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

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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power. 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. 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.

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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. Allison’s new discovery got him thinking. His colleague, Sarah Townsend, had done some studies which showed that the B-7 molecule inhibits the growth of tumors, so it certainly seemed that our immune systems have to power to fight cancer. Nevertheless, all previous attempts to do so had failed. Once again, he was presented with a mystery to figure out. 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. 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.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.

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

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. 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. These four attributes, deep domain expertise, skepticism, persistence and a collaborative approach don’t guarantee a breakthrough, but one rarely happens without them. A brilliant detective story about the sources of human creativity. I loved it. * Malcolm Gladwell * 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 .We often hear stories of outsiders who seem to come from nowhere to revolutionize a field and that does happen, but the starting point for any breakthrough is always a deep well of expertise. You have to understand the problems of a particular domain before you can begin to solve them and recognize a truly novel solution. Healthy Skepticism 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. 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.) 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. 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.

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At some point in the journey of existence, there comes a moment when the weight of monotony and stagnation holds sway, as individuals find themselves ensnared in a relentless cycle of sameness. It's a feeling that resonates with countless souls, a gnawing sense that there must be more to life. 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.

Clearly, innovation is never a single event. Allison spent decades studying the immune system before he hit on the insight that led to his miracle cure. It then took more time for him to understand and verify its implications. From there, he spent years pounding the pavement to gain acceptance for it. All that takes an enormous personal effort. Make Your Bed: Little Things That Can Change Your Life...And Maybe the World by William McRaven (2017) Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg (2016) PDF / EPUB File Name: Anatomy_of_a_Breakthrough_-_Adam_Alter.pdf, Anatomy_of_a_Breakthrough_-_Adam_Alter.epub 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

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

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.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. 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