Adam M. Grant Quotes & Sayings

a perspective gap: when we're not experiencing a psychologically or physically intense state, we dramatically underestimate how much it will affect us. — Adam M. Grant

The art of advocacy is to lead you to my conclusion on your terms. — Adam M. Grant

Leaders and managers appreciate it when employees take the initiative to offer help, build networks, gather new knowledge, and seek feedback. But there's one form of initiative that gets penalized: speaking up with suggestions. In one study across manufacturing, service, retail, and nonprofit settings, the more frequently employees voiced ideas and concerns upward, the less likely they were to receive raises and promotions over a two-year period. And — Adam M. Grant

The greatest shapers don't stop at introducing originality into the world. They create cultures that unleash originality in others. — Adam M. Grant

Rules and systems were created by people. And that awareness gives us the courage to contemplate how we can change them. — Adam M. Grant

For the next two hours, the executives worked in groups, pretending to be one of Merck's top competitors. Energy soared as they developed ideas for drugs that would crush theirs and key markets they had missed. Then, their challenge was to reverse their roles and figure out how to defend against these threats.* This "kill the company" exercise is powerful because it reframes a gain-framed activity in terms of losses. — Adam M. Grant

To become original, you have to try something new, which means accepting some measure of risk. — Adam M. Grant

In these pages, I learned that great creators don't necessarily have the deepest expertise but rather seek out the broadest perspectives. — Adam M. Grant

As Samuel Johnson purportedly wrote, "The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good. — Adam M. Grant

People who started businesses and contributed to patent applications were more likely than their peers to have leisure time hobbies that involved drawing, painting, architecture, sculpture, and literature. — Adam M. Grant

Now that you have a bit of respect, you value your standing in the group and don't want to jeopardize it. To maintain and then gain status, you play a game of follow-the-leader, conforming to prove your worth as a group member. As — Adam M. Grant

Without a sense of urgency , people ... won't make needed sacrafices. Instead they cling to the status quo and resist.' - Quoting John Kotter — Adam M. Grant

Batson figured out a clever way to tease apart whether empathy drives us to help because we want to reduce another person's distress or our own distress. If the goal is to reduce our own distress, we should choose whatever course of action makes us feel better. If the goal is to reduce another person's distress, we should help even when it's costly and other courses of action would make us feel good. — Adam M. Grant

If they think the behavior is safe, we should emphasize all the good things that will happen if they do it - they'll want to act immediately to obtain those certain gains. But when people believe a behavior is risky, that approach doesn't work. They're already comfortable with the status quo, so the benefits of change aren't attractive, and the stop system kicks in. Instead, we need to destabilize the status quo and accentuate the bad things that will happen if they don't change. Taking a risk is more appealing when they're faced with a guaranteed loss if they don't. The prospect of a certain loss brings the go system online. — Adam M. Grant

Similarly, when women offer suggestions for improvement, managers judge them as less loyal than men and are less likely to implement their proposals. Especially — Adam M. Grant

the more familiar a face, letter, number, sound, flavor, brand, or Chinese character becomes, the more we like it. It's true across different cultures and species; even baby chickens prefer the familiar. — Adam M. Grant

To generate a handful of masterworks, Mozart composed more than 600 pieces before his death at thirty-five, Beethoven produced 650 in his lifetime, and Bach wrote over a thousand. — Adam M. Grant

groupthink occurs when people "are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group," and their "strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action. — Adam M. Grant

The worst performers and the best performers are givers; takers and matchers are more likely to land in the middle. This pattern holds up across the board. The Belgian medical students with the lowest grades have unusually high giver scores, but so do the students with the highest grades. Over the course of medical school, being a giver accounts for 11 percent higher grades. Even in sales, I found that the least productive salespeople had 25 percent higher giver scores than average performers - but so did the most productive salespeople. The top performers were givers, and they averaged 50 percent more annual revenue than the takers and matchers. Givers dominate the bottom and the top of the success ladder. Across occupations, if you examine the link between reciprocity styles and success, the givers are more likely to become champs - not only chumps. — Adam M. Grant

women were beginning to see that custom, religious precept, and law were in fact man-made and therefore reversible. — Adam M. Grant

When we've developed an idea, we're typically too close to our own tastes - and too far from the audience's taste - to evaluate it accurately. We're — Adam M. Grant

People who suffer the most from a given state of affairs are paradoxically the least likely to question, challenge, reject, or change it. — Adam M. Grant

The more you give, the more you want to do it - as do others around you. It's like going to the gym. If you've been working out your kindness muscles, you get stronger at it. - Nipun Mehta — Adam M. Grant

In the deepest sense of the word, a friend is someone who sees more potential in you than you see in yourself, someone who helps you become the best version of yourself. — Adam M. Grant

Americans see independence as a symbol of strength, viewing interdependence as a sign of weakness — Adam M. Grant

As physicist Max Planck once observed, "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die. — Adam M. Grant

If we communicate the vision behind our ideas, the purpose guiding our products, people will flock to us. — Adam M. Grant

Having a sense of security in one realm gives us the freedom to be original in another. By — Adam M. Grant

highly successful people have three things in common: motivation, ability, and opportunity. If we want to succeed, we need a combination of hard work, talent, and luck. — Adam M. Grant

Although many successful givers start from the default of trusting others' intentions, they're also careful to scan their environments to screen for potential takers, always ready to shift from feeling a taker's emotions to analyzing a taker's thoughts, and flex from giving unconditionally to a more measured approach of generous tit for tat. And when they feel inclined to back down, successful givers are prepared to draw reserves of assertiveness from their commitments to the people who matter to them. — Adam M. Grant

At work, our sense of commitment and control depends more on our direct boss than on anyone else. When we have a supportive boss, our bond with the organization strengthens and we feel a greater span of influence. As — Adam M. Grant

To get Firefox or Chrome, you have to demonstrate some resourcefulness and download a different browser. Instead of accepting the default, you take a bit of initiative to seek out an option that might be better. And that act of initiative, however tiny, is a window into what you do at work. — Adam M. Grant

You never know where somebody's going to end up. It's not just about building your reputation; it really is about being there for other people. — Adam M. Grant

When we're determined to reach an objective, it's the gap between where we are and where we aspire to be that lights a fire under us. — Adam M. Grant

Nobody walks in here with what they think is a bad idea. — Adam M. Grant

As much as agreeable people may love us, they often hate conflict even more. Their desire to please others and preserve harmony makes them prone to backing down instead of sticking up for us. "Because — Adam M. Grant

Success doesn't measure a human being, effort does. — Adam M. Grant

Shapers" are independent thinkers: curious, non-conforming, and rebellious. They practice brutal, nonhierarchical honesty. And they act in the face of risk, because their fear of not succeeding exceeds their fear of failing. — Adam M. Grant

One participant got so angry after thinking about the insulting feedback that hitting the punching bag wasn't enough: he punched a hole in the wall of the lab. — Adam M. Grant

For many years, psychologists believed that in any domain, success depended on talent first and motivation second. To groom world-class athletes and musicians, experts looked for people with the right raw abilities, and then sought to motivate them. If you want to find people who can dunk like Michael Jordan or play piano like Beethoven, it's only natural to start by screening candidates for leaping ability and an ear for music. But in recent years, psychologists have come to believe that this approach may be backward. — Adam M. Grant

Logically, learning about the people around you should depend on listening. The less you talk, the more you should discover about the group. But Pennebaker found the opposite: the more you talk, the more you think you've learned about the group. By talking like a taker and dominating the conversation, you believe you've actually come to know the people around you, even though they barely spoke. In Opening Up, Pennebaker muses, "Most of us find that communicating our thoughts is a supremely enjoyable learning experience. — Adam M. Grant

Of course it was Hamlet - The uncle kills the father, and the son has to avenge his father's death. So then we decided it was going to be Hamlet with lions." In that pivotal moment, the film got the green light. — Adam M. Grant

So if givers are most likely to land at the bottom of the success ladder, who's at the top - takers or matchers? Neither. When I took another look at the data, I discovered a surprising pattern: It's the givers again. — Adam M. Grant

In light of this evidence, Bryan suggests that we should embrace nouns more thoughtfully. "Don't Drink and Drive" could be rephrased as: "Don't Be a Drunk Driver." The same thinking can be applied to originality. When a child draws a picture, instead of calling the artwork creative, we can say "You are creative." After a teenager resists the temptation to follow the crowd, we can commend her for being a non-conformist. When we shift our emphasis from behavior to character, people evaluate choices differently. Instead of asking whether this behavior will achieve the results they want, they take action because it is the right thing to do. In the poignant words of one Holocaust rescuer, "It's like saving somebody who is drowning. You don't ask them what God they pray to. You just go and save them. — Adam M. Grant

But just as exposure research would suggest, the brief presentations interspersed between other communications - and the delays between them - caused leaders to warm up to Medina's ideas. — Adam M. Grant

is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. — Adam M. Grant

If originals aren't reliable judges of the quality of their ideas, how do they maximize their odds of creating a masterpiece? They come up with a large number of ideas. Simonton finds that on average, creative geniuses weren't qualitatively better in their fields than their peers. They simply produced a greater volume of work, which gave them more variation and a higher chance of originality. "The odds of producing an influential or successful idea," Simonton notes, are "a positive function of the total number of ideas generated. — Adam M. Grant

The greatest tragedy of mankind," Dalio says, "comes from the inability of people to have thoughtful disagreement to find out what's true." Through — Adam M. Grant

At its core, comedy is an act of rebellion. Evidence shows that compared to the norms in the population, comedians tend to be more original and rebellious - and the higher they score on these dimensions, the more professional success they attain. After — Adam M. Grant

Instead of courage' management guru Tom Peters recommends fostering 'a level of fury with the status quo such that one cannot not act. — Adam M. Grant

research shows that givers get extra credit when they offer ideas that challenge the status quo. — Adam M. Grant

Giving and taking are based on our motives and values, and they're choices that we make regardless of whether our personalities trend agreeable or disagreeable. — Adam M. Grant

Rather than looking outward in an attempt to predict the outcome, you turn inward to your identity. You base the decision on who you are - or who you want to be. — Adam M. Grant

The least favorite students were the non-conformists who made up their own rules. Teachers tend to discriminate against highly creative students, labeling them as troublemakers. In — Adam M. Grant

They're constrained by a shortage of people who excel at choosing the right novel ideas. The — Adam M. Grant

Middle-status conformity leads us to choose the safety of the tried-and-true over the danger of the original. Sociologists — Adam M. Grant

Passionate people don't wear their passion on their sleeves; they have it in their hearts." The — Adam M. Grant

kissing up, kicking down." Although — Adam M. Grant

Overall, the evidence suggests that liking continues to increase as people are exposed to an idea between ten and twenty times, with additional exposure still useful for more complex ideas. Interestingly, — Adam M. Grant

There's a particular kind of explanation that works especially well in enforcing discipline. When the Oliners examined the guidance of the Holocaust rescuers' parents, they found that they tended to give "explanations of why behaviors are inappropriate, often with reference to their consequences for others." While the bystanders' parents focused on enforcing compliance with rules for their own sake, the rescuers' parents encouraged their children to consider the impact of their actions on others.* — Adam M. Grant

Ultimately, by repeatedly making the choice to act in the interest of others, strategic matchers may find themselves developing giver identities, resulting in a gradual drift in style toward the giving end of the reciprocity spectrum. — Adam M. Grant

Argue like you're right and listen like you're wrong. — Adam M. Grant

Francis Ford Coppola observed, "The way to come to power is not always to merely challenge the Establishment, but first make a place in it and then challenge and double-cross the Establishment. — Adam M. Grant

Originality is taking the road less traveled, championing a set of novel ideas that go against the grain but ultimately make things better. Of — Adam M. Grant

According to Brian Uzzi, a management professor at Northwestern University, networks come with three major advantages: private information, diverse skills, and power. By developing a strong network, people can gain invaluable access to knowledge, expertise, and influence. Extensive research demonstrates that people with rich networks achieve higher performance ratings, get promoted faster, and earn more money. And because networks are based on interactions and relationships, they serve as a powerful prism for understanding the impact of reciprocity styles on success. — Adam M. Grant

When our commitment is wavering, the best way to stay on track is to consider the progress we've already made. As we recognize what we've invested and attained, it seems like a waste to give up, and our confidence and commitment surge. — Adam M. Grant

When we become curious about the dissatisfying defaults in our world, we begin to recognize that most of them have social origins: Rules and systems were created by people. And that awareness gives us the courage to contemplate how we can change them. Before — Adam M. Grant

It's helpful to know that Eden drew his inspiration from a classic study led by the Harvard psychologist Robert Rosenthal, who teamed up with Lenore Jacobson, the principal of an elementary school in San Francisco. In eighteen different classrooms, students from kindergarten through fifth grade took a Harvard cognitive ability test. The test objectively measured students' verbal and reasoning skills, which are known to be critical to learning and problem solving. Rosenthal and Jacobson shared the test results with the teachers: approximately 20 percent of the students had shown the potential for intellectual blooming, or spurting. Although they might not look different today, their test results suggested that these bloomers would show "unusual intellectual gains" over the course of the school year. — Adam M. Grant

And astronomy stagnated for decades because Nicolaus Copernicus refused to publish his original discovery that the earth revolves around the sun. Fearing rejection and ridicule, he stayed silent for twenty-two years, circulating his findings only to his friends. Eventually, — Adam M. Grant

When Galileo made his astonishing discovery of mountains on the moon, his telescope didn't actually have enough magnifying power to support that finding. Instead, he recognized the zigzag pattern separating the light and dark areas of the moon. Other astronomers were looking through similar telescopes, but only Galileo "was able to appreciate the implications of the dark and light regions," Simonton notes. He had the necessary depth of experience in physics and astronomy, but also breadth of experience in painting and drawing. Thanks to artistic training in a technique called chiaroscuro, which focuses on representations of light and shade, Galileo was able to detect mountains where others did not. — Adam M. Grant

When we use the logic of consequence, we can always find reasons not to take risks. The — Adam M. Grant

The hallmark of originality is rejecting the default and exploring whether a better option exists. I've — Adam M. Grant

As Jack Handey advised in one of his "Deep Thoughts" on Saturday Night Live, before you criticize people, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes. — Adam M. Grant

Regardless of their reciprocity styles, people love to be asked for advice. — Adam M. Grant

The customer service agents who accepted the defaults of Internet Explorer and Safari approached their job the same way. They stayed on script in sales calls and followed standard operating procedures for handling customer complaints. They saw their job descriptions as fixed, so when they were unhappy with their work, they started missing days, and eventually just quit. The employees who took the initiative to change their browsers to Firefox or Chrome approached their jobs differently. They looked for novel ways of selling to customers and addressing their concerns. When — Adam M. Grant

You gotta kiss a lot of frogs," he often told his team, "before you find a prince." In fact, frog kissing was one of his mantras: he encouraged his engineers to try out many variations to increase their chances of stumbling on the right one. But — Adam M. Grant

Being original doesn't require being first. It just means being different and better. — Adam M. Grant

... superb presentations - start by establishing "what is: here's the status quo." Then, they "compare that to what could be," making "that gap as big as possible" - Quoting Nancy Duarte — Adam M. Grant

Other studies show that male executives who talk more than their peers are rewarded, but female executives who engage in the same behavior are devalued by both men and women. Similarly, — Adam M. Grant

If creative procrastination, selectively applied, prevented Leonardo from finishing a few commissions - of minor importance when one is struggling with the inner workings of the cosmos - then only someone who is a complete captive of the modern cult of productive mediocrity . . . could fault him for it. Productive mediocrity requires discipline of an ordinary kind. It is safe and threatens no one. Nothing will be changed by mediocrity. . . . But genius is uncontrolled and uncontrollable. You cannot produce a work of genius according to a schedule or an outline. — Adam M. Grant

creative geniuses weren't qualitatively better in their fields than their peers. They simply produced a greater volume of work, which gave them more variation and a higher chance of originality. — Adam M. Grant

Conviction in our ideas is dangerous not only because it leaves us vulnerable to false positives, but also because it stops us from generating the requisite variety to reach our creative potential. — Adam M. Grant

Practice makes perfect, but it doesn't make new. — Adam M. Grant

The people who had been recognized for making original contributions shared many more stories that started negatively but surged upward: they struggled early and triumphed later. Despite being confronted with more negative events, they reported greater satisfaction with their lives and a stronger sense of purpose. — Adam M. Grant

All it took was having them spend their initial six minutes a little differently: instead of adopting a managerial mindset for evaluating ideas, they got into a creative mindset by generating ideas themselves. Just — Adam M. Grant

Housman ran the same analysis for absences from work. The pattern was the same: Firefox and Chrome users were 19 percent less likely to miss work than Internet Explorer and Safari fans. — Adam M. Grant

Attaching a single patient's photo to a CT exam increased diagnostic accuracy by 46 percent. And roughly 80 percent of the key diagnostic findings came only when the radiologists saw the patient's photo. The radiologists missed these important findings when the photo was absent - even if they caught them three months earlier. When the radiologists saw the patient's photo, they felt more empathy. By encouraging empathy, the photos motivated the radiologists to conduct their diagnoses more carefully. Their reports were 29 percent longer when the CT exams included patient photos. When the radiologists saw a photo of a patient, they felt a stronger connection to the human impact of their work. A patient photo "makes each CT scan unique," said one radiologist. — Adam M. Grant

to the psychologist Robert Cialdini, people can capitalize on this norm of reciprocity by giving what they want to receive. Instead — Adam M. Grant

Bryan finds that appeals to character are effective for adults as well. His team was able to cut cheating in half with the same turn of phrase: instead of "Please don't cheat," they changed the appeal to "Please don't be a cheater." When — Adam M. Grant

Rice professor Erik Dane finds that the more expertise and experience people gain, the more entrenched they become in a particular way of viewing the world. He points to studies showing that expert bridge players struggled more than novices to adapt when the rules were changed, and that expert accountants were worse than novices at applying a new tax law. As we gain knowledge about a domain, we become prisoners of our prototypes. — Adam M. Grant

The thing about credit is that it's not zero-sum. There's room for everybody, and you'll shine if other people are shining. — Adam M. Grant

Some people, when they do someone a favor, are always looking for a chance to call it in. And some aren't, but they're still aware of it - still regard it as a debt. But others don't even do that. They're like a vine that produces grapes without looking for anything in return . . . after helping others . . . They just go on to something else . . . We should be like that. - Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor A — Adam M. Grant

Merely knowing that you are not the only resister makes it substantially easier to reject the crowd. — Adam M. Grant

adopted an approach that resembled Geller's. She started doing group mentoring sessions instead of only one-on-ones: I asked myself, "Am I really the only person who can help in this particular instance?" I tried not to think about myself as the only resource I was optimizing, and started connecting people to help each other. — Adam M. Grant

Procrastination may be the enemy of productivity, but it can be a resource for creativity. — Adam M. Grant

When women speak up, they run the risk of violating that gender stereotype, which leads audiences to judge them as aggressive. Voice — Adam M. Grant

This explains why we often undercommunicate our ideas. They're already so familiar to us that we underestimate how much exposure an audience needs to comprehend and buy into them. When — Adam M. Grant

Based on David Hornik's story, you might predict that givers achieve the worst results - and you'd be right. Research demonstrates that givers sink to the bottom of the success ladder. Across a wide range of important occupations, givers are at a disadvantage: they make others better off but sacrifice their own success in the process. — Adam M. Grant

Interest in the arts among entrepreneurs, inventors, and eminent scientists obviously reflects their curiosity and aptitude. People who are open to new ways of looking at science and business also tend to be fascinated by the expression of ideas and emotions through images, sounds, and words. — Adam M. Grant

It seems counterintuitive, but the more altruistic your attitude, the more benefits you will gain from the relationship," writes LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman. "If you set out to help others," he explains, "you will rapidly reinforce your own reputation and expand your universe of possibilities. — Adam M. Grant