Adam Alter

People get stuck in every imaginable area of life. They get stuck in jobs they’d prefer to leave, and in relationships that leave them unfulfilled. They get stuck as writers, artists, composers, athletes, scientists, and entrepreneurs. Sometimes they’re stuck for days, and other times for decades. Sometimes they stumble on breakthroughs, and other times they remain mired for life. We hear relatively little about these stubborn cases of stuckness because we’re bombarded by popular success stories.

After the third launch, the team was introduced to fifteen angel investors.

Jeff Bezos ultimately brought in Jeff Wilke, who saved the growing company from itself. Wilke’s background in manufacturing gave him the tools to turn Amazon’s warehouses into finely tuned machines, ultimately allowing the company to promise the same-day and next-day
delivery options that fueled its Prime membership service.

The bottom line is that entrepreneurial struggles are hard to see regardless of whether a business succeeds or fails

Today some experts argue that writer’s block isn’t real—that it’s the natural product of procrastination, poor planning or strategy, or the extended absence of good ideas.

For most of his sixty-seven-year painting career, Claude Monet was a model of productive success.

Some were stuck in bad relationships; some in stagnant careers; some were incapable of losing or gaining or maintaining weight; some were struggling to start a new business or to apply to school or to pay off loans or to save for their futures. Some sought creative solutions to enduring problems; others felt the solution was obvious but they were “frozen on the spot.”

Many people 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. Psychologists call this a classic case of pluralistic ignorance—the tendency to believe you see the world
differently from other people when in fact you feel the same way.

The problem arises because behavior is visible, but attitudes and beliefs are hidden from view.

The third thing I learned is that the diverse instances of “being stuck” my respondents described fall into two categories: those that are imposed from outside, and those that originate within the individual.