Anatomy of a Breakthrough: How to get unstuck and unlock your potential

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The field Allison pioneered, cancer immunotherapy, is now a major branch of medical science with thousands of people working to improve it and expand its use. Breakthroughs like of this magnitude are never routine, but they almost always share common attributes and we can learn a lot from how Allison overcame intense challenges to create a miracle cure. Alter was recently included in the Poets and Quants “40 Most Outstanding Business School Professors under 40 in the World,” and has written for the New York Times, New Yorker, Wired, Washington Post, and The Atlantic, among other publications. He has shared his ideas at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity and with dozens of companies around the world. Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg (2016) By the mid 1990s, due to the work of hundreds of scientists, a working model of immune regulation had been established. One receptor, called B-7 works much like the ignition switch in a car, initiating the immune response while another, CD-28 acts as a gas pedal, stimulating the body to produce T-cells at a furious rate.

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

Make Your Bed: Little Things That Can Change Your Life...And Maybe the World by William McRaven (2017) Breakthroughs, especially symptomatic ones, are still uncommon, as a proportion of immunized people. But by sheer number, “the more people get vaccinated, the more you will see these breakthrough infections,” Juliet Morrison, a virologist at UC Riverside, told me. (Don’t forget that a small fraction of millions of people is still a lot of people—and in communities where a majority of people are vaccinated, most of the positive tests could be for shot recipients.) Reports of these cases shouldn’t be alarming, especially when we drill down on what’s happening qualitatively. A castle raid is worse if its inhabitants are slaughtered and all its jewels stolen; with vaccines in place, those cases are rare—many of them are getting replaced with lighter thefts, wherein the virus has time only to land a couple of punches before it’s booted out the door. Sure, vaccines would be “better” if they erected impenetrable force fields around every fortress. They don’t, though. Nothing does. And our shots shouldn’t be faulted for failing to live up to an impossible standard—one that obscures what they are able to accomplish. A breached stronghold is not necessarily a defeated stronghold; any castle that arms itself in advance will be in a better position than it was before. Post-vaccination infections, or breakthroughs, might occasionally turn symptomatic, but they aren’t shameful or aberrant. They also aren’t proof that the shots are failing. These cases are, on average, gentler and less symptomatic; faster-resolving, with less virus lingering—and, it appears, less likely to pass the pathogen on. The immunity offered by vaccines works in iterations and gradations, not absolutes. It does not make a person completely impervious to infection. It also does not evaporate when a few microbes breach a body’s barriers. A breakthrough, despite what it might seem, does not cause our defenses to crumble or even break; it does not erase the protection that’s already been built. Rather than setting up fragile and penetrable shields, vaccines reinforce the defenses we already have, so that we can encounter the virus safely and potentially build further upon that protection. A new dichotomy has begun dogging the pandemic discourse. With the rise of the über-transmissible Delta variant, experts are saying you’re either going to get vaccinated, or going to get the coronavirus .

These four attributes, deep domain expertise, skepticism, persistence and a collaborative approach don’t guarantee a breakthrough, but one rarely happens without them. Adam Alter marries research-based solutions with genuine insight. This book is an invaluable guide to turning hurdles into breakthroughs. * Scott Galloway, NYU Stern professor of marketing and author of Adrift *

ANATOMY OF A BREAKTHROUGH — Adam Alter

A brilliant detective story about the sources of human creativity. I loved it. * Malcolm Gladwell * Adam Alter marries research-based solutions with genuine insight. This book is an invaluable guide to turning hurdles into breakthroughs." —Scott Galloway, NYU Stern professor of marketing and author of Adrift On the curiosity spectrum, you have children on the one end, constantly asking questions about everything. On the other end, you have adults, who assume things are the way they are for a reason. Adults question very little, and so we tend to herd together, doing most things the same way as other people do them. The exceptions—adults who ask questions like children—are known as experimentalists. They question everything. Sometimes they come to agree that a popular approach has merit, but often they stumble on superior alternatives. Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All by Tom and David Kelley (2013)The road to breakthroughs is a series of Zen paradoxes. One of my favorites is the idea that pausing is the best way to move forward in the long run. The idea here is to take a beat—whether a minute or a day or a week—before you act.

Anatomy of a Breakthrough by Adam Alter | Waterstones

Prepped by a vaccine, immune reinforcements will be marshaled to the fore much faster—within days of an invasion, sometimes much less. Adaptive cells called B cells, which produce antibodies, and T cells, which kill virus-infected cells, will have had time to study the pathogen’s features, and sharpen their weapons against it. While the guard dogs are pouncing, archers trained to recognize the virus will be shooting it down; the few microbes that make their way deeper inside will be gutted by sword-wielding assassins lurking in the shadows. “Each stage it has to get past takes a bigger chunk out” of the virus, Bhattacharya said. Even if a couple particles eke past every hurdle, their ranks are fewer, weaker, and less damaging. Yet it is just as clear, as Allison is happy to point out, that he didn’t do it alone. Many prominent researchers contributed to our understanding of immune regulation. It was a team of French researchers that discovered CTLA-4. Sarah Townsend showed that the immune system can fight cancer. Jedd Wolchok and his team recruited patients and performed clinical trials.

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A deeply researched and compelling guide to breaking through the inevitable obstacles on the path to meaningful accomplishment." —Cal Newport, New York Times bestselling author of Digital Minimalism and Deep Work There’s a potential silver lining to breakthroughs as well. By definition, these infections occur in immune systems that already recognize the virus and can learn from it again. Each subsequent encounter with SARS-CoV-2 might effectively remind the body that the pathogen’s threat still looms, coaxing cells into reinvigorating their defenses and sharpening their coronavirus-detecting skills, and prolonging the duration of protection. Some of that familiarity might ebb with certain variants. But in broad strokes, a post-inoculation infection can be “like a booster for the vaccine,” Su, of the University of Pennsylvania, told me. It’s not unlike keeping veteran fighters on retainer: After the dust has settled, the battle’s survivors will be on a sharper lookout for the next assault. That’s certainly no reason to seek out infection. But should such a mishap occur, there’s a good chance that “continuously training immune cells can be a really good thing,” Nicole Baumgarth, an immunologist at UC Davis, told me. (Vaccination, by the way, might mobilize stronger protection than natural infection, and it’s less dangerous to boot.) 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.

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Adam Alter marries research-based solutions with genuine insight. This book is an invaluable guide to turning hurdles into breakthroughs."— Scott Galloway, NYU Stern professor of marketing and author of Adrift This type of incubation period is very common for breakthrough discoveries. Darwin, quite famously, spent five years travelling on the HMS Beagle, cataloguing the flora and fauna he encountered while traveling through South America, Australia and, most notably, the Galapagos Islands. Einstein spent a full decade pondering special relativity and then another decade on general relativity.The same is true in the worlds of business, art, and film-making: before you strike gold, you need to spend a period of time exploring different options, approaches, and techniques. According to one study, most of us experience at least one hot streak during our careers—a period of unusual progress and consistent success—and those periods almost always follow a burst of exploration, followed by a concerted attempt to exploit or mine the best option that emerges during that first phase. The lesson from Berkoff and these hot streaks: assume nothing till you’ve considered the alternatives, and once you’ve sketched the lay of the land, pursue the best option with laser focus. 5. Different is often better than good. It’s tempting to surround yourself with people who are both competent and similar to yourself, but that’s a mistake. The best way to capitalize on the value of other people is to consult with those who are fundamentally different from you. When striving for new ideas, do as Dylan did by taking two or more good but disparate concepts, and seeing if you can merge them to form a novel recombination. That’s the origin of many successful businesses and creative products, and it’s a much lower, attainable bar than revolutionary originality. 3. Pause to move forward. Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace (2009) To understand the anatomy of a breakthrough case, it’s helpful to think of the human body as a castle. Deepta Bhattacharya, an immunologist at the University of Arizona, compares immunization to reinforcing such a stronghold against assault.