The greatest shapers don’t stop at introducing originality into the world. They create cultures that unleash originality in others. - Adam Grant

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.

If they think the behavior is safe, we should emphasize all the good things that will happen if they do it — they’ll want to act immediately to obtain those certain gains. But when people believe a behavior is risky, that approach doesn’t work. They’re already comfortable with the status quo, so the benefits of change aren’t attractive, and the stop system kicks in. Instead, we need to destabilize the status quo and accentuate the bad things that will happen if they don’t change. Taking a risk is more appealing when they’re faced with a guaranteed loss if they don’t. The prospect of a certain loss brings the go system online.

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.