Originals

By Adam M. Grant

15 min read

Why does it matter? Because the originals you admire were probably playing it safer than you think.

Everything you know about originality is wrong. The people who changed how we see the world — who built companies, toppled dictators, rewrote science — weren't the ones who burned their boats and leapt. They kept their day jobs. They waited. They led with their doubts instead of their certainties. They procrastinated on purpose. Adam Grant spent years studying what actually separates people who move the world from people who merely observe it, and what he found upended his own assumptions along the way. Originality isn't a personality type or a tolerance for chaos. It's a specific set of behaviors — learnable, repeatable, available to anyone — that look nothing like the mythology we've built around them. This book lays out the evidence — and it looks nothing like the mythology.

The Warby Parker Founders Kept Their Day Jobs — And That's Exactly Why They Succeeded

In 2009, a Wharton student named Neil Blumenthal sat across from Adam Grant and pitched him on a new company: an online eyewear startup that would sell glasses for $95 instead of the $500 you'd pay at a LensCrafters owned by the monopolist controlling over 80% of the global eyewear market. Grant was skeptical, but willing to listen. Then he heard how the founders were spending their time. All four were still in school. Three had taken internships — consulting, venture capital, healthcare. Post-graduation, Neil had accepted a full-time job offer as a safety net. Dave had kept a former employer's door open as a fallback. They hadn't even finished building a website. Grant saw what he thought was a lack of conviction and passed on the investment. Within three weeks of launching, Warby Parker hit its sales target for the entire first year. By 2015 it was valued at over a billion dollars. Grant calls it the worst financial decision he's ever made.

What he missed — what most of us miss — is that the hedging wasn't a sign of doubt. It was the mechanism of success. A large study tracking more than five thousand Americans who became entrepreneurs found that founders who kept their day jobs while building their companies had 33% lower failure rates than those who quit outright. The full-plunge risk-takers were more confident, yes. They were also far more likely to fail. Doubt and caution, it turns out, correlate with building something that lasts.

This runs against everything we believe about originality. But the actual story of almost every celebrated original looks more like Warby Parker. Steve Wozniak co-founded Apple and stayed at his engineering job at Hewlett-Packard for another year. Phil Knight sold running shoes from the trunk of his car while working full time as an accountant — for five years. The logic holds because of how risk actually works: when you take a chance in one area of your life, offsetting it with stability elsewhere gives you the psychological runway to think clearly, experiment honestly, and avoid the desperate shortcuts that kill fragile new ideas. Security in one domain purchases freedom in another. The Warby Parker founders didn't hedge because they lacked faith in their idea. They hedged because it let them design a home try-on program, test their assumptions, and go all-in on the parts that mattered — without the pressure of burning through savings making every decision feel like life or death.

Choosing Your Browser Reveals More About You Than Your Résumé Does

Your choice of web browser turns out to be a better predictor of job performance than anything on your résumé. An economist named Michael Housman was studying why some customer service agents stayed in their jobs longer than others, working from a dataset of over thirty thousand employees. His team had captured which browser each person had used when applying for the job. Figuring it was irrelevant noise, he ran the analysis anyway — and found that people who had applied using Firefox or Chrome stayed in their positions 15% longer, missed work 19% less often, and reached strong customer satisfaction ratings a full month faster than colleagues who had used Internet Explorer or Safari. It had nothing to do with technical skill; both groups scored similarly on computer proficiency tests. The difference was simpler than that. Internet Explorer and Safari come pre-installed. To get Firefox or Chrome, you have to notice that a better option might exist, go find it, and install it. That small act of questioning the default — something that takes five minutes — predicted everything about how a person would approach their job. The default-accepters followed scripts, escalated problems through official channels, and when they grew unhappy, they quit. The default-questioners improvised, fixed problems they hadn't been asked to fix, and tended to stay. The browser wasn't causing any of this. It was revealing an orientation — a habit of mind that either takes what it's handed or asks whether something better is available. That habit, applied to a job, turns out to be the difference between showing up and checking out. Originality, at its root, isn't about being bolder or more creative in some innate sense. It's about whether you've developed the reflex to notice when you're accepting a default — and to pause long enough to ask if you should. Which raises the harder question: how do you actually build that reflex, especially when the defaults around you are invisible?

The Problem Isn't That You Can't Generate Good Ideas — It's That You Can't Tell Which Ones Are Good

The Segway is the cleanest illustration of how badly idea selection can fail. Dean Kamen — holder of hundreds of patents, inventor of a wheelchair that climbed stairs, recipient of America's highest technology honor — pitched his self-balancing transporter to some of the sharpest minds in business. Steve Jobs offered $63 million for a ten percent stake. Jeff Bezos declared it would have no trouble selling itself. John Doerr invested $80 million and predicted it would become more important than the internet. Kamen himself projected 10,000 units a week within a year. Six years later, total sales were around 30,000. The company never turned a profit.

At almost the same moment, the opposite error was playing out with Seinfeld. Test audiences called the pilot a dismal failure. Network executives passed on it. The show survived only because one executive who worked in variety specials — not sitcoms — scraped together leftover budget to fund four episodes, the smallest order in television history. He gave a chance to something that would eventually become the highest-rated show in America.

Both failures follow a pattern that researcher Justin Berg mapped in a study of circus performers. He had artists, managers, and general audiences predict which acts would get the most views, shares, and donations, then tracked the actual results with over 13,000 raters. Artists ranked their own work about two slots too high on average. Managers and test audiences were roughly 56% and 55% more likely than peer creators to commit major false negatives — to dramatically undervalue something genuinely strong. The most accurate forecasters were fellow creators evaluating each other's work. They were roughly twice as accurate as managers, because they weren't in a purely evaluative mindset looking for reasons to reject the unfamiliar.

The correctable part is this: Berg ran a simple experiment where he asked people to spend six minutes generating ideas before rating someone else's work. That small shift — inhabiting a creative rather than evaluative mindset — raised their accuracy from 51% to 77%. The bottleneck for originality isn't that good ideas are rare. It's that the people responsible for selecting them keep showing up in the wrong frame of mind.

The Smartest Way to Pitch a Risky Idea Is to Lead With Why It Might Fail

Rufus Griscom walked into a meeting with Disney executives carrying a slide that read, in plain text: 'Here's Why You Should Not Buy Babble.' He wasn't being modest. He was selling his company, and he was about to explain all the reasons the deal should fail.

User engagement was lower than expected. Nearly half the content on a parenting site was celebrity gossip. The back-end infrastructure needed serious work. Griscom laid all of it out before anyone could ask. Disney bought the company for $40 million.

This wasn't beginner's luck. Two years earlier, pitching Babble to venture capitalists when the startup had nothing but a vision, Griscom had done the same thing — walked in with a slide listing the top five reasons not to invest. That pitch brought in $3.3 million. Unknown startup, established acquisition target, skeptical investors, skeptical acquirer: leading with the flaws worked every time.

The mechanism isn't magic; it's psychology operating in a specific direction. When someone is pitching you, your brain knows it. You raise your defenses automatically, scanning for the trick, looking for what's being hidden. Confident enthusiasm reads as salesmanship, and salesmanship triggers suspicion. But when the person across the table hands you the problems before you can find them yourself, that reflex has nothing to grip. You stop defending and start problem-solving. As Griscom put it, you can see people physically relax — the pitch stops smelling like a pitch.

There's a second effect that's more counterintuitive: critics sound smarter than fans. Psychologist Teresa Amabile had people read the same book review rewritten to be either glowing or harsh. The critical reviewer was rated 14 percent more intelligent and 16 percent more expert than the enthusiastic one. A sharp observation about what's wrong with something signals professional judgment; praise signals that you might be a pushover. When Griscom named Babble's flaws, he wasn't undermining himself — he was demonstrating that he couldn't be fooled by his own product.

The third mechanism is the one that surprised me most. By naming the downsides first, Griscom made it harder for his audience to generate their own concerns. Psychologist Norbert Schwarz showed that we treat difficulty of recall as evidence of rarity: if you're straining to think of problems, you conclude there can't be many. Investors who tried to find additional flaws after Griscom's walkthrough came up with one or two minor quibbles, then stalled — and read that blankness as a sign the problems weren't so bad. The pre-emptive confession had immunized the pitch before they opened their mouths.

Procrastination Is a Creative Strategy — Under One Specific Condition

Jihae Shin had college students pitch business ideas for an empty campus lot. Students who started immediately tended toward the obvious — another convenience store to replace the one that left. But students randomly assigned to play Minesweeper or Solitaire before working produced proposals rated 28 percent more creative by independent judges who had no idea which group they were evaluating. The timing mattered precisely. Playing games before hearing about the task did nothing. Starting the task, then taking a structured break, did nothing. The boost appeared only when students held the task in mind while procrastinating — keeping the problem alive, unresolved, turning slowly in the background. An unfinished task, psychologists have known since the 1920s, stays active in ways a completed one doesn't. The procrastination wasn't causing laziness; it was creating conditions for the mind to range wider before committing.

King's 'I Have a Dream' speech is the most famous illustration of what this produces at scale. The speech's most remembered passage — the dream sequence that doubled the length of his remarks and lodged itself permanently in American memory — appeared in none of the drafts. Not in Clarence Jones's version. Not in King's own script. King had spoken about his dream in earlier speeches across two years, and had logged over 275,000 miles and 350 speeches in the year of the march alone, testing fragments, refining refrains, assembling a deep repertoire of oratorical material. Then, eleven minutes into the speech, gospel singer Mahalia Jackson shouted from behind him: tell them about the dream. King pushed his prepared notes aside and improvised — pulling from that stockpile of tested language — and in the process nearly doubled the length of what he'd planned to say. The procrastination hadn't prevented preparation. It had prevented premature closure, leaving room for the best material to surface at the moment it was needed.

The same logic extends to when you enter a market. Peter Golder and Gerard Tellis studied hundreds of brands across 36 product categories and found that pioneer companies failed at a 47 percent rate, compared with 8 percent for settlers who waited; pioneers also averaged just 10 percent market share versus 28 percent for those who entered later. Being early, it turns out, mostly means absorbing all the risk of being wrong about timing.

Your Best Advocate Isn't the Person Who Already Agrees With You

The person most likely to convince a skeptic to join your cause isn't your longest-standing ally — it's your most recently converted enemy. Longtime supporters are easy to discount as cheerleaders who were never going to say no. Someone who resisted you, thought you were wrong, and then changed their mind has done the hard cognitive work of overcoming doubt. When a former opponent becomes your advocate, they can articulate objections from the inside, because they held those objections themselves. They're credible precisely because they weren't always on your side.

The practical implication is that building your coalition by strengthening ties with existing believers is often the wrong investment. Your best move is frequently the one that feels like a waste of time: engaging the people who are already against you.

The harder problem is getting skeptics to engage with your idea in the first place. Most originals hit this wall and push harder on the same framing — which is exactly what doesn't work. Frances Willard solved it by hiding the radical goal inside a conventional one. In the 1870s, the women's suffrage movement had stalled badly. Its most progressive leaders — Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton — had alienated potential allies with uncompromising positions, and the justice-based case for women's equality left conservative temperance activists cold. Willard, emerging as a leader in the Women's Christian Temperance Union, never asked those women to believe in gender equality. She asked them whether they wanted to protect their homes from alcohol abuse. Then she explained that a ballot was the most powerful tool available for exactly that purpose. The right to vote wasn't the goal she presented; it was a means to a goal her audience already held. The result was a network of suffrage-temperance alliances that spread across almost every state in the country, and after Willard visited a state, the odds of such an alliance forming spiked measurably. Western states — where the approach took firmest hold — passed suffrage laws at a rate of 81 percent, compared with 6 percent in the East and zero in the South. Willard didn't persuade conservatives to abandon their values. She offered suffrage as a vehicle for the values they already had.

Strong Cultures Don't Prevent Groupthink — They Cause It

The opening description is unmistakable: a founder who staged theatrical product launches, held 535 patents, disdained market research, and told the world to think different. If you assumed Steve Jobs, you're in exactly the company Grant intended — because the subject is actually Edwin Land, Jobs's hero and the founder of Polaroid, and the trick is designed to land hard. Land created one of the most original companies in American history, then watched it go bankrupt over an innovation his own engineers had pioneered. Polaroid's digital prototype in 1992 captured four times the resolution of any competitor. By the time leadership allowed it to launch in 1996, forty-plus rivals had already beaten them to market. The culture Land built couldn't absorb the dissent that might have saved it — and when the CEO responded to a proposal for acquiring a digital-imaging startup by threatening to 'punch you in the nose or fire you,' the dissenters eventually just left.

The conventional diagnosis for this kind of failure is groupthink, and the conventional cause is too much cohesion — people too friendly, too cozy, too reluctant to upset the room. Irving Janis built a career on this theory, using the Bay of Pigs invasion as his central exhibit. The problem is that the evidence doesn't hold up. Kennedy's advisers for that decision weren't a stable, tight-knit group; membership shifted across meetings. The same core team, one year later, successfully managed the Cuban Missile Crisis. And when researchers studied strategic decisions at Fortune 500 companies, cohesive groups were no more likely to suppress dissent — and often made better decisions than fragmented ones. The actual culprits at Polaroid were overconfidence and reputational fear: leaders certain that customers would always want a printed photograph, and employees who understood that challenging that assumption could end their careers.

Once you locate the real problem, the popular solution — assigning a devil's advocate — looks like theater. Charlan Nemeth ran the comparison directly. Groups with an assigned dissenter grew only 4% less confident in their original position; groups with a genuine dissenter, someone who actually held the minority view, grew 15% less confident and generated 48% more solutions. Everyone in the room knows a role is being performed, and they discount it accordingly. Authentic dissent is uncomfortable precisely because it can't be dismissed as a formality.

So how do you surface real minority opinions before decisions calcify? Dalio's answer at Bridgewater is structural. Opinions are weighted by domain-specific credibility rather than seniority, the norm runs in one direction (you can be fired for failing to challenge the status quo), and when an employee emailed Dalio a D-minus for a rambling client meeting, he circulated the exchange to the entire company. The infrastructure doesn't produce dissent by assigning it. It produces dissent by making silence the riskier choice.

Fear and Excitement Are the Same Physiological State — You Choose the Label

In 2007, Lewis Pugh stood at the North Pole in a Speedo, about to enter water cold enough to kill him in under twenty minutes. His body had already done something no sports scientist had documented in another human: his core temperature rose from 98.6°F to 101°F in anticipation of the plunge — a kind of Pavlovian self-heating built over decades of cold-water training. The problem was that two days earlier, his practice swim had gone catastrophically wrong. After five minutes in sub-29°F water, he lost feeling in his entire left hand and couldn't feel his right fingers for four months. His cells had burst. And suddenly the man who had shattered cold-water records at both poles was standing at the edge thinking: I don't believe I can do this.

Harvard researcher Alison Wood Brooks offers the cleanest answer to what Pugh needed in that moment — and it isn't what most people would guess. When she asked three hundred working adults how to handle pre-performance fear, over ninety percent said the same thing: calm down. Then she ran the experiment. Before delivering a persuasive speech, some students said aloud "I am calm." Others said "I am excited." That single word swapped persuasiveness ratings by 17%, confidence ratings by 15%, and extended how long speakers stayed on stage by nearly 30%. In a karaoke version, saying "I am anxious" dropped accuracy from 69% to 53%. Saying "I am excited" pushed it to 80%.

The mechanism is physiological, not motivational. Fear and excitement are both high-arousal states — racing heart, coursing adrenaline, heightened attention. Trying to calm down is like hitting the brakes on a car doing 80 miles per hour; you still have momentum. Converting fear to excitement is shifting gears. You're working with the energy rather than against it.

The same logic applies to anger, but in reverse. The instinct is to vent — hit something, scream it out. Psychologist Brad Bushman tested this directly: participants who punched a bag while picturing the person who'd wronged them became more aggressive, not less; venting feeds the loop. What redirects anger into something useful is shifting focus from the person who wronged you to the people harmed by the injustice. That converts the desire for revenge into the desire to fix something. When Srdja Popovic, who organized the student resistance that helped bring down Slobodan Milosevic, wanted to mobilize Serbians against their dictator, he didn't flash Milosevic's face on the screen. He showed photographs of dead soldiers. The crowd didn't want to punish anyone. They wanted to act.

You already have the fuel. The question is only which direction you point it.

Originality Runs in Families — But Not the Way You'd Expect

What actually determines whether a child grows up to think originally? The instinct is to credit personality — some kids are wired to question authority — or to credit parenting style, specifically the bold variety that pushes children to challenge everything. The research points somewhere more specific than either.

The question of what makes someone hide a Jewish family in their attic at risk of death turned out to have a surprisingly specific answer. Sociologists Samuel and Pearl Oliner spent years comparing non-Jews who had done exactly that with neighbors who lived in the same towns and did nothing. The two groups were almost identical: same educational backgrounds, same occupations, same political and religious beliefs, and — the part that should stop you — the same rates of childhood rule-breaking. The rescuers weren't more rebellious children. What separated them was a single pattern in how their parents responded when they misbehaved. Bystanders' parents enforced rules for compliance. Rescuers' parents explained why the behavior was wrong, specifically what harm it caused to other people. Reasoning accounted for 21% of how rescuers' parents disciplined, versus 6% for bystanders. Fifteen percentage points in how often a parent paused to say 'here's who gets hurt when you do that' predicted who would risk their life for a stranger decades later.

The companion finding is about what happens when children do something right. Psychologist Joan Grusec found that praising the action ('that was a helpful thing to do') produced 10% generosity in a follow-up task two weeks later. Praising the person ('you're the kind of person who helps others') produced 45%. The difference is whether the child files the episode as a one-time event or builds it into their identity. Christopher Bryan confirmed the same logic with adults: 'don't be a cheater' cut cheating in half compared to 'don't cheat.' Nouns embed values; verbs describe episodes.

You can raise a child with very few rules and still raise one with a strong moral compass — if you explain what's at stake for others and tell them who they are, not just what they did.

The Permission You've Been Waiting For

Every original in this book felt the doubt you're feeling. They weren't immune to it — they were just specific about what to do next. Keep the day job. Ask a peer, not a manager. Name the flaws first. Stop mid-task instead of finishing clean. These aren't workarounds for people who lack conviction; they're how conviction actually gets built, one small reversible action at a time. The obstacles were never really about your temperament. They're structural — predictable patterns in how institutions suppress dissent, how brains misread anxiety, how selection processes filter out exactly what they should amplify — and because they're structural, they yield to structural responses. Grant turned down Warby Parker. The network executives passed on Seinfeld. The people who got it wrong weren't less intelligent than you. They just hadn't named the mechanism yet. Now you have it. The question is only which of these you try first — and the answer, almost certainly, is whichever one you can start without quitting anything.