
was to remove a couple of bricks, stabilizing the tower, but the vast majority of
adults leap into building complex supporting structures before even considering
the merits of a simpler solution. Only when Klotz nudged them by saying some-
thing like, “remember, extra bricks cost money, but subtracting bricks is free” did
they consider subtracting before adding.

The best way to avoid complicating is to make simplifying habitual. Alter uses
a process known as a friction audit for this purpose—an algorithmic set of steps
like Bolte’s questionnaire that enables entrepreneurs, governments, and even
individuals to audit their businesses, policies, and lives for needless complexity.
As Klotz noted, simplifying tends to be much cheaper than complicating, so
the best return on your investment of both time and money tends to come from
removing friction before adding complexity.

6. The Myth of Originality

Alter makes the bold claim that nothing is original—using the extreme defini-
tion of the word “original,” which implies a degree of novelty that almost never
occurs in reality. This is true for, among other products, songs, books, art move-
ments, music, and commercial goods and services.

Take the case of Bob Dylan, whom many creatives identify as one of the pro-
foundly original musical forces of the twentieth century. “There’s no one like
him. He’s unique and way cool,” filmmaker David Lynch has said. Rock ‘n Roll
Hall of Famer Jackson Browne called Dylan his biggest musical influence. “He
changed all the rules about what it meant to write songs,” said Browne.

Dylan’s music may have seemed original, but it wove together strands from the
pop, folk, and blues traditions. Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” for example, bears
a close resemblance to the antislavery hymn “No More Auction Block for Me,” a
track that Dylan heard folk musician Odetta sing first on an album and then at a
live show in the early 1960s. Odetta herself recognized the unmistakable similar-
ity between the songs, generously describing “Blowin’ in the Wind” as an act of
“[not] stealin’ or appropriation…[but rather] passing on the folk tradition.”

The same is true about other cultural and commercial products, but that doesn’t
stop creatives from striving for novelty. This quest, though, can be counterproduc-
tive precisely because radical originality is so rare. It’s like aiming for perfection-
ism—you’ll be paralyzed forever if you strive for perfection rather than excellence.

The better route is to combine old ideas to form something new, just as Dylan
and thousands of other musicians and creatives before and after him did. Re-
combination—the act of creating novel combinations of existing ingredients—is
superior because if you collect enough existing ingredients, you can generate new
combinations at will rather than having to wait for divine inspiration. The act of
recombining turns the slippery quest for creativity into a process that is tractable,
reproducible, and algorithmic.

7. Never Seek Breakthroughs in Social Isolation

Getting unstuck can be a lonely business, but it shouldn’t be. Among all species,
humans are unique in being able to consult other members of our species for
inspiration and advice. The question is: if you’re putting together a team designed
to foster breakthroughs, how should you construct that team?

The answer is that your team or brain trust should include three kinds of people:

The first and most obvious are people who have expertise in the domain at hand.
If you’re a musician, speak to other musicians. If you’re an investor, speak to other
investors, and so on.

The second is the non-redundant actor. Take the longest-running TV show of all
time: Doctor Who. There are hundreds of episodes of Doctor Who, which has been
running in some form since the 1960s. Naturally, some of these episodes are
stronger, more original, and more engaging than others. A couple of years ago a
team of management researchers sought to understand how these better episodes
came to be. They discovered that better episodes tended to come from creative
teams of writers, directors, and producers with non-redundant, or non-overlap-
ping backgrounds. These were people who hadn’t worked together before, who
came from different creative traditions, and often from different countries. Good
friends who reunited tended to produce episodes that left Doctor Who fans cold,
whereas, through their friction, novel combinations of creatives with little or no
overlapping history produced original, memorable episodes.

The third kind of person critical to breakthroughs is the black sheep. It’s easy
to assemble a team of people who like each other, who have worked together
before, and who see the world the same way. Harmony is valuable, but if you’re
trying to get unstuck on the quest for breakthroughs, harmony sometimes mires
you further. When Pixar’s Brad Bird directed The Incredibles and Ratatouille,
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he deliberately included black sheep in his creative team—people who “shook

things up,” as Bird described them. “A lot of them were malcontents,” Bird
recalled. They had big, new ideas, and “we gave them a chance to prove their
theories, [which] changed the way a number of things are done here.”

An experiment in which strangers were asked to solve mental puzzles shows

that Bird was onto something. In that experiment, the strangers did better when
a computer-generated AI bot deliberately misled them or made random (and
therefore unhelpful) suggestions. The bot behaved like a black sheep, inspiring
new ideas and new ways of thinking that ultimately liberated creative break-
throughs.

To get unstuck, then, go beyond the obvious experts who see the world the same
way. Introduce non-redundant actors with diverse perspectives, and even black
sheep who see the world differently, and you’re more likely to succeed.

8. Explore, then Exploit: The Tale of Two Jacksons

Artist Jackson Pollock and filmmaker Peter Jackson were stuck many times
before arriving at the richest period of their respective careers. Both had tremen-
dous talent and promise, but success eluded the two Jacksons for decades before
it landed.

As it turns out, both used the same two-pronged strategy as they hunted down
breakthroughs. The first prong was to explore—a term borrowed from evolution-
ary biology, which suggests uncritically combing the landscape as omnivorously
as possible. For Jackson Pollock, this meant trying on lots of different artistic
styles as a person might try on different clothes. He dabbled in cubism and
surrealism and expressionism for several years, but none of these styles quite
worked. Peter Jackson similarly, and without luck, tried his hand at horror films,
somber mockumentaries, and true crime documentaries.

Both Jacksons learned a lot from this period, though, developing a taste for
the styles and approaches that would land them both commercial and critical
success. For several years, both exploited what they had learned, focusing sharply
on the approach that seemed most promising, and abandoning the process of
exploration entirely. Pollock alit on the drip-painting technique that defined
a five-year hot streak, painting hundreds of canvases using a single artistic
approach. Peter Jackson similarly became an expert in creating the richly-drawn
Tolkienesque fantasy worlds that defined The Lord of the Rings and Hobbit
films—films that earned him Academy Awards and a decade-long hot streak.

This exploration-exploitation combination turns out to predict hot streaks in many

careers. A team of researchers led by Northwestern University’s Dashun Wang has
shown that most careers include at least one hot streak—an extended period of
success—and that such periods tend to arrive after a phase of exploration-then-ex-
ploitation much like the phases that preceded hot streaks for Jackson Pollock and
Peter Jackson. The key to having more than one hot streak is to alternate between
exploring and exploiting, shifting periodically from one to the other as the relative
value of shallow breadth and deep narrowness waxes and wanes.

9. Action Above All

It isn’t easy being creative day after day, year after year. Jeff Tweedy, the frontman
of the band Wilco and a writer, has produced sublime art, but he’s also trudged
through creative deserts. Some days, Tweedy wakes up without the creative verve
that drives his best ideas. Instead of labeling that day a lost cause, Tweedy turns
down his judgmental instincts and allows himself to “pour out” ideas without
criticism. In practice, that means writing prose, or composing music, judgment-free
for ten or fifteen minutes a day either before he leaves his bed in the morning, or
before firing up his smartphone to read the news and check his emails.

This is acting without the baggage of emotion and thought, and for Tweedy it
has produced decades of creative outputs—hundreds of songs, several books,
and plenty of good ideas. And all of this despite, not because of, his complicated
history of mental health and addiction struggles.

Tweedy’s insight here is that acting in any form—whether making small steps
forward or even moving sideways—is better than not acting at all. The “empty-
ing” process Tweedy describes is a kind of unsticking magic because it achieves
two things that are very difficult to accomplish when you’re stuck: it frees you to
act with very little emotional or mental baggage, and it puts no demands on the
output that flows from your actions.

10. Conclusion
Getting unstuck on the path to breakthroughs requires three ingredients: the
right emotional state, the right ideas, and the right actions. When we’re stuck,
we often instinctively skip the first two, taking what often turns out to be the
wrong kind of action.

The best unstickers know to slow down first—to dial down the emotional tem-
perature of the moment as they simplify the problem, recombine existing ideas,
turn to non-redundant actors and black sheep, and explore their menu of options
before they begin exploiting a particular course of action.

In the spirit of inspiring breakthroughs, Anatomy of a Breakthrough ends with an

unusual epilogue. Instead of concluding with an anecdote that exemplifies the
book’s central themes, Alter titled the conclusion, “100 Ways to Get Unstuck,”
which distills the book into 100 discrete strategies that are designed to replace
friction with motion.

As a runner, Alter’s favorite may be idea #96: “Moving your body is one of the
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best ways to unstick yourself mentally. That’s particularly true if you’ve been
sitting—or sedentary—for long periods. It’s especially true of movements that
feel fluent.” If you’re stuck right now, the best thing you can do is to step outside
or into a different room. When you’re overwhelmed by mental sticking points,
the best first step is to physically unstick yourself from the here and now. Mental
breakthroughs reliably follow brief periods of physical unsticking.

TALKING POINTS
A few of the most memorable and shareable stories, facts, and statistics from Anatomy
of a Breakthrough.

• Is it just me?: If you ask college students how comfortable they are with the
drinking norms on campus, most will tell you they privately believe that students
drink too much, but that the average college student is quite comfortable with
campus drinking norms. This mismatch arises because behavior is visible, but
attitudes and beliefs are hidden from view. Most college students don’t visibly
protest campus drinking norms—and some visibly drink too much alcohol—so
students are left believing their views are unusual.

• The goal gradient effect: Research shows that rats move quickly when they
near the end of the maze, but move slowly or stop altogether at its beginning
and middle. The end of the maze is like a magnet that pulls them more strongly
as they get closer. This is true regardless of whether the mazes are long, straight
tunnels or complex webs of trunks and branches. This phenomenon applies to
people, too. Researchers have shown that no matter the domain, people seem to
slow down or stop midway through the task, and speed up when they think they
are approaching the goal.

• Shake it up: According to Bruce Feiler, who spent three years traveling across
all fifty states while collecting 225 life stories, every life story was dotted with
small and large life disruptions. There were no exceptions. Young, old, rich, poor,
professional, laborer, urban, rural—disruptions were universal. Most of these
setbacks were unchosen, like losing a job or battling an illness, and most were
unwanted. Some were minor—these happened every twelve to eighteen months
for most people—but roughly every tenth disruption was a major life event,
which he called lifequakes.

• The fertile forties: Despite Silicon Valley’s obsession with youthful entre-
preneurs—fueled by the mythologies of twentysomething wunderkinder like
Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg—the average age for successful
entrepreneurs is forty-two. And the most successful of them are even older.
The founders of the one-in-a-thousand most successful firms are on average
forty-five years old, and those who successfully exit from their start-ups were on
average forty-seven years old when they founded their start-ups. According to
one study, “a founder at age 50 is approximately twice as likely to experience a
successful exit compared to a founder at age 30.”

• Science for grown-ups: Scientific genius follows a pattern similar to entrepre-

neurial pursuits. In disciplines as varied as chemistry, economics, medicine, and
physics, scientists tend to do their best work near age forty. Nobel Prize winners
and inventors similarly do most of their best work between their late thirties and
early forties. While scientific precocity is fascinating, it’s also highly unusual.
Instead, the richest advances come from getting stuck and then unstuck over and
over; from learning what works and what doesn’t; from persevering in the face of
difficult lessons.

• Diversification and creativity: In one analysis of three million songs by seven-

ty thousand artists, a creativity researcher showed that the biggest difference be-
tween one-hit wonders and sustained success across a career is a vibrant pipeline
of “relatively creative” songs in the wings just waiting to be produced.

• The perks of being a wallflower: Biologist Lee Dugatkin ran an experiment

where he placed both timid and bold guppies and a predator sunfish in the same
tank and left them to swim, eat, and explore for sixty hours. The result? Boldness
was a disastrous strategy. Seventy percent of the timid guppies survived the first
thirty-six hours, and 40 percent were still alive at the sixty-hour mark. In con-
trast, only 25 percent of the bold guppies survived the first thirty-six hours, and
none of them were alive sixty hours after the experiment began. Dialing down
the pressure—sitting back, watching, and waiting—was the key to survival.

• Should I stay or should I go?: According to researchers, the optimal error

rate is 15.87 percent. If you’re failing much more than once in every five or six
attempts, you’re probably failing too often; and if you almost never fail or fail
rarely, you’re probably not failing often enough.
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READING QUIZ
Quiz time! Research shows that tests and quizzes can boost your recall of what you’ve
studied. So after you’ve finished reading Anatomy of a Breakthrough, lock in your
learning with this brief assessment. Good luck!

1. Anatomy of a Breakthrough discusses the importance of failure in innova-

tion. What role does it suggest failure plays?
A) A necessary evil
B) An obstacle to avoid
C) A key stepping stone to success
D) Irrelevant to the innovation process

2. How does Anatomy of a Breakthrough describe the impact of diverse teams

on innovation?
A) Beneficial but not essential
B) Crucial for generating unique solutions
C) Only important in certain industries
D) Less important than individual genius

3. What does the book say about the predictability of breakthroughs?

A) They are mostly predictable
B) They are always unexpected
C) They can often occur unexpectedly
D) They follow a set pattern

4. According to Alter, what is a significant driver of breakthroughs?

A) Financial incentives
B) Strict management
C) Collaborative efforts
D) Individual effort
5. The tendency to believe you see the world differently from other people
when in fact you all feel the same way is called ______________.
A) pluralistic ignorance
B) misdirection
C) the veil of reason
D) facile intention

6. The book emphasizes the importance of what in the innovation process?

A) Avoiding risks
B) Embracing uncertainty
C) Following trends
D) Competing with rivals

7. What does Anatomy of a Breakthrough suggest about the intersection of

technology and creativity?
A) They are mutually exclusive
B) Technology hinders creativity
C) Creativity is less important than technology
D) Technology opens new avenues for creativity

8. How does Alter view the human elements, like intuition, in innovation?
A) They are unreliable
B) They are central to driving breakthroughs
C) They are less important than data
D) They are irrelevant

9. One remedy for losing steam in the middle of an endeavor is to shrink or

eliminate the midpoint altogether, also called _________.
A) goal gathering
B) backhanding
C) blacklisting
D) narrow bracketing
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A N AT O M Y O F A B R E A K T H R O U G H
A D A M A LT E R

10. What does Alter say about scaling ideas from concept to reality?
A) It’s fraught with challenges and strategies
B) It’s a straightforward process
C) It depends solely on financial backing
D) It’s not covered in the book

1C, 2B, 3C, 4C, 5A, 6B, 7D, 8B, 9D, 10A
Reading Quiz Answer Key:
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