Of the many compliments that I can give to Adam Grant’s remarkable new book Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, a rare one is that I will have to read it again soon. Grant is an unusual social scientist in that he’s also a terrific writer, a gem-cutting anecdote selector of real-life stories that illuminate his points with a breezy, swallow-it-in-a-gulp momentum so I found myself racing through the book with a smile on my face. I didn’t even take notes! That doesn’t happen. So, I’m going to read it again, slower, pencil in hand.
In the meantime my first tour through Originals haunts my waking life, an insightful shadow nodding in at unexpected moments— as a professional, a thinker and as a parent.
For example, when an academic friend told me she was trying to salvage as much as she could from her recent articles to put into a book she needs to write for tenure, I replied, “Don’t do that. You are prolific and have tons of ideas: only chase the ones that still excite you.” That’s lifted straight from Grant, who talks about genius as a surprisingly quantitative endeavor: it’s not that creative masters have better ideas than the rest of us, instead they have have a much greater number of ideas so the odds go up that some of those ideas are terrific.
One of Grant’s opening anecdotes explores a non-causal correlation between success in a call center and an employee’s decision to change the default web browser on her or his computer. If the employee switched away from Internet Explorer to Firefox or Chrome (this isn’t hot-off-the-presses data, I think), then that switch demonstrated a kind of “how can I make this better?” mindset that led to higher job performance. I’ve thought about my own default choices repeatedly since then. noticing how sometimes I work around the technology when it’s too much bother to make the technology serve me. Looking at the pile of remote controls near the entertainment center in my living room is one example: I haven’t bothered to research, buy and program one universal remote.
Grant’s notion of strategic procrastination has also proved actionable faster than I might have predicted. I’ve often been a pressure-cooker worker, mulling things over for a long simmering period before rolling up my sleeves. Grant has persuaded me, though, that getting started first and then taking a mulling break at the halfway point leads to higher quality outcomes, and I’ve used this to my advantage — and the advantage of the work — on a research project that is taking up most of my time.
Originals isn’t perfect but it’s always provocative. Another phenomenon that Grant explores is the correlation between birth order and creativity, with younger children — particularly the youngest of many children — often becoming more successful as ground-breaking creatives because they inhabit a different social niche in their families than rule-making parents and rule-abiding oldest children (of which I am one). Grant’s birth order argument focuses so much on the nuclear family that I wonder if it’s too Western, too settled, too suburban. My mother, for example, grew up in a close, hodgepodge, overlapping community of immigrant parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and oodles of cousins. Her closest peer group were her cousins, with whom she roamed her city neighborhood unsupervised. The cousins, with whom she is still close decades later, influenced her as much if not more than her sister, eight years her senior and a more distant presence in her childhood than, say, the presence of my 14 year old daughter in my 10 year old son’s day-to-day in our little suburb. Still, Grant’s birth order research has made me rethink some of my own parenting choices with my older child.
Perhaps my only real complaint with Originals is that I want some additional product that will help me to apply its powerful insights in my everyday life. As I gobbled up the book, I wanted something like a deck of playing cards with distilled versions of the chapters that I might rifle through to help sharpen my thinking… something like the Oblique Strategies or Story Cubes.
I was a big fan of Grant’s first book, Give and Take, and Originals is just as good if not better. It was a pleasure to read the first time, and I’m eager to dive in once again… perhaps I’ll make my own deck of helpful playing cards using my friend John Willshire’s product, the Artefact Cards.
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