Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World

by Adam M. Grant

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” George Bernard Shaw

We’re all vulnerable to “kleptomnesia”—accidentally remembering the ideas of others as our own.

When the founders were sitting in the computer lab on the night they conjured up the company, they had spent a combined sixty years wearing glasses.

Means nothing.

When we become curious about the dissatisfying defaults in our world, we begin to recognize that most of them have social origins: Rules and systems were created by people. And that awareness gives us the courage to contemplate how we can change them.

Although child prodigies are often rich in both talent and ambition, what holds them back from moving the world forward is that they don’t learn to be original. As they perform in Carnegie Hall, win the science Olympics, and become chess champions, something tragic happens: Practice makes perfect, but it doesn’t make new. The gifted learn to play magnificent Mozart melodies and beautiful Beethoven symphonies, but never compose their own original scores. They focus their energy on consuming existing scientific knowledge, not producing new insights. They conform to the codified rules of established games, rather than inventing their own rules or their own games. All along the way, they strive to earn the approval of their parents and the admiration of their teachers.

Grammy winner John Legend released his first album in 2000 but kept working as a management consultant until 2002, preparing PowerPoint presentations by day while performing at night.

Having a sense of security in one realm gives us the freedom to be original in another.

Before signing the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln agonized for six months over whether he should free the slaves. He questioned whether he had the constitutional authority; he worried that the decision might lose him the support of the border states, forfeit the war, and destroy the country.

If you want to be original, “the most important possible thing you could do,” says Ira Glass, the producer of This American Life and the podcast Serial, “is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work.”

As we gain knowledge about a domain, we become prisoners of our prototypes.

“The truth is, most pilots don’t test well,” Warren Littlefield observes, because “audiences do not respond well to things that are new or different.” Audiences don’t have enough experience: they simply haven’t seen a lot of the novel ideas that landed on the cutting-room floor. “The Seinfeld testing should put an end to all conversations about testing, ever. Please don’t tell me my show is going to come down to twenty people in Sherman Oaks,” comedian Paul Reiser says. “I’ve never been to any testing that’s any good.”

In Berg’s study of circus acts, the most accurate predictors of whether a video would get liked, shared, and funded were peers evaluating one another.

If we want to increase our odds of betting on the best original ideas, we have to generate our own ideas immediately before we screen others’ suggestions.

The most creative fashion collections came from houses where directors had the greatest experience abroad, but there were three twists. First, time living abroad didn’t matter: it was time working abroad, being actively engaged in design in a foreign country, that predicted whether their new collections were hits. The most original collections came from directors who had worked in two or three different countries. Second, the more the foreign culture differed from that of their native land, the more that experience contributed to the directors’ creativity. An American gained little from working in Canada, compared to the originality dividends of a project in Korea or Japan. But working in multiple countries with different cultures wasn’t enough. The third and most important factor was depth—the amount of time spent working abroad. A short stint did little good, because directors weren’t there long enough to internalize the new ideas from the foreign culture and synthesize them with their old perspectives. The highest originality occurred when directors had spent thirty-five years working abroad.

traipsed

The first advantage is that leading with weaknesses disarms the audience. Marketing professors Marian Friestad and Peter Wright find that when we’re aware that someone is trying to persuade us, we naturally raise our mental shields. Rampant confidence is a red flag—a signal that we need to defend ourselves against weapons of influence.

This is the second benefit of leading with the limitations of an idea: it makes you look smart.*

The third advantage of being up front about the downsides of your ideas is that it makes you more trustworthy.

This is what happened to investors when Rufus Griscom cited Babble’s weaknesses. By acknowledging its most serious problems, he made it harder for investors to generate their own ideas about what was wrong with the company. And as they found themselves thinking hard to identify other concerns, they decided Babble’s problems weren’t actually that severe. Griscom saw this happen in the early Babble board meeting when he first tested his upside-down pitch. “When I led with the factors that could kill the company, the response from the board was the exact opposite: oh, these things aren’t so bad. Newton’s third law can be true in human dynamics as well: every action has an equal and opposite reaction.”

In 1927, Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik demonstrated that people have a better memory for incomplete than complete tasks. Once a task is finished, we stop thinking about it. But when it is interrupted and left undone, it stays active in our minds.

It was eleven minutes into the speech that Mahalia Jackson called for King to share his dream. It is unclear whether he heard her, but “just all of a sudden, I decided,” King recalled. He followed the emotion of the moment and unfolded his dream. By the time the speech was done, Hansen notes, “King added so much new material to his prepared speech that the length of his address nearly doubled.”

Not surprising coming from Morehouse.

Research shows that in American culture, people believe strongly in a first-mover advantage. We want to be leaders, not followers. Scientists rush to make discoveries ahead of their rivals; inventors hurry to apply for patents before their adversaries; entrepreneurs aspire to launch before their competitors.

Nintendo.

Pioneers were about six times more likely to fail than settlers. Even when the pioneers did survive, they only captured an average of 10 percent of the market, compared with 28 percent for settlers.

One study of over three thousand startups indicates that roughly three out of every four fail because of premature scaling—making investments that the market isn’t yet ready to support.

As physicist Max Planck once observed, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die.”

Conceptual innovators formulate a big idea and set out to execute it. Experimental innovators solve problems through trial and error, learning and evolving as they go along. They are at work on a particular problem, but they don’t have a specific solution in mind at the outset. Instead of planning in advance, they figure it out as they go.

concept of horizontal hostility. Even though they share a fundamental objective, radical groups often disparage more mainstream groups as impostors and sellouts.

The message was clear: if you were a true believer, you’d be all in. The more strongly you identify with an extreme group, the harder you seek to differentiate yourself from more moderate groups that threaten your values.

In a clever experiment, Stanford researchers Scott Wiltermuth and Chip Heath randomly assigned people in groups of three to listen to the national anthem “O Canada” under different conditions of synchrony. In the control condition, participants read the words silently while the song played. In the synchronous condition, they sang the song out loud together. In the asynchronous condition, they all sang, but not in unison: each person heard the song at a different tempo. The participants thought they were being tested on their singing. But there was a twist: after singing, they moved into what was supposedly a different study, where they had a chance to keep money for themselves or cooperate by sharing it with the group. The few minutes they spent singing shouldn’t have affected their behavior, but it did. The group that sang together shared significantly more. They reported feeling more similar to each other and more like a team than participants in the other conditions.*

Researchers Debra Meyerson and Maureen Scully have found that to succeed, originals must often become tempered radicals. They believe in values that depart from traditions and ideas that go against the grain, yet they learn to tone down their radicalism by presenting their beliefs and ideas in ways that are less shocking and more appealing to mainstream audiences. Meredith Perry is a tempered radical: she made an implausible idea plausible by obscuring its most extreme feature.

Its fatal error, he argues, was naming the movement after the radical tactic of camping out, which few people find attractive. He believes that had the group simply relabeled itself “The 99 Percent,” it might still exist. The Occupy name “implied that the only way you could belong was if you dropped everything you were doing and started occupying something,” Popovic writes. “Occupying is still just a single weapon in the enormous arsenal of peaceful protest—and, more to the point, one that tends to invite only a certain type of dedicated person.

Forming another alliance that cast a dark cloud over the movement, Stanton joined forces with Victoria Woodhull, an activist who became the first woman to run for the American presidency, but undermined the suffrage movement with a radical agenda. Woodhull, whose past included time as a prostitute and a charlatan healer, advocated for sexual freedom, proclaiming that she had an “inalienable, constitutional, and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can, to change that love every day if I please.” Suffrage opponents used Woodhull’s position as evidence that the movement was really about sexual promiscuity rather than voting rights. Members withdrew in large numbers from Anthony and Stanton’s organization, to the point that they couldn’t even gather sufficient attendance for a convention.

duplicity.

Negative relationships are unpleasant, but they’re predictable: if a colleague consistently undermines you, you can keep your distance and expect the worst. But when you’re dealing with an ambivalent relationship, you’re constantly on guard, grappling with questions about when that person can actually be trusted. As Duffy’s team explains, “It takes more emotional energy and coping resources to deal with individuals who are inconsistent.”

Second, just as we saw in the case of Meredith Perry’s disguising her real objective of creating wireless power, transparency isn’t always the best policy. As much as they want to be straightforward with potential partners, originals occasionally need to reframe their ideas to appeal to their audience. Willard smuggled the vote inside the Trojan horse of fighting alcohol abuse.

As journalist Robert Quillen wrote, “Progress always involves risk. You can’t steal second and keep one foot on first base.”

When older siblings serve as surrogate parents and role models, you don’t face as many rules or punishments, and you enjoy the security of their protection. You also end up taking risks earlier: instead of emulating the measured, carefully considered choices of adults, you follow the lead of other children.

Even when the parenting role isn’t delegated to children, parents tend to start out as strict disciplinarians with firstborns and become increasingly flexible with laterborns. Parents often relax as they gain experience, and there simply aren’t as many chores for the lastborn children to do, because their older siblings handle them.

The larger the family, the more laterborns face lax rules and get away with things that their elder siblings wouldn’t have. “I’m from a very large family—nine parents,” comedian Jim Gaffigan jokes. “When you’re the youngest of a big family, by the time you’re a teenager, your parents are insane.”

It is in their reliance on reasoning, explanations, suggestions of ways to remedy the harm done, persuasion, and advice that the parents of rescuers differed most. . . . Reasoning communicates a message of respect. . . . It implies that had children but known better or understood more, they would not have acted in an inappropriate way. It is a mark of esteem for the listener; an indication of faith in his or her ability to comprehend, develop, and improve. While reasoning accounted for only 6 percent of the disciplinary techniques that the bystanders’ parents used, it accounted for a full 21 percent of how the rescuers’ parents disciplined their children. One rescuer said her mother “told me when I did something wrong. She never did any punishing or scolding—she tried to make me understand with my mind what I’d done wrong.”

There’s a particular kind of explanation that works especially well in enforcing discipline. When the Oliners examined the guidance of the Holocaust rescuers’ parents, they found that they tended to give “explanations of why behaviors are inappropriate, often with reference to their consequences for others.” While the bystanders’ parents focused on enforcing compliance with rules for their own sake, the rescuers’ parents encouraged their children to consider the impact of their actions on others.*

Highlighting consequences for others directs attention to the distress of the person who may be harmed by an individual’s behavior, fueling empathy for her. It also helps children understand the role that their own actions played in causing the harm, resulting in guilt. As Erma Bombeck put it, “Guilt is the gift that keeps on giving.” The dual moral emotions of empathy and guilt activate the desire to right wrongs of the past and behave better in the future.

Affirming character appears to have the strongest effect in the critical periods when children are beginning to formulate strong identities.

In light of this evidence, Bryan suggests that we should embrace nouns more thoughtfully. “Don’t Drink and Drive” could be rephrased as: “Don’t Be a Drunk Driver.” The same thinking can be applied to originality. When a child draws a picture, instead of calling the artwork creative, we can say “You are creative.” After a teenager resists the temptation to follow the crowd, we can commend her for being a non-conformist.

If we want to encourage originality, the best step we can take is to raise our children’s aspirations by introducing them to different kinds of role models.

Once he chose Robinson, Rickey encouraged him to take some risks on the base path—“run wild, to steal the pants off them”—but urged him to be more cautious outside the lines. “I want a ballplayer with guts enough not to fight back.”

Baron’s team wanted to see which founder blueprint predicted the greatest success. When they tracked the firms through the internet boom of the late 1990s and after the bubble burst in 2000, one blueprint was far superior to the others: commitment. When founders had a commitment blueprint, the failure rate of their firms was zero—not a single one of them went out of business.

“Commitment firms have greater difficulty attracting, retaining, or integrating a diverse workforce,” Baron and his colleagues suggest. There’s data to back it up: Psychologist Benjamin Schneider finds that organizations tend to become more homogeneous over time. As they attract, select, socialize, and retain similar people, they effectively weed out diversity in thoughts and values.

Company performance only improved when CEOs actively gathered advice from people who weren’t their friends and brought different insights to the table, which challenged them to fix mistakes and pursue innovations.*

“Minority viewpoints are important, not because they tend to prevail but because they stimulate divergent attention and thought,” finds Berkeley psychologist Charlan Nemeth, one of the world’s leading experts on group decisions. “As a result, even when they are wrong they contribute to the detection of novel solutions and decisions that, on balance, are qualitatively better.” Dissenting opinions are useful even when they’re wrong.