Adam Grant Quotes

A mark of lifelong learners is recognizing that they can learn something from everyone they meet.

When someone becomes hostile, if you respond by viewing the argument as a war, you can either attack or retreat. If instead you treat it as a dance, you have another option — you can sidestep. Having a conversation about the conversation shifts attention away from the substance of the disagreement and toward the process for having a dialogue. The more anger and hostility the other person expresses, the more curiosity and interest you show. When someone is losing control, your tranquility is a sign of strength. It takes the wind out of their emotional sails.

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

confirmation bias: seeing what we expect to see. The other is desirability bias: seeing what we want to see.

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.

We mistake confidence for competence, certainty for credibility, and quantity for quality. We get stuck following people who dominate the discussion instead of those who elevate it.

But learning is not always about finding the right method for you. It’s often about finding the right method for the task.

As Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and decision expert Gary Klein explain, intuitions are only trustworthy when people build up experience making judgments in a predictable environment.

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

Generosity is not a loan to repay or a debt to settle. It's a gift to appreciate. You reciprocate a favor by paying it back. You honor an act of kindness by paying it forward.

"The first follower is what transforms a lone nut into a leader." - Quoting Derek Sivers

This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.

Character is often confused with personality, but they’re not the same. Personality is your predisposition — your basic instincts for how to think, feel, and act. Character is your capacity to prioritize your values over your instincts.

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.

What look like differences in natural ability are often differences in opportunity and motivation.