Across time, the average American holds twelve jobs, has seven significant romantic relationships, has more than fifteen close friends, owns four homes, moves twelve times, and lives in five or six different cities (often in more than one country).

With each shift, both professional and personal, comes a period of friction -- a moment of stuckness that, when all works well, precedes a breakthrough.

NYU Stern Professor of Marketing Adam Alter has spent the past two decades trying to understand why people get stuck so frequently, and how they get unstuck on the path to bigger and better things. He has interviewed and examined the stories of Olympians, business titans, musical giants, artists, bestselling authors, Nobel prizewinners, Oscar winners, and thousands of everyday people in a quest to create a kind of recipe guide for getting unstuck and manufacturing personal and creative breakthroughs.

The result is his most recent book Anatomy of a Breakthrough: How to Get Unstuck and Unlock Your Potential, which he will discuss with Stern alumni as part of this in-person Lifelong Learning workshop.

In this session, participants will uncover:

• Why more than 95% of people are stuck in at least one respect at any moment in time—but they feel lonely and alone in this stuckness despite how common it is to experience barriers and frustrations.
• The specific steps that drive breakthroughs in the face of stuckness across dozens of domains, from financial and interpersonal to professional and creative.
• Why features of U.S. culture make us particularly prone to stuckness, whereas other cultures are equipped with narratives that propel them forward more rapidly than Americans (and other Westerners) tend to progress.
• How these ideas can be applied to almost any imaginable context, and why, despite the broad range of domains in which people find themselves stuck, the same general principles apply.
• Why certain features of our lives in 2025 make us particularly prone to stuckness, and how to shrink those barriers systemically to improve our lives and the lives of the next generation.

Professor Alter will incorporate several interactive elements throughout the session to provide a more engaging, hands-on experience and to reinforce key ideas shared.