Adam Grant Quotes

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

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.

We all have blind spots in our knowledge and opinions. The bad news is that they can leave us blind to our blindness, which gives us false confidence in our judgment and prevents us from rethinking. The good news is that with the right kind of confidence, we can learn to see ourselves more clearly and update our views. In driver’s training we were taught to identify our visual blind spots and eliminate them with the help of mirrors and sensors. In life, since our minds don’t come equipped with those tools, we need to learn to recognize our cognitive blind spots and revise our thinking accordingly.

Indeed, Cialdini finds that people donate more money to charity when the phrase “even a penny will help” is added to a request.

Character is more than just having principles. It’s a learned capacity to live by your principles. Character skills equip a chronic procrastinator to meet a deadline for someone who matters deeply to them, a shy introvert to find the courage to speak out against an injustice, and the class bully to circumvent a fistfight with his teammates before a big game. Those are the skills that great kindergarten teachers nurture — and great coaches cultivate.

After all, the purpose of learning isn’t to affirm our beliefs; it’s to evolve our beliefs.

controlling the flow of facts to our minds, much like Kim Jong-un controls the press in North Korea. The technical term for this in psychology is the totalitarian ego, and its job is to keep out threatening information.

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die.

When we select leaders, we don’t usually pick the person with the strongest leadership skills. We frequently choose the person who talks the most. It’s called the babble effect. Research shows that groups promote the people who command the most airtime — regardless of their aptitude and expertise. 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.

Timing accounted for forty-two percent of the difference between success and failure.

By asking questions rather than thinking for the audience, we invite them to join us as a partner and think for themselves. If we approach an argument as a war, there will be winners and losers. If we see it more as a dance, we can begin to choreograph a way forward. By considering the strongest version of an opponent’s perspective and limiting our responses to our few best steps, we have a better chance of finding a rhythm.

Who you are should be a question of what you value, not what you believe. Values are your core principles in life — they might be excellence and generosity, freedom and fairness, or security and integrity.

But there’s something distinctive that happens when givers succeed: it spreads and cascades.

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

When our audiences are skeptical, the more we try to dominate them, the more they resist.