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

Product Information

The best examples of this come from elite athletes who sacrifice immediate performance for long-term dominance. For example, the greatest soccer player today (and perhaps ever), Lionel Messi, walks for the first few minutes of every game as he soothes his nerves and develops a sense of how the other 21 players on the field are behaving. He has never scored during the first two minutes of any game but has scored during every single other minute from three to ninety. That two-minute sacrifice pays dividends during the remaining eighty-eight-plus. “The idea here is to take a beat—whether a minute or a day or a week—before you act.” 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. A brilliant detective story about the sources of human creativity. I loved it. * Malcolm Gladwell * Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All by Tom and David Kelley (2013)

ANATOMY OF A BREAKTHROUGH — Adam Alter

Over the next two decades, he became a highly respected researcher and made some notable discoveries in the field of immune regulation. It was slow, painstaking work, identifying the myriad different receptors that govern the human immune system, decoding the structure of their proteins and inferring how they functioned together. 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. 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.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. PDF / EPUB File Name: Anatomy_of_a_Breakthrough_-_Adam_Alter.pdf, Anatomy_of_a_Breakthrough_-_Adam_Alter.epub In the best-case scenario, the virus might even be instantly sniped at by immune cells and antibodies, still amped up from the vaccine’s recent visit, preventing any infection from being established at all. But expecting this of our shots every time isn’t reasonable (and, in fact, wasn’t the goal set for any COVID-19 vaccine). Some people’s immune cells might have slow reflexes and keep their weapons holstered for too long; that will be especially true among the elderly and immunocompromised—their fighters will still rally, just to a lesser extent. A groundbreaking guide to breaking free from the thoughts, habits, jobs , relationships, and even business models that prevent us from achieving our full potential.

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

That’s why collaboration is becoming a key competitive advantage. Clever individuals working alone can tweak around the edges, but to solve a really big problem requires a collective effort. You need experts and outsiders, managers and researchers, engineers, marketers, logistics specialists and others as well. When Jim Allison walked into that office in 2004, it didn’t mark the beginning or the end of the journey, but the middle. We still have a long way to go. 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. Changes on the virus side could tip the scales as well. Like invaders in disguise, wily variants might evade detection by certain antibodies. Even readily recognizable versions of the coronavirus can overwhelm the immune system’s early cavalcade if they raid the premises in high-enough numbers—via, for instance, an intense and prolonged exposure event. When Jim Allison received a call from Dr. Jedd Wolchok, asking him to come to his office, he was puzzled at first. As a researcher, he rarely ventured into the clinical part of the hospital. Yet when he opened the door and saw his colleague sitting with a young woman whose emotion was clearly marked on her face, he immediately understood and tears began to fill his eyes.

Summary

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

If anything, he thought, CTLA-4 wasn’t a gas pedal, but a brake. So, just as he always had, Allison returned to his lab to figure things out and his research confirmed his suspicions. CTLA-4 didn’t stimulate the immune response, but shut it down. Coronavirus infections are happening among vaccinated people. They’re going to keep happening as long as the virus is with us, and we’re nowhere close to beating it. When a virus has so thoroughly infiltrated the human population, post-vaccination infections become an arithmetic inevitability. As much as we’d like to think otherwise, being vaccinated does not mean being done with SARS-CoV-2. A few months before, the woman had terminal cancer, but she had just been told that she was in remission. Today, more than a decade later, she remains cancer free and works as a fitness instructor. It was a breakthrough of monumental proportions and one that would make Allison world famous.El autor entrelaza ingeniosamente estudios científicos, anécdotas y entrevistas para explicar que las adversidades son parte de la vida y sentirse atascado es una característica más que un problema en el camino hacia el éxito. Afortunadamente, podemos superar el estancamiento y alcanzar nuestros objetivos más elevados implementando los ajustes y correcciones adecuados. In 1987 a team of French researchers discovered another molecule, called CTLA-4, which was very similar in structure to CD-28 and most assumed that they worked in conjunction. Allison, however, was skeptical. He noted that CTLA-4 never seemed to show up until after the immune response had already started, so he didn’t see how it could have a role in stimulating it. 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. 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. 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.

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

Jim Allison’s journey began a long time before he walked into that office. When he was finishing up his graduate work in the early 1970s, researchers had just discovered T-cells, which were largely a mystery at the time. Allison, who told me that he always liked “figuring things out,” was intrigued and thought the immune system was something he could spend his career studying. Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds. 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 AdriftThese four attributes, deep domain expertise, skepticism, persistence and a collaborative approach don’t guarantee a breakthrough, but one rarely happens without them. In art, music, writing, and business, the holy grail is an original idea—something revolutionary that no one’s considered before. The problem with ideas that appear revolutionary is that they’re almost never truly original. Instead, they’re what’s known as recombinations—the marriage of two old ideas to form something evolutionarily different. “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.” 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. Work Like Da Vinci: Gaining the Creative Advantage in Your Business and Career by Michael Gelb (2006)