This is a book full of well written chapters with interesting insights based on solid research.
It could have been a 5 star book, but struggles for a few reasons. Firstly, it wanders around bringing in some topics which seem to have little to do with the topic of originality. The second issue is similar, it can't seem to decide if it wants to be a book about originality in the situation of entrepreneurship and business, or originality in terms of wider creativity and innovation. Thirdly, some of the examples used seem to be of successful businesses, but I struggle to see them as hugely original. Finally, the perennial problem of many business books - its very US centric. Don't get me wrong I've got no problem with the US and many of us can learn a lot from US businesses, but there is a wider world out there with plenty of originals in it!
An easy read, some useful information, but it does not really live up to the original promise. Still, the good bits and quite good, so it manages 3 stars from me.
Psychology, Business, Science This is one of the best books I have read lately. It has a lot that I already knew, but it added important principals, told great stories, and wrapped it all in great structure.
When was the last time you had an original idea and what did you do with it?
Originality is scary, and it is conventional wisdom that some people are innately creative, while most have few original thoughts. This is of course far from being the truth, but it is the easy way out of being original. People are afraid to speak up and stand out. We worry about the costs of non-conformity, and not wired to embrace uncertainty and ignore social approval. It doesn’t even take a violent dictator to silence us, standing out can be paralyzing and make us to conform to the majority. Even the claim that all inventions are happening by the young geniuses is very wrong. There are plenty of old masters who soar much later.
Our most known original creators almost did not make it. Martin Luther King had no intention to lead the civil rights movement, one of the attendees nominated King for the presidency. Michelangelo almost didn't take the project of the Sistine Chapel, he wasn’t interested since he viewed himself as a sculptor, not a painter, and found the task so overwhelming, only the pope’s insistence convinced him. Wozniak did not plan to leave his full time job at HP and join Steve Jobs to start Apple. Even Jerry Seinfeld almost didn't make it. Each one of these almost could change the world.
As we see, they are not cut from a completely different cloth and do not have full proof biologicals immunity for risk. They are much better in risk mitigation, and “They take the risk out of risk-taking”.
How important it is to excel at your studies to become an inventor/entrepreneur?
Funny but the least favorite students for teachers were the non-conformists who made up their own rules. And it seems pretty tragic that practice makes perfect but it doesn't make new. People that follow the rules perform in Carnegie Hall, win the science Olympics, and become chess champions. “only a fraction of gifted children eventually become revolutionary adult creators”
If you play it safe by following the conventional paths to success, without questioning, without the drive to change things, you just keep running on a treadmill.
Achievement motivation actually drives out originality. Valuing achievement too much, makes people dread failure and go for guaranteed success. So the pressure to achieve leads to do the opposite of creativity and originality.
Can we really judge our ideas? Well, not really, but neither the crowds. The wisdom of crowds doesn't really hold, it depends on who is the crowd. Peer creators are the ones more open to different kinds of ideas and will best judge other's creators inventions. (It reminded me the jam tasting from Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell, which was outstanding, asking people to rate jams. I highly recommend to find and read it).
And of course, passion is very important, but is not enough. (Sending you back to Malcolm Gladwell, this time to Outliers: The Story of Success and the ten thousand hours). Bill Sahlman adds: “It’s never the idea; it’s always the execution.” And real creators are hard working people: “They were the kinds of guys who would be in the writer’s room trying to figure out how to fix the second act at midnight. You saw how meticulous Jerry was in his work. That’s the passion you’re looking for.” (Or in Outliers: The Story of Success, The Beatles and their relentless performances, playing for eight hours a day in Hamburg before becoming outstanding).
Can we tell who is going to be a better original?
For one, Research on highly creative adults shows that they tended to move to new cities much more frequently than their peers in childhood, which gave them exposure to different cultures and values, and encouraged flexibility and adaptability. Being open to change, to new cultures, to new environment makes a difference and further open the mind.
Not taking the default and questioning or looking to improve things is another critical trait (even if it is not to accept the defaults of Internet Explorer and Safari). It also makes people happier with their jobs, not to take them as fixed, and to allow themselves to take the initiative to improve their circumstances. But they were the exception, not the rule.
Coming with large amount of ideas is also a good signals. There is no quantity against quality. In fact, when it comes to idea generation, quantity is the most predictable path to quality. “Original thinkers,” Stanford professor Robert Sutton notes, “will come up with many ideas that are strange mutations, dead ends, and utter failures. The cost is worthwhile because they also generate a larger pool of ideas—especially novel ideas.”
You will find so much more in the book. Emotion regulation and positive thinking
(is it really the best to think positive and imagine yourself succeed or to be a defensive pessimist)? How many values or principals are too many and what is that effect? How do our parents affect us? And do they the best role models? And is it gender related? What is worse - your adversaries or your frenemies? Is your position in the family makes a difference in taking risks?
Originality brings more bumps in the road, yet it leaves us with more happiness and a greater sense of meaning. Highly recommended and a very important book. Above 4.5 stars. Psychology, Business, Science Read this for the EY book club at work. I found it to be mostly weak connections and psychological claims with no real support. It is like a BuzzFeed article turned into a book. There are better books in this genre. Psychology, Business, Science Originals
Two stars are generous. The first 3 or 4 chapters had some value, but the examples that were used, in those chapters, were dated and generic. The author’s credentials seem steer and the reviews were quite good, so you can imagine my surprise when I found the content to be so remedial.
The remaining chapters seemed trite and had little value. It’s sad. I love to find something worthwhile in this subject matter, so please recommend something if anyone knows of anything worth reading.
Psychology, Business, Science 1/31/16 The author wrote an interesting synopsis for the nyts here: How to Raise a Creative Child. Step One: Back Off http://nyti.ms/1nv0ZIj
3/14/16
I appreciated learning about a company that seriously promotes dissenting opinions as well as social science experiments. It's great to know they exist, but the book didnt match my expectations set by the title at all. These are anecdotes about successful people. It's not about nonconformists or originals.
There are many Social Science tests discussed. Setting up the tests themselves are interesting ideas, but the audio book never mentions the sample sizes or if any experiments have been able to recreate results, so you don't know how real the implications are.
He deals with how relatively little decisions are made where the main gist is to get people to just be more open minded and less dogmatic. I would have found it much more interesting if he analyzed decision making in war where people die based on your decisions.
I would have appreciated some insights into failed artists. It seems that would be easy to find people who create original art, but do not become successful by doing so. I would have appreciated a discussion of the book Moby Dick, which I think is very original and would have been lost to history if an influential book publisher hadn't happened into an old copy of what was an obscure book at the time. Point is, success isn't a key driver of Original. The author never puts that in context.
The book is misnamed. He doesn't define what is original or give a framework to discuss it. He takes a lot of successful people and goes backward to see how they got there implying that they are an Original because they are successful. I would get a lot more out of the author pointing out unsuccessful Originals.
Still, it's interesting to hear about successful people in a casual way. It's better use of time than reading People magazine. Psychology, Business, Science
Adam M. Grant Ü 4 review
“Fools rush in.” Those 3 words are the foundation for the recurring theme that Adam Grant reveals through studied research which shakes the dominant mythology of our modern dogma on what it takes to succeed.
The myth is that first movers gain a first-to-market advantage. The fact is that “settlers” who enter later, lower their risk of failure compared to the early “pioneers.” The slow-movers also raise their yield of measurable returns. Who is really laughing first and last here?
The myth is that genius triumphs in youth. The reality is that older wisdom does in fact have value and measured results, particularly in the wealth of accumulated experimental insights.
The myth is that procrastination is a recipe for disaster. The reality is that procrastination (aka waiting) may in fact be the measured recipe for provoking more creative output as judged by multiple observers.
The myth is that first borns have an innate advantage compared to later siblings. The reality is that later birth ordered children have demonstrable abilities to take risks that older siblings avoid and these calculating risk-takers succeed in higher ratios.
If your are ready to stop believing the dogma of what it takes to succeed and start questioning the mythology of success then you must read this book. This is Adam Grant’s magnum opus, a true Original, that asks you to rightly question with fact all that has been heralded as the truth about success. Psychology, Business, Science Strikingly unoriginal for a book on originality. This is a mash-up of other books on pop psychology and whatnot with some personal anecdotes about other people who are original. It's entertaining enough because it's got these counterintuitive ideas like procrastination is good. The problem is that these are just teasers, because they get hedged with except when it isn't or they're overall gibberish.
Take the procrastination example. Grant talks about MLK's famous I have a dream speech and he makes it sound like it was great because MLK put it off and then had to pull an all-nighter and then just ad libbed anyway. By the end of the chapter you find out that's all BS, because really the speech was building on a few hundred other speeches he'd delivered and what he was doing was editing and perfecting. This made me think of that recent movie The Darkest Hour, where Winston Churchill was scribbling and rewriting his hugely important speech until the last possible second. That kind of overachieving activity is pretty much the opposite of what most people think of when they hear the word procrastination. There's something interesting in these speech stories about greatness, but it's not procrastination and I don't even know that it's about originality.
Of course, touting the benefits of procrastination is in itself unoriginal and if you want a better book for that I'd recommend:
The Art of Procrastination: A Guide to Effective Dawdling, Lollygagging and Postponing
Nerd addendum:
Some of the stuff he refers to is books I have read and that contain sloppy science. He doesn't get 1* as they do, precisely because he is not original: he's apparently just somebody who read their books and took them at face value. He doesn't present himself as a scientist. It is concerning though that people might think this is well-researched strong science.
Update 2021: It turns out the author does label himself a scientist and makes an awfully big deal in subsequent writings about how he thinks like a scientist and investigates things before talking about them. So I have to lower the rating. Psychology, Business, Science Ironically, this book contains very few original ideas on it's own Psychology, Business, Science I got the sense that this book was yet another compilation of blog posts with examples cherrypicked from successful books to support ideas with very little first hand research. The author is critical of other formulaic authors, such as those that write self help books, yet he follows the same formula that those in the pop psych genre have relied upon. The book is a collection of anecdotes slathered with confirmation bias in place of a logic rooted argument.
The examples are written in more of an infotainment style than the likes of Thinking Fast & Slow, yet it does not make up for the lack of detailed critical analysis with an engaging narrative as Malcolm Gladwell masterfully executes with his books.
One example that really stuck with me as lacking any scientific validity was the phrasing of the sign which instructed doctors to wash their hands. A 10% increase was reported when the sign mentioned getting others sick rather than protecting themselves. The study relied on weighing the hand gel to determine the amount used and, ...there were professionals on each unit doing covert observations of whether you washed according to guidelines before and after patient contact. There are so many flaws in the study that to include it as evidence of people responding to a more why centric reason for hand washing is silly. No details are given to even try to sell this as anything but an attempt to create a story to make doctors appear more empathetic. If the sample size was only 20 or so doctors in each group it sure wouldn't take much to swing 10% in either direction.
Another section of the book that got me feeling like the information was not very helpful, was the section that droned on and on about the various organizational blueprints employed by companies and how they related to their success or failure. Was it just me, or did Adam just dive into all the examples without giving the reader a comprehensive definition of each?
I do not doubt Adam Grant's expertise in organizational psychology. It is just the style in which he presents his rationale that leaves me feeling like he is more of a salesman than educator. Psychology, Business, Science I beg to differ with Sheryl Sandberg. This isn't a cutting-edge primer on what it takes to be original. It's a pleasantly readable, if mediocre, collection of findings and anecdotes that are more-or-less related to the notion of fostering creativity/success.
Earnest? Yes. The author applies his formula with zest: he starts each chapter with a hook, spaces out his anecdotes, sprinkles in previews to build suspense, and distills each story into a pithy moral. He tries hard to keep us engaged and to make us feel like we're learning.
Informative? Somewhat. The take-away points are numerous and don't all hang together thematically. To illustrate his points, the author tells the stories of mostly familiar heroes (mostly white guys, except of course MLK) whose underdog narratives are either well-worn or predictable.
Original? Not so much. This book joins a growing genre that might be dubbed how to succeed at being more [X], according to a slew of curated anecdotes and research studies. Like its predecessors, it really wants to be a quotable bestseller, to be shelved next to the Malcolm Gladwell books, and to be bought by MBA types who are really into things like leverage and disruption. Psychology, Business, Science
In Originals the author addresses the challenge of improving the world from the perspective of becoming original: choosing to champion novel ideas and values that go against the grain, battle conformity, and buck outdated traditions. How can we originate new ideas, policies, and practices without risking it all?
Using surprising studies and stories spanning business, politics, sports, and entertainment, Grant explores how to recognize a good idea, speak up without getting silenced, build a coalition of allies, choose the right time to act, and manage fear and doubt; how parents and teachers can nurture originality in children; and how leaders can build cultures that welcome dissent. Learn from an entrepreneur who pitches his start-ups by highlighting the reasons not to invest, a woman at Apple who challenged Steve Jobs from three levels below, an analyst who overturned the rule of secrecy at the CIA, a billionaire financial wizard who fires employees for failing to criticize him, and a TV executive who didn’t even work in comedy but saved Seinfeld from the cutting-room floor. The payoff is a set of groundbreaking insights about rejecting conformity and improving the status quo.
Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World