Top 160 Adam M. Grant Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If knowledge is power, knowing what we don’t know is wisdom.”

— Adam M. Grant

2. “As Jack Handey advised in one of his “Deep Thoughts” on Saturday Night Live, before you criticize people, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you’re a mile away and you have their shoes.”

— Adam M. Grant

3. “Grit is the combination of passion and perseverance.”

— Adam M. Grant

4. “Motivational interviewing requires a genuine desire to help people reach their goals.”

— Adam M. Grant

5. “What works is not perspective-taking but perspective-seeking: actually talking to people to gain insight into the nuances of their views. That’s what good scientists do: instead of drawing conclusions about people based on minimal clues, they test their hypotheses by striking up conversations.”

— Adam M. Grant

6. “Don’t confuse confidence with competence.”

— Adam M. Grant

7. “In a recent study comparing every Nobel Prize–winning scientist from 1901 to 2005 with typical scientists of the same era, both groups attained deep expertise in their respective fields of study. But the Nobel Prize winners were dramatically more likely to be involved in the arts than less accomplished scientists. Here’s.”

— Adam M. Grant

8. “The first follower is what transforms a lone nut into a leader.” – Quoting Derek Sivers.”

— Adam M. Grant

9. “The more you value achievement, the more you come to dread failure.”

— Adam M. Grant

10. “The curse of knowledge is that it closes our minds to what we don’t know. Good judgment depends on having the skill – and the will – to open our minds.”

— Adam M. Grant

11. “In ancient Greece, Plutarch wrote of a wooden ship that Theseus sailed from Crete to Athens. To preserve the ship, as its old planks decayed, Athenians would replace them with new wood. Eventually all the planks had been replaced. It looked like the same ship, but none of its parts was the same. Was it still the same ship? Later, philosophers added a wrinkle: if you collected all the original planks and fashioned them into a ship, would that be the same ship?”

— Adam M. Grant

12. “A third potential factor is that when we hunt for happiness, we overemphasize pleasure at the expense of purpose. This theory is consistent with data suggesting that meaning is healthier than happiness, and that people who look for purpose in their work are more successful in pursuing their passions – and less likely to quit their jobs – than those who look for joy. While enjoyment waxes and wanes, meaning tends to last.”

— Adam M. Grant

13. “Listening is a way of offering others our scarcest, most precious gift: our attention. Once we’ve demonstrated that we care about them and their goals, they’re more willing to listen to us.”

— Adam M. Grant

14. “Arrogance is ignorance plus conviction,” blogger Tim Urban explains. “While humility is a permeable filter that absorbs life experience and converts it into knowledge and wisdom, arrogance is a rubber shield that life experience simply bounces off of.”

— Adam M. Grant

15. “The art of advocacy is to lead you to my conclusion on your terms.”

— Adam M. Grant

16. “A mark of lifelong learners is recognizing that they can learn something from everyone they meet.”

— Adam M. Grant

17. “Conformity means following the crowd down conventional paths and maintaining the status quo. Originality is taking the road less traveled, championing a set of novel ideas that go against the grain but ultimately make things better.”

— Adam M. Grant

18. “Now, the Star-Belly Sneetches Had bellies with stars.1 The Plain-Belly Sneetches Had none upon thars. Those stars weren’t so big. They were really so small You might think such a thing wouldn’t matter at all. But, because they had stars, all the Star-Belly Sneetches Would brag, ‘We’re the best kind of Sneetch on the beaches.’ With their snoots in the air, they would sniff and they’d snort ‘We’ll have nothing to do with the Plain-Belly sort!’” Dr. Seuss.”

— Adam M. Grant

19. “Yet in a turbulent world, there’s another set of cognitive skills that might matter more: the ability to rethink and unlearn.”

— Adam M. Grant

20. “Let’s agree to disagree” shouldn’t end a discussion. It should start a new conversation, with a focus on understanding and learning rather than arguing and persuading. That’s what we’d do in scientist mode: take the long view and ask how we could have handled the debate more effectively.”

— Adam M. Grant

21. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” philosopher George Santayana.”

— Adam M. Grant

22. “We laugh at people who still use Windows 95, yet we still cling to opinions that we formed in 1995.”

— Adam M. Grant

23. “As entrepreneur Derek Sivers put it, “The first follower is what transforms a lone nut into a leader.” If.”

— Adam M. Grant

24. “As Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and decision expert Gary Klein explain, intuitions are only trustworthy when people build up experience making judgments in a predictable environment.”

— Adam M. Grant

25. “How do you know? It’s a question we need to ask more often, both of ourselves and of others. The power lies in its frankness. It’s nonjudgmental – a straightforward expression of doubt and curiosity that doesn’t put people on the defensive.”

— Adam M. Grant

26. “If you’re a scientist by trade, rethinking is fundamental to your profession. You’re paid to be constantly aware of the limits of your understanding. You’re expected to doubt what you know, be curious about what you don’t know, and update your views based on new data.”

— Adam M. Grant

27. “You never know where somebody’s going to end up. It’s not just about building your reputation; it really is about being there for other people.”

— Adam M. Grant

28. “Arrogance leaves us blind to our weaknesses. Humility is a reflective lens: it helps us see them clearly. Confident humility is a corrective lens: it enables us to overcome those weaknesses.”

— Adam M. Grant

29. “We favor the comfort of conviction over the discomfort of doubt, and we let our beliefs get brittle long before our bones.”

— Adam M. Grant

30. “When students confront complex problems, they often feel confused. A teacher’s natural impulse is to rescue them as quickly as possible so they don’t feel lost or incompetent. Yet psychologists find that one of the hallmarks of an open mind is responding to confusion with curiosity and interest. One student put it eloquently: “I need time for my confusion.” Confusion can be a cue that there’s new territory to be explored or a fresh puzzle to be solved.”

— Adam M. Grant

31. “By asking questions rather than thinking for the audience, we invite them to join us as a partner and think for themselves. If we approach an argument as a war, there will be winners and losers. If we see it more as a dance, we can begin to choreograph a way forward. By considering the strongest version of an opponent’s perspective and limiting our responses to our few best steps, we have a better chance of finding a rhythm.”

— Adam M. Grant

32. “The better you are at crunching numbers, the more spectacularly you fail at analyzing patterns that contradict your views.”

— Adam M. Grant

33. “Teachers’ beliefs created self-fulfilling prophecies. When teachers believed their students were bloomers, they set high expectations for their success. As a result, the teachers engaged in more supportive behaviors that boosted the students’ confidence and enhanced their learning and development.”

— Adam M. Grant

34. “Humility is often misunderstood. It’s not a matter of having low self-confidence. One of the Latin roots of humility means “from the earth.” It’s about being grounded – recognizing that we’re flawed and fallible.”

— Adam M. Grant

35. “In the moral philosophy of John Rawls, the veil of ignorance asks us to judge the justice of a society by whether we’d join it without knowing our place in it. I think the scientist’s veil of ignorance is to ask whether we’d accept the results of a study based on the methods involved, without knowing what the conclusion will be.”

— Adam M. Grant

36. “We learn more from people who challenge our thought process than those who affirm our conclusions. Strong leaders engage their critics and make themselves stronger. Weak leaders silence their critics and make themselves weaker. This reaction isn’t limited to people in power. Although we might be on board with the principle, in practice we often miss out on the value of a challenge network.”

— Adam M. Grant

37. “In performance cultures, people often become attached to best practices. The risk is that once we’ve declared a routine the best, it becomes frozen in time.”

— Adam M. Grant

38. “You gotta kiss a lot of frogs,” he often told his team, “before you find a prince.” In fact, frog kissing was one of his mantras: he encouraged his engineers to try out many variations to increase their chances of stumbling on the right one. But.”

— Adam M. Grant

39. “As stereotypes stick and prejudice deepens, we don’t just identify with our own group; we disidentify with our adversaries, coming to define who we are by what we’re not. We don’t just preach the virtues of our side; we find self-worth in prosecuting the vices of our rivals.”

— Adam M. Grant

40. “If you want people to modify their behavior, is it better to highlight the benefits of changing or the costs of not changing?”

— Adam M. Grant

41. “Research reveals that the higher you score on an IQ test, the more likely you are to fall for stereotypes, because you’re faster at recognizing patterns. And recent experiments suggest that the smarter you are, the more you might struggle to update your beliefs.”

— Adam M. Grant

42. “You don’t have to be first to be an original, and the most successful originals don’t always arrive on schedule. They are fashionably late to the party. The.”

— Adam M. Grant

43. “Psychologists have long found that the person most likely to persuade you to change your mind is you. You get to pick the reasons you find most compelling, and you come away with a real sense of ownership over them.”

— Adam M. Grant

44. “You gain believability by other believable people saying you’re believable.”

— Adam M. Grant

45. “If being wrong repeatedly leads us to the right answer, the experience of being wrong itself can become joyful.”

— Adam M. Grant

46. “I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world,” E. B. White once wrote. “This makes it difficult to plan the day.”

— Adam M. Grant

47. “Questioning ourselves makes the world more unpredictable. It requires us to admit that the facts may have changed, that what was once right may now be wrong.”

— Adam M. Grant

48. “Research suggests that there are two fundamental paths to influence: dominance and prestige. When we establish dominance, we gain influence because others see us as strong, powerful, and authoritative. When we earn prestige, we become influential because others respect and admire us.”

— Adam M. Grant

49. “Part of the beauty of motivational interviewing is that it generates more openness in both directions. Listening can encourage others to reconsider their stance toward us, but it also gives us information that can lead us to question our own views about them. If we take the practices of motivational interviewing seriously, we might become the ones who think again.”

— Adam M. Grant

50. “What evidence would change your mind?” If the answer is “nothing,” then there’s no point in continuing the debate. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it think.”

— Adam M. Grant