Psychology Expert: How Colours, Your First Name And Your Location Might Be Ruining Your Life!

Adam Alter joins Steven Bartlett to explain why so many people feel stuck in their careers, relationships, and lives, and how to engineer breakthroughs. He argues that the modern career model is broken because specialization narrows our lives, and that variety, curiosity, and experimentation are antidotes. The conversation ranges across how names, colors, environments, and symbols subtly shape behavior, the 'nine-ending crisis' that strikes at ages ending in 9, and the difference between maximizers and satisficers. Alter offers practical tools including the friction audit, recombination for creativity, and the exploration-then-exploitation pattern behind career hot streaks.

• Alter's pet theory is that the career model is broken: specialization narrows what you do, and doing the same thing daily is exactly how you get stuck.
  00:05:36
• The 'nine-ending crisis' - people at ages 29, 39, 49, 59 show spikes in first-time marathon running, infidelity, and even suicide as they audit their lives.
  00:51:37
• People who satisfice rather than maximize tend to be much happier; chronic maximizing is choice-based perfectionism that is paralyzing and exhausting.
  00:47:30
• The friction audit: rather than sweetening incentives, remove the friction (the 'stick') and you see large rises in conversion at almost no cost.
  01:08:42
• Career hot streaks come from exploration (default 'yes', go broad) followed by exploitation (default 'no', go narrow on the best option).
  01:16:29
• The best creative ideas are not radically original but recombinations of old ideas - even Bob Dylan's music traces back to prior traditions.
  01:21:43
• Hardship is the first step to something good; in many domains the good stuff only happens after it gets hard, so we misread difficulty as a problem.
  00:28:48

• In a famous study, two-thirds of people chose to give themselves electric shocks rather than sit alone with their thoughts for half an hour.
  00:01:01
• After Hurricane Katrina, people whose names began with K donated significantly more aid than those whose names did not.
  00:16:29
• Lawyers with easy-to-pronounce names become partners several percent more likely and earlier, roughly years 10-20 of their careers.
  00:17:30
• 'Drunk tank pink' is a bubble-gum pink used in jail cells that initially calms people, then produces a backlash effect if used too long.
  00:21:38
• The color red makes people more attractive in dating-app and hitchhiking studies, especially a woman in red seen by a heterosexual male driver.
  00:22:09
• The optimal age to start a maximally successful company is mid-40s into the 50s, not the early-20s founder we fixate on.
  00:30:51
• Olympic swimmer Dave Berkoff, only 5'10", invented the underwater 'Berkoff Blastoff' after discovering you swim ~88% faster fully submerged.
  00:35:33
• The Y2K bug was first flagged at IBM by Bob Bemer in the 1960s; ignoring that small fix cost governments billions in the 1990s.
  01:13:53
• Alter's nostalgia research finds people miss mundane routines (like a daily walk) far more than momentous events like graduations.
  01:29:26
• In the presence of others, skilled people perform better - a champion cyclist pedals faster on a stationary bike with an audience.
  00:14:25

Books, products and media the guest or host genuinely endorsed here — with the buy link.

Affiliate link — we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.