The culture of a workplace – an organization’s values, norms and practices – has a huge impact on our happiness and success.
Adam Grant
The mark of higher education isn’t the knowledge you accumulate in your head. It’s the skills you gain about how to learn.
Adam Grant
It’s ironic that when you go through a tragedy, you appreciate more. You realize how fragile life is and that there are so many things to still be thankful for.
Adam Grant
If an organization values innovation, you can assume it’s safe to speak up with new ideas, leaders will listen, and your voice matters.
Adam Grant
For years, I believed that anything worth doing was worth doing early. In graduate school, I submitted my dissertation two years in advance. In college, I wrote my papers weeks early and finished my thesis four months before the due date. My roommates joked that I had a productive form of obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Adam Grant
To get real diversity of thought, you need to find the people who genuinely hold different views and invite them into the conversation.
Adam Grant
Being a nice person is about courtesy: you’re friendly, polite, agreeable, and accommodating. When people believe they have to be nice in order to give, they fail to set boundaries, rarely say no, and become pushovers, letting others walk all over them.
Adam Grant
Authenticity means erasing the gap between what you firmly believe inside and what you reveal to the outside world.
Adam Grant
By admitting your inadequacies, you show that you’re self-aware enough to know your areas for improvement – and secure enough to be open about them.
Adam Grant
Some people are selfish in all of their relationships. Those people are called sociopaths.
Adam Grant
When I think about voting, I can skip it and still see myself as a good citizen. But when I think about being a voter, now the choice reflects on my character. It casts a shadow.
Adam Grant
Once people take ownership over the decision to receive feedback, they’re less defensive about it.
Adam Grant
If you want to be a generous giver, you have to watch out for selfish takers.
Adam Grant
When takers talk about mistakes, they’re usually quick to place the blame on other people. Givers are more likely to say ‘Here’s the mistake I made; I learned the following from it. Here are the steps I’m taking to make sure I don’t let people down in the future.’
Adam Grant
Procrastination gives you time to consider divergent ideas, to think in nonlinear ways, to make unexpected leaps.
Adam Grant
In the workplace, many people become helicopter managers, hovering over their employees in a well-intentioned but ill-fated attempt to provide support. These are givers gone awry – people so desperate to help others that they develop a white knight complex and end up causing harm instead.
Adam Grant
When you’re good at controlling your own emotions, you can disguise your true feelings. When you know what others are feeling, you can tug at their heartstrings and motivate them to act against their own best interests.
Adam Grant
If we want girls to receive positive reinforcement for early acts of leadership, let’s discourage bossy behavior along with banning bossy labels. That means teaching girls to engage in behaviors that earn admiration before they assert their authority.
Adam Grant
Agreeable people are warm and friendly. They’re nice; they’re polite. You find a lot of them in Canada.
Adam Grant
Authenticity is a virtue. But just as you can have too little authenticity, you can also have too much.
Adam Grant
I try to get as close as I can to cleaning out my inbox every night.
Adam Grant
Procrastinating is a vice when it comes to productivity, but it can be a virtue for creativity.
Adam Grant
Being a giver is not about saying yes to all of the people all of the time to all of the requests.
Adam Grant
Bragging about yourself violates norms of modesty and politeness – and if you were really competent, your work would speak for itself.
Adam Grant
From a motivation perspective, helping others enriches the meaning and purpose of our own lives, showing us that our contributions matter and energizing us to work harder, longer, and smarter.
Adam Grant
Instead of assuming that emotional intelligence is always useful, we need to think more carefully about where and when it matters.
Adam Grant
Productive givers focus on acting in the long-term best interests of others, even if it’s not pleasant. They have the courage to give the critical feedback we prefer not to hear, but truly need to hear. They offer tough love, knowing that we might like them less, but we’ll come to trust and respect them more.
Adam Grant
I believe that the most meaningful way to succeed is to help other people succeed.
Adam Grant
I have two rules for a great book: make me think and make me smile.
Adam Grant
From a relationship perspective, givers build deeper and broader connections.
Adam Grant
The more important argument against grade curves is that they create an atmosphere that’s toxic by pitting students against one another. At best, it creates a hypercompetitive culture, and at worst, it sends students the message that the world is a zero-sum game: Your success means my failure.
Adam Grant
Meditation isn’t snake oil. For some people, meditation might be the most efficient way to reduce stress and cultivate mindfulness. But it isn’t a panacea. If you don’t meditate, there’s no need to stress out about it.
Adam Grant
Takers believe in a zero-sum world, and they end up creating one where bosses, colleagues and clients don’t trust them. Givers build deeper and broader relationships – people are rooting for them instead of gunning for them.
Adam Grant
As more women ‘lean in’ and we collectively continue to fight sexism, there’s another barrier to progress that hasn’t been addressed: Many men who would like to see more women leaders are afraid to speak up about it.
Adam Grant
I’m a precrastinator. Yes, that’s an actual term. You know that panic you feel a few hours before a big deadline when you haven’t done anything yet? I just feel that a few months ahead of time.
Adam Grant
To get important work done, most leaders organize people into teams. They believe that when people collaborate toward a common goal, great things can happen. Yet in reality, the whole is often much less than the sum of the parts.
Adam Grant
Creativity is generating ideas that are novel and useful. I define originals as people who go beyond dreaming up the ideas and take initiative to make their visions a reality.
Adam Grant
To generate creative ideas, it’s important to start from an unusual place. But to explain those ideas, they have to be connected to something familiar.
Adam Grant
Saying no frees you up to say yes when it matters most.
Adam Grant
The opposite of an underminer is a supporter. When colleagues are supportive, they go out of their way to be givers rather than takers, working to enhance our productivity, make us look good, share ideas, and provide timely help.
Adam Grant
Takers are self-serving in their interactions. It’s all about what can you do for me.
Adam Grant
When it comes to landing a good job, many people focus on the role. Although finding the right title, position, and salary is important, there’s another consideration that matters just as much: culture.
Adam Grant
When medical students focus on helping others, they’re able to weather the slings and arrows of long hours and devastating health outcomes: they know their colleagues and patients are depending on them.
Adam Grant
The most promising ideas begin from novelty and then add familiarity.
Adam Grant
Some of the greatest moments in human history were fueled by emotional intelligence.
Adam Grant
Power frees us from the chains of conformity.
Adam Grant
When young women get called bossy, it’s often because they’re trying to exercise power without status. It’s not a problem that they’re being dominant; the backlash arises because they’re overstepping their status.
Adam Grant
Originals are nonconformists, people who not only have new ideas but take action to champion them. They are people who stand out and speak up. Originals drive creativity and change in the world. They’re the people you want to bet on.
Adam Grant
If you want your children to bring original ideas into the world, you need to let them pursue their passions, not yours.
Adam Grant
Negative feedback can make people feel inferior.
Adam Grant
Kids who evolve into creative adults tend to have a strong moral compass.
Adam Grant
It’s true that every leader needs followers. We can’t all be nonconformists at every moment, but conformity is dangerous – especially for an entity in formation.
Adam Grant