Adam Grant Quotes

people often become attached to best practices. The risk is that once we’ve declared a routine the best, it becomes frozen in time.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Inverse charisma. What a wonderful turn of phrase to capture the magnetic quality of a great listener. Think about how rare that kind of listening is.

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.”1 Scott Adams

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness. — Martin Luther King Jr., civil rights leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner

Listening is a way of offering others our scarcest, most precious gift: our attention. Once we’ve demonstrated that we care about them and their goals, they’re more willing to listen to us.

founder Ray Dalio told me, “If you don’t look back at yourself and think, ‘Wow, how stupid I was a year ago,’ then you must not have learned much in the last year.

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

When we treat man as he is, we make him worse than he is; when we treat him as if he already were what he potentially could be, we make him what he should be. — attributed to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German writer, physicist, biologist, and artist

Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experiences of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved.