Listen to my Podcast Interview with the author of Originals, Adam Grant Above ⇑

Originals Adam Grant Book Summary

1. Originals are made, NOT Born

  1. They try a lot, fail a lot and Succeed a LOT.  They don’t have better ideas than their peers. They just keep trying and trying.
  2. Einstein had 248 other papers that nobody knows about. Edison had 1000 patents BUT only 6 that really matter.
  3. Originals try a lot of ideas to get to a few good ones. Quantity and Quality are correlated. Originals persist instead of quitting. That’s the biggest difference.

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2. Originals are not better. They just do more work

  1. Originals are not better. They just produced more work.
  2. Odds of producing an influential or successful idea are positively correlated to the total number of ideas generated. Periods when we generate the most ideas are when we also create the best ideas.
  3. Original people are ordinary – They just do more work. They just choose to ACT.

3. First Mover advantage is a myth

  • It can actually be a disadvantage
    • 3 out of 4 startups fail because of Premature Scaling
    • Moving first is a tactic not a goal – Peter Thiel
    • Pioneers have to make all the mistakes themselves
  • 500 Product Category Research:
    • 1st movers: 47% failure rate
    • 2nd mover: 8% failure rate
  • 1st movers have to take on unnecessary higher risk.
    • Facebook was not the first on social media.
    • Myspace flopped before facebook
    • Friendster flopped before facebook
  • Search: Google came way after askjeeves, lycos, alta vista, yahoo

4. Creative Destruction

  1. Rules and systems are created by people. And they can and will be changed. Originals challenge those rules
  2. There is a constant pressure in this world to conform to the status quo… To accept the default.
  3. Originals make their own rules
  4. Practice makes perfect but doesn’t make new
  5. Who are the individuals who change the world?
    1. They are not child prodigies
    2. The more you value achievement the more you dread failure. The intense desire to succeed leads us to go after guaranteed success. Once people pass an intermediate level in their need to achieve, there is evidence that they actually become less creative. The drive to succeed and accompanying fear of failure hold back some of the greatest change agents in history.
  6. The word entrepreneur literally means – bearer of risk.
  7. We think they are all risk takers who are willing to bet the farm, but that’s not the case.
    1. Example – warby Parker
    2. Sarah Blakely – stayed in her job for 2 years after launching spanx
    3. They all take calculated risks rather than brash risks
  8. Lincoln wasn’t born as an original. It was an act of courage to go against the grain.
    1. “He was one of you and yet he became Abraham Lincoln”
  9. Falling will give you less regret than failing to try
Becoming original: choosing to champion novel ideas and values that go against the grain, battle conformity, and buck outdated traditions

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5. Idea Selection

  1. Seinfeld almost never took off after getting so many bad reviews early on. It generated $1 billion in revenue
  2. Segway on the other hand had investors lining up to invest in it. It failed.
  3. The biggest barrier to originality is not idea generation but idea selection
  4. Dean simonton – we are not very good at evaluating which of our ideas will be a success. Hence the key is to try a lot of them. Dean simonton said creativity is a probabilistic output of productivity.
    1. The key is to produce greater volume of work
    2. Mozart composed 600 peices but we only care about the 10
    3. Beethoven composed 650
    4. Bach wrote 1000
    5. In a study of 15000 classical music compositions the more peices a composer produced in a 5 yr window the more hits they had
    6. It’s widely assumed that quantity diminishes quality. But the exact opposite is true. The more you produce, the more quality you produce
    7. Quantity is the most predictable path to quality
    8. Upworthy’s rule: you need to generate 25 headlines to generate gold
      1. Once you start getting desperate the creativity strikes
      2. The 25th headline will be gift from gods
  5. Seinfeld
    1. The most accurate predictor of great idea is usually fellow creators who are doing similar things

6. Have hobbies outside of Work

  1. Odds for Nobel prize winners when they have a certain kind of hobby
    1. Music – 2 times greater
    2. Art – drawing painting – 7x greater
    3. Crafts – woodworking, glass blowing – 7.5x
    4. Writing – poetry, essays, stories – 12x greater
    5. Performing – actor, dancer, magician – 22x
  2. Entrepreneurs – have more hobbies in other areas like arts, music, craft etc
  3. Galileo looked through the same telescope but he was able to detect mountains on the moon while others couldn’t because he also had a hobby in drawing and he could understand colors and shadows
  4. Our intuition is only accurate in areas where we have a lot of domain expertise
  5. Pioneers have lower market share, profit margins and success rates

7. How to Sell

  1. Babble founder started investors pitch by telling them why they should not invest in the company
  2. 4 reasons to assume powerless communications when communicating to those you are trying to sell to
    1. Leading with weakness disarms the audience
      1. When we are aware that someone is trying to pursuade us we naturally raise our shield
    2. Being forthright about our faults
      1. Changes the frame
      2. Changes how audience evaluates us
    3. It makes you more trustworthy
      1. If you tell them what’s wrong they automatically assume that there must be an awful lot that is right with the business.
  3. You become more happier by counting 3 good things happening in your life rather than 12.
    1. Counting 12 bad things is harder than counting 3. So people get defeated at 3.
  4. Middle status forces us to choose conformity over originality. When we are at the bottom it’s easier to be original because you can’t fall.
  5. Mistakes we regret most are not one of commission but those of omission

 

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8. The Power of Identity

    1. Jackie Robinson – the identity of a risk taker
      1. Logic of consequences – measuring consequences before taking risky steps
      2. Logic of appropriateness – what would a person like me do? What’s my identity? Am I the kind of person who does this?
  1. Our identity defines our behavior – it’s better to tell people – don’t be a drunk driver rather than tell them – don’t drink and drive. The first appeals to their identity

9. Handling fear, anxiety and stress

  1. Make fear your friend
  2. Stressful situations – instead of calming yourself down, feel excited. When contestants say-
    1. I’m calm –
    2. I’m excited – +17% higher performance in public speaking. +29% increased length of speech
    3. In case of anxiety
      1. Knowing the worst case is much better than
      2. Worrying about an unknown outcome
      3. Better to think about the worst case than a random

 

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