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This is the art of charm.
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Learn everything you need to know to crush it in business, love, and life.
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Today we re talking with my friend Adam Grant on how to become more original.
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You might remember Adam from an earlier episode on his previous work, Give and Take.
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This is called Originals.
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There s a lot here.
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We re gonna talk about questioning the default instead of taking the status quo for granted, tripling the number of ideas you generate, procrastinating strategically, balancing your risk portfolio.
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I could go on and on here, but you ll just have to hear more as we talk now with Adam Grant.
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And with that, welcome to the Art of Charm.
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I m Jordan Harbinger.
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I m here with producer
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Jason.
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What s shaking, brother?
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The Art of Charm brings together the best thought leaders, teachers, and exceptional individuals to teach you how to be a top performer in life, love, and at work.
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If you re new, we d love to send you some top episodes and the toolbox where we discuss things like body language, nonverbal communication, persuasion, networking, negotiation, and everything else we teach here at AOC.
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Just text charmed to 33444 or go to theartofcharm.com, that s charmed, that s C-H-A-R-M-E-D, to 33444.
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We may not have all the answers, but we definitely have some of the questions.
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Here s Adam Grant.
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So tell us what you do in one sentence.
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I teach at Wharton and I occasionally write books and give speeches.
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Some people who really do lots of stuff, it s like they re trying to unsell it, which I totally appreciate.
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You re a ridiculously productive person.
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Are you the youngest full tenure professor at Wharton?
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Am I close on that one?
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I believe that was true at some point, but those things are not honors you hold on to for long.
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That is kind of an inevitability, right?
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At some point, you could be the youngest ever to become such.
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I don t know.
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Jonah Berger looks young too, though, or is he just one of those genetic guys who s 50 and looks like he s 31?
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He is definitely young.
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I think he s a year older than me.
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Oh, busted.
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You busted his record.
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He probably secretly hates you.
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He ll be on the show soon as well.
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I loved originals.
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I really, really dug it.
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And at first, what I do before I go through these is I read the positive and mostly the negative Amazon reviews.
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And when the negative reviews seem kind of ridiculous and they re trying to find something wrong with the book because you gave them a bad grade five years ago or something, then I usually pick up the book.
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That was the case with your book.
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I think the most helpful negative review kind of didn t hold water.
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And there s so much in this book that we re not going to get through all of it today, so I should probably stop babbling and kick things off.
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In the book, you mention that great creators don t necessarily have the deepest level of expertise, but rather seek out the broadest perspectives.
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And I d love for you to speak on that a little bit.
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For us, when we look at people we consider original, we usually think they studied this since they were eight, and now they re freaking the bomb at it, and they ve changed everything in the field.
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Yeah, that turns out to not at all be true, which is kind of exciting.
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And, you know, Jordan, I worry, you read the book so thoroughly that you re in danger of not being original because of that, if we take this idea seriously.
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Crap, I didn t even think about that possibility.
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But that aside, I was really intrigued, like this evidence shows up over and over again, that if you draw, like the letter U, and then you turn it upside down, that captures the relationship between the depth of your expertise and how creative you re likely to be.
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On a graph, you mean?
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Yeah, exactly.
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Don t just draw the letter U, make the graph.
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Well, all right, let s talk about the 10,000 hour rule and then we ll circle back to this.
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So the 10,000 hours, it s an average that often takes people in fields like chess and music to achieve expertise.
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And it s true that practice makes perfect.
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The more you do deliberate practice, which is what the 10,000 hours are about, where, you know, you re trying to hone a scale and get feedback and then make adjustments to get better and better at that.
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That kind of practice does make perfect, but it doesn t make new.
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And the more you repeat a skill over and over again, the more you tend to get stuck in the way that everybody else has done it.
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So, I first learned about this growing up playing sports.
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So, Jordan, have you ever played tennis?
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Not well.
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I mean, I know kind of how it works, but generally, let s just say no.
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All right, let s take tennis players.
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There s some cool research on this.
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You re like, no.
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OK, I m going to use the example anyway, because you re out of luck.
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You ll just figure it out.
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No, you ll understand it, it s simple.
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If you did have that experience, I would have had you explain this, but instead, I m gonna do it.
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Good thing I said no.
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So, when you learn to serve, at first, you can t hit the ball at all, right?
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You throw it up and you miss, and then eventually you start to hit the ball onto the court somewhere, and then you start to hit it into the right service box, and then as you practice this more and more, your serve gets accurate.
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And then at some point, you can hit the ball harder and your serve gets stronger, but if you re a kid, you re getting taller and you re getting stronger.
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And at some point, you re gonna switch from the coach at your local place, if you re serious about tennis, to a real pro.
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And the real pro is gonna want you to change your grip.
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and change the angle that you hit the ball, and the more practice you have with the old one, the harder it is to change to the new one.
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And that s part of what happens to people when they go really deep into one domain, is they re so used to looking at the world in one way, that they re almost blind to seeing it all the other ways.
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So in order to be more original, quote unquote, we need to take a road less traveled, or go against the grain, or question the default.
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There s probably some other cliche I could throw in here, but I just ran out.
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You got all the cliches that I used, it s good.
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Okay, in your work you mention that the next level is to ask, maybe why does this exist in the first place?
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Yeah, the cool thing is that if you re somebody who s relatively new to a domain, you re more likely to do that.
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So I had a lot of fun with the Warby Parker founders who have built a very successful eyewear company and they gave me the chance to invest in it and I said, no thank you.
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Oh man, yikes.
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Yeah, whoops, they re valued at over a billion dollars.
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But one of the things that they were able to do, they came to the eyewear industry totally fresh.
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And they asked, why do glasses cost so much?
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And they just assumed like there was always a medical reason.
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And then they did some research, like a lot of people hadn t thought to ask that question.
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But
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As outsiders, they were like, wait a minute, there s one company that controls about 80% of the market, so they can charge whatever they want.
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And there s got to be a way to make these cheaper.
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This is just a cost decision that a bunch of people made at some point, and we can make a different decision.
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And then they realized if they sold them online, they could remove a lot of their costs.
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And that was the beginning of a wildly successful brand.
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And I think that s where originality often starts.
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And it s easier to do when you know less about the industry or the field.
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Yeah, it seems counterintuitive, right?
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Because most of us think we need to become some sort of uber authority on something in order to innovate.
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Turns out it s actually kind of the opposite.
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Yeah, I mean, Einstein had a terrible experience with this, right?
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So he s pretty new to physics.
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He imagines himself riding on a beam of light.
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and ends up sort of coming up with these two revolutionary advances over relativity.
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And later, like he s resisting the next major development in the field, which is quantum physics.
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He ends up getting proven wrong by somebody who points out that he forgot to account for his own theory of relativity.
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Whoops.
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Oops.
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He was kind of dismayed by that, and he ends up saying, gosh, to punish me for challenging authority, the fates made me an authority myself.
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Ouch.
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So how do we know at which point we are expert enough to make a change, or we know enough to make a change, but we re not at the level where we re so entrenched in our ways?
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Because it seems like something you can only identify in hindsight, right?
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Like, oh, now I m too much of an expert to really innovate because I m blinded by my own
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constraints, that doesn t seem like something you can come up with in the middle of that process.
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Yeah, it s a great question.
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I think you re right.
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The only way that I know of to overcome this is to do something that s also super cliched, which is to quote Steve Jobs.
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But I m gonna do it.
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Steve Jobs said, a little over three decades ago, he said that the key to creativity was that you just have to have a different bag of experiences than anyone else.
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And I think the bag of experiences that he chose in that period of his life is illegal in most countries.
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But he was really onto something powerful there that you don t actually get stuck in this like entrenchment of, you know, blind to alternative ways of seeing things, if you re constantly broadening your knowledge base.
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And we see this with Nobel Prize winning scientists are much more likely than their peers to have artistic hobbies.
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They re twice as likely to play musical instruments, seven times as likely to draw or paint, 12 times as likely to write poetry or fiction, and 22 times as likely to perform as actors, dancers, or yes, magicians.
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You could say curious people are just drawn to self-expression in those ways, but there s also some evidence that the time they spend doing art makes them better scientists, like Galileo, first person to see mountains on the moon, but not the first astronomer to look at that image through a telescope.
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His big advantage was he had trained in a drawing technique that involves special shading.
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And when he saw different shades through his telescope, he realized those had to be changes in elevation and those had to be mountains.
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And so artistic training made him a better scientist.
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We see this with fashion designers, too, that the most innovative fashion designers
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are the ones who have broadened their experience literally by going abroad, not traveling abroad, not living abroad, but working abroad.
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The more time you ve spent working in countries different from your own, the more you get access to new ingredients that you can use to create something that didn t really exist before.
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And I think if you broaden your experience like that, you don t get trapped in expertise.
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I think that makes a lot of sense.
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It s kind of that Renaissance man outlook where one skill rubs off and complements the other.
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The Galileo example s brilliant.
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I feel like it must kind of grind people s gears, other scientists who are now long dead, at some level that he made a discovery based on something that most of us would consider a waste of time if we re really trying to pursue something in one direction.
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I think a lot of people who are craftsmen in one area
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like the idea of having hobbies, especially the entrepreneurs, for example, right now.
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A lot of people who work for startups, for example, seven days, 15 hours a day, busting their butt, doing the one thing, pushing forward, but they re not really able to be that creative, at least in other areas of their life.
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They re lucky just to get some sun time in the prison yard, essentially, and go out for a walk on the way to lunch, if they ever even get that opportunity.
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We re talking about a city that just invented a drink that has all the nutrients you need so that you don t have to eat actual food because it takes up too much time.
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There s not a lot of people putting emphasis on, you know, be well-rounded.
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We re going against that big time here in Silicon Valley anyway.
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Yeah, I think this is one of the reasons that you re seeing more and more startups doing disruptive work from other places.
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I think that this is something that you always have to toggle back and forth between, ah, now I m broadening my experience, I have a bunch of big ideas, I m gonna test them.
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When one seems like it has potential, of course you wanna do a deep dive into that and bring enough grit and consistency of focus that you actually deliver on it.
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I think we re off the far tail of going too deep and not broad enough.
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One of the ways to diversify is you brought up a renaissance man.
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I think a simpler model of that is MacGyver.
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I think if we had more people in the tech world who said, like, I just want to be a little more like MacGyver.
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Put me in a room with some random objects and let me see what I can make out of them.
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I think that should be part of everybody s week.
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And it s just a good way to keep you thinking a little bit differently.
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Jason, didn t you just send me something that was like, there s a new MacGyver coming out?
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That s right.
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I just sent you the new trailer for the reboot of MacGyver.
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Wait, is Richard Dean Anderson still in it?
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Oh no, we ve got a new mullet coming to town.
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No, there can only be one mullet.
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The proto-mullet.
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Let s move.
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We have limited time here, folks.
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Define more original.
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I almost think I jumped the shark a little bit here.
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I m not sure everybody listening, including when I first started reading the book, even understands what that means.
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I mean, who cares about originality?
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I got stuff to do, right?
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Yeah, well, if you re doing anything that doesn t require originality, there s a good chance in the next decade your job isn t gonna exist anymore, right?
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So I would say that when I think about originality, to me it means there s nothing fundamentally original in the sense that every idea that you ever come up with is based on the experiences you ve had and the frameworks you ve been exposed to in the past.
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One of my favorite thinkers, Carl Weick, often says that creativity is just putting old things in new combinations and new things in old combinations.
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If you take that idea seriously, originality to me is about saying, I m gonna do something that s relatively novel in the domain that I m in, and then it can t just be novel, it also has to be useful, so that it solves a problem for somebody.
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And then you stop there and you say, all right, creativity is novel and useful ideas.
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Becoming an original person means you ve taken some extra action, you ve had the initiative to actually implement them.
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And that s what I would call someone original, but I think an idea can be original when it s novel and useful.
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you had this really brilliant proxy called the browser effect, or at least I think I called it the browser effect.
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It s this proxy for people who think more effectively, at least in this certain context, which was customer service.
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Can you speak to that?
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I thought that was ridiculously original in itself, and I was shocked to find out that people s browser choice meant a damn thing, frankly.
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I was too.
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I remember sitting at a conference when this economist, Michael Hasman, was presenting his data.
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And he said, we have this evidence that people who use Chrome and Firefox are on average significantly better at their customer service and sales jobs.
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And they also stay 15% longer than Internet Explorer and Safari users.
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And I was like, yes, I use Firefox.
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I feel really good about myself.
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except you should really use Chrome.
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But anyway, keep going.
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Chrome s my backup, I m with you.
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But I wanted to know why, and I had a bunch of hypotheses.
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One was that it was just a technical advantage, that more computer-savvy people were using these newer Chrome, Firefox kinds of browsers.
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He had the data, and he ran the analyses with his team, and they found that actually all the browser groups are pretty similar in tech proficiency.
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They had similar typing speed, they had the same amount of computer knowledge.
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And then my next hypothesis, which turns out to be the one that s probably right, is about how you got the browser.
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If you used Internet Explorer or Safari, those came pre-installed on your computer.
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They were the default option, and you just accepted it exactly as it was built for you.
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Whereas if you wanted Chrome or Firefox, you had to be a little resourceful, download a different browser after wondering, is there something better out there?
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And so people hear about this, and they re like, great, so I wanna get better at my job, I just need to download a different browser?
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No, it s about being the kind of person who has the instinct to ask, is there another option out there, and then seek it out, and that s kind of a preview of how a lot of people approach their jobs.
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Right, essentially, having taken the initiative to improve their circumstances at work, they realized they could shape their environment, or at least their job a little bit, so they created the job that they wanted, and unfortunately, it turned out they were the exception instead of the rule, and as you state in the book, we live in an internet explorer world, which is just brutal,
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Given anybody s experience with Internet Explorer, I can t believe anyone actually uses it.
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So just as the two-thirds of the customer service reps use the default browser on their computers, many of us accept the defaults in our own lives.
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And this show, The Art of Charm, is essentially entirely about not accepting those defaults, yet another reason why I thought this was such a great fit.
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What s the browser effect look like in action when it s not applied to, say, browsers?
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It seems like there s a lot of people in a lot of areas that accept the given state of affairs.
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I would love to see where the browser effect takes effect in our daily lives.
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And how do we know if we re one of those people aside from which browser we re using?
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Well, I think that we see this all the time, right?
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So if you think about your job, are you doing your job description exactly as it was written for everyone else who s done the job?
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Or are you asking like, hmm,
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Are there other tasks I could be bringing into my job?
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Are there other skills that I have that I m not using?
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Are there other interests that I have that I could be pursuing in ways that are useful for my organization?
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And that s one easy place to look at this.
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Another place where people accept the default all the time is in families and relationships.
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Who decided that one family of parents and children should live together in the United States?
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Why should there be a nuclear family?
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That s the default.
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There are lots of other countries and cultures and points in history where people lived with extended family, and I m often wondering how much better the world would be if people weren t just raised by the two parents that they happen to get stuck with.
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but they had the support of the extended family, you know, since no two parents are gonna be perfect.
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As you start to look at the world that way, you have all these moments every day where you re like, wow, I m just doing exactly the way that everybody else does it, and I have no logic for it whatsoever, and maybe I should stop and think about whether there s an alternative.
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Jordan, let me ask you, do you think about the defaults that you see other people accept way too often?
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What are the ones that drive you most crazy?
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That s a great question.
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The one that comes to mind immediately, and I m sorry, because you re a professor at a university, but going to college.
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That s the big one for me right now.
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And I did this, so I m in a great position to sort of complain about it.
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So many people, the majority of people that I knew, almost everybody that I knew growing up, went to college.
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regardless of whether or not that was a suitable decision for them in the moment.
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For me, I think it was one of the worst times and decisions for me to go to college despite meeting great people like our mutual friend who you grew up with.
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I think it s a really, really bad choice for so many folks, but I wouldn t have ever dreamed of doing anything else because growing up, even from kindergarten, I remember my parents talking about college.
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Yeah, I think that s a great example.
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And I guess at Wharton, the default is to major in finance if you re an undergrad.
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And who decided that that was the way you should go?
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Well, everybody else is doing it.
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Well, let s sit down and figure out what you actually want to do with your life.
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It s not clear that finance is the right way to go.
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And there are those kinds of defaults everywhere.
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Jason, what s yours?
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Mine is people who leave their keyboard sounds on on their smartphone.
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The default to the keyboard clickies, those are the worst.
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Ooh, yeah.
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Painful.
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You always want to take people who do that and be like, oh, there s this thing called the internet.
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Yeah, you know that your phone can do other things besides play Candy Crush and make phone calls.
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Hey, Art of Charm listeners, I m excited to share a new podcast I ve been absolutely binging.
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Winning is an everyday mindset, and Craig Robinson and John Calipari are here to help.
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On Ways to Win podcast, Craig and Coach Cal use their on-court wisdom to solve your off-court problems.
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Whether it s trouble at home or a workplace dilemma, the coaches will help you find a winning formula for success.
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You ll hear from prominent athletes, business leaders, and celebrities who reveal insights that made them into the leaders they are today.
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And don t miss President Obama sharing how he deals with pressure by projecting confidence, believing in your team, and taking criticism.
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Listen to Ways to Win wherever you get your podcasts.
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I definitely agree that there are tons of people who accept the defaults.
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What your book is stating, what Originals is essentially trying to communicate, at least in this particular part, is that the defaults are created by people and thus can be changed by people.
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It s just that many people don t do that.
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I mean, the hallmark of originality is rejecting that default and exploring whether or not a better option exists in the first place.
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Did I say that?
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I said that, didn t I?
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I feel like you may have, it s in my notes in bold, which means I typed it.
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Well, you also said earlier in the book, and this is great, because it goes to your point, we re all vulnerable to kleptomnesia, accidentally remembering the ideas of others as our own.
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So that might have actually been that in play right now.
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Well, you know what, the funny thing is, everybody thinks that plagiarism is an intentional thing, and sometimes it is.
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This show is intentional, and it s pretty much entirely made up of other people s ideas.
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I just happened to be talking with them at the time, so you re right.
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Yeah, no, but we re all vulnerable to this.
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It happens to everyone, right?
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And it especially happens when somebody is generating ideas and about to speak.
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The person who s talking right then, they are paying no attention whatsoever to that person.
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Those are the ideas that are most likely to get kind of accidentally borrowed and incorporated without remembering the source.
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And if that s you, you are a kleptomnesiac.
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which is something that we all happen to have it from time to time.
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Although I think what we do is slightly different, right?
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I mean, we tease the content out of people and people know that you re here as well, that s the point.
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So it s different than me writing a book and calling it originality and it has all of your ideas in it, rephrased by a virtual assistant in the Philippines.
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You did make another great point, which was that the people who suffer the most from a given state of affairs are paradoxically the least likely to question, challenge, reject, or change it.
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And why is that?
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I mean, is that the browser effect in action?
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Is it just their nature to not think that they can change anything?
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Or is this programmed into us somehow?
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Yeah, I think it s more than that.
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What happens is, there s this body of research called System Justification.
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John Jost and his colleagues have done the majority of this work.
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What they show is that people are really motivated to believe in a just world.
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It s hard to wake up in the morning and think, you know, my company or my country or my community is fundamentally unfair.
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And so, in order to preserve this belief that, like, the world around us is fair, we come to assume that we get what we deserve.
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And that means that if you re somebody who is unfortunately disadvantaged by a system, you re especially vulnerable to justify it because you re constantly going around asking, why is this this way?
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And the default answer is, well, this must be what I deserve because I don t want to live in a place that s not fair.
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That s really unsettling.
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And so I must just not be that great.
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And it s one of the reasons that injustices persist for so long.
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If people who are most disadvantaged by a system are the ones who are most likely to justify it, then who s gonna go and try to challenge the status quo and improve it?
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I guess that s true.
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It is a bummer because it s essentially, in my opinion, largely those people who should, who have the most incentive to challenge the status quo because they re the ones benefiting from it the least.
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And that s where, you know, sometimes things just have to get ridiculously awful before people are motivated to act.
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Very often, it s like the people who are moderately disadvantaged by a system and are pretty annoyed by it, and then they look around and see that other people are getting even more screwed than they are.
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Sometimes it s those people who are the most likely to step up.
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But what do you think the civil rights, the Rosa Parks thing was?
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It seems like that was at the point where it was just so awful that they couldn t take it anymore, but on the other hand, there is the relativism of, well, okay, but it s not slavery, or something that could have been considered even worse.
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Where do you put that in the hierarchy of originality?
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I mean, I m not a civil rights expert by any stretch, but from reading a lot of books about the movement and studying a little bit of the history, the thing that s striking to me is just how much of that was a false promise.
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This is what Martin Luther King Jr.
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spoke about in his famous dream speech about how
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after slavery was abolished, equal rights were supposed to exist.
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And instead, you saw continued massive inequalities.
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You saw extreme prejudice and discrimination, to the point that a lot of people felt that the 1950s sort of unfolded, that things were getting worse rather than better.
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And I think that that s one of the easiest ways to foment revolution in a group of people.
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People are not sensitive to the absolute state of affairs they re in.
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They re more sensitive to the relative state.
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And so you re in a bad situation, but it s stable and you ve always been there.
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It s a lot easier to tolerate than if you re in a pretty bad situation that has just turned horrible.
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And I think that that was probably one of the big factors that stimulated such meaningful change.
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And I know there s people listening right now, and I kind of had this thought myself where not everyone can be original, but not everyone should be original.
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What about people who just work hard and bust butt and don t necessarily create a quote-unquote world-changing idea?
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I mean, we need more of those people than we necessarily do originals, in theory.
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Yeah, I think I agree with that.
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I think, though, that every leader needs followers.
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We can t all be original in every single moment.
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I don t worry that the world has too little conformity.
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I think it has too much.
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And I think we all have moments where we look at something in our lives and say, this does not make sense.
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This needs to change.
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And then most of us prefer not to rock the boat.
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We d rather fit in than stand out.
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And so we don t do anything about it.
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And what I want is for everyone to have both the will and the skill to be able to say, when I do see something that seems ineffective or wrong, I m able and motivated to speak up about it and try to drive change.
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I think that everybody should have moments of originality, and I d like for more of us to have more of those moments.
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How s that?
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Yeah, I like it.
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What about entrepreneurs and folks like that?
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Because I know we re trying to sort of pinpoint what makes an original, and we see, alright, these children were really good students, these children really weren t, and you see entrepreneurs come out of both camps.
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How is it that even creative people sort of fall into the unoriginal bucket, and people who you think
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are maybe just burnouts fall into the original bucket and we go, wow, thank God for these people.
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I mean, it seems like great creators must have something in common.
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What is that thread?
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I like the risk-taking aspect of originals.
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That s good, I was gonna go there.
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One of the things I found most surprising was I always thought to be an entrepreneur, you had to be a huge risk taker.
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When I was in college, I had helped start an online network of people who were all going to go to college together and never even occurred to me to turn this thing into a company.
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And then Mark Zuckerberg comes around the house next door a couple of years later and builds Facebook.
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And his idea was way better than ours.
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But when I saw that, I was like, I would never be one of those people because I don t have any appetite for risk.
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Part of the draw to a university was permanent job security.
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I have tenure.
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I don t have to worry about losing my job.
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And it s roommates in college who decided to forego a bunch of job offers and start a company.
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And they tried to convince me to do it with them.
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I said no.
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And I just, I am not one of those people.
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But I was wrong, because yes, there are lots of entrepreneurs who are big risk takers, but those are usually the ones who fail, not the ones who succeed.
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And my favorite study on this is, this is a nationally representative study of American entrepreneurs.
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There are basically two ways you can become an entrepreneur if you have a job currently.
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One is, if you re a big risk taker, you have an idea, and you say, you know what, I m gonna quit my job, and I m gonna go all in.
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The other is,
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if you re very cautious like me, you re like, I don t wanna put everything on the line.
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I m gonna keep my day job and I ll start my business on the side.
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And that second group is 33% less likely to fail than the risk takers.
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And you see this over and over.
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There s a long list of businesses from Nike to Spanx to Minecraft.
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all of which were started by people who were risk averse enough that they didn t quit their day job for sometimes months, often years, until they had almost certain proof that their company was gonna succeed.
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Interesting, so if you keep your day job, you re 33% more likely to succeed, or is that how that works?
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Sorry, 33% less likely to fail.
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I think you did say that, and I just read it backwards in my head.
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Okay, why do you think that is?
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Obviously it has something to do with the mindset behind quitting or not quitting your job, or not going all in, or is it just the security of having that other income?
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There s probably multiple factors at play here.
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Look, we need more data to really get to the bottom of that.
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But I think both of those predictions are probably right in that the kinds of people who are careful enough to say, I don t want to put all my eggs in one basket, tend to make smarter decisions with their businesses, too.
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They re less likely, for example, to say things like, gosh, I quit my entire job to do this company, so I have to make it succeed as opposed to, you know, this first three ideas didn t work out.
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Let me tinker with some more.
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And then I think, you know, there s also having the security blanket.
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When you know you have this job, you don t feel this pressure to rush your product to market.
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Like Sarah Blakely with Spanx was such a good example of this, where she spent two years selling fax machines while she was trying to create footless penny hoes.
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And eventually, she created a prototype.
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The first prototype was not as good as what she wanted.
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And if she had quit her job, and her livelihood was dependent on selling this thing, she would have had to put it out in the market.
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Because she had a stable source of income, she was able to say, no, I m gonna keep working at it.
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I m gonna get it patented.
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And then when she finally launched, she became the youngest self-made billionaire in America.
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And I think having that stable source of income is a great, great elevator for entrepreneurs to become successful.
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Yeah, luckily she was married to Jesse Itzler, who s a pretty smart dude, too, actually, who s been on the show.
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They re both badass.
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Kind of unfair.
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There s people who just are able to take on more risk because they have a plan B. I think Chris Gulliboe, who talked about the idea of having this as a side gig, actually allows you to take more risk.
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than you normally would because your risk is compartmentalized in some ways, and I think that s great, and it fights against the myth that people have of entrepreneurs, which, as you point out in the book, literally means bearer of risk in French or something like that.
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A lot of people believe that great creators are born
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somehow immune to that risk.
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They re just wired to be wingsuit flying, crazy red bull drinking, risk taking knuckleheads who sometimes strike it big and other times burn out, but we don t hear about those people.
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So it becomes this sexy thing to do, to be like, I m quitting my job and I m going all in.
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And you only hear from the people that end up on Shark Tank or better, you don t hear from the people who are like,
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Yeah, my brother lives with me now, because he went all in on this thing, and it didn t work, and he can t even get a job, and he is just stinking up my living room.
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You don t hear about that as much.
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So basically, if you re listening to this right now, don t go all in and quit thinking, this is what I gotta do to succeed.
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because of a myth or more likely some BS inspirational speech or podcast where somebody recommends that, usually from the side of a self-selecting group where they ve made it and they feel like that was what made them win when they really have no idea.
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Do you see this a lot?
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I mean, you study a lot of businesses.
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You must see that the winners tend to be self-selecting and the losers don t have a microphone because they live on their sister s couch.
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Yeah, I mean, I can t speak to that particular example, but I do think it s striking that if you look at wildly successful entrepreneurs, they really don t like risk.
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I ve interviewed Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Mark Cuban, the list goes on and on.
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None of them are excited about just trying something that s risky because risk by definition means you re accepting a huge amount of uncertainty.
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And people who like to succeed do not like uncertainty.
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What s interesting about most of them is that they almost think about risk like a stock portfolio.
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where actually this idea had its origins at the great University of Michigan.
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There was a psychologist, Clyde Coombs, who wrote about this idea of risk portfolios, and he said, look, if you re gonna make a risky bet on a very, very new stock, and you have no idea what s gonna happen to it, you would know instinctively that you should take a bunch of other money and put it in some very boring mutual funds.
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These great entrepreneurs tend to think about risk in very similar ways.
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They say, look, if I m gonna do something that s very high uncertainty, I m gonna then balance out my portfolio by having a bunch of cautious moves.
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Keeping your day job is one of those cautious moves, but there are tons of other things that you can do to try to secure your organization s success, and I think that that s a really healthy way to think about risk-taking.
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Yeah, I agree, and I think, I hate even seeing it on friggin  Shark Tank, where someone s like, I m on my second mortgage, but these light-up buttons that go on your jeans, they re gonna make it big, and you re cringing, and the sharks are cringing, and the investors that don t exist are cringing.
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All right, so we don t go all in, but don t day jobs or quote unquote real jobs distract us from doing our best work?
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I mean, it seems like creative accomplishments, especially big ones, can t really happen without big windows of time, of energy.
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How do we do this when we ve got a 10, 12 hour a day job?
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Yes, having a sense of security in one realm gives us the freedom to be original in another.
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Do we have to hover in the middle of the risk portfolio, as you say, by hovering right in the middle there, by staying in the middle there and taking only moderate risk?
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No, I think what you see with successful people, and this is beautifully illustrated by entrepreneurs, is they go and take one big risk and they offset that with a bunch of safe moves.
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You know, toggling back and forth between the extremes that seems to predict higher levels of success.
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One of my big successes was built while I still had a day job with blogrolling.com, which turned into an award-winning web service, but I only built it in the evenings when I still had my day job to back me up and had the comfort of while I was writing the code to know that I didn t have to actually depend on that for food for the next month.
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Is that something that s interesting?
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Yeah, and I would just say we need more of those examples out there to counteract the few examples of people who went for broke and made it.
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We never hear about the people who took big risks and didn t make it.
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We especially need to hear more from the people who played it safe and succeeded.
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Even people who accidentally play it safe, I think it s fine.
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This show, the whole business, The Art of Charms, started essentially eight years ago, but I ve been doing this show for almost 10 years.
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It was a hobby back then.
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That was fun, and I did it with AJ, who s my business partner now, and we had friends and we would do it.
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We never thought we would monetize it, and that was massively liberating because now I see people launching their own media platforms
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and they re like, okay, we ve got this three month ramp up to profitability and blah, blah, blah, and I m thinking, if you don t hit those numbers, you re gonna hate yourself, your whole team s gonna be demoralized.
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It s super unlikely that your media platform, or any media platform, is gonna be the next big...
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thing in iTunes or anywhere, so you re really hoping that this moonshot is gonna crush, and that s why most people quit.
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We didn t have any reason to quit, because if we didn t wanna release something that week, or we didn t have time, we just didn t do it, nobody cared, we d get a couple emails from fans asking where the show was, we d do another one the next week, and not care about how many people downloaded it or anything, so it stayed fun for a really long time.
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till we hit this weird critical mass point where we decided, okay, this is really working.
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Let s make it a business and then make some money off of it and we can hire people to help us with the parts we don t like.
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And the rest is kind of history and still developing.
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And I think that s really important.
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There s some intangible benefit by not having cinder blocks on your feet.
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when you re launching a business and just thinking, if this works, great, cool, I enjoy it.
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And if not, that s fine, I have other ideas.
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Not, if this doesn t work, I m so screwed, what am I gonna do?
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Oh my God, I can t sleep.
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Bingo.
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One thing I thought was actually really surprising was that entrepreneurs are significantly more risk averse than the general population.
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That actually shocked me.
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But what did not surprise me at all was that economists found that as teenagers, successful entrepreneurs were
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nearly three times as likely as anyone else to break the rules and engage in illicit activities.
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Jason, I m looking at you right now like, yep, that checks out.
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I mean, you and I both.
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I was informing the FBI and working with them on phone security stuff with cellular phones back in the 90s before I could even drive because I was getting in so much crap, but I was so young, they were like, wait a minute, how do you know how to eavesdrop on cell phone conversations?
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What the hell s happening here?
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I was just running from the police because I was a skateboarder in the suburbs in the Midwest, but that s a little bit different.
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That still counts.
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I think that still counts.
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The Economist would count that as a illicit activity and at least a broken rule.
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Yeah, and let s be clear though, it s not like all illicit activities, right?
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It s mild delinquency as opposed to breaking major laws or rules.
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Right, this isn t burglary and violent crime.
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This is, yeah, I knew I was wrong.
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I wasn t supposed to wiretap people s phones, but I did it anyway, because I figured out how, and that was the thrill.
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And they just wanted to know, how the hell is this so easy for somebody so young, because somebody who s malicious in doing it is going to want to be able to do that too.
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So we need to fix this.
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And that s kind of where I was.
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I think now, post-September 11th, it s kind of a different thing with the whole NSA and all that stuff.
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Anyway, looking back at originals, it seems like a lot of people have great ideas.
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Is it just because they re good at generating ideas, or is there something else going on here?
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Well, I found this really fascinating.
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Across domains, the most original people have more bad ideas than their peers.
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And it s like, well, what s going on there?
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The most convincing explanation when you track all the studies in this area is
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The best way to come up with something original is to generate variety.
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And the easiest path to variety is just volume.
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So most of us, we generate a few ideas, we fall in love with our first few, or we just feel like we can t solve the problem and we give up.
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And either way, we never get to the most original ideas because the ideas that come to mind first are the most obvious.
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That s why you thought of them right away.
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And it s the ones you come up with later, you know, you re generating more ideas and getting further from the stuff that you already know well, that s more likely to take you in a fresh direction.
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You know, it s interesting that if you look at classical composers, if you look at great inventors, the most innovative ones consistently did not have better hit rates than their peers.
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They just did more work.
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And that meant they had a better shot at doing something new.
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You see this in all sorts of different domains.
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Even a movie studio like Pixar will often look at 4,000 scripts before they make a single Toy Story.
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I think that most people and most organizations just don t generate enough ideas to get to their point of originality.
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I think that makes sense.
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When I read that in your book, how many scripts they go through, it made me almost feel a little bit sick for the people that have to read those all day and iterate and iterate and iterate.
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You gotta love that stuff.
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to really go into that amount of effort to create it before anything gets made.
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I mean, you re just going back and forth, and they re the best at it.
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That s why it s a successful company, but it seems like from what you ve presented here that we re actually really bad at predicting how good or bad our ideas are.
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There s confirmation bias, and there s all these sort of overconfidence bias that a lot of people have.
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Do we overcome that by just generating more and more and more ideas, kind of like how we increase our odds in any numbers game?
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Yeah, I think that s exactly right.
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I mean, it s really hard to judge your own ideas because you don t have enough distance from them.
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I think that, you know, a lot of people are way overconfident.
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I mean, it s really heavily driven by confirmation bias that, you know, you want to see all the pros of your idea.
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You re not that excited to look at the cons.
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I think that anybody, no matter how many successes you ve had, how many great ideas you ve had,
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you need to have some humility about your own judgment, because it s very hard to get a balanced or unbiased perspective on something you created.
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And that means you have to rely a lot on the judgment of other people.
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So the wisdom of crowds, but not all crowds are equally wise.
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You know, I think that there, the data suggests that often the best judges of new ideas, if it s not you, it s usually not your boss either.
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Because if you re a manager,
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there are two kinds of mistakes you can make when you look at new ideas.
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You could commit a false positive, where you bet on a terrible idea, or you could commit a false negative, where you reject an idea that turns out to be great.
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And in the ideal world, managers would have equal incentives, you know, sort of outcomes attached to both.
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You know, it would be skewed in one direction, but the direction where it s skewed is if you re a manager, and you invest in an idea that bombs,
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You have just embarrassed yourself and maybe ruined your career.
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Whereas if you reject a good idea, most of the time, no one will ever know.
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That idea won t see the light of day.
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It s only really in high innovation worlds like Silicon Valley or in entertainment where you can shop your screenplay or your novel to lots of different audiences.
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that we actually get to see these false negatives eventually come to light.
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Seinfeld, Harry Potter, Star Wars, the list goes on and on.
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I think that because managers tend to be so risk-averse because they don t want to bet on bad ideas, they miss out on a lot of good ideas.
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But the group that tends to be best at recognizing those new ideas is peers, fellow creators.
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because they have enough distance to tell you, you know, this is really terrible.
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But they re also invested in seeing originality thrive.
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They don t have the same stakes attached as managers to making a bad bet.
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And those are the people who can usually give you the best feedback on your unusual ideas.
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What about the idea, the sort of the quantity versus quality thing?
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I mean, if we re coming up with tons of ideas, don t we need to do less work to do better work?
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I think that that s often true when it comes to execution for quality.
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But there s actually not a quality quantity trade-off when it comes to creativity.
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if you don t increase your volume, you re missing out on your most original ideas like we talked about before.
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And so that means what you want to do is you want to maximize quantity when it comes to idea generation, just the raw possibilities that you put on the table.
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And then after that is when you take a step back and say, okay, I m going to put the quality filter on deciding which of these ideas to spend some time thinking about and working on and trying to make them good.
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I realize I literally have 17 pages of notes from after I read the book, so I want to dive into some of the practicals, and in the end, you include a really handy final breakdown of practicals.
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It s not called that, but I called it that, and I would love to just dive into this in the last segment of the show so that people have more actionable stuff, including go get the effing book, because there s so much stuff in here, I couldn t even prepare for it in under an hour, or create a show that s under an hour long.
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It took me a long time to do this and I don t resent it because I got a lot of benefit and I want other people to have the same or similar as well.
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So we talked about questioning the default.
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We talked about tripling the number of ideas you generate.
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What other ways can we become more original?
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You ve got suggestions like immerse yourself in a new domain, procrastinate strategically.
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I d love to get into the procrastination and how that enhances creativity because that seems like the opposite of what we ve been told to do our entire lives.
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Yes, it does, and it s certainly the opposite of what I intended to do.
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I had a lot of fun with this.
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I spoke at TED earlier this year, and I talked about how I m a precrastinator.
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So you know that just terror that you feel a few hours before a big deadline when you haven t made enough progress?
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Yeah.
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I feel that a few months before a deadline.
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Oh, that sounds miserable slash useful.
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Yeah, I ve always tried to get stuff done ahead, and I thought if anything was important, I should do it early.
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And what I then learned was I had this student named Jihei who gathered a bunch of data.
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She surveyed people in different companies about how often they procrastinated.
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She got their bosses to rate their creativity.
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And then she also designed some experiments to really look at what was causing what.
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And it turned out that procrastinators like me were significantly less creative than people who procrastinate sometimes for some length of time.
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And what happens is if you dive right into a task, you re stuck with your first ideas usually and you re implementing those, not necessarily your most original.
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You also tend to think in really linear and structured ways.
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and you don t give yourself time to incubate.
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If you work on ideas and you put them aside for a while and you come back to them, then you re much more likely to do some divergent thinking, you make some unexpected leaps and random connections, and you re more likely to stumble on something truly new.
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And so I think the simple recipe here is to be quick to start and slow to finish.
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where you want to dive in very early if you re trying to be original, but you want to resist the temptation to just close the door and say, all right, I figured this out, no more new ideas.
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And it s not a coincidence that Da Vinci, Frank Lloyd Wright, even Abraham Lincoln, all epic procrastinators.
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This makes sense.
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I love the idea that if you start something and then you let it sit for a while, you almost subconsciously start to let your brain figure out ways to solve the problem, add to the project, and do better work.
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The trick, of course, is coming back and finishing it.
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But procrastination can actually be selectively...
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used in order to enhance the quality of the work, and I m working on that.
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Usually it s one or the other.
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Get it done real nice and easy, all in one go, or procrastinate until the end and then go, oh crap.
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And that s sort of been the way I worked in the past, however.
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Today, a little bit different.
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It s hard to even say what looks like work these days.
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One other strategy that I thought was brilliant that so many smart people don t do is seeking more feedback from peers.
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It s deceptively obvious, right?
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Of course I want feedback from peers, and yet we see Polaroid and big companies like that, Kodak, failing because they just can t do it.
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Yeah, oh gosh.
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Like, we could do a whole session just on this, right?
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Yeah.
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I mean, the most important thing that you can do is a conversation we had a few years ago, my first book, I have always gone to givers rather than takers for feedback on ideas.
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Because, you know, I know that people who are constantly asking, you know, not what can you do for me, but rather what can I do for you, they would really try to help advance the idea.
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I made this mistake consistently of assuming that people who are really agreeable, warm, friendly, polite, you know, nice people would be the right givers to go to.
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And they re not because highly agreeable people dislike conflict.
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and they really want to make you feel good about your ideas, they want to cheerlead, you don t get enough critical feedback from them, and then they re uncomfortable really advocating for your ideas if they re unpopular in some way.
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It s the disagreeable givers.
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the people who are gruff and tough on the surface but underneath have others  best interests at heart.
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Bob Sutton calls them porcupines with a heart of gold.
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Those are the people that you want to take your ideas to because they will tear them apart to try to make them better.
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And then if you can convince them, they will run through walls for you.
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There s one study that I loved showing that highly disagreeable people actually experience more joy in an argument than a friendly conversation.
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I believe that.
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Yeah, so you find a disagreeable giver, and you pitch an idea to that person, and they are not afraid to fight the uphill battle.
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So I would really love to see more people shifting which kinds of peers they seek feedback from.
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Sure, I mean, dissenting opinions, as you explain in the book, are useful even when they re actually wrong, which I found surprising as well.
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And the worst companies performed, unfortunately, a la Polaroid, the more the leaders sought advice from yes men and people who didn t dissent,
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But do we just assign people to play devil s advocate?
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I mean, is that the same thing we re talking about here, or is there a difference between real dissent and somebody who s just poking holes in things?
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Yeah, there s a real difference, as you know.
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So when people assign devil s advocates, leaders do this all the time.
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It s like, I m gonna get somebody to represent a different opinion, and then we ll make sure we have diversity of thought in the room.
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It s a great idea with one tiny problem.
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It doesn t work.
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Because we have decades of evidence on this.
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Sharlon Nemeth at Berkeley, among others.
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What you see is that if you assign a devil s advocate, two bad things happen.
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One is that person does not argue forcefully enough.
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I m just playing a role.
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And then the other is the audience doesn t take that seriously enough because they know the person s just playing a role.
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And then you wonder, well, how do you then really get dissenting opinions heard?
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The data suggests that instead of assigning a devil s advocate, you want to unearth the devil s advocate.
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And that means finding an authentic dissenter, somebody who genuinely disagrees with the majority opinion in the room, and inviting that person into the conversation.
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And authentic dissenters, even when they re wrong, improve decision quality and judgment because they encourage people to take a step back and say, you know, let me reexamine our assumptions, let s go back and look at the criteria.
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And that increases your chances of getting to a good solution or a creative outcome.
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Right, so the norm is strong opinions, weakly held, and it seems like this is something that you ve really taken to heart.
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I mean, I think it was in your Twitter profile, or somewhere I saw this, where you say, arguing like I m right, listening like I m wrong.
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Yep, that s another Carl White quote, and I think if more people lived their lives that way, the world would be a slightly less terrible place.
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Let s talk about the type of people listening here to AOC, and the type of people that we train folks to become here at our live programs and boot camps.
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Shapers are what you call them.
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Who are they, and what makes these people tick?
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Well, this is something I learned about when I was studying Bridgewater, the hedge funds.
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Ray Dalio, the billionaire founder, has this mantra that he wants people who are shapers, and what he means is, look, it s one thing to be an original thinker yourself,
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It s another thing entirely to shape the originality of the context that you re in.
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And so by Ray s definition, a shaper is somebody who not only brings new ideas to the table, but also unleashes originality in others.
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Ray s been interviewing a lot of the great shapers of our time.
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You know, when I compared his insights to what we see from academic research that social scientists have spent their careers on, you see a lot of commonalities.
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So pretty consistently, they re people who are curious, they re independent thinkers, and they re non-conforming.
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They tend to be these disagreeable givers, where they want to make things better, but they re not afraid to tell the truth in doing that.
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The coolest thing that Ray found about them was that when they confront risks,
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they re afraid of failing just like the rest of us, but they re even more afraid of failing to try, and that motivates them to give things a shot where other people would hesitate.
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How do we start to become more like that?
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How do we institute a culture of that into either the organization that we re in or just into our personal lives?
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I think one of the simple things is we need to throw the idea of fit out the window.
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So let s talk about this in hiring for a second, and then we can broaden it to the rest of life.
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Most of the leaders that I know hire on culture fit.
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They say, look, you know, skills are nice, potential is great, but I really want people who share our values.
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And that s a nice recipe for groupthink, because culture fit is a proxy for, I m going to hire a bunch of people who are just like all of us.
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And you end up just weeding out diversity of thought that way.
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The way to get around that, that I ve gotten most excited about is from IDEO, the great product design firm that built the mouse for Apple.
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IDEO has said, look, instead of hiring on culture fit, we hire on cultural contribution, which means instead of asking, do you match the culture, they re going to ask what s missing from the culture.
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And how do we bring that to the table and not only hire it, but reward and promote the people who enrich the culture.
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Yeah, I think we all make this mistake, right?
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We gravitate toward people who are similar to us, who share our backgrounds, and that s great for comfort, it s really bad for original thinking.
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There s so much stuff in here that I would love to cover, but alas, people will have to buy the book, and I m not one to normally be like, book teaser, but honestly, we are almost one third of the way through.
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what I ve got for this show.
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That s how much I was able to glean from this.
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And Adam, this has been amazing.
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Thank you so much for coming on.
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Thank you for creating something like this for the world, as cheesy as that might sound.
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No, thank you for giving all of your listeners a chance to listen to us talk.
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I really appreciate the opportunity to share these ideas.
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Adam, again, thank you so much for taking the time.
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Much appreciated.
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Thank you, my pleasure.
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Adam Grant, always a crowd pleaser, such a good, such a good content creator, such a good author and thinker.
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No, man, he s a great guy.
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I loved this book.
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I powered through it and went back twice to find some of the key points that I really loved.
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And my favorite was balancing your risk portfolio as an original thinker.
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Because what I did when I started some of my smaller companies, I still had a day job in that way.
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I could take the risks that I wanted to take with my side job and still know that the ramen was still going to be delivered on Monday every week.
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Yeah, I love the idea of shapers, why they re important, and of course teaching AOC fam how to become one.
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And he closes the book in a great way.
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As you heard, we did so much prep, we couldn t even get near the entire content of what I d prepared, just the selections from the book.
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And he writes, in the quest for happiness, many of us choose to enjoy the world as it is.
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Originals embrace the uphill battle, striving to make the world what it could be.
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Becoming original is not the easiest path in the pursuit of happiness, but it leaves us perfectly poised for the happiness of pursuit.
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So there s other resources linked here on the show as well, and don t forget to thank Adam on Twitter, we ll have that linked in the show notes, along with his book and this self-assessment he has for originality on his website.
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I m also on Twitter.
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A lot of stuff never makes it to the show notes.
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Articles, insights, and you can engage with me there at The Art of Charm on Twitter.
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Our sponsors and all that info at theartofcharm.com slash advertisers, and of course, I want to encourage you to join our AOC challenge at theartofcharm.com slash challenge.
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or text charmed to 33444, that s C-H-A-R-M-E-D, to 33444.
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It s all about networking, connection skills, developing relationships for business and personal reasons.
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We ll also email you our fundamentals toolbox I mentioned earlier on the show, the drills and exercises I do every week to help you move forward, and it will make you a better networker, connector, and a better thinker.
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That s theartofcharm.com slash challenge or text charmed to 33444.
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This episode of The Art of Charm was produced by Jason DeFillippo.
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Jason Sanderson is our audio engineer and editor.
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Show notes on the website are by Robert Fogerty.
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I m your host, Jordan Harbinger.
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Go ahead and tell your friends, because the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to someone else, either in person or shared on the web.
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Now stay charming and leave everything and everyone better than you found them.
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Thanks for listening to the Art of Charm.
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Get more confidence, relationship skills, life hacks, and more at theartofcharmpodcast.com.