Adam Grant Quotes
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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.
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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.
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In college, my idea of a productive day was to start writing at 7 A.M. and not leave my chair until dinnertime.
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We have many identities, and we can't be authentic to them all. The best we can do is be sincere in our efforts to earn the values we claim.
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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.
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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.
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Some people are selfish in all of their relationships. Those people are called sociopaths.
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I want my children to know that we often become resilient for others.
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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.
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If you want to be a generous giver, you have to watch out for selfish takers.
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From a relationship perspective, givers build deeper and broader connections.
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In the conversation about women in leadership, male voices are noticeably absent.
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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.'
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When writing 'Give and Take' and 'Originals,' the predominant emotion for me was curiosity.
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To grow, people need to be challenged.
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In life, there's no such thing as an unmitigated good.
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When people are depending on us, we end up finding strength we didn't know we had.
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Being a magician taught me how powerful the element of surprise can be. In each book, I've tried to work that in - an unexpected twist in a story that reveals an insight, a counter intuitive study that turns your beliefs upside-down.
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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.
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I can't tell you that if you bring in a bunch of weird and different people, then a bunch of good things will happen. But I can tell you that if you hire a bunch of similar people and promote only the ones who are most similar, a bunch of bad things are likely to happen.
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If you don't hire originals, you run the risk of people disagreeing but not voicing their dissent.
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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.
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The most promising ideas begin from novelty and then add familiarity.
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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.