Quotes from Adam Grant

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.

When you put off a task, you buy yourself time to engage in divergent thinking rather than foreclosing on one particular idea.

Tweeting has taught me the discipline to say more with fewer words.

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

The great thing about a culture of givers is that's not a delusion - it's reality.

When trying to innovate, most people stop after 10-15 possibilities, failing to recognize that their first ideas are usually the most obvious ones.

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

In the workplace, many people become helicopter managers, hovering over their employees in a well-intentioned but ill-fated attempt to provide support. These are givers gone awry - people so desperate to help others that they develop a white knight complex and end up causing harm instead.

When it comes to landing a good job, many people focus on the role. Although finding the right title, position, and salary is important, there's another consideration that matters just as much: culture.

Teams need the opportunity to learn about each other's capabilities and develop productive routines. So once we get the right people on the bus, let's make sure they spend some time driving together.

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

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

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

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

When writing 'Give and Take' and 'Originals,' the predominant emotion for me was curiosity.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

If you want your children to bring original ideas into the world, you need to let them pursue their passions, not yours.

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