“Original” by Adam Grant

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  • Achievement can either come from conformity or originality
  • Firefox and Chrome users tend to stay longer perform better, and miss less work than IE our Safari
  • What made the difference is how you get the browser
  • Disadvantaged groups tend to be more entrenched in the state quo
    • (It is harder to let go of the familiar when you have a lot to lose relative to what you have)
  • We justify the default
  • Practice makes perfect but nothing original
  • Achievement motivation crowds out originality
  • Originality it’s not about taking big risks
  • We tend to manage risk as a portfolio, so risky in one place and stable in all other places
  • The difficulty with originals is in selecting winners not in generating ideas
  • Great ideas are a numbers game (aim for 25)
  • Peer evaluation is best
  • Domain experience and intuition go together
  • Passion is in the heart, not the sleeves
  • The way success was achieved matters (execution) more than the idea itself
  • Sometimes it is better to embrace the establishment to change it from the inside
  • When presenting great ideas, remember that you are living with the ideas in your head while everyone else is hearing them for the first time
  • Short, mixed presentations are best for warming people up to a new idea
  • We do better at remembering open tasks than completed tasks
  • Stopping mid-way through the project is the best time to discuss how to proceed with it
  • Percolate the ideas!
  • Settlers tend to outlast pioneers
  • Pioneers tend to overextend
  • Get in when the market cools
  • Moving first is a tactics not a goal
  • Zero to start
  • Experimental approaches enable creative longevity
  • Horizontal hostility is common and deadly
  • Similarities are actually bad for inter group alliances
  • Pull back on radicalism at first
  • Frenemies and ambivalent relationships are literally more exhausting than enemies
  • It is better to try to convert enemies than it is to continue to placate frenemies
  • Start with novelty but add a dose of familiarity
  • “The point is to push the envelope not to tear it.”
  • Later-born children tend to take more risks including in creativity
  • Calculation of rationality vs appropriateness
  • Praise the person in moral domains but action in skill domains
  • Phrase as nouns instead of verbs
  • Commitment culture is good for launching but grow slower and struggle to evolve
    • Shifting blueprints later is difficult
    • Make dissent a core commitment
  • Dissent with respect to foster better ideas
  • Cohesion is not the problem in groupthink; overconfidence and reputational concerns are
  • Pretend or assigned dissent is not enough, find someone who believes it
  • “I am excited” is more productive than “I am scared”
  • Lean into the energy of the fear
  • Leaders should present the vision and have users endorse it
  • Show the problems with the status quo then show what could be

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