Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist. I discovered him 6 years ago from his TED Talk on original thinkers. Having followed some of his work on YouTube, I could finally make time and get through my reading list to finally land up on his book. This note captures the essence of his book for my future references:

• Groups as a disadvantage consistently support the status quo more than advantaged groups. People who suffer the most from a given state of affairs are paradoxically the least likely to question, challenge, reject or change it. Justifying the default system is a soothing function.

If the world is supposed to be this way, we don’t need to be dissatisfied with it.

• Acquiescence robs us of the moral outrage to stand against injustice and the creative will to consider alternative ways that the world could work.

• When we become curious about the dissatisfying defaults of our world, we begin to recognize that most of them have social origins.

• When psychologists study history’s most eminent and influential people; they discover that most of them were not gifted as children. Child prodigies rarely change the world. The common line of thought is that prodigies lack in street smarts what they have in book smarts, however this idea falls short when examined carefully. Most child prodigies do not have trouble in navigating society or suffer from emotional problems.

• The tragedy is that practice makes man perfect, but it doesn’t make new. The gifted learn are great at consuming and grasping but very poor at producing. They confirm to the codified rules of the established game and rarely go on about
  inventing their own rules of the game.

• The fraction of prodigies who become revolutionary adult creators must undergo the very painful transition from a child who “learns rapidly in a domain” to an adult who “reshapes the domain itself”.

• Many times we question someone’s conviction and commitment if we feel that they do not have enough skin in the game. It is important to debunk the myth that originality requires extreme risk taking. The people who move the world forward with original ideas are rarely paragons of conviction and commitment. If you peel back some of the layers, you realize that they too grapple with fear, ambivalence and self-doubt.

• If you are risk averse and have doubts about the feasibility of your idea, it is likely that your business will be built to list. If you are freewheeling gambler, your startup is far more fragile.

The Art and Science of Recognizing Original Ideas

• Our companies, communities and countries don’t necessarily suffer from a shortage of novel ideas. They are constrained by a shortage of people who excel at choosing the right novel ideas. It is difficult for managers to accurately evaluate new ideas, so we need to get better at deciding when to roll the dice.

• Overconfidence may be a particularly difficult bias to overcome in the creative domain. When you are generating a new idea, by definition it’s unique, so you can ignore all the feedback you have received in the past about earlier inventions. Even if you previous ideas have bombed, this one is different.

When we are developing an idea, we are typically too close to our own tastes and too far from the audience’s taste to evaluate it correctly.

• Psychologists tend to call this “confirmation bias”: they focus on the strengths of their ideas while ignoring or discounting their limitations.

• So, if originals are not reliable judges of the quality of their ideas, they maximize their odds of creating a masterpiece by coming up with a large number of ideas. Creative geniuses are not qualitatively better than their peers.

The odds of producing an influential or successful idea is a positive function of the total number of ideas generated.

• Managers are too risk averse. They focus on the costs of investing in bad ideas rather than the benefits of piloting good ones. The more experience and expertise people gain, the more entrenched they become in a particular way of viewing the world.

• Focused group of evaluators often make the same mistakes as the manager. They do not engage with something to experience it, they do so to evaluate it hence there is judgement from the beginning.

• If we want to increase of our odds of betting on the best original ideas, we have to generate our own ideas immediately before we screen others’ suggestions. Interest in arts among entrepreneurs, inventors and eminent scientists obviously reflect their curiosity and aptitude. People who are open to new ways of looking at science and business also tend to be fascinated by the expression of ideas and emotions through images, sounds and words.

• It is when people have moderate expertise in a particular domain that they are the most open to radically creative ideas.

• Experience helps physicists, accountants, insurance analysts and chess masters as they are all in fields where cause-and-effect relationships are fairly consistent. But admission officers, court judges, intelligence analysts, psychiatrists and stockbrokers do not benefit much from experience. In a rapidly changing world, the lessons of experience can easily point us in the wrong direction. And because the pace of change is accelerating, our environments are becoming ever more unpredictable. This makes intuition less reliable as a source of insight about new ideas and places a growing premium on analysis.

There is a hubris that comes with success. The more successful people have been in the past, the worse they perform when they enter a new environment.

• The enthusiasm we inject into our words, tone of voice, and body language isn’t a clue on the internal passion we experience, but merely a reflection of our presentation skills and our personalities. Being extroverted or introverted has essentially no bearing on whether we’ll succeed as entrepreneurs.

It’s never the idea, it is the execution.