Psychology Business Big Ideas

Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World (Summary)

by Adam Grant

The founders of Warby Parker, the revolutionary eyewear company, almost gave up before they even started. They spent six months agonizing over a name and delayed their launch for so long that they almost missed their window. We're taught that entrepreneurs must be confident, decisive, and ready to leap. But what if the opposite is true? What if doubt, delay, and procrastination are actually the secret ingredients to groundbreaking success?

Great Innovators Are Surprisingly Risk-Averse

The stereotype of the bold entrepreneur who risks it all is largely a myth. Most successful 'originals' don't bet the farm; they create a 'risk portfolio,' balancing their radical idea in one domain with extreme stability in others, like keeping a day job.

Bill Gates didn't drop out of Harvard to start Microsoft on a whim. He took an official leave of absence, ensuring he had a safety net to return to if his software venture failed. He was mitigating risk, not recklessly embracing it.

Procrastinate Strategically to Boost Creativity

Rushing to complete a creative task locks you into your first idea, which is often the most conventional. Strategic delay, or procrastination, allows your mind to incubate the problem, make novel connections, and arrive at more original solutions.

Martin Luther King Jr. was still rewriting his famous 'I Have a Dream' speech the night before the March on Washington. He hadn't finalized the core message, which allowed him to improvise the iconic 'I have a dream' refrain on stage, a section that wasn't even in his prepared notes.

To Get a Hit, Generate a Ton of Ideas

Originality isn't about having a single stroke of genius; it's a numbers game. The most prolific creators in history—from Mozart to Picasso—didn't have a higher success rate than their peers; they simply produced a much larger volume of work, which increased their odds of creating a masterpiece.

Scientists who win the Nobel Prize don't just publish groundbreaking studies; they publish significantly more studies of all kinds than their peers. The path to quality is through quantity.

Browser Choice Predicts Job Performance

Our small, everyday choices can reveal our underlying disposition towards originality and initiative. Even a simple choice can be a powerful signal of a non-conformist mindset.

Grant shares a study of customer service agents that found employees who used Firefox or Chrome to browse the web stayed at their jobs 15% longer and had higher customer satisfaction ratings than those who used the default browsers, Internet Explorer or Safari. The reason? They took the initiative to seek out and install a better option, demonstrating a key trait of an 'original'.

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