Adam Grant Quotes

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.

When we use the logic of consequence, we can always find reasons not to take risks.

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

It’s a sign of wisdom to avoid believing every thought that enters your mind. It’s a mark of emotional intelligence to avoid internalizing every feeling that enters your heart.

We favor the comfort of conviction over the discomfort of doubt,

When people hesitate to give honest feedback on an idea, draft, or performance, I ask for a 0-10 score.

No one ever says 10. Then I ask how I can get closer to a 10.

It motivates them to start coaching me – and motivates me to be coachable. I want to learn how to close the gap.

If knowledge is power, knowing what we don’t know is wisdom.

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.

the higher the psychological safety in a unit, the fewer errors they made. Why? In the units that lacked psychological safety, health care professionals hid their errors, fearing retribution. As a result, they weren’t able to learn from their mistakes. In the units with high psychological safety, on the other hand, reporting errors made it possible to prevent them moving forward.

Many entrepreneurs take plenty of risks — but those are generally the failed entrepreneurs, not the success stories.

The way you like to learn is what makes you comfortable, but it isn’t necessarily how you learn best.

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.

It’s often said that where there’s a will, there’s a way. What we overlook is that when people can’t see a path, they stop dreaming of the destination.

The greatest communicators of all time,” says communication expert Nancy Duarte — who has spent her career studying the shape of 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.

Procrastination may be the enemy of productivity, but it can be a resource for creativity. Long before the modern obsession with efficiency precipitated by the Industrial Revolution and the Protestant work ethic, civilizations recognized the benefits of procrastination. In ancient Egypt, there were two different verbs for procrastination: one denoted laziness; the other meant waiting for the right time.