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.Collection: Knowledge
Some of the greatest moments in human history were fueled by emotional intelligence.Collection: History
The culture of a workplace - an organization's values, norms and practices - has a huge impact on our happiness and success.Collection: Happiness
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.Collection: Thankful
From a relationship perspective, givers build deeper and broader connections.Collection: Relationship
When making decisions about people, stop confusing experience with evidence. Just as owning a car doesn't make you an expert on engines, having a brain doesn't mean you understand psychology.Collection: Car
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.Collection: Failure
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.Collection: Positive
I have two rules for a great book: make me think and make me smile.Collection: Smile
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.Collection: Respect
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.Collection: Women
In the conversation about women in leadership, male voices are noticeably absent.Collection: Leadership
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.Collection: Medical
Leaders who master emotions can rob us of our capacities to reason. If their values are out of step with our own, the results can be devastating.
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.
Procrastinating is a vice when it comes to productivity, but it can be a virtue for creativity.
Takers are self-serving in their interactions. It's all about what can you do for me.
The most promising ideas begin from novelty and then add familiarity.
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.
As a man, it is true that I will never know what it is like to be a woman. As an organizational psychologist, though, I feel a responsibility to bring evidence to bear on dynamics of work life that affect all of us, not only half of us.
For women to achieve equal representation in leadership roles, it's important that they have the backing of men as well as women.
When a salesperson truly cares about you, trust forms, and you're more likely to buy, come back for repeat business, and refer new customers.
If we want people to vote, we need to make it a larger part of their self-image.
If I had the day off and knew everyone else was voting, I wouldn't miss it. It would become a routine part of my responsibility as a citizen - like paying taxes, only less soul crushing.
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.
In college, my idea of a productive day was to start writing at 7 A.M. and not leave my chair until dinnertime.
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.
Some people are selfish in all of their relationships. Those people are called sociopaths.
I spend a lot of my time trying to help leaders build cultures of productive givers.
I'm not a fan of being inauthentic.
In life, there's no such thing as an unmitigated good.
Perhaps gaining power doesn't cause people to act like takers. It simply creates the opportunity for people who think like takers to express themselves.
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.
Teams need the opportunity to learn about each other's capabilities and develop productive routines. So once we get the right people on the bus, let's make sure they spend some time driving together.
Tweeting has taught me the discipline to say more with fewer words.
I love discovering compelling new ideas and doing what I can to help spread the word about them.
To make sense of bossiness, we need to tease apart two fundamental aspects of social hierarchy that are often lumped together: power and status. Power lies in holding a formal position of authority or controlling important resources. Status involves being respected or admired.
If you want to find out if someone's a taker, it's not actually that useful to know what they've accomplished. What you want to want to know is how they explain them.
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.'
You want people who choose to follow because they genuinely believe in ideas, not because they're afraid to be punished if they don't. For startups, there's so much pivoting that's required that if you have a bunch of sheep, you're in bad shape.
I want my children to know that we often become resilient for others.
When people are depending on us, we end up finding strength we didn't know we had.
I try to get as close as I can to cleaning out my inbox every night.
I start a lot of things and purposely leave them unfinished. When I have a bunch of really long emails, and I need time to think about the response, I'll actually start replying, leave them as drafts, and move onto something else mid-sentence.
I have lots of micro-goals of trying to get things done, whatever the amount of time available.
Geniuses don't have better ideas than the rest of us. They just have more of them.
When trying to innovate, most people stop after 10-15 possibilities, failing to recognize that their first ideas are usually the most obvious ones.
People often believe that character causes action, but when it comes to producing moral children, we need to remember that action also shapes character.
When writing 'Give and Take' and 'Originals,' the predominant emotion for me was curiosity.
Authenticity means erasing the gap between what you firmly believe inside and what you reveal to the outside world.