English
Magyar
The Originals
Adam Grant
Free download · 500+ book summaries
What is The Originals about?
The Originals provides a practical guide on how to bring our visions to life and how to be original. It not only changes our mindset but also inspires us to make the world around us better.
Key ideas of The Originals
Hedging Enables Creative Risk
Most groundbreaking founders and creators kept their day jobs while building new ideas, making them more likely to succeed than those who went all in.
Quantity Predicts Creative Quality
Originals produce far more work than their peers, accepting that most of it will fail in order to increase the odds of a breakthrough.
Timing and Framing Win Ideas
When and how an idea is presented matters as much as the idea itself, with patient timing and conventional framing making radical proposals easier to accept.
Read an excerpt from the summary
Why Adam Grant Refused to Invest in Warby Parker
In 2009, Adam Grant was offered a small slice of a company four of his Wharton students were trying to launch. They wanted to sell glasses online for ninety-five dollars instead of five hundred. They had a clever name borrowed from two Jack Kerouac characters. They had a plan to donate a pair for every pair sold. Grant said no. Six years later, Fast Company named those four students the most innovative company in America — ahead of Google, Nike, and Apple. Their company was valued at more than a billion dollars. Grant calls the moment he passed "the worst financial decision I've ever made." That admission opens *Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World*, and it does something most business books refuse to do — it concedes, on page one, that the author would have killed the very idea he is now writing a book to celebrate.
That's the puzzle the book sets out to solve. We all claim to admire original thinkers, the people who see what everyone else missed and act on it. But when they're sitting right across from us, asking for a check or a yes vote or just a fair hearing, we fold our arms. Grant wants to know why. He also wants to know how a handful of people — Carmen Medina at the CIA, Lucy Stone at the front of the suffrage movement, Ray Dalio at Bridgewater, a Serbian student named Srdja Popovic who helped take down a dictator with a clenched fist and a few good jokes — manage to push their ideas through anyway. The answer turns out to be very different from the mythology of the fearless rebel. Originals, in Grant's telling, are mostly reluctant, anxious, deeply hedged people who learned a few specific moves. The good news is that the moves are teachable.
Like it?
Continue in the appWho is it for?
- Anyone who wants to champion a new idea at work without risking everything they have built.
- Anyone who feels creatively stuck and wonders whether originality is a talent or a learnable set of behaviors.
- Anyone who manages a team and wants to build a culture where disagreement is productive rather than political.
- Anyone who is raising children or mentoring others and wants to know what actually cultivates independent thinking.
About the author: Adam Grant
Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist and professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he has been recognized as one of the institution's top-rated teachers. His research focuses on how people find motivation and meaning at work, and how they become more generous and creative contributors.
He is the author of several bestselling books on work, psychology, and human behavior. His work has been featured widely in major publications and he hosts the WorkLife podcast. Originals draws on decades of social science research, combined with case studies from business, politics, and the arts.
Read it in 54 minutes
The summary of The Originals and 500+ more books await in the BookBase app.