Creativity may be hard to nurture, but it's easy to thwart.
Adam Grant
The culture of a workplace - an organization's values, norms and practices - has a huge impact on our happiness and success.
The mark of higher education isn't the knowledge you accumulate in your head. It's the skills you gain about how to learn.
Being a nice person is about courtesy: you're friendly, polite, agreeable, and accommodating. When people believe they have to be nice in order to give, they fail to set boundaries, rarely say no, and become pushovers, letting others walk all over them.
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.
Authenticity means erasing the gap between what you firmly believe inside and what you reveal to the outside world.
Bragging about yourself violates norms of modesty and politeness - and if you were really competent, your work would speak for itself.
Originals are nonconformists, people who not only have new ideas but take action to champion them. They are people who stand out and speak up. Originals drive creativity and change in the world. They're the people you want to bet on.
I believe that the most meaningful way to succeed is to help other people succeed.
Procrastinating is a vice when it comes to productivity, but it can be a virtue for creativity.
From a motivation perspective, helping others enriches the meaning and purpose of our own lives, showing us that our contributions matter and energizing us to work harder, longer, and smarter.
Being a giver is not about saying yes to all of the people all of the time to all of the requests.
Procrastination gives you time to consider divergent ideas, to think in nonlinear ways, to make unexpected leaps.
To get real diversity of thought, you need to find the people who genuinely hold different views and invite them into the conversation.
The opposite of an underminer is a supporter. When colleagues are supportive, they go out of their way to be givers rather than takers, working to enhance our productivity, make us look good, share ideas, and provide timely help.
Power frees us from the chains of conformity.
I have two rules for a great book: make me think and make me smile.
In the workplace, many people become helicopter managers, hovering over their employees in a well-intentioned but ill-fated attempt to provide support. These are givers gone awry - people so desperate to help others that they develop a white knight complex and end up causing harm instead.
Saying no frees you up to say yes when it matters most.
If you want to be a generous giver, you have to watch out for selfish takers.
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.
Successful givers secure their oxygen masks before coming to the assistance of others. Although their motives may be less purely altruistic, their actions prove more altruistic, because they give more.
When you develop a reputation for being responsive and generous, an ever-expanding mountain of requests will come your way.
When writing 'Give and Take' and 'Originals,' the predominant emotion for me was curiosity.
When you procrastinate, you're more likely to let your mind wander. That gives you a better chance of stumbling onto the unusual and spotting unexpected patterns.
Teams need the opportunity to learn about each other's capabilities and develop productive routines. So once we get the right people on the bus, let's make sure they spend some time driving together.
Authenticity is a virtue. But just as you can have too little authenticity, you can also have too much.
If you don't hire originals, you run the risk of people disagreeing but not voicing their dissent.
When making decisions about people, stop confusing experience with evidence. Just as owning a car doesn't make you an expert on engines, having a brain doesn't mean you understand psychology.
When people are depending on us, we end up finding strength we didn't know we had.
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.
When I think about voting, I can skip it and still see myself as a good citizen. But when I think about being a voter, now the choice reflects on my character. It casts a shadow.
Some people are selfish in all of their relationships. Those people are called sociopaths.
When it comes to landing a good job, many people focus on the role. Although finding the right title, position, and salary is important, there's another consideration that matters just as much: culture.
Once people take ownership over the decision to receive feedback, they're less defensive about it.
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.
Instead of assuming that emotional intelligence is always useful, we need to think more carefully about where and when it matters.
Productive givers focus on acting in the long-term best interests of others, even if it's not pleasant. They have the courage to give the critical feedback we prefer not to hear, but truly need to hear. They offer tough love, knowing that we might like them less, but we'll come to trust and respect them more.
To grow, people need to be challenged.
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.
As more women 'lean in' and we collectively continue to fight sexism, there's another barrier to progress that hasn't been addressed: Many men who would like to see more women leaders are afraid to speak up about it.
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.
To make sense of bossiness, we need to tease apart two fundamental aspects of social hierarchy that are often lumped together: power and status. Power lies in holding a formal position of authority or controlling important resources. Status involves being respected or admired.
Conformity is dangerous.
Frenemies are worse than enemies, and it's not just in the workplace.
Kids who evolve into creative adults tend to have a strong moral compass.
I have lots of micro-goals of trying to get things done, whatever the amount of time available.
You want people who choose to follow because they genuinely believe in ideas, not because they're afraid to be punished if they don't. For startups, there's so much pivoting that's required that if you have a bunch of sheep, you're in bad shape.
Tweeting has taught me the discipline to say more with fewer words.
Takers are self-serving in their interactions. It's all about what can you do for me.
