Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant examines how non-conformity — expressing ideas and taking creative risks — can be essential for creating progress and innovation. The book demonstrates how to cut through groupthink and become more innovative in any profession. As a UX designer, reading this book can teach you how to spot unique opportunities, approach problems from unexpected perspectives, and go against the grain to make meaningful changes in your profession. Further key learnings of this book are:
• How to recognize when a concept, strategy, or solution is in need of an upgrade
• How to gain the courage to communicate unpopular ideas
• How to balance risk-taking with caution
• How to create a culture that embraces and encourages non-conformity
For more books related to UX design, consider The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman, Designing for Emotion by Aarron Walter, and Lean UX by Jeff Gothelf.
Created time
Jan 22, 2023 10:17 AM
✏️ Highlights
Adam Grant is the perfect person to write Originals because he is one.
He is an informed optimist who offers insights and advice about how anyone—at home, at work, in the community—can make the world a better place.
Conventional wisdom holds that some people are innately creative, while most have few original thoughts. Some people are born to be leaders, and the rest are followers. Some people can have real impact, but the majority can’t. In Originals Adam shatters all of these assumptions.
He shows how we can become better parents by nurturing originality in our children and better managers by fostering diversity of thought instead of conformity.
I learned that great creators don’t necessarily have the deepest expertise but rather seek out the broadest perspectives.
I saw how success is not usually attained by being ahead of everyone else but by waiting patiently for the right time to act. And to my utter shock, I learned that procrastinating can be good.
In the deepest sense of the word, a friend is someone who sees more potential in you than you see in yourself, someone who helps you become the best version of yourself. The magic of this book is that Adam becomes that kind of friend to everyone who reads it. He offers a wealth of advice for overcoming doubt and fear, speaking up and pitching ideas,
Originals is one of the most important and captivating books I have ever read, full of surprising and powerful ideas. It will not only change the way you see the world; it might just change the way you live your life. And it could very well inspire you to change your world.
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” George Bernard Shaw
Luxottica, the 800-pound gorilla of the industry, controlled more than 80 percent of the eyewear market. To make glasses more affordable, the students would need to topple a giant. Having recently watched Zappos transform footwear by selling shoes online, they wondered
Luxottica, the 800-pound gorilla of the industry, controlled more than 80 percent of the eyewear market. To make glasses more affordable, the students would need to topple a giant. Having recently watched Zappos transform footwear by selling shoes online, they wondered if they could do the same with eyewear.
when GQ called them “the Netflix of eyewear,” they hit their target for the entire first year in less than a month, selling out so fast that they had to put twenty thousand customers on a waiting list.
Back in 2009, one of the founders pitched the company to me, offering me the chance to invest in Warby Parker. I declined. It was the worst financial decision I’ve ever made, and I needed to understand where I went wrong.
Originality itself starts with creativity: generating a concept that is both novel and useful. But it doesn’t stop there. Originals are people who take the initiative to make their visions a reality.
he suspected that their employment histories would contain telltale signs about their commitment. He thought that people with a history of job-hopping would quit sooner, but they didn’t: Employees who had held five jobs in the past five years weren’t any more likely to leave their positions than those who had stayed in the same job for five years.
He didn’t expect to find any correlation, assuming that browser preference was purely a matter of taste. But when he looked at the results, he was stunned: Employees who used Firefox or Chrome to browse the Web remained in their jobs 15 percent longer than those who used Internet Explorer or Safari.
The Firefox and Chrome users had significantly higher sales, and their call times were shorter. Their customers were happier, too: After 90 days on the job, the Firefox and Chrome users had customer satisfaction levels that Internet Explorer and Safari users reached only after 120 days at work.
Why are the Firefox and Chrome users more committed and better performers on every metric? The obvious answer was that they’re more tech savvy,
The employees had all taken a computer proficiency test, which assessed their knowledge of keyboard shortcuts, software programs, and hardware, as well as a timed test of their typing speed.
What made the difference was how they obtained the browser. If you own a PC, Internet Explorer is built into Windows. If you’re a Mac user, your computer came preinstalled with Safari. Almost two thirds of the customer service agents used the default browser, never questioning whether a better one was available. To get Firefox or Chrome, you have to demonstrate some resourcefulness and download a different browser. Instead of accepting the default, you take a bit of initiative to seek out an option that might be better.
The employees who took the initiative to change their browsers to Firefox or Chrome approached their jobs differently. They looked for novel ways of selling to customers and addressing their concerns. When they encountered a situation they didn’t like, they fixed it.
We live in an Internet Explorer world. Just as almost two thirds of the customer service reps used the default browser on their computers, many of us accept the defaults in our own lives. In a series of provocative studies, a team led by political psychologist John Jost explored how people responded to undesirable default conditions.
“People who suffer the most from a given state of affairs are paradoxically the least likely to question, challenge, reject, or change it.”
In one study, they tracked Democratic and Republican voters before the 2000 U.S. presidential election. When George W. Bush gained in the polls, Republicans rated him as more desirable, but so did Democrats, who were already preparing justifications for the anticipated status quo.
same happened when Al Gore’s likelihood of success increased: Both Republicans and Democrats judged him more favorably. Regardless of political ideologies, when a candidate seemed destined to win, people liked him more.
Vuja de is the reverse—we face something familiar, but we see it with a fresh perspective that enables us to gain new insights into old problems.
Dave wondered why glasses had such a hefty price tag. Why did such a fundamentally simple product cost more than a complex smartphone? Anyone could have asked those questions and arrived at the same answer that the Warby Parker squad did.
it was dominated by Luxottica, a European company that had raked in over $7 billion the previous year. “Understanding that the same company owned LensCrafters and Pearle Vision, Ray-Ban and Oakley, and the licenses for Chanel and Prada prescription frames and sunglasses—all of a sudden, it made sense to me why glasses were so expensive,”
Before women gained the right to vote in America, many “had never before considered their degraded status as anything but natural,”
As the suffrage movement gained momentum, “a growing number of women were beginning to see that custom, religious precept, and law were in fact man-made and therefore reversible.”
play magnificent Mozart melodies and beautiful Beethoven symphonies,
We assume that what gifted kids have in book smarts, they lack in street smarts. While they have the intellectual chops, they must lack the social, emotional, and practical skills to function in society. When you look at the evidence, though, this explanation falls short: Less than a quarter of gifted children suffer from social and emotional problems. The vast majority are well-adjusted—as delightful at a cocktail party as in a spelling bee.
Research demonstrates that it is the most creative children who are the least likely to become the teacher’s pet.
In one study, elementary school teachers listed their favorite and least favorite students, and then rated both groups on a list of characteristics. 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.
The more you value achievement, the more you come to dread failure. Instead of aiming for unique accomplishments, the intense desire to succeed leads us to strive for guaranteed success.
As psychologists Todd Lubart and Robert Sternberg put it, “Once people pass an intermediate level in the need to achieve, there is evidence that they actually become less creative.”
When the pope commissioned him to paint a fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo wasn’t interested. He viewed himself as a sculptor, not a painter, and found the task so overwhelming that he fled to Florence. Two years would pass before he began work on the project, at the pope’s insistence.
And astronomy stagnated for decades because Nicolaus Copernicus refused to publish his original discovery that the earth revolves around the sun. Fearing rejection and ridicule, he stayed silent for twenty-two years, circulating his findings only to his friends. Eventually, a major cardinal learned of his work and wrote a letter encouraging Copernicus to publish it.
Almost half a millennium later, when an angel investor offered $250,000 to Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak to bankroll Apple in 1977, it came with an ultimatum: Wozniak would have to leave Hewlett-Packard. He refused. “I still intended to be at that company forever,” Wozniak reflects. “My psychological block was really that I didn’t want to start a company. Because I was just afraid,” he admits. Wozniak changed his mind only after being encouraged by Jobs, multiple friends, and his own parents.
originality is an act of creative destruction. Advocating for new systems often requires demolishing the old way of doing things, and we hold back for fear of rocking the boat.
When employees in consulting, financial services, media, pharmaceuticals, and advertising companies were interviewed, 85 percent admitted to keeping quiet about an important concern rather than voicing it to their bosses.
what did you do with it? Although America is a land of individuality and unique self-expression, in
Although America is a land of individuality and unique self-expression, in search of excellence and in fear of failure, most of us opt to fit in rather than stand out.
“On matters of style, swim with the current,” Thomas Jefferson allegedly advised, but “on matters of principle, stand like a rock.”
The word entrepreneur, as it was coined by economist Richard Cantillon, literally means “bearer of risk.”
I declined to invest in Warby Parker because Neil and his friends were too much like me. I became a professor because I was passionate about discovering new insights, sharing knowledge, and teaching the next generations of students. But in my most honest moments, I know that I was also drawn to the security of tenure. I would never have had the confidence to start a business in my twenties. If I had, I certainly would have stayed in school and lined up a job to cover my bases.
They didn’t have enough skin in the game. In my mind, they were destined to fail because they played it safe instead of betting the farm. But in fact, this is exactly why they succeeded.
When people start a business, are they better off keeping or quitting their day jobs? From 1994 until 2008, they tracked a nationally representative group of over five thousand Americans in their twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties who became entrepreneurs. Whether these founders kept or left their day jobs wasn’t influenced by financial need; individuals with high family income or high salaries weren’t any more or less likely to quit and become full-time entrepreneurs.
“We almost didn’t start Google,” Page says, because we “were too worried about dropping out of our Ph.D. program.” In 1997, concerned that their fledgling search engine was distracting them from their research, they tried to sell Google for less than $2 million in cash and stock.
Grammy winner John Legend released his first album in 2000 but kept working as a management consultant until 2002, preparing PowerPoint presentations by day while performing at night.
T. S. Eliot’s landmark work, The Waste Land, has been hailed as one of the twentieth century’s most significant poems. But after publishing it in 1922, Eliot kept his London bank job until 1925, rejecting the idea of embracing professional risk. As the novelist Aldous Huxley noted after paying him an office visit, Eliot was “the most bank-clerky of all bank clerks.” When he finally did leave the position, Eliot still didn’t strike out on his own. He spent the next forty years working for a publishing house to provide stability in his life, writing poetry on the side. As
Common sense suggests that creative accomplishments can’t flourish without big windows of time and energy, and companies can’t thrive without intensive effort.
By covering our bases financially, we escape the pressure to publish half-baked books, sell shoddy art, or launch untested businesses.
When Pierre Omidyar built eBay, it was just a hobby; he kept working as a programmer for the next nine months, only leaving after his online marketplace was netting him more money than his job.
successful originals take extreme risks in one arena and offset them with extreme caution in another. At age twenty-seven, Sara Blakely generated the novel idea of creating footless pantyhose, taking
successful originals take extreme risks in one arena and offset them with extreme caution in another.
evidence shows that having co-CEOs elicits positive market reactions and increases firm valuation.
To make customers more comfortable with the unfamiliar concept of ordering eyewear over the internet, they decided to offer free returns.
After discussing the problem at length, the team came up with a solution—a free home try-on program. Customers could order the frames alone without any financial commitment, and simply send them back if they didn’t like the feel or look. This would actually be less costly than free returns. If a customer bought the frames with lenses and then returned them, Warby Parker would lose a lot of money, as the lenses were unique to the customer. But if customers tried on only the frames and returned them, the company could reuse them.
In one representative study of over eight hundred Americans, entrepreneurs and employed adults were asked to choose which of the following three ventures they would prefer to start:
One that made $1.25 million in profit with an 80 percent chance of success
One that made $5 million in profit with a 20 percent chance of success
“We find that entrepreneurs are significantly more risk-averse than the general population,” the authors conclude. These are just preferences on a survey, but when you track entrepreneurs’ real-world behavior, it’s clear that they avoid dangerous risks.
Economists find that as teenagers, successful entrepreneurs were nearly three times as likely as their peers to break rules and engage in illicit activities.
productive companies were only taking calculated risks.
Across all three studies, the people who become successful entrepreneurs were more likely to have teenage histories of defying their parents, staying out past their curfews, skipping school, shoplifting, gambling, drinking alcohol, and smoking marijuana. They were not, however, more likely to engage in hazardous activities like driving drunk, buying illegal drugs, or stealing valuables.
To become original, you have to try something new, which means accepting some measure of risk. But the most successful originals are not the daredevils who leap before they look. They are the ones who reluctantly tiptoe to the edge of a cliff, calculate the rate of descent, triple-check their parachutes, and set up a safety net at the bottom just in case.
“Many entrepreneurs take plenty of risks—but those are generally the failed entrepreneurs, not the success stories.”
jobs are not static sculptures, but flexible building blocks. We gave them examples of people becoming the architects of their own jobs, customizing their tasks and relationships to better align with their interests, skills, and values—like an artistic salesperson volunteering to design a new logo and an outgoing financial analyst communicating with clients using video chat instead of email.
they looked at their familiar jobs in an unfamiliar way: vuja de.
I’ll start with the dilemma of timing: It turns out that you should be wary of being the first mover, because it’s often riskier to act early than late. Unexpectedly, some of the greatest creative achievements and change initiatives in history have their roots in procrastination, and the tendency to delay and postpone can help
the women’s suffrage movement will illustrate why enemies make better allies than frenemies, and shared values can divide rather than unite.
I’ll close with reflections on the emotions that hold us back from pursuing originality.
group of twentysomethings who toppled a tyrant and a lawyer who fought climate change by swimming the North Pole.
pessimism is sometimes more energizing than optimism.
niche markets. That product was the Segway,
When we bemoan the lack of originality in the world, we blame it on the absence of creativity.
in reality, the biggest barrier to originality is not idea generation—it’s idea selection.
The Segway was a false positive: it was forecast as a hit but turned out to be a miss. Seinfeld was a false negative: it was expected to fail but ultimately flourished.
sixteen, he took it upon himself to redesign a museum’s lighting system—and only then sought the chairman’s permission to implement
At sixteen, he took it upon himself to redesign a museum’s lighting system—and only then sought the chairman’s permission to implement it.
The Segway was the most extraordinary technology he had ever created, and Kamen predicted that it would “be to the car what the car was to the horse and buggy.”
Twitter, Google+, and email, and received a ten-cent
Social scientists have long known that we tend to be overconfident when we evaluate ourselves. Here are some highlights of their findings:
High school seniors: 70 percent report that they have “above average” leadership skills, compared with 2 percent “below average”;
High school seniors: 70 percent report that they have “above average” leadership skills, compared with 2 percent “below average”; in the ability to get along with others, 25 percent rate themselves in the top 1 percent, and 60 percent put themselves in the top 10 percent.
After spending his career studying creative productivity, psychologist Dean Simonton has found that even geniuses have trouble recognizing when they have a hit on their hands. In music, Beethoven was known as a perceptive self-critic, yet as Simonton observes, “Beethoven’s own favorites among his symphonies, sonatas, and quartets are not those most frequently performed and recorded by posterity.”
In the same five-year window that Shakespeare produced three of his five most popular works—Macbeth, King Lear, and Othello—he also churned out the comparatively average Timon of Athens and All’s Well That Ends Well, both of which rank among the worst of his plays and have been consistently slammed for unpolished prose and incomplete plot and character development.
In fact, when it comes to idea generation, quantity is the most predictable path to quality. “Original thinkers,” Stanford professor Robert Sutton notes, “will come up with many ideas that are strange mutations, dead ends, and utter failures. The cost is worthwhile because they also generate a larger pool of ideas—especially novel ideas.”
It’s widely assumed that there’s a tradeoff between quantity and quality—if you want to do better work, you have to do less of it—but this turns out to be false.
Many people fail to achieve originality because they generate a few ideas and then obsess about refining them to perfection.
Upworthy’s rule is that you need to generate at least twenty-five headline ideas to strike gold. Backtracking studies show that wizards do sometimes come up with novel ideas early in the creative process.
for the rest of us, our first ideas are often the most conventional—the closest to the default that already exists. It’s only after we’ve ruled out the obvious that we have the greatest freedom to consider the more remote possibilities. “Once you start getting desperate, you start thinking outside the box,” the Upworthy team writes.
While working on the Segway, Dean Kamen was aware of the blind variations that mark the creative process. With more than 440 patents to his name, he had plenty of misses as well as hits. “You gotta kiss a lot of frogs,” he often told his team, “before you find a prince.”
Put a lot of ideas out there and see which ones are praised and adopted by your target audience. After spending decades creating comedy, The Daily Show cocreator Lizz Winstead still doesn’t know what will make people laugh. She recalls that she was “desperately trying to figure out jokes, writing them out, and trying them on stage.” Some of them sizzled; others popped. Now, with social media, she has a more rapid feedback mechanism.
Managers tend to be too risk averse: they focus on the costs of investing in bad ideas rather than the benefits of piloting good ones, which leads them to commit a large number of false negatives.
The annals of corporate innovation are filled with tales of managers ordering employees to stop working on projects that turned out to be big hits, from Nichia’s invention of LED lighting to Pontiac’s Fiero car to HP’s electrostatic displays. The Xbox was almost buried at Microsoft; the laser printer was nearly canceled at Xerox for being expensive and impractical. In the face of uncertainty, our first instinct is often to reject novelty, looking for reasons why unfamiliar concepts might fail. When managers vet novel ideas, they’re in an evaluative mindset.
When publishing executives passed on Harry Potter, they said it was too long for a children’s book; when Brandon Tartikoff saw the Seinfeld pilot, he felt it was “too Jewish” and “too New York” to appeal to a wide audience.
In principle, audiences should be more open to novelty than managers. They don’t have the blinders associated with expertise, and they have little to lose by considering a fresh format and expressing enthusiasm for an unusual idea.
Justin Berg finds that test audiences are no better than managers at predicting the success of new ideas: focus groups are effectively set up to make the same mistakes as managers.
“The truth is, most pilots don’t test well,” Warren Littlefield observes, because “audiences do not respond well to things that are new or different.” Audiences don’t have enough experience: they simply haven’t seen a lot of the novel ideas that landed on the cutting-room floor.
neither test audiences nor managers are ideal judges of creative ideas. They’re too prone to false negatives; they focus too much on reasons to reject an idea and stick too closely to existing prototypes.
creators struggle as well, because they’re too positive about their own ideas. But there is one group of forecasters that does come close to attaining mastery: fellow creators evaluating one another’s ideas.
When artists assessed one another’s performances, they were about twice as accurate as managers and test audiences in predicting how often the videos would be shared.
When we evaluate new ideas, we can become better at avoiding false negatives by thinking more like creators.
Berg asked over a thousand adults to make forecasts about the success of novel products in the marketplace. Some were ideas that might be useful—a 3-D image projector, a flooring system that simulates natural ground, and an automatic bed-maker. Others were less practical, like an electrified tablecloth to prevent ants from ruining a picnic. The rest were conventional ideas that varied in usefulness, from a portable container for steaming food in a microwave to a hands-free system for carrying towels.
Berg wanted to boost the chances that people would correctly rank a novel, useful idea first, as opposed to favoring conventional ideas. He randomly assigned half of the participants to think like managers by spending six minutes making a list of three criteria for evaluating the success of new products.
Ludwin says. Jerry Seinfeld would go on to remark that an order of six episodes “is like a slap in the face.” NBC ordered just four.
“If you’re gonna make connections which are innovative,” Steve Jobs said back in 1982, “you have to not have the same bag of experience as everyone else does.”
“Being around comedy writers is like going to a baseball fantasy camp. You think you’re really good, until you get up to bat,” he reminisces. “Not only can’t you hit the ball; you can’t even see the ball. I knew I was not in their league, but I at least spoke the same language.”
ways of delivering it. Instead of narrowly scrutinizing
The time I spent reading Saturday Night Live scripts made me more open to the offbeat storylines that are now legendary on Seinfeld.
One of the best things that I had going for me was the fact that I had never developed a primetime situation comedy, but I was accustomed to offbeat, off-kilter ideas.
recent study comparing every Nobel Prize–winning scientist from 1901 to 2005 with typical scientists of the same era, both groups attained deep expertise in their respective fields of study. But the Nobel Prize winners were dramatically more likely to be involved in the arts than less accomplished scientists.
Writing: poetry, plays, novels, short stories, essays, popular books  12x greater  Performing: amateur actor, dancer, magician  22x
Writing: poetry, plays, novels, short stories, essays, popular books  12x greater  Performing: amateur actor, dancer, magician  22x greaterÂ
People who started businesses and contributed to patent applications were more likely than their peers to have leisure time hobbies that involved drawing, painting, architecture, sculpture, and literature.
First, time living abroad didn’t matter: it was time working abroad, being actively engaged in design in a foreign country, that predicted whether their new collections were hits.
The most original collections came from directors who had worked in two or three different countries. Second, the more the foreign culture differed from that of their native land, the more that experience contributed to the directors’ creativity.
The third and most important factor was depth—the amount of time spent working abroad. A short stint did little good, because directors weren’t there long enough to internalize the new ideas from the foreign culture and synthesize them with their old perspectives. The
The Hazards of Intuition: Where Steve Jobs Went Wrong The first time Steve Jobs stepped on a Segway, he refused to climb
The Hazards of Intuition: Where Steve Jobs Went Wrong The first time Steve Jobs stepped on a Segway, he refused to climb off.
Steve Jobs was famous for making big bets based on intuition rather than systematic analysis.
If you’re the proud owner of several designer handbags, the less time you have to inspect them, the more accurate your judgments.
When you’ve spent years studying handbags, intuition can beat analysis, because your unconscious mind excels at pattern recognition.
When Steve Jobs had a gut feeling that the Segway would change the world, he was seduced by an impulsive attraction to its novelty rather than a careful examination of its usefulness.
And because the pace of change is accelerating, our environments are becoming ever more unpredictable. This makes intuition less reliable as a source of insight about new ideas and places a growing premium on analysis. Given that Jobs
And because the pace of change is accelerating, our environments are becoming ever more unpredictable. This makes intuition less reliable as a source of insight about new ideas and places a growing premium on analysis.
The more successful people have been in the past, the worse they perform when they enter a new environment. They become overconfident, and they’re less likely to seek critical feedback even though the context is radically different.
As Daniel Kahneman explains in Thinking, Fast and Slow, intuition operates rapidly, based on hot emotions, whereas reason is a slower, cooler process. Intuitive investors are susceptible to getting caught up in an entrepreneur’s enthusiasm; analytical investors are more
As Daniel Kahneman explains in Thinking, Fast and Slow, intuition operates rapidly, based on hot emotions, whereas reason is a slower, cooler process. Intuitive investors are susceptible to getting caught up in an entrepreneur’s enthusiasm; analytical investors are more likely to focus on the facts and make cold judgments about the viability of the business.
For example, research shows that extraverts tend to be more expressive than introverts, which means that they display more passion.
If we want to improve our idea selection skills, we shouldn’t look at whether people have been successful. We need to track how they’ve been successful.
Bill Sahlman adds: “It’s never the idea; it’s always the execution.”
Dave, had lost his glasses while spending several months traveling abroad with no phone. When he came back to the United States, the need to buy a phone and glasses at the same time gave him a fresh perspective.
Neil Blumenthal didn’t wear glasses, but he had spent the past five years working at a nonprofit that trained women to start businesses in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
The product that he taught women to sell was eyeglasses. That gave him the necessary depth of knowledge in the optical industry: he knew that glasses could be manufactured, designed, and sold at a lower cost. And having spent time outside the conventional eyeglass channels, he had the breadth to adopt a fresh approach. “It’s rare that originality comes from insiders,”
As an investor, you’ll be able to see more clearly, but you’ll still be making one-eyed gambles. Instead of banking on a single idea, your wisest move might be to bet on a whole portfolio of Kamen’s creations.
The chances that any one of these inventions will change the world are tiny.
a high-flying CIA analyst named Carmen Medina went to Western Europe on a three-year assignment. When she returned to the United States, she found that leaving the country had set her career back. After getting stuck with one job after another that didn’t fit her skills and aspirations, she searched for another way to contribute.
She began attending working groups about the future of intelligence. During the course of her career at the CIA, Medina recognized a fundamental problem with communication in the intelligence community.
Analysts had no way of sharing insights as they emerged. Since knowledge was evolving constantly, it took too long for critical information to land in the right hands.
To break down the silos and speed up communication, she proposed something wildly countercultural: instead of printing reports on sheets of paper, intelligence agencies ought to begin publishing their findings instantaneously and transmitting them over Intelink, the intelligence community’s classified internet. Her
If knowledge landed in the wrong hands, we would all be in jeopardy.
She continued advocating for an internet platform that would allow the CIA to transmit intelligence back and forth with other agencies like the FBI and NSA. Medina kept voicing her opinions, but no one listened.
three years after her flameout, she decided to speak up again in support of an online system for real-time, continuous reporting across agencies. Less than a decade later, Carmen Medina played an indispensable role in creating a platform called Intellipedia, an internal Wikipedia for intelligence agencies to access one another’s knowledge. It was so radically at odds with CIA norms that, in the words of one observer, “it was like being asked to promote vegetarianism in Texas.”
Within a few years, the site accrued over half a million registered users in the intelligence community, over a million pages, and 630 million page views—and won the Service to America Homeland Security Medal. “It’s hard to overstate what they did,” said one senior leader. “They made a major transformation almost overnight with no money after other programs failed to achieve these results with millions of dollars in funding.”
To land that position, she needed to learn to communicate differently—to speak up in ways that won credibility instead of losing it.
This chapter is about when to speak up and how to do it effectively without jeopardizing our careers and relationships. What are the right times to raise our voices, and what steps can we take to get heard?
Leaders and managers appreciate it when employees take the initiative to offer help, build networks, gather new knowledge, and seek feedback. But there’s one form of initiative that gets penalized: speaking up with suggestions.
the more frequently employees voiced ideas and concerns upward, the less likely they were to receive raises and promotions over a two-year period.
People who started businesses and contributed to patent applications were more likely than their peers to have leisure time hobbies that involved drawing, painting, architecture, sculpture, and literature.
First, time living abroad didn’t matter: it was time working abroad, being actively engaged in design in a foreign country, that predicted whether their new collections were hits.
The most original collections came from directors who had worked in two or three different countries. Second, the more the foreign culture differed from that of their native land, the more that experience contributed to the directors’ creativity.
The third and most important factor was depth—the amount of time spent working abroad. A short stint did little good, because directors weren’t there long enough to internalize the new ideas from the foreign culture and synthesize them with their old perspectives. The
The Hazards of Intuition: Where Steve Jobs Went Wrong The first time Steve Jobs stepped on a Segway, he refused to climb
The Hazards of Intuition: Where Steve Jobs Went Wrong The first time Steve Jobs stepped on a Segway, he refused to climb off.
Steve Jobs was famous for making big bets based on intuition rather than systematic analysis.
If you’re the proud owner of several designer handbags, the less time you have to inspect them, the more accurate your judgments.
When you’ve spent years studying handbags, intuition can beat analysis, because your unconscious mind excels at pattern recognition.
When Steve Jobs had a gut feeling that the Segway would change the world, he was seduced by an impulsive attraction to its novelty rather than a careful examination of its usefulness.
And because the pace of change is accelerating, our environments are becoming ever more unpredictable. This makes intuition less reliable as a source of insight about new ideas and places a growing premium on analysis. Given that Jobs
And because the pace of change is accelerating, our environments are becoming ever more unpredictable. This makes intuition less reliable as a source of insight about new ideas and places a growing premium on analysis.
The more successful people have been in the past, the worse they perform when they enter a new environment. They become overconfident, and they’re less likely to seek critical feedback even though the context is radically different.
As Daniel Kahneman explains in Thinking, Fast and Slow, intuition operates rapidly, based on hot emotions, whereas reason is a slower, cooler process. Intuitive investors are susceptible to getting caught up in an entrepreneur’s enthusiasm; analytical investors are more
As Daniel Kahneman explains in Thinking, Fast and Slow, intuition operates rapidly, based on hot emotions, whereas reason is a slower, cooler process. Intuitive investors are susceptible to getting caught up in an entrepreneur’s enthusiasm; analytical investors are more likely to focus on the facts and make cold judgments about the viability of the business.
For example, research shows that extraverts tend to be more expressive than introverts, which means that they display more passion.
If we want to improve our idea selection skills, we shouldn’t look at whether people have been successful. We need to track how they’ve been successful.
Bill Sahlman adds: “It’s never the idea; it’s always the execution.”
Dave, had lost his glasses while spending several months traveling abroad with no phone. When he came back to the United States, the need to buy a phone and glasses at the same time gave him a fresh perspective.
Neil Blumenthal didn’t wear glasses, but he had spent the past five years working at a nonprofit that trained women to start businesses in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
The product that he taught women to sell was eyeglasses. That gave him the necessary depth of knowledge in the optical industry: he knew that glasses could be manufactured, designed, and sold at a lower cost. And having spent time outside the conventional eyeglass channels, he had the breadth to adopt a fresh approach. “It’s rare that originality comes from insiders,”
As an investor, you’ll be able to see more clearly, but you’ll still be making one-eyed gambles. Instead of banking on a single idea, your wisest move might be to bet on a whole portfolio of Kamen’s creations.
The chances that any one of these inventions will change the world are tiny.
a high-flying CIA analyst named Carmen Medina went to Western Europe on a three-year assignment. When she returned to the United States, she found that leaving the country had set her career back. After getting stuck with one job after another that didn’t fit her skills and aspirations, she searched for another way to contribute.
She began attending working groups about the future of intelligence. During the course of her career at the CIA, Medina recognized a fundamental problem with communication in the intelligence community.
Analysts had no way of sharing insights as they emerged. Since knowledge was evolving constantly, it took too long for critical information to land in the right hands.
To break down the silos and speed up communication, she proposed something wildly countercultural: instead of printing reports on sheets of paper, intelligence agencies ought to begin publishing their findings instantaneously and transmitting them over Intelink, the intelligence community’s classified internet. Her
If knowledge landed in the wrong hands, we would all be in jeopardy.
She continued advocating for an internet platform that would allow the CIA to transmit intelligence back and forth with other agencies like the FBI and NSA. Medina kept voicing her opinions, but no one listened.
three years after her flameout, she decided to speak up again in support of an online system for real-time, continuous reporting across agencies. Less than a decade later, Carmen Medina played an indispensable role in creating a platform called Intellipedia, an internal Wikipedia for intelligence agencies to access one another’s knowledge. It was so radically at odds with CIA norms that, in the words of one observer, “it was like being asked to promote vegetarianism in Texas.”
Within a few years, the site accrued over half a million registered users in the intelligence community, over a million pages, and 630 million page views—and won the Service to America Homeland Security Medal. “It’s hard to overstate what they did,” said one senior leader. “They made a major transformation almost overnight with no money after other programs failed to achieve these results with millions of dollars in funding.”
To land that position, she needed to learn to communicate differently—to speak up in ways that won credibility instead of losing it.
This chapter is about when to speak up and how to do it effectively without jeopardizing our careers and relationships. What are the right times to raise our voices, and what steps can we take to get heard?
Leaders and managers appreciate it when employees take the initiative to offer help, build networks, gather new knowledge, and seek feedback. But there’s one form of initiative that gets penalized: speaking up with suggestions.
the more frequently employees voiced ideas and concerns upward, the less likely they were to receive raises and promotions over a two-year period.
Neglect entails staying in the current situation but reducing your effort: doing just enough at work not to get fired, choosing new hobbies that keep you away from your spouse, or refusing to vote.
Middle-status conformity leads us to choose the safety of the tried-and-true over the danger of the original.
Agreeable people were happiest in the moments when they doled out compliments and praise, smiled and laughed with others, expressed affection, reassured others, and compromised or made concessions to please others.
Research shows that when managers have a track record of challenging the status quo, they tend to be more open to new ideas and less threatened by contributions from others. They care more about making the organization better than about defending it as it stands.
Dubinsky and Hawkins left Palm to found a new company, Handspring, in 1998. After merely a year, Handspring launched the Visor handheld computer, rapidly capturing a quarter of its market.
In some circumstances, leaving a stifling organization can be a better path to originality.
the mistakes we regret are not errors of commission, but errors of omission.
Dripping with anxiety, he reached for the telephone and pitched some ideas to an adviser in a room several floors below, who then raced up the stairs to discuss a speech that would change history.
“If it is a ten-minute speech it takes me all of two weeks to prepare it,”
In the self-help world, an entire cottage industry of resources is devoted to fighting procrastination.
When we have an original idea to invent a product or start a company, we’re encouraged to be the first mover.
surprisingly, as I’ve studied originals, I’ve learned that the advantages of acting quickly and being first
surprisingly, as I’ve studied originals, I’ve learned that the advantages of acting quickly and being first are often outweighed by the disadvantages.
I’ll discuss why procrastination can be as much of a virtue as a vice,
why older innovators sometimes outdo younger ones, and why the leaders who drive change effectively are those who wait patiently for the right moment.
You don’t have to be first to be an original, and the most successful originals don’t always arrive on schedule. They are fashionably late to the party.
when you put off a task, you buy yourself time to engage in divergent thinking rather than foreclosing on one particular idea.
Shin asked college students to write proposals for a business on a university campus to fill a lot vacated by a convenience store. When they started the task immediately, they tended to propose conventional ideas—like another convenience store.
Shin randomly assigned some of the participants to procrastinate, putting off the task to play computer games like Minesweeper, FreeCell, and Solitaire, they produced more novel business ideas, like a tutoring center and a storage facility.
The proposals from the procrastinators were 28 percent more creative.
When people played the games first, before learning about the task, they didn’t submit more novel proposals. To do that, they needed to actually be procrastinating while playing the games, keeping the business proposal task in the back of their minds.
Delaying progress enabled them to spend more time considering different ways to accomplish it, rather than “seizing and freezing” on one particular strategy.
Procrastination didn’t always fuel creativity: if the employees weren’t intrinsically motivated to solve a major problem, stalling just set them behind. But when they were passionate about coming up with new ideas, putting off the task led them to more creative solutions.
Employees who procrastinated regularly spent more time engaging in divergent thinking and were rated as significantly more creative by their supervisors.
In ancient Egypt, there were two different verbs for procrastination: one denoted laziness; the other meant waiting for the right time.
da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa on and off for a few years starting in 1503, left it unfinished, and didn’t complete it until close to his death in 1519.
Far from being a distraction—like many of his contemporaries thought—they represent a lifetime of productive brainstorming, a private working out of the ideas on which his more public work depended. . . .
Productive mediocrity requires discipline of an ordinary kind. It is safe and threatens no one. Nothing will be changed by mediocrity. . . . But genius is uncontrolled and uncontrollable.
Da Vinci spent about fifteen years developing the ideas for The Last Supper while working on a variety of other projects.
Vinci realized that originality could not be rushed. He noted that people of “genius sometimes accomplish most when they work the least, for they are thinking out inventions and forming in their minds the perfect idea.”
“In scientific work, ideas need time to mature,” and procrastination is one way to “restrain that urge to respond prematurely.”
Rockefeller paid for the note. Reminiscing
Jones to sign a promissory note; Rockefeller
Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik demonstrated that people have a better memory for incomplete than complete tasks. Once a task is finished, we stop thinking about it. But when it is interrupted and left undone, it stays active in our minds.
that the “dream” idea was not written into the speech at all. It didn’t appear in the draft by Jones, nor did King include it in his script.
King improvised, pushing his notes aside and launching into his inspiring vision of the future. “In front of all those people, cameras, and microphones,” Clarence Jones reflects, “Martin winged it.”
Donald MacKinnon discovered that the most creative architects in America tended to be more spontaneous than their technically skilled but unoriginal peers,
The CEOs who tended to delay work were more flexible and versatile—they were able to change their strategies to capitalize on new opportunities and defend against threats.
in American culture, people believe strongly in a first-mover advantage. We want to be leaders, not followers. Scientists rush to make discoveries ahead of their rivals;
Pioneers were about six times more likely to fail than settlers.
the downsides of being the first mover are frequently bigger than the upsides. On balance, studies suggest that pioneers may sometimes capture greater market share, but end up not only with lower chances of survival but lower profits as well.
One study of over three thousand startups indicates that roughly three out of every four fail because of premature scaling—making investments that the market isn’t yet ready to support.
“When ideas get really complicated, and when the world gets complicated, it’s foolish to think the person who’s first can work it all out,”
better suited to succeed. Risk seekers are drawn to being first, and they’re prone to making impulsive decisions.
“Nonconformists . . . that buck the trend are most likely to stay in the market, receive funding, and ultimately go public.”
The pioneers were first movers: the initial company to develop or sell a product. The settlers were slower to launch, waiting until the pioneers had created a market before entering
“Moving first is a tactic, not a goal,” Peter Thiel writes in Zero to One; “being the first mover doesn’t do you any good if someone else comes along and unseats you.”
When Warby Parker launched, e-commerce companies had been thriving for more than a decade, though other companies had tried selling glasses online with little success. “There’s no way it would have worked before,” Neil Blumenthal tells me. “We had to wait for Amazon, Zappos, and Blue Nile to get people comfortable buying products they
When Warby Parker launched, e-commerce companies had been thriving for more than a decade, though other companies had tried selling glasses online with little success. “There’s no way it would have worked before,” Neil Blumenthal tells me. “We had to wait for Amazon, Zappos, and Blue Nile to get people comfortable buying products they typically wouldn’t order online.”
If we all wait for others to act, nothing original will ever be created.
in the majority of circumstances, your odds of success aren’t higher if you go first. And when the market is uncertain, unknown, or underdeveloped, being a pioneer has pronounced disadvantages. The key lesson here is that if you have an original idea,
it’s a mistake to rush with the sole purpose of beating your competitors to the finish line.
Over the course of a person’s lifetime, is there a risk of waiting too long to act? The Two Life Cycles of Creativity: Young Geniuses and Old Masters
“People under 35 are the people who make change happen. People over 45 basically die in terms of new ideas.”
Tragically, innovators often do lose their originality over time.
“A person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of 30 will never do so.”
this decline isn’t inevitable. When companies run suggestion boxes, there is evidence that older employees tend to submit more ideas and higher-quality ideas than their younger colleagues, with the most valuable suggestions coming from employees older than fifty-five.
The time at which we reach our heights of originality, and how long they last, depends on our styles of thinking.
When Galenson studied creators, he discovered two radically different styles of innovation: conceptual and experimental. Conceptual
When Galenson studied creators, he discovered two radically different styles of innovation: conceptual and experimental. Conceptual innovators formulate a big idea and set out to execute it. Experimental innovators solve problems through trial and error, learning and evolving as they go along. They are at work on a particular problem, but they don’t have a specific solution in mind at the outset. Instead of planning in advance, they figure it out as they go. To paraphrase writer E. M. Forster, how can I know what I think until I see what I say? According to Galenson, conceptual innovators are sprinters, and experimental innovators are marathoners. When he studied economists who won the Nobel Prize, on average the conceptual innovators did their most influential work at forty-three, whereas the experimental innovators did theirs at sixty-one. When he analyzed the most often reproduced poems by famous poets, conceptual innovators authored their best works at twenty-eight, compared with age thirty-nine for experimental innovators. And in an independent study of every physicist who has
According to Galenson, conceptual innovators are sprinters, and experimental innovators are marathoners.
These fundamental differences between conceptual and experimental innovators explain why some originals peak early and others bloom late.
When he analyzed the most often reproduced poems by famous poets, conceptual innovators authored their best works at twenty-eight, compared with age thirty-nine for experimental innovators.
Conceptual innovation can be done quickly, because it doesn’t require years of methodical investigation.
The inability of . . . aging conceptual innovators to match the brilliant achievements of their youth is not a product of their depletion of a stock of some magical elixir of artistry. Instead, it is caused by the impact of accumulating experience. . . . The real enemies of conceptual innovators are the establishment of fixed habits of thought. . . . Conceptual innovators may become the captives of an important early achievement.
innovation can require years or decades to accumulate the requisite knowledge and skill, it becomes a more sustainable source of originality.
Conceptual innovators tend to generate original ideas early but risk copying themselves.
The experimental approach takes longer, but proves more renewable: instead of reproducing our past ideas, experiments enable
The experimental approach takes longer, but proves more renewable: instead of reproducing our past ideas, experiments enable us to continue discovering new ones.
Good things come to those who wait, and for experimentalists, it’s never too late to become original.
The more experiments you run, the less constrained you become by your ideas from the past.
Instead of getting mired in the tunnel vision of your imagination, by looking out into the world you improve the acuity of your peripheral vision.
We assume that common goals bind groups together, but the reality is that they often drive groups apart.
the concept of horizontal hostility.
When a deaf woman won the Miss America crown, instead of cheering her on as a trailblazer, deaf activists protested.
When a light-skinned black woman was appointed as a law professor at one university, its Black Students Association objected on the grounds that she wasn’t black enough.
A radical environmental activist dismissed the more mainstream Greenpeace as a “mindless monster motivated by eco-buck profits”
In one study, vegans and vegetarians evaluated members of their own groups and one another’s groups, relative to members of the general public. Vegans showed nearly three times as much prejudice toward vegetarians as vegetarians did toward vegans.
in Greece, members of the most conservative party judged the most similar party more unfavorably than they did a progressive party, and members of the most liberal party were much harsher toward the progressive party than toward even the most conservative party.
Orthodox Jews evaluated conservative Jewish women more negatively than Jewish women who didn’t practice or observe religious holidays at all.
they maintained their distance, working independently in some cases and at cross-purposes in others. With the women’s suffrage movement splintered, Lucy Stone needed new allies, as did Anthony and Stanton. They all found support in an unexpected place—the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), which had been formed to fight alcohol abuse, as drunken men often abused their wives and left their families in poverty. In contrast to the suffrage groups, the WCTU was heavily conservative. Its members tended to be middle- and upper-class women with strong religious beliefs and traditional values. Yet somehow, coalitions between the WCTU and suffragists sprang up in almost every state in the nation. The reasons for suffragists to partner with the WCTU were clear: the suffrage movement had stalled in influencing legislation, a surge of antisuffrage organizations was forming to work against them, and suffrage membership was dwindling.
In seeking alliances with groups that share our values, we overlook the importance of sharing our strategic tactics.
If you’ve spent the past decade taking part in protests and marches, it’s easy to feel a sense of shared identity and community with another organization that operates the same way. Lucy Stone recognized that common goals weren’t sufficient for a coalition to prosper, noting, “People will differ as to what they consider the best methods & means.”
young, visionary entrepreneur who found a surprising way to get naysayers to give her idea a chance.
In 2011, a college senior named Meredith Perry noticed that something very basic was wrong with technology. She didn’t need a cord to make phone calls or connect to the internet. Everything that used to be wired was now wireless . . . except for one thing. Sitting in her dorm room, she was still tethered to the wall by the most ancient component of her devices: the power that charged them.
she had a chicken-and-egg problem: she needed funding to build a prototype, but her idea was so radical that investors wanted to see a prototype first. As the solo founder of a technology startup, with no engineering background, she needed allies to move forward.
In a popular TED talk and book, Simon Sinek argues that if we want to inspire people, we should start with why. If we communicate the vision behind our ideas, the purpose guiding our products, people will flock to us. This is excellent advice—unless you’re doing something original that challenges the status quo. When people championing moral change explain their why, it runs the risk of clashing with deep-seated convictions. When creative non-conformists explain their why, it may violate common notions of what’s possible. Researchers Debra Meyerson and Maureen Scully have found that to succeed, originals must often become tempered radicals. They believe in values that depart from traditions and ideas that go against the grain, yet they learn to tone down their radicalism by presenting their beliefs and ideas in ways that are less shocking and more appealing to mainstream audiences. Meredith Perry is a tempered radical: she made an implausible idea plausible by obscuring its most extreme feature.
In a popular TED talk and book, Simon Sinek argues that if we want to inspire people, we should start with why.
When she couldn’t persuade technical experts to take a leap with her, she convinced them to take a few steps by masking her purpose.
when people with extreme political views were asked to explain the reasons behind their policy preferences, they stuck to their guns.
Explaining why gave them a chance to affirm their convictions. But when asked to explain how their preferred policies work, they became more moderate. Considering how led them to confront the gaps in their knowledge and realize that some of their extreme views were impractical.
To form alliances, originals can temper their radicalism by smuggling their real vision inside a Trojan horse.
“That’s when we threw the strike,” Steinman recalls. “Sir, the future is going to be about software, not hardware, and we need an entity of the U.S. Navy in Silicon Valley.”
afterward, the secretary of defense announced an embassy in Silicon Valley. Steinman leveraged what psychologist Robert Cialdini calls the foot-in-the-door technique, where you lead with a small request to secure an initial commitment before revealing the larger one.
By opening with a moderate ask instead of a radical one, Steinman gained allies.
Coalitions often fall apart when people refuse to moderate their radicalism.
Its fatal error, he argues, was naming the movement after the radical tactic of camping out, which few people find attractive. He believes that had the group simply relabeled itself “The 99 Percent,” it might still exist. The Occupy name “implied that the only way you could belong was if you dropped everything you were doing and started occupying something,”
Movements, which are always fighting uphill battles, need to draw in more casual participants if they are to succeed.” “The 99 Percent” is inclusive: it invites everyone to get involved and to use their own preferred tactics.
Woodhull, whose past included time as a prostitute and a charlatan healer, advocated for sexual freedom, proclaiming that she had an “inalienable, constitutional, and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can, to change that love every day if I please.”
for outsiders, the person who represents the group is the one with the most extreme views. That was Woodhull: her personal scandal overshadowed the suffrage cause and alienated many who were open to the relatively moderate idea of voting rights but not the more radical ideas of sexual independence for women.
“Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.”
research shows that we need to draw two independent axes: one for how positive a relationship is and a separate one for how negative the relationship is.
“It takes more emotional energy and coping resources to deal with individuals who are inconsistent.”
if a colleague consistently undermines you, you can keep your distance and expect the worst. But when you’re dealing with an ambivalent relationship, you’re constantly on guard, grappling with questions about when that person can actually be trusted.
focus on strengthening your ties with people who already support you.
Adam Grant is the perfect person to write Originals because he is one.
He is an informed optimist who offers insights and advice about how anyone—at home, at work, in the community—can make the world a better place.
Conventional wisdom holds that some people are innately creative, while most have few original thoughts. Some people are born to be leaders, and the rest are followers. Some people can have real impact, but the majority can’t. In Originals Adam shatters all of these assumptions.
He shows how we can become better parents by nurturing originality in our children and better managers by fostering diversity of thought instead of conformity.
I learned that great creators don’t necessarily have the deepest expertise but rather seek out the broadest perspectives.
I saw how success is not usually attained by being ahead of everyone else but by waiting patiently for the right time to act. And to my utter shock, I learned that procrastinating can be good.
In the deepest sense of the word, a friend is someone who sees more potential in you than you see in yourself, someone who helps you become the best version of yourself. The magic of this book is that Adam becomes that kind of friend to everyone who reads it. He offers a wealth of advice for overcoming doubt and fear, speaking up and pitching ideas,
Originals is one of the most important and captivating books I have ever read, full of surprising and powerful ideas. It will not only change the way you see the world; it might just change the way you live your life. And it could very well inspire you to change your world.
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” George Bernard Shaw
Luxottica, the 800-pound gorilla of the industry, controlled more than 80 percent of the eyewear market. To make glasses more affordable, the students would need to topple a giant. Having recently watched Zappos transform footwear by selling shoes online, they wondered
Luxottica, the 800-pound gorilla of the industry, controlled more than 80 percent of the eyewear market. To make glasses more affordable, the students would need to topple a giant. Having recently watched Zappos transform footwear by selling shoes online, they wondered if they could do the same with eyewear.
when GQ called them “the Netflix of eyewear,” they hit their target for the entire first year in less than a month, selling out so fast that they had to put twenty thousand customers on a waiting list.
Back in 2009, one of the founders pitched the company to me, offering me the chance to invest in Warby Parker. I declined. It was the worst financial decision I’ve ever made, and I needed to understand where I went wrong.
Originality itself starts with creativity: generating a concept that is both novel and useful. But it doesn’t stop there. Originals are people who take the initiative to make their visions a reality.
he suspected that their employment histories would contain telltale signs about their commitment. He thought that people with a history of job-hopping would quit sooner, but they didn’t: Employees who had held five jobs in the past five years weren’t any more likely to leave their positions than those who had stayed in the same job for five years.
He didn’t expect to find any correlation, assuming that browser preference was purely a matter of taste. But when he looked at the results, he was stunned: Employees who used Firefox or Chrome to browse the Web remained in their jobs 15 percent longer than those who used Internet Explorer or Safari.
The Firefox and Chrome users had significantly higher sales, and their call times were shorter. Their customers were happier, too: After 90 days on the job, the Firefox and Chrome users had customer satisfaction levels that Internet Explorer and Safari users reached only after 120 days at work.
Why are the Firefox and Chrome users more committed and better performers on every metric? The obvious answer was that they’re more tech savvy,
The employees had all taken a computer proficiency test, which assessed their knowledge of keyboard shortcuts, software programs, and hardware, as well as a timed test of their typing speed.
What made the difference was how they obtained the browser. If you own a PC, Internet Explorer is built into Windows. If you’re a Mac user, your computer came preinstalled with Safari. Almost two thirds of the customer service agents used the default browser, never questioning whether a better one was available. To get Firefox or Chrome, you have to demonstrate some resourcefulness and download a different browser. Instead of accepting the default, you take a bit of initiative to seek out an option that might be better.
The employees who took the initiative to change their browsers to Firefox or Chrome approached their jobs differently. They looked for novel ways of selling to customers and addressing their concerns. When they encountered a situation they didn’t like, they fixed it.
We live in an Internet Explorer world. Just as almost two thirds of the customer service reps used the default browser on their computers, many of us accept the defaults in our own lives. In a series of provocative studies, a team led by political psychologist John Jost explored how people responded to undesirable default conditions.
“People who suffer the most from a given state of affairs are paradoxically the least likely to question, challenge, reject, or change it.”
In one study, they tracked Democratic and Republican voters before the 2000 U.S. presidential election. When George W. Bush gained in the polls, Republicans rated him as more desirable, but so did Democrats, who were already preparing justifications for the anticipated status quo.
same happened when Al Gore’s likelihood of success increased: Both Republicans and Democrats judged him more favorably. Regardless of political ideologies, when a candidate seemed destined to win, people liked him more.
Vuja de is the reverse—we face something familiar, but we see it with a fresh perspective that enables us to gain new insights into old problems.
Dave wondered why glasses had such a hefty price tag. Why did such a fundamentally simple product cost more than a complex smartphone? Anyone could have asked those questions and arrived at the same answer that the Warby Parker squad did.
it was dominated by Luxottica, a European company that had raked in over $7 billion the previous year. “Understanding that the same company owned LensCrafters and Pearle Vision, Ray-Ban and Oakley, and the licenses for Chanel and Prada prescription frames and sunglasses—all of a sudden, it made sense to me why glasses were so expensive,”
Before women gained the right to vote in America, many “had never before considered their degraded status as anything but natural,”
As the suffrage movement gained momentum, “a growing number of women were beginning to see that custom, religious precept, and law were in fact man-made and therefore reversible.”
play magnificent Mozart melodies and beautiful Beethoven symphonies,
We assume that what gifted kids have in book smarts, they lack in street smarts. While they have the intellectual chops, they must lack the social, emotional, and practical skills to function in society. When you look at the evidence, though, this explanation falls short: Less than a quarter of gifted children suffer from social and emotional problems. The vast majority are well-adjusted—as delightful at a cocktail party as in a spelling bee.
Research demonstrates that it is the most creative children who are the least likely to become the teacher’s pet.
In one study, elementary school teachers listed their favorite and least favorite students, and then rated both groups on a list of characteristics. 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.
The more you value achievement, the more you come to dread failure. Instead of aiming for unique accomplishments, the intense desire to succeed leads us to strive for guaranteed success.
As psychologists Todd Lubart and Robert Sternberg put it, “Once people pass an intermediate level in the need to achieve, there is evidence that they actually become less creative.”
When the pope commissioned him to paint a fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo wasn’t interested. He viewed himself as a sculptor, not a painter, and found the task so overwhelming that he fled to Florence. Two years would pass before he began work on the project, at the pope’s insistence.
And astronomy stagnated for decades because Nicolaus Copernicus refused to publish his original discovery that the earth revolves around the sun. Fearing rejection and ridicule, he stayed silent for twenty-two years, circulating his findings only to his friends. Eventually, a major cardinal learned of his work and wrote a letter encouraging Copernicus to publish it.
Almost half a millennium later, when an angel investor offered $250,000 to Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak to bankroll Apple in 1977, it came with an ultimatum: Wozniak would have to leave Hewlett-Packard. He refused. “I still intended to be at that company forever,” Wozniak reflects. “My psychological block was really that I didn’t want to start a company. Because I was just afraid,” he admits. Wozniak changed his mind only after being encouraged by Jobs, multiple friends, and his own parents.
originality is an act of creative destruction. Advocating for new systems often requires demolishing the old way of doing things, and we hold back for fear of rocking the boat.
When employees in consulting, financial services, media, pharmaceuticals, and advertising companies were interviewed, 85 percent admitted to keeping quiet about an important concern rather than voicing it to their bosses.
what did you do with it? Although America is a land of individuality and unique self-expression, in
Although America is a land of individuality and unique self-expression, in search of excellence and in fear of failure, most of us opt to fit in rather than stand out.
“On matters of style, swim with the current,” Thomas Jefferson allegedly advised, but “on matters of principle, stand like a rock.”
The word entrepreneur, as it was coined by economist Richard Cantillon, literally means “bearer of risk.”
I declined to invest in Warby Parker because Neil and his friends were too much like me. I became a professor because I was passionate about discovering new insights, sharing knowledge, and teaching the next generations of students. But in my most honest moments, I know that I was also drawn to the security of tenure. I would never have had the confidence to start a business in my twenties. If I had, I certainly would have stayed in school and lined up a job to cover my bases.
They didn’t have enough skin in the game. In my mind, they were destined to fail because they played it safe instead of betting the farm. But in fact, this is exactly why they succeeded.
When people start a business, are they better off keeping or quitting their day jobs? From 1994 until 2008, they tracked a nationally representative group of over five thousand Americans in their twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties who became entrepreneurs. Whether these founders kept or left their day jobs wasn’t influenced by financial need; individuals with high family income or high salaries weren’t any more or less likely to quit and become full-time entrepreneurs.
“We almost didn’t start Google,” Page says, because we “were too worried about dropping out of our Ph.D. program.” In 1997, concerned that their fledgling search engine was distracting them from their research, they tried to sell Google for less than $2 million in cash and stock.
Grammy winner John Legend released his first album in 2000 but kept working as a management consultant until 2002, preparing PowerPoint presentations by day while performing at night.
T. S. Eliot’s landmark work, The Waste Land, has been hailed as one of the twentieth century’s most significant poems. But after publishing it in 1922, Eliot kept his London bank job until 1925, rejecting the idea of embracing professional risk. As the novelist Aldous Huxley noted after paying him an office visit, Eliot was “the most bank-clerky of all bank clerks.” When he finally did leave the position, Eliot still didn’t strike out on his own. He spent the next forty years working for a publishing house to provide stability in his life, writing poetry on the side. As
Common sense suggests that creative accomplishments can’t flourish without big windows of time and energy, and companies can’t thrive without intensive effort.
By covering our bases financially, we escape the pressure to publish half-baked books, sell shoddy art, or launch untested businesses.
When Pierre Omidyar built eBay, it was just a hobby; he kept working as a programmer for the next nine months, only leaving after his online marketplace was netting him more money than his job.
successful originals take extreme risks in one arena and offset them with extreme caution in another. At age twenty-seven, Sara Blakely generated the novel idea of creating footless pantyhose, taking
successful originals take extreme risks in one arena and offset them with extreme caution in another.
evidence shows that having co-CEOs elicits positive market reactions and increases firm valuation.
To make customers more comfortable with the unfamiliar concept of ordering eyewear over the internet, they decided to offer free returns.
After discussing the problem at length, the team came up with a solution—a free home try-on program. Customers could order the frames alone without any financial commitment, and simply send them back if they didn’t like the feel or look. This would actually be less costly than free returns. If a customer bought the frames with lenses and then returned them, Warby Parker would lose a lot of money, as the lenses were unique to the customer. But if customers tried on only the frames and returned them, the company could reuse them.
In one representative study of over eight hundred Americans, entrepreneurs and employed adults were asked to choose which of the following three ventures they would prefer to start:
One that made $1.25 million in profit with an 80 percent chance of success
One that made $5 million in profit with a 20 percent chance of success
“We find that entrepreneurs are significantly more risk-averse than the general population,” the authors conclude. These are just preferences on a survey, but when you track entrepreneurs’ real-world behavior, it’s clear that they avoid dangerous risks.
Economists find that as teenagers, successful entrepreneurs were nearly three times as likely as their peers to break rules and engage in illicit activities.
productive companies were only taking calculated risks.
Across all three studies, the people who become successful entrepreneurs were more likely to have teenage histories of defying their parents, staying out past their curfews, skipping school, shoplifting, gambling, drinking alcohol, and smoking marijuana. They were not, however, more likely to engage in hazardous activities like driving drunk, buying illegal drugs, or stealing valuables.
To become original, you have to try something new, which means accepting some measure of risk. But the most successful originals are not the daredevils who leap before they look. They are the ones who reluctantly tiptoe to the edge of a cliff, calculate the rate of descent, triple-check their parachutes, and set up a safety net at the bottom just in case.
“Many entrepreneurs take plenty of risks—but those are generally the failed entrepreneurs, not the success stories.”
jobs are not static sculptures, but flexible building blocks. We gave them examples of people becoming the architects of their own jobs, customizing their tasks and relationships to better align with their interests, skills, and values—like an artistic salesperson volunteering to design a new logo and an outgoing financial analyst communicating with clients using video chat instead of email.
they looked at their familiar jobs in an unfamiliar way: vuja de.
I’ll start with the dilemma of timing: It turns out that you should be wary of being the first mover, because it’s often riskier to act early than late. Unexpectedly, some of the greatest creative achievements and change initiatives in history have their roots in procrastination, and the tendency to delay and postpone can help
the women’s suffrage movement will illustrate why enemies make better allies than frenemies, and shared values can divide rather than unite.
I’ll close with reflections on the emotions that hold us back from pursuing originality.
group of twentysomethings who toppled a tyrant and a lawyer who fought climate change by swimming the North Pole.
pessimism is sometimes more energizing than optimism.
niche markets. That product was the Segway,
When we bemoan the lack of originality in the world, we blame it on the absence of creativity.
in reality, the biggest barrier to originality is not idea generation—it’s idea selection.
The Segway was a false positive: it was forecast as a hit but turned out to be a miss. Seinfeld was a false negative: it was expected to fail but ultimately flourished.
sixteen, he took it upon himself to redesign a museum’s lighting system—and only then sought the chairman’s permission to implement
At sixteen, he took it upon himself to redesign a museum’s lighting system—and only then sought the chairman’s permission to implement it.
The Segway was the most extraordinary technology he had ever created, and Kamen predicted that it would “be to the car what the car was to the horse and buggy.”
Twitter, Google+, and email, and received a ten-cent
Social scientists have long known that we tend to be overconfident when we evaluate ourselves. Here are some highlights of their findings:
High school seniors: 70 percent report that they have “above average” leadership skills, compared with 2 percent “below average”;
High school seniors: 70 percent report that they have “above average” leadership skills, compared with 2 percent “below average”; in the ability to get along with others, 25 percent rate themselves in the top 1 percent, and 60 percent put themselves in the top 10 percent.
After spending his career studying creative productivity, psychologist Dean Simonton has found that even geniuses have trouble recognizing when they have a hit on their hands. In music, Beethoven was known as a perceptive self-critic, yet as Simonton observes, “Beethoven’s own favorites among his symphonies, sonatas, and quartets are not those most frequently performed and recorded by posterity.”
In the same five-year window that Shakespeare produced three of his five most popular works—Macbeth, King Lear, and Othello—he also churned out the comparatively average Timon of Athens and All’s Well That Ends Well, both of which rank among the worst of his plays and have been consistently slammed for unpolished prose and incomplete plot and character development.
In fact, when it comes to idea generation, quantity is the most predictable path to quality. “Original thinkers,” Stanford professor Robert Sutton notes, “will come up with many ideas that are strange mutations, dead ends, and utter failures. The cost is worthwhile because they also generate a larger pool of ideas—especially novel ideas.”
It’s widely assumed that there’s a tradeoff between quantity and quality—if you want to do better work, you have to do less of it—but this turns out to be false.
Many people fail to achieve originality because they generate a few ideas and then obsess about refining them to perfection.
Upworthy’s rule is that you need to generate at least twenty-five headline ideas to strike gold. Backtracking studies show that wizards do sometimes come up with novel ideas early in the creative process.
for the rest of us, our first ideas are often the most conventional—the closest to the default that already exists. It’s only after we’ve ruled out the obvious that we have the greatest freedom to consider the more remote possibilities. “Once you start getting desperate, you start thinking outside the box,” the Upworthy team writes.
While working on the Segway, Dean Kamen was aware of the blind variations that mark the creative process. With more than 440 patents to his name, he had plenty of misses as well as hits. “You gotta kiss a lot of frogs,” he often told his team, “before you find a prince.”
Put a lot of ideas out there and see which ones are praised and adopted by your target audience. After spending decades creating comedy, The Daily Show cocreator Lizz Winstead still doesn’t know what will make people laugh. She recalls that she was “desperately trying to figure out jokes, writing them out, and trying them on stage.” Some of them sizzled; others popped. Now, with social media, she has a more rapid feedback mechanism.
Managers tend to be too risk averse: they focus on the costs of investing in bad ideas rather than the benefits of piloting good ones, which leads them to commit a large number of false negatives.
The annals of corporate innovation are filled with tales of managers ordering employees to stop working on projects that turned out to be big hits, from Nichia’s invention of LED lighting to Pontiac’s Fiero car to HP’s electrostatic displays. The Xbox was almost buried at Microsoft; the laser printer was nearly canceled at Xerox for being expensive and impractical. In the face of uncertainty, our first instinct is often to reject novelty, looking for reasons why unfamiliar concepts might fail. When managers vet novel ideas, they’re in an evaluative mindset.
When publishing executives passed on Harry Potter, they said it was too long for a children’s book; when Brandon Tartikoff saw the Seinfeld pilot, he felt it was “too Jewish” and “too New York” to appeal to a wide audience.
In principle, audiences should be more open to novelty than managers. They don’t have the blinders associated with expertise, and they have little to lose by considering a fresh format and expressing enthusiasm for an unusual idea.
Justin Berg finds that test audiences are no better than managers at predicting the success of new ideas: focus groups are effectively set up to make the same mistakes as managers.
“The truth is, most pilots don’t test well,” Warren Littlefield observes, because “audiences do not respond well to things that are new or different.” Audiences don’t have enough experience: they simply haven’t seen a lot of the novel ideas that landed on the cutting-room floor.
neither test audiences nor managers are ideal judges of creative ideas. They’re too prone to false negatives; they focus too much on reasons to reject an idea and stick too closely to existing prototypes.
creators struggle as well, because they’re too positive about their own ideas. But there is one group of forecasters that does come close to attaining mastery: fellow creators evaluating one another’s ideas.
When artists assessed one another’s performances, they were about twice as accurate as managers and test audiences in predicting how often the videos would be shared.
When we evaluate new ideas, we can become better at avoiding false negatives by thinking more like creators.
Berg asked over a thousand adults to make forecasts about the success of novel products in the marketplace. Some were ideas that might be useful—a 3-D image projector, a flooring system that simulates natural ground, and an automatic bed-maker. Others were less practical, like an electrified tablecloth to prevent ants from ruining a picnic. The rest were conventional ideas that varied in usefulness, from a portable container for steaming food in a microwave to a hands-free system for carrying towels.
Berg wanted to boost the chances that people would correctly rank a novel, useful idea first, as opposed to favoring conventional ideas. He randomly assigned half of the participants to think like managers by spending six minutes making a list of three criteria for evaluating the success of new products.
Ludwin says. Jerry Seinfeld would go on to remark that an order of six episodes “is like a slap in the face.” NBC ordered just four.
“If you’re gonna make connections which are innovative,” Steve Jobs said back in 1982, “you have to not have the same bag of experience as everyone else does.”
“Being around comedy writers is like going to a baseball fantasy camp. You think you’re really good, until you get up to bat,” he reminisces. “Not only can’t you hit the ball; you can’t even see the ball. I knew I was not in their league, but I at least spoke the same language.”
ways of delivering it. Instead of narrowly scrutinizing
The time I spent reading Saturday Night Live scripts made me more open to the offbeat storylines that are now legendary on Seinfeld.
One of the best things that I had going for me was the fact that I had never developed a primetime situation comedy, but I was accustomed to offbeat, off-kilter ideas.
recent study comparing every Nobel Prize–winning scientist from 1901 to 2005 with typical scientists of the same era, both groups attained deep expertise in their respective fields of study. But the Nobel Prize winners were dramatically more likely to be involved in the arts than less accomplished scientists.
Writing: poetry, plays, novels, short stories, essays, popular books  12x greater  Performing: amateur actor, dancer, magician  22x
Writing: poetry, plays, novels, short stories, essays, popular books  12x greater  Performing: amateur actor, dancer, magician  22x greaterÂ
People who started businesses and contributed to patent applications were more likely than their peers to have leisure time hobbies that involved drawing, painting, architecture, sculpture, and literature.
First, time living abroad didn’t matter: it was time working abroad, being actively engaged in design in a foreign country, that predicted whether their new collections were hits.
The most original collections came from directors who had worked in two or three different countries. Second, the more the foreign culture differed from that of their native land, the more that experience contributed to the directors’ creativity.
The third and most important factor was depth—the amount of time spent working abroad. A short stint did little good, because directors weren’t there long enough to internalize the new ideas from the foreign culture and synthesize them with their old perspectives. The
The Hazards of Intuition: Where Steve Jobs Went Wrong The first time Steve Jobs stepped on a Segway, he refused to climb
The Hazards of Intuition: Where Steve Jobs Went Wrong The first time Steve Jobs stepped on a Segway, he refused to climb off.
Steve Jobs was famous for making big bets based on intuition rather than systematic analysis.
If you’re the proud owner of several designer handbags, the less time you have to inspect them, the more accurate your judgments.
When you’ve spent years studying handbags, intuition can beat analysis, because your unconscious mind excels at pattern recognition.
When Steve Jobs had a gut feeling that the Segway would change the world, he was seduced by an impulsive attraction to its novelty rather than a careful examination of its usefulness.
And because the pace of change is accelerating, our environments are becoming ever more unpredictable. This makes intuition less reliable as a source of insight about new ideas and places a growing premium on analysis. Given that Jobs
And because the pace of change is accelerating, our environments are becoming ever more unpredictable. This makes intuition less reliable as a source of insight about new ideas and places a growing premium on analysis.
The more successful people have been in the past, the worse they perform when they enter a new environment. They become overconfident, and they’re less likely to seek critical feedback even though the context is radically different.
As Daniel Kahneman explains in Thinking, Fast and Slow, intuition operates rapidly, based on hot emotions, whereas reason is a slower, cooler process. Intuitive investors are susceptible to getting caught up in an entrepreneur’s enthusiasm; analytical investors are more
As Daniel Kahneman explains in Thinking, Fast and Slow, intuition operates rapidly, based on hot emotions, whereas reason is a slower, cooler process. Intuitive investors are susceptible to getting caught up in an entrepreneur’s enthusiasm; analytical investors are more likely to focus on the facts and make cold judgments about the viability of the business.
For example, research shows that extraverts tend to be more expressive than introverts, which means that they display more passion.
If we want to improve our idea selection skills, we shouldn’t look at whether people have been successful. We need to track how they’ve been successful.
Bill Sahlman adds: “It’s never the idea; it’s always the execution.”
Dave, had lost his glasses while spending several months traveling abroad with no phone. When he came back to the United States, the need to buy a phone and glasses at the same time gave him a fresh perspective.
Neil Blumenthal didn’t wear glasses, but he had spent the past five years working at a nonprofit that trained women to start businesses in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
The product that he taught women to sell was eyeglasses. That gave him the necessary depth of knowledge in the optical industry: he knew that glasses could be manufactured, designed, and sold at a lower cost. And having spent time outside the conventional eyeglass channels, he had the breadth to adopt a fresh approach. “It’s rare that originality comes from insiders,”
As an investor, you’ll be able to see more clearly, but you’ll still be making one-eyed gambles. Instead of banking on a single idea, your wisest move might be to bet on a whole portfolio of Kamen’s creations.
The chances that any one of these inventions will change the world are tiny.
a high-flying CIA analyst named Carmen Medina went to Western Europe on a three-year assignment. When she returned to the United States, she found that leaving the country had set her career back. After getting stuck with one job after another that didn’t fit her skills and aspirations, she searched for another way to contribute.
She began attending working groups about the future of intelligence. During the course of her career at the CIA, Medina recognized a fundamental problem with communication in the intelligence community.
Analysts had no way of sharing insights as they emerged. Since knowledge was evolving constantly, it took too long for critical information to land in the right hands.
To break down the silos and speed up communication, she proposed something wildly countercultural: instead of printing reports on sheets of paper, intelligence agencies ought to begin publishing their findings instantaneously and transmitting them over Intelink, the intelligence community’s classified internet. Her
If knowledge landed in the wrong hands, we would all be in jeopardy.
She continued advocating for an internet platform that would allow the CIA to transmit intelligence back and forth with other agencies like the FBI and NSA. Medina kept voicing her opinions, but no one listened.
three years after her flameout, she decided to speak up again in support of an online system for real-time, continuous reporting across agencies. Less than a decade later, Carmen Medina played an indispensable role in creating a platform called Intellipedia, an internal Wikipedia for intelligence agencies to access one another’s knowledge. It was so radically at odds with CIA norms that, in the words of one observer, “it was like being asked to promote vegetarianism in Texas.”
Within a few years, the site accrued over half a million registered users in the intelligence community, over a million pages, and 630 million page views—and won the Service to America Homeland Security Medal. “It’s hard to overstate what they did,” said one senior leader. “They made a major transformation almost overnight with no money after other programs failed to achieve these results with millions of dollars in funding.”
To land that position, she needed to learn to communicate differently—to speak up in ways that won credibility instead of losing it.
This chapter is about when to speak up and how to do it effectively without jeopardizing our careers and relationships. What are the right times to raise our voices, and what steps can we take to get heard?
Leaders and managers appreciate it when employees take the initiative to offer help, build networks, gather new knowledge, and seek feedback. But there’s one form of initiative that gets penalized: speaking up with suggestions.
the more frequently employees voiced ideas and concerns upward, the less likely they were to receive raises and promotions over a two-year period.
why the photos we like of ourselves are the opposite of the ones we prefer of our friends.
In an experiment led by University of North Carolina professor Alison Fragale, people were punished for trying to exercise power without status.
When we’re trying to influence others and we discover that they don’t respect us, it fuels a vicious cycle of resentment. In an effort to assert our own authority, we respond by resorting to increasingly disrespectful behaviors.
Medina didn’t put her career on the line by attempting to attack the system from below. Instead, she aimed to earn status by becoming part of the system and then changing it from within.
Her primary role was to keep knowledge safe. “That’s not something I would have normally gone for—it was a very conservative thing,” she remembers.
Intellipedia, a classified variation on Wikipedia that would be accessible across the intelligence community.
Babble was supposed to be a parenting website, but 40 percent of the posts were about celebrities. And the back end of the website was in sore need of retooling. Disney ended up buying the company for $40 million. This is called the Sarick Effect, named after the social
when you’re pitching a novel idea or speaking up with a suggestion for change, your audience is likely to be skeptical.
for at least four reasons, it’s actually more effective to adopt Griscom’s form of powerless communication by accentuating the flaws in your idea.
leading with weaknesses disarms the audience.
In the early days of Babble, when Griscom presented at the first two board meetings, he talked about everything that was going right with the business, hoping to excite the board about the company’s momentum and potential.
“Every time I would say something emphasizing the upside, I would get skeptical responses,”
Everyone is allergic to the feeling, or suspicious of being sold.”
People think an amateur can appreciate art, but it takes a professional to critique it. Merely changing a handful of words from positive to negative—inspired to uninspired,
One group is tasked with writing three good things about their lives; another group has to list twelve good things. Everyone expects the twelve group to be happier: the more blessings you count, the better you should feel about your circumstances. But most of the time, the opposite is true.
We’re happier after we list three good things than twelve.
Psychologist Norbert Schwarz has shown that the easier it is to think of something, the more common and important we assume it is. We use ease of retrieval as information. It’s a cinch for executives to come up with three good things about their lives. They immediately list their love of their children, their spouses, and their jobs. Since it was a breeze to generate a few positives, they infer that their lives are pretty darn good. It’s noticeably harder to name twelve good things about their lives. After covering family and work, executives often mention their friends and then ask if they can count each one separately. Having struggled
Psychologist Norbert Schwarz has shown that the easier it is to think of something, the more common and important we assume it is.
Psychologist Norbert Schwarz has shown that the easier it is to think of something, the more common and important we assume it is. We use ease of retrieval as information. It’s a cinch for executives to come up with three good things about their lives. They immediately list their love of their children, their spouses, and their jobs. Since it was a breeze to generate a few positives, they infer that their lives are pretty darn good. It’s noticeably harder to name twelve good things about their lives. After covering family and work, executives often mention their friends and then ask if they can count each one separately. Having struggled to come up with a dozen good
Psychologist Norbert Schwarz has shown that the easier it is to think of something, the more common and important we assume it
It’s a cinch for executives to come up with three good things about their lives. They immediately list their love of their children, their spouses, and their jobs.
“When I led with the factors that could kill the company, the response from the board was the exact opposite: oh, these things aren’t so bad. Newton’s third law can be true in human dynamics as well: every action has an equal and opposite reaction.”
He turned out to be right—but most of the time, we’re overconfident in our predictions. Why?
When you present a new suggestion, you’re not only hearing the tune in your head. You wrote the song. You’ve spent hours, days, weeks, months, or maybe even years thinking about the idea. You’ve contemplated the problem, formulated the solution, and rehearsed the vision.
the core challenge of speaking up with an original idea.
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.
If we want people to accept our original ideas, we need to speak up about them, then rinse and repeat.
which of these two words do you like better? iktitaf    sarick If you’re like most people, you’ll choose sarick over iktitaf. But it has nothing to do with the word itself.
Robert Zajonc called it the mere exposure effect: the more often we encounter something, the more we like it. When he showed people the nonsense words iktitaf and sarick for the first time, the two words tested as equally appealing.
The mere exposure effect has been replicated many times—the more familiar a face, letter, number, sound, flavor, brand, or Chinese character becomes, the more we like it.
“Familiarity doesn’t breed contempt,” says serial entrepreneur Howard Tullman. “It breeds comfort.”
exposure increases the ease of processing. An unfamiliar idea requires more effort to understand. The more we see, hear, and touch it, the more comfortable we become with it,
Overall, the evidence suggests that liking continues to increase as people are exposed to an idea between ten and twenty times,
It’s also best to introduce a delay between the presentation of the idea and the evaluation of it, which provides time for it to sink in.
Whether you’re unhappy with your job, your marriage, or your government, decades of research show that you have a choice between exit, voice, persistence, and neglect. Exit means removing yourself from the situation altogether: quitting a miserable job, ending an abusive marriage, or leaving an oppressive country.
Neglect entails staying in the current situation but reducing your effort: doing just enough at work not to get fired, choosing new hobbies that keep you away from your spouse, or refusing to vote.
Middle-status conformity leads us to choose the safety of the tried-and-true over the danger of the original.
Agreeable people were happiest in the moments when they doled out compliments and praise, smiled and laughed with others, expressed affection, reassured others, and compromised or made concessions to please others.
Research shows that when managers have a track record of challenging the status quo, they tend to be more open to new ideas and less threatened by contributions from others. They care more about making the organization better than about defending it as it stands.
Dubinsky and Hawkins left Palm to found a new company, Handspring, in 1998. After merely a year, Handspring launched the Visor handheld computer, rapidly capturing a quarter of its market.
In some circumstances, leaving a stifling organization can be a better path to originality.
the mistakes we regret are not errors of commission, but errors of omission.
Dripping with anxiety, he reached for the telephone and pitched some ideas to an adviser in a room several floors below, who then raced up the stairs to discuss a speech that would change history.
“If it is a ten-minute speech it takes me all of two weeks to prepare it,”
In the self-help world, an entire cottage industry of resources is devoted to fighting procrastination.
When we have an original idea to invent a product or start a company, we’re encouraged to be the first mover.
surprisingly, as I’ve studied originals, I’ve learned that the advantages of acting quickly and being first
surprisingly, as I’ve studied originals, I’ve learned that the advantages of acting quickly and being first are often outweighed by the disadvantages.
I’ll discuss why procrastination can be as much of a virtue as a vice,
why older innovators sometimes outdo younger ones, and why the leaders who drive change effectively are those who wait patiently for the right moment.
You don’t have to be first to be an original, and the most successful originals don’t always arrive on schedule. They are fashionably late to the party.
when you put off a task, you buy yourself time to engage in divergent thinking rather than foreclosing on one particular idea.
Shin asked college students to write proposals for a business on a university campus to fill a lot vacated by a convenience store. When they started the task immediately, they tended to propose conventional ideas—like another convenience store.
Shin randomly assigned some of the participants to procrastinate, putting off the task to play computer games like Minesweeper, FreeCell, and Solitaire, they produced more novel business ideas, like a tutoring center and a storage facility.
The proposals from the procrastinators were 28 percent more creative.
When people played the games first, before learning about the task, they didn’t submit more novel proposals. To do that, they needed to actually be procrastinating while playing the games, keeping the business proposal task in the back of their minds.
Delaying progress enabled them to spend more time considering different ways to accomplish it, rather than “seizing and freezing” on one particular strategy.
Procrastination didn’t always fuel creativity: if the employees weren’t intrinsically motivated to solve a major problem, stalling just set them behind. But when they were passionate about coming up with new ideas, putting off the task led them to more creative solutions.
Employees who procrastinated regularly spent more time engaging in divergent thinking and were rated as significantly more creative by their supervisors.
In ancient Egypt, there were two different verbs for procrastination: one denoted laziness; the other meant waiting for the right time.
da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa on and off for a few years starting in 1503, left it unfinished, and didn’t complete it until close to his death in 1519.
Far from being a distraction—like many of his contemporaries thought—they represent a lifetime of productive brainstorming, a private working out of the ideas on which his more public work depended. . . .
Productive mediocrity requires discipline of an ordinary kind. It is safe and threatens no one. Nothing will be changed by mediocrity. . . . But genius is uncontrolled and uncontrollable.
Da Vinci spent about fifteen years developing the ideas for The Last Supper while working on a variety of other projects.
Vinci realized that originality could not be rushed. He noted that people of “genius sometimes accomplish most when they work the least, for they are thinking out inventions and forming in their minds the perfect idea.”
“In scientific work, ideas need time to mature,” and procrastination is one way to “restrain that urge to respond prematurely.”
Rockefeller paid for the note. Reminiscing
Jones to sign a promissory note; Rockefeller
Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik demonstrated that people have a better memory for incomplete than complete tasks. Once a task is finished, we stop thinking about it. But when it is interrupted and left undone, it stays active in our minds.
that the “dream” idea was not written into the speech at all. It didn’t appear in the draft by Jones, nor did King include it in his script.
King improvised, pushing his notes aside and launching into his inspiring vision of the future. “In front of all those people, cameras, and microphones,” Clarence Jones reflects, “Martin winged it.”
Donald MacKinnon discovered that the most creative architects in America tended to be more spontaneous than their technically skilled but unoriginal peers,
The CEOs who tended to delay work were more flexible and versatile—they were able to change their strategies to capitalize on new opportunities and defend against threats.
in American culture, people believe strongly in a first-mover advantage. We want to be leaders, not followers. Scientists rush to make discoveries ahead of their rivals;
Pioneers were about six times more likely to fail than settlers.
the downsides of being the first mover are frequently bigger than the upsides. On balance, studies suggest that pioneers may sometimes capture greater market share, but end up not only with lower chances of survival but lower profits as well.
One study of over three thousand startups indicates that roughly three out of every four fail because of premature scaling—making investments that the market isn’t yet ready to support.
“When ideas get really complicated, and when the world gets complicated, it’s foolish to think the person who’s first can work it all out,”
better suited to succeed. Risk seekers are drawn to being first, and they’re prone to making impulsive decisions.
“Nonconformists . . . that buck the trend are most likely to stay in the market, receive funding, and ultimately go public.”
The pioneers were first movers: the initial company to develop or sell a product. The settlers were slower to launch, waiting until the pioneers had created a market before entering
“Moving first is a tactic, not a goal,” Peter Thiel writes in Zero to One; “being the first mover doesn’t do you any good if someone else comes along and unseats you.”
When Warby Parker launched, e-commerce companies had been thriving for more than a decade, though other companies had tried selling glasses online with little success. “There’s no way it would have worked before,” Neil Blumenthal tells me. “We had to wait for Amazon, Zappos, and Blue Nile to get people comfortable buying products they
When Warby Parker launched, e-commerce companies had been thriving for more than a decade, though other companies had tried selling glasses online with little success. “There’s no way it would have worked before,” Neil Blumenthal tells me. “We had to wait for Amazon, Zappos, and Blue Nile to get people comfortable buying products they typically wouldn’t order online.”
If we all wait for others to act, nothing original will ever be created.
in the majority of circumstances, your odds of success aren’t higher if you go first. And when the market is uncertain, unknown, or underdeveloped, being a pioneer has pronounced disadvantages. The key lesson here is that if you have an original idea,
it’s a mistake to rush with the sole purpose of beating your competitors to the finish line.
Over the course of a person’s lifetime, is there a risk of waiting too long to act? The Two Life Cycles of Creativity: Young Geniuses and Old Masters
“People under 35 are the people who make change happen. People over 45 basically die in terms of new ideas.”
Tragically, innovators often do lose their originality over time.
“A person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of 30 will never do so.”
this decline isn’t inevitable. When companies run suggestion boxes, there is evidence that older employees tend to submit more ideas and higher-quality ideas than their younger colleagues, with the most valuable suggestions coming from employees older than fifty-five.
The time at which we reach our heights of originality, and how long they last, depends on our styles of thinking.
When Galenson studied creators, he discovered two radically different styles of innovation: conceptual and experimental. Conceptual
When Galenson studied creators, he discovered two radically different styles of innovation: conceptual and experimental. Conceptual innovators formulate a big idea and set out to execute it. Experimental innovators solve problems through trial and error, learning and evolving as they go along. They are at work on a particular problem, but they don’t have a specific solution in mind at the outset. Instead of planning in advance, they figure it out as they go. To paraphrase writer E. M. Forster, how can I know what I think until I see what I say? According to Galenson, conceptual innovators are sprinters, and experimental innovators are marathoners. When he studied economists who won the Nobel Prize, on average the conceptual innovators did their most influential work at forty-three, whereas the experimental innovators did theirs at sixty-one. When he analyzed the most often reproduced poems by famous poets, conceptual innovators authored their best works at twenty-eight, compared with age thirty-nine for experimental innovators. And in an independent study of every physicist who has
According to Galenson, conceptual innovators are sprinters, and experimental innovators are marathoners.
These fundamental differences between conceptual and experimental innovators explain why some originals peak early and others bloom late.
When he analyzed the most often reproduced poems by famous poets, conceptual innovators authored their best works at twenty-eight, compared with age thirty-nine for experimental innovators.
Conceptual innovation can be done quickly, because it doesn’t require years of methodical investigation.
The inability of . . . aging conceptual innovators to match the brilliant achievements of their youth is not a product of their depletion of a stock of some magical elixir of artistry. Instead, it is caused by the impact of accumulating experience. . . . The real enemies of conceptual innovators are the establishment of fixed habits of thought. . . . Conceptual innovators may become the captives of an important early achievement.
innovation can require years or decades to accumulate the requisite knowledge and skill, it becomes a more sustainable source of originality.
Conceptual innovators tend to generate original ideas early but risk copying themselves.
The experimental approach takes longer, but proves more renewable: instead of reproducing our past ideas, experiments enable
The experimental approach takes longer, but proves more renewable: instead of reproducing our past ideas, experiments enable us to continue discovering new ones.
Good things come to those who wait, and for experimentalists, it’s never too late to become original.
The more experiments you run, the less constrained you become by your ideas from the past.
Instead of getting mired in the tunnel vision of your imagination, by looking out into the world you improve the acuity of your peripheral vision.
We assume that common goals bind groups together, but the reality is that they often drive groups apart.
the concept of horizontal hostility.
When a deaf woman won the Miss America crown, instead of cheering her on as a trailblazer, deaf activists protested.
When a light-skinned black woman was appointed as a law professor at one university, its Black Students Association objected on the grounds that she wasn’t black enough.
A radical environmental activist dismissed the more mainstream Greenpeace as a “mindless monster motivated by eco-buck profits”
In one study, vegans and vegetarians evaluated members of their own groups and one another’s groups, relative to members of the general public. Vegans showed nearly three times as much prejudice toward vegetarians as vegetarians did toward vegans.
in Greece, members of the most conservative party judged the most similar party more unfavorably than they did a progressive party, and members of the most liberal party were much harsher toward the progressive party than toward even the most conservative party.
Orthodox Jews evaluated conservative Jewish women more negatively than Jewish women who didn’t practice or observe religious holidays at all.
they maintained their distance, working independently in some cases and at cross-purposes in others. With the women’s suffrage movement splintered, Lucy Stone needed new allies, as did Anthony and Stanton. They all found support in an unexpected place—the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), which had been formed to fight alcohol abuse, as drunken men often abused their wives and left their families in poverty. In contrast to the suffrage groups, the WCTU was heavily conservative. Its members tended to be middle- and upper-class women with strong religious beliefs and traditional values. Yet somehow, coalitions between the WCTU and suffragists sprang up in almost every state in the nation. The reasons for suffragists to partner with the WCTU were clear: the suffrage movement had stalled in influencing legislation, a surge of antisuffrage organizations was forming to work against them, and suffrage membership was dwindling.
In seeking alliances with groups that share our values, we overlook the importance of sharing our strategic tactics.
If you’ve spent the past decade taking part in protests and marches, it’s easy to feel a sense of shared identity and community with another organization that operates the same way. Lucy Stone recognized that common goals weren’t sufficient for a coalition to prosper, noting, “People will differ as to what they consider the best methods & means.”
young, visionary entrepreneur who found a surprising way to get naysayers to give her idea a chance.
In 2011, a college senior named Meredith Perry noticed that something very basic was wrong with technology. She didn’t need a cord to make phone calls or connect to the internet. Everything that used to be wired was now wireless . . . except for one thing. Sitting in her dorm room, she was still tethered to the wall by the most ancient component of her devices: the power that charged them.
she had a chicken-and-egg problem: she needed funding to build a prototype, but her idea was so radical that investors wanted to see a prototype first. As the solo founder of a technology startup, with no engineering background, she needed allies to move forward.
In a popular TED talk and book, Simon Sinek argues that if we want to inspire people, we should start with why. If we communicate the vision behind our ideas, the purpose guiding our products, people will flock to us. This is excellent advice—unless you’re doing something original that challenges the status quo. When people championing moral change explain their why, it runs the risk of clashing with deep-seated convictions. When creative non-conformists explain their why, it may violate common notions of what’s possible. Researchers Debra Meyerson and Maureen Scully have found that to succeed, originals must often become tempered radicals. They believe in values that depart from traditions and ideas that go against the grain, yet they learn to tone down their radicalism by presenting their beliefs and ideas in ways that are less shocking and more appealing to mainstream audiences. Meredith Perry is a tempered radical: she made an implausible idea plausible by obscuring its most extreme feature.
In a popular TED talk and book, Simon Sinek argues that if we want to inspire people, we should start with why.
When she couldn’t persuade technical experts to take a leap with her, she convinced them to take a few steps by masking her purpose.
when people with extreme political views were asked to explain the reasons behind their policy preferences, they stuck to their guns.
Explaining why gave them a chance to affirm their convictions. But when asked to explain how their preferred policies work, they became more moderate. Considering how led them to confront the gaps in their knowledge and realize that some of their extreme views were impractical.
To form alliances, originals can temper their radicalism by smuggling their real vision inside a Trojan horse.
“That’s when we threw the strike,” Steinman recalls. “Sir, the future is going to be about software, not hardware, and we need an entity of the U.S. Navy in Silicon Valley.”
afterward, the secretary of defense announced an embassy in Silicon Valley. Steinman leveraged what psychologist Robert Cialdini calls the foot-in-the-door technique, where you lead with a small request to secure an initial commitment before revealing the larger one.
By opening with a moderate ask instead of a radical one, Steinman gained allies.
Coalitions often fall apart when people refuse to moderate their radicalism.
Its fatal error, he argues, was naming the movement after the radical tactic of camping out, which few people find attractive. He believes that had the group simply relabeled itself “The 99 Percent,” it might still exist. The Occupy name “implied that the only way you could belong was if you dropped everything you were doing and started occupying something,”
Movements, which are always fighting uphill battles, need to draw in more casual participants if they are to succeed.” “The 99 Percent” is inclusive: it invites everyone to get involved and to use their own preferred tactics.
Woodhull, whose past included time as a prostitute and a charlatan healer, advocated for sexual freedom, proclaiming that she had an “inalienable, constitutional, and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can, to change that love every day if I please.”
for outsiders, the person who represents the group is the one with the most extreme views. That was Woodhull: her personal scandal overshadowed the suffrage cause and alienated many who were open to the relatively moderate idea of voting rights but not the more radical ideas of sexual independence for women.
“Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.”
research shows that we need to draw two independent axes: one for how positive a relationship is and a separate one for how negative the relationship is.
“It takes more emotional energy and coping resources to deal with individuals who are inconsistent.”
if a colleague consistently undermines you, you can keep your distance and expect the worst. But when you’re dealing with an ambivalent relationship, you’re constantly on guard, grappling with questions about when that person can actually be trusted.
focus on strengthening your ties with people who already support you.
