Top 116 Quotes & Sayings by Adam Grant

For women to achieve equal representation in leadership roles, it's important that they have the backing of men as well as women.

When you're good at controlling your own emotions, you can disguise your true feelings. When you know what others are feeling, you can tug at their heartstrings and motivate them to act against their own best interests.

I have two rules for a great book: make me think and make me smile.

If you want to be a generous giver, you have to watch out for selfish takers.

The most promising ideas begin from novelty and then add familiarity.

Being a nice person is about courtesy: you're friendly, polite, agreeable, and accommodating. When people believe they have to be nice in order to give, they fail to set boundaries, rarely say no, and become pushovers, letting others walk all over them.

When young women get called bossy, it's often because they're trying to exercise power without status. It's not a problem that they're being dominant; the backlash arises because they're overstepping their status.

To get real diversity of thought, you need to find the people who genuinely hold different views and invite them into the conversation.

Agreeable people are warm and friendly. They're nice; they're polite. You find a lot of them in Canada.

Procrastination gives you time to consider divergent ideas, to think in nonlinear ways, to make unexpected leaps.

Some of the greatest moments in human history were fueled by emotional intelligence.

Once people take ownership over the decision to receive feedback, they're less defensive about it.

I want my children to know that we often become resilient for others.

I have lots of micro-goals of trying to get things done, whatever the amount of time available.

When medical students focus on helping others, they're able to weather the slings and arrows of long hours and devastating health outcomes: they know their colleagues and patients are depending on them.

Procrastinating is a vice when it comes to productivity, but it can be a virtue for creativity.

From a motivation perspective, helping others enriches the meaning and purpose of our own lives, showing us that our contributions matter and energizing us to work harder, longer, and smarter.

Productive givers focus on acting in the long-term best interests of others, even if it's not pleasant. They have the courage to give the critical feedback we prefer not to hear, but truly need to hear. They offer tough love, knowing that we might like them less, but we'll come to trust and respect them more.

When making decisions about people, stop confusing experience with evidence. Just as owning a car doesn't make you an expert on engines, having a brain doesn't mean you understand psychology.

When I think about voting, I can skip it and still see myself as a good citizen. But when I think about being a voter, now the choice reflects on my character. It casts a shadow.

To grow, people need to be challenged.

Geniuses don't have better ideas than the rest of us. They just have more of them.

It's ironic that when you go through a tragedy, you appreciate more. You realize how fragile life is and that there are so many things to still be thankful for.

I believe that the most meaningful way to succeed is to help other people succeed.

When takers talk about mistakes, they're usually quick to place the blame on other people. Givers are more likely to say 'Here's the mistake I made; I learned the following from it. Here are the steps I'm taking to make sure I don't let people down in the future.'

The culture of a workplace - an organization's values, norms and practices - has a huge impact on our happiness and success.

When you procrastinate, you're more likely to let your mind wander. That gives you a better chance of stumbling onto the unusual and spotting unexpected patterns.

If we want girls to receive positive reinforcement for early acts of leadership, let's discourage bossy behavior along with banning bossy labels. That means teaching girls to engage in behaviors that earn admiration before they assert their authority.

Takers believe in a zero-sum world, and they end up creating one where bosses, colleagues and clients don't trust them. Givers build deeper and broader relationships - people are rooting for them instead of gunning for them.

When you develop a reputation for being responsive and generous, an ever-expanding mountain of requests will come your way.

One of the signs of a bad coworker is a pattern of persistent undermining - intentionally hindering a colleague's success, reputation, or relationships.

A resilient culture has a certain amount of resistance embedded in it. Not so much to capsize it, but enough so that it doesn't atrophy.

Conformity is dangerous.

Meditation isn't snake oil. For some people, meditation might be the most efficient way to reduce stress and cultivate mindfulness. But it isn't a panacea. If you don't meditate, there's no need to stress out about it.

From a relationship perspective, givers build deeper and broader connections.

I start a lot of things and purposely leave them unfinished. When I have a bunch of really long emails, and I need time to think about the response, I'll actually start replying, leave them as drafts, and move onto something else mid-sentence.

The more important argument against grade curves is that they create an atmosphere that's toxic by pitting students against one another. At best, it creates a hypercompetitive culture, and at worst, it sends students the message that the world is a zero-sum game: Your success means my failure.

To get important work done, most leaders organize people into teams. They believe that when people collaborate toward a common goal, great things can happen. Yet in reality, the whole is often much less than the sum of the parts.

Negative feedback can make people feel inferior.

Leaders who master emotions can rob us of our capacities to reason. If their values are out of step with our own, the results can be devastating.

Creativity is generating ideas that are novel and useful. I define originals as people who go beyond dreaming up the ideas and take initiative to make their visions a reality.

Saying no frees you up to say yes when it matters most.

If an organization values innovation, you can assume it's safe to speak up with new ideas, leaders will listen, and your voice matters.

The mark of higher education isn't the knowledge you accumulate in your head. It's the skills you gain about how to learn.

Authenticity means erasing the gap between what you firmly believe inside and what you reveal to the outside world.

Bragging about yourself violates norms of modesty and politeness - and if you were really competent, your work would speak for itself.

As more women 'lean in' and we collectively continue to fight sexism, there's another barrier to progress that hasn't been addressed: Many men who would like to see more women leaders are afraid to speak up about it.

Instead of assuming that emotional intelligence is always useful, we need to think more carefully about where and when it matters.

By admitting your inadequacies, you show that you're self-aware enough to know your areas for improvement - and secure enough to be open about them.

Originals are nonconformists, people who not only have new ideas but take action to champion them. They are people who stand out and speak up. Originals drive creativity and change in the world. They're the people you want to bet on.

Complex tasks are often better handled in the back of our mind, and that's often true of creative tasks - when you have something complex to deal with in writing or research or responding to an email. I'll start working, put it aside, and sometimes I'll wake up the next morning with a solution, or I'll find one when I exercise.

To make sense of bossiness, we need to tease apart two fundamental aspects of social hierarchy that are often lumped together: power and status. Power lies in holding a formal position of authority or controlling important resources. Status involves being respected or admired.

Being a giver is not about saying yes to all of the people all of the time to all of the requests.

No one wants to hear everything that's in your head. They just want you to live up to what comes out of your mouth.

For years, I believed that anything worth doing was worth doing early. In graduate school, I submitted my dissertation two years in advance. In college, I wrote my papers weeks early and finished my thesis four months before the due date. My roommates joked that I had a productive form of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Creativity may be hard to nurture, but it's easy to thwart.

In the conversation about women in leadership, male voices are noticeably absent.

We all have original ideas. Even if we don't see ourselves as supercreative or as wild nonconformists, we have insights every day about how the world around us could be better. It might be a better way of running meetings in your office that would be less mind-numbing. It might be a little twist on a product or a service.

When people are depending on us, we end up finding strength we didn't know we had.

I'm a precrastinator. Yes, that's an actual term. You know that panic you feel a few hours before a big deadline when you haven't done anything yet? I just feel that a few months ahead of time.