Adam M. Grant Quotes

... 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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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,

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Set foot in his classroom, and you'll see that he hasn't quite given up on these dreams. True to his compulsive nature and eclectic taste, he punctuates his courses with entertaining routines to keep his students engaged, playing four songs at the start of each class and tossing candy bars to the first students who shout out the correct answers to music trivia. This is how a poster of a rapper ended up on his wall. "If you want to engage your audience, if you really want to grab their attention, you have to know the world they live in, the music they listen to, the movies they watch," he explains. "To most of these kids, accounting is like a root canal. But when they hear me quote Usher or Cee Lo Green, they say to themselves, 'Whoa, did that fat old white-haired guy just say what I thought he said?' And then you've got 'em.

In a study of over 15,000 classical music compositions, the more pieces a composer produced in a given five-year window, the greater the spike in the odds of a hit.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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,

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.

is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work.

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.

Practice makes perfect, but it doesn't make new.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

It's widely assumed that there's a tradeoff between quantity and quality - if you want to do better work, you have to do less of it - but this turns out to be false. In fact, when it comes to idea generation, quantity is the most predictable path to quality. "Original thinkers," Stanford professor Robert Sutton notes, "will come up with many ideas that are strange mutations, dead ends, and utter failures. The cost is worthwhile because they also generate a larger pool of ideas - especially novel ideas.

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

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

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.

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.*

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.

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

Nobody walks in here with what they think is a bad idea.

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

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.

Argue like you're right and listen like you're wrong.

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.