171 Quotes by Adam Grant

I love discovering compelling new ideas and doing what I can to help spread the word about them.

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.

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

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.

Kids who evolve into creative adults tend to have a strong moral compass.

Frenemies are worse than enemies, and it's not just in the workplace.

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.

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.

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