Book SummaryOriginals, by Adam Grant

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of Originals

Many people want to be more innovative. But how do you generate good ideas? And how do you execute to make them real? In Originals, Adam Grant studies the habits and practices of innovators so you too can innovate.

Grant is an organizational psychologist, public speaker, consultant, and tenured professor at Wharton, where he was recognized as the school’s top-rated professor for seven consecutive years. He uses data and storytelling to challenge conventional wisdom. His other books include Give and Take, Think Again, and Hidden Potential. Originals was published in 2016.

In our guide, we’ll explain what originals are; how to become an original by generating, executing, and nurturing new ideas; and how to cultivate originality in children.

What Are Originals?

Grant says that achievement can follow two paths: The first is conformity, which means sticking to familiar ways of doing things. Much of modern life is built around conformity—the structure and rules of schooling, uniform career tracks, the social recognition of status and accomplishment. The second path to achievement is originality, which means coming up with new ideas. Originals are those who question the status quo and find ways to improve it.

One example of an original is the eyewear company Warby Parker. Its owners questioned why eyewear was so expensive, and they determined that it was due to a virtual monopoly by a luxury brand. The company started a website that offered eyewear at a fraction of the competitor’s price while donating glasses to people in need. Within five years, Warby Parker was valued at over $1 billion and had donated over a million pairs of glasses

Myths of Originals

Grant dispels some myths surrounding originals. One is that originals take extreme, uncontrolled risks. Rather, they hedge their risks—often keeping a source of stability (like their full-time job) while working on their idea on the side. This doesn’t mean they take moderate risks in all areas; instead, having one foot in stability allows more radical risks in the other, creating a balanced risk portfolio. The stability prevents the pressure of desperately launching half-baked ideas.

Another is that originals fearlessly go forward. Grant says that they do face fear of failure and anxiety. For example, Martin Luther King Jr. and Copernicus both felt concern over taking on the duties expected of them.

Generating and Executing Ideas

Grant says that to generate good new ideas like an original, the most important factor is to generate a lot of ideas. Some of them will naturally be good. Don’t try to perfect a few mediocre ideas. Consider Thomas Edison, who had thousands of patents, only a handful of which are broadly remembered today.

But even if you generate a lot of ideas, you’ll still have limited resources, and you can’t pursue them all. How do you tell which ones are good enough to work on? Grant says that you’re a terrible judge of your own ideas, since if you’re like most people, you overestimate your abilities. Instead, test your ideas with believable colleagues and with your target audience. Colleagues have the benefit of domain expertise without having a personal stake in your idea, so you should openly consider their feedback without being defensive or biased. On the other hand, your target users will openly tell you how your idea will fit into their lives and whether it might be pointless.

The Benefits of Procrastinating

While...

Originals Summary Chapter 1: Creative Destruction

The first necessary quality for originals is to question the status quo, and generate concepts that are both novel and useful. Much of modern life is built around conformity - the structure and rules of schooling, uniform career tracks, the social recognition of status and accomplishment. However, this can be suppressive, pushing people into guaranteed success instead of venturing into the unknown, dreading failure instead of aiming for innovation. Possibly for this reason, child prodigies who show mastery at an early age tend not to become agents of massive change - they are very good at learning established rules, but not at breaking them or designing a totally new game.

(Unfortunately, studies suggest that the poor tend to accept the status quo more readily. This might be a defense mechanism termed “system justification” - if the system exists for a good reason and people deserve their...

Originals Summary Chapter 2: Blind Inventors and One-Eyed Investors

How do you come up with good ideas?

By far the most important way is to generate LOTS of ideas. Most of them won’t be very good, but some of them will be gems. You increase your chances of getting a gem by creating more ideas. Despite being widely known for just a few seminal works, Mozart, Picasso, and Edison each had thousands of compositions/pieces/patents. This is much better than generating few ideas and trying to perfect them.

You can also increase your creativity by having a breadth of experience in orthogonal fields (like engineering x art) over a sustained period of time. The more different, the better. A popular study found that Nobel prize winners were more likely to be thespians and creatives than non-Nobel-winning professors.

But if you generate lots of ideas, you have limited resources and you can’t pursue them all. How do you tell which ideas are good?

First off, you’re a terrible judge of your own ideas. We generally all suffer from overconfidence in our own abilities. Like the Lake Wobegon effect, we tend to believe we and our ideas are better than they really are, and we find it hard to let go of our favorite ideas. When confronted with opposing...

Shortform Exercise: Generating and Testing Ideas

Use this exercise to create more novel ideas and validate them.

Generating more ideas is important to finding the few good ones. What are some ways you can generate more ideas in your daily life?

Originals Summary Chapter 3: Out on a Limb - Speaking Truth to Power

Once you have an idea, you’ll likely need to bring other people onboard, whether as investors or teammates. How do you become most persuasive?

First, you have to earn status to exert power. Status is earned through real contributions, credibility, and reputation. Earning status gives you “idiosyncracy credits,” or the latitude to deviate from norms.

• (This also seems to work in reverse - college professors who dress casually are accorded more authority than those who don’t. A student infers that the casual professors have earned their idiosyncracy, whereas the formal dressers need to work harder to compensate for lack of authority.)

In contrast, if you try to exert power without status, you will be resented as speaking out of turn. You’ll also be punished, since you challenge others’ authority and they seek to put you back in your place. (An interesting study shows that research subjects who are told their peer looks down on them make the peer do more degrading tasks, compared to those who are told their peer admires them.)

Second, if you’re likely to get a skeptical, defensive reaction, try powerless communication. Many people, when threatened, try to bluff their...

Shortform Exercise: Presenting Ideas

Use this exercise to learn how to present ideas that might be controversial.

In the near future, are you going to present something where you expect skepticism from your audience? How could you specifically try powerless communication? Tips: express doubt, highlight weaknesses.

Originals Summary Chapter 4: Fools Rush In - Timing, Strategic Procrastination, and the First-Mover Disadvantage

This Originals chapter deals with three loosely related themes on the benefits of waiting: procrastinating, the myth of first-mover advantage, and innovation at older ages.

The Creative Benefits of Procrastinating

The consensus around productivity states that procrastinating is a disease that should be stamped out, that we should always plan our work on timelines and get a head start.

But procrastination is useful to avoid too early of a commitment to an idea. If you lodge a problem in the back of your mind and give it time to marinate, you attack it from a variety of angles. You consider it in relaxed states, free from time pressure, which allows divergent thinking (hence the pattern of coming up with best ideas in the shower or on the toilet). You make incremental progress by testing and refining different possibilities.

By procrastinating, you also allow for greater input from your colleagues. If you decide early and set a strict timeline, there’s little strategic flexibility.

Then, as you near the deadline, you assemble the breadth of options you’ve considered, and then you can then focus down on the best one.

Importantly, for procrastination to have these...

Originals Summary Chapter 5: Goldilocks and the Trojan Horse - Creating and Maintaining Coalitions

When you try to gather support for your new idea, you need to strike a Goldilocks zone in radicalism - radical enough to stand for something and not be tepid, but conservative enough to avoid alienating a mainstream audience. People external to the movement tend to identify it with its most radical position, not its median. As the originator of a movement, you’ll tend to be on the radical side, and you may need to temper the cause, or at least how you present it to the outside world.

Occupy Wall Street largely faded out, partly because its insistence on the disruptive,radical behavior in its name alienated many who otherwise would have aligned with the cause. Not many people want to camp out to effect change, nor might they think it the most effective method. Instead, if they had instead rallied around the “we are the 99%” theme, it would unify groups of people using their own preferred tactics, and the movement might still be ongoing.

Being just right in radicalism can be a difficult balance. The more radical people within the group tend to accuse the more moderate ones of selling out or not doing enough. Counter-intuitively, the radicals dislike moderates (who largely agree on...

Shortform Exercise: Building Alliances

Do you need to attract followers to your idea? Think about how to best approach them.

Which person or group of people would be a valuable partner for what you’re trying to do? How does your mission allow them to reach their own goals? Can you explain this to them to recruit them?

Originals Summary Chapter 6: Rebel with a Cause - How Siblings, Parents, and Mentors Nurture Originality

Here Originals takes a turn away from how to execute as an original, to how originality is cultivated. How do our childhood environments affect our tendency for rebelliousness and risk-seeking?

Birth order has a very strong effect - firstborn children tend to be conscientious and dominant, showing achievement along classical lines - income, academic achievement, Nobel Prize winning (but apparently only until age 30, when the differences even out). Lastborn children are more likely to be risk-seeking, rebellious, and unconventional. (Middle children tend to be more diplomatic, having to negotiate between the extreme members of the sibling group.) This tends to be true regardless of child gender.

Suggestive observational studies:

• In baseball, stealing bases is a very risky, not necessarily optimal play. Younger brothers are 10.6x more likely than older siblings to steal a base.
• Laterborn children are more likely to adopt revolutionary scientific ideas like Copernican astronomy and Darwinian evolution, even controlling for the mentally calcifying effects of age.
• Rebels were twice as likely to be lastborn as firstborn.
• Of a list of the top 100...

Originals Summary Chapter 7: Rethinking Groupthink

Groupthink suppresses dissenting opinions, for the sake of social harmony and conformity. In organizations, this can become toxic. The best ideas should always surface, regardless of what fraction of people believe it and how threatening it can be to any portion of the company.

Company culture is cheered as pivotal in company success. In reality it can be a mixed bag.

• Pros
  • An emphasis on culture leads to recruiting people who share beliefs on mission and tactics, making work feel invigorating and possibly improving retention.
  • Hiring for culture also allows spotting of underpriced talent who lack credentials but have energy and growth potential.
  • In stable industries, large companies with strong cultures have more reliable financial performance.
• Cons
  • By its very stabilizing nature, culture can become calcified over time, making a company obsolete in volatile industries. If people come together for a mission and strategy, upheaving this is difficult.
    • In the 1980s Xerox became dominated by a sales culture, pushing product innovation to the wayside as microcomputers disrupted the industry.
  • Culture can limit diversity,...

Originals Summary Checklist: Brainstorming Effectively to Reduce Groupthink

Refer to this checklist the next time you need to practice brainstorming.

• Stress how the group shouldn’t be overconfident about their position. Try to feel like an...

Originals Summary Chapter 8: Rocking the Boat and Keeping it Steady - Managing Anxiety, Apathy, Ambivalence, and Anger

When espousing original ideas, you’ll face opposition, setbacks, and anxiety about failure. How do you best cope with this?

The final chapter of Originals teaches a variety of tactics to manage uncertainty and anger. The better you can manage your emotions, the more effectively you’ll push your original ideas.

The Benefits of Pessimism

People seem to deal with stress and uncertainty in two ways - strategic optimism and defensive pessimism. Strategic optimists reinforce the belief that things will work out; defensive pessimists predict the worst that could happen in excruciating detail.

The popular belief is that optimism is preferable, but studies suggest that defensive pessimists do not perform worse than optimists. Despite having more anxiety and less confidence, pessimists visualize all the things that could go wrong, and by controlling their risk, they feel in control. They don’t become paralyzed by fear - once they’ve imagined the worst, they’re driven to avoid it. In a state of anxiety, uncertainty is actually worse than fear or failure. If you want to sabotage a defensive pessimist, just make her happy.

More subtly, optimism and pessimism are optimal with...

Shortform Exercise: Managing Emotions While Innovating

Innovation is hard. Here’s an exercise on how to manage your emotions as you try to innovate.

Strategic optimists reinforce the belief that things will work out; defensive pessimists predict the worst that could happen in excruciating detail. Do you consider yourself naturally a strategic optimist or a defensive pessimist?