Originals – by Adam Grant

There are two paths to success: be a conformist or be an original. Both can lead to eventual success, but each require a different approach to life. This book is all about how everyone can be more creative and bring new ideas to the table by being an ‘original’. We talk about the things you can do to come up with more good original ideas, how you can spread these ideas, and the mindset required to keep moving along the path less taken.

Originals Summary

There are two potential paths to achievements: ‘conformity’ or ‘originality’. Both options can eventually lead to success, but they require very different approaches. 

Being a ‘conformist’ means you follow the clear path that’s ahead of you. There is a set trajectory and a hierarchy in place. You doing the same thing as people who have come before you and you’re competing against other people on the same path. If you can work a little bit harder and try a little bit more a be a little bit better than everyone else on your level, then you take a step up. By striding ahead, you’ll eventually reach success. This is a well-known and well-respected path. The guidelines have been in place for years or decades, and it’s quite clear what is required from you in order to achieve.

Being an ‘original’ requires a much more unique approach. There is no path other than the one you make for yourself. the people who cross your path aren’t heading in the same direction and aren’t competing with you for limited resources, they’re merely others on their own original journeys who happen to intersect with you for a brief period of time. Following an original path means that everything becomes less clear and feels more risky because there are no guarantees. This book gives you the tools and the attitudes you need to increase your odds of original success by having better ideas and sharing them in the right way. 

IDEAS: Triple Your Output

Adam Grant shows us that a lot of history’s greatest artists produced masterpieces that we’re still talking about centuries later, but they also produced a lot of crap that isn’t worth mentioning. These originals weren’t expecting to hit a home run with every swing – they knew that couldn’t possibly predict which things would work, so they kept stepping up to the plate and taking a lot of different swings. 

When it comes to idea generation and trying new things, quantity is far more important than quality. You might stop yourself from trying something new and different out of the fear that it won’t work, but before you’ve tried it, you couldn’t possibly know. The best and most famous disruptors didn’t only do things that worked, they also failed a lot too. Every innovator swings and misses. In order to do things that work, you need to be willing to try things that might not work. 

When we look back and assess someone’s output and contribution, we don’t look at the average, just the peaks. We ignore the 100 ideas they tried that flopped and only look at the one masterpiece that changed the world. But it would been impossible for them to make something world-changing without going through those 100 failures along the way first.

Grant highlights some of history’s greatest Originals: 

• William Shakespeare. We’re all familiar with his best works, like Romeo & Juliet, Hamlet and Macbeth, but you probably haven’t seen all 37 of his plays or read all 154 of his sonnets that spanned his two-decade career. In a single 5-year span, he produced three of his five most popular and most performed plays. But in that exact same five year period, he also produced two of his least popular works that were slammed by critics for unpolished prose, incomplete plotlines and weak character development.
• Pablo Picasso. One of the most well-known artists of the 20th Century, with genre-defying artwork and some completely ‘original’ ideas. But aside from a few well-known works, you won’t have seen most of his art. Apparently Picasso created 1800 paintings, 1200 sculptures, 2800 ceramics, 12,000 drawings, as well as rugs, tapestries and prints. 
• Albert Einstein. Two of Einstein’s theories completely changed how we view the world around us: General Relativity and Special Relativity. But his other 246 published academic papers had minimal impact.

“In every field, even the most eminent creators typically produce a large quantity of work that’s considered unremarkable by experts and audiences,” says Grant. “The most important thing you can do it do a lot of work, do a huge volume of work… It’s widely assumed that there’s a trade-off between quantity and quality – if you want to do better work, you have to do less of it (and be more focused) – but this turns out to be false. In fact, when it comes to idea generation, quantity is the most predictably path to quality”.

EXPERIENCES: Immerse yourself in a new domain 

One great study looked at two groups. The first group was a group of scientists and researchers that were at the top of their field, working for world-leading organisations, do groundbreaking work, making cutting-edge discoveries and publishing their findings around the world. The other group were scientists and researchers who were ever-so-slightly above the first group: they were at the top of their field, working for world-leading organisations, do groundbreaking work, making cutting-edge discoveries and publishing their findings around the world, AND they won the Nobel Prize. The study compared the Nobel Prize winning scientists from 1901 to 2005 to their equivalent peers that seemed oh-so-close but didn’t win the Nobel Prize. The study sought to identify some skill or trait or approach that set the Nobel Prize winners apart and took their work to the next level. 

You might assume that those who won the Nobel Prize worked harder. You might assume that they spent more hours in the lab and more hours doing research. But instead they found that, almost paradoxically, this wasn’t the case at all. 

Compared to their almost-top-of-their-field peers, the Nobel Prize winners were: 

 – 2x more likely to be involved in music (play an instrument, compose, conduct)

 – 7x more likely to engage in art (drawing, painting, sculpting)

 – 7.5x more likely to do crafts (woodwork, mechanics, electronics, glassblowing)

 – 12x more likely to write (poetry, plays, novels, short stories, essays, popular books)

 – 22x more likely to do performances (acting, dancing, magic)

If you want to be a world-leading scientist, you might question how that one extra free hour in your week is spent. Should you go and sit down at your desk for an extra hour, or should you sit down at the piano instead?

In any study like this, we need to be wary of correlation and causation. Just because two things go together statistically doesn’t necessarily mean that one leads to the other. Like we mentioned in Freakonomics (see book #XX), one infamous study showed that boys with a larger ratio of ring finger length to index finger length performed higher on the maths section of their SAT tests, but this doesn’t mean that if you sit at home stretching out your ring finger you’ll get better at maths. Similarly here, if you’re a scientist, taking up violin lessons or doing a stand up comedy routine won’t win you the Nobel Prize. What this does suggest though is that people with varied interests in a wider range of creative endeavours may see things from different angles, they may bring in new ideas to a field, they may see things that others miss, or they may bring a different style or flair than their peers. 

This isn’t necessarily a prescription to join your local Tuesday evening ‘wine and water colours’ club, but it’s certainly worth considering how you can inject more creativity and originality into your week and your work.