Adam Grant Quotes

I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world,” E. B. White once wrote. “This makes it difficult to plan the day.

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.

Arrogance is ignorance plus conviction,” blogger Tim Urban explains. “While humility is a permeable filter that absorbs life experience and converts it into knowledge and wisdom, arrogance is a rubber shield that life experience simply bounces off of.

The art of advocacy is to lead you to my conclusion on your terms.

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

Regardless of their reciprocity styles, people love to be asked for advice.

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.

When we’re in scientist mode, we refuse to let our ideas become ideologies. We don’t start with answers or solutions; we lead with questions and puzzles. We don’t preach from intuition; we teach from evidence. We don’t just have healthy skepticism about other people’s arguments; we dare to disagree with our own arguments. Thinking like a scientist involves more than just reacting with an open mind. It means being actively open-minded. It requires searching for reasons why we might be wrong — not for reasons why we must be right — and revising our views based on what we learn.

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.

personality is how you respond on a typical day, character is how you show up on a hard day.

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

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.

Progress is impossible without change; and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. — George Bernard Shaw

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

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