Top 200 Adam M. Grant Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “Indeed, Cialdini finds that people donate more money to charity when the phrase “even a penny will help” is added to a request.”

— Adam M. Grant

102. “Now that you have a bit of respect, you value your standing in the group and don’t want to jeopardize it. To maintain and then gain status, you play a game of follow-the-leader, conforming to prove your worth as a group member. As.”

— Adam M. Grant

103. “The Tennessee experiment contained a startling result. Chetty was able to predict the success that students achieved as adults simply by looking at who taught their kindergarten class. By age 25, students who happened to have had more experienced kindergarten teachers were earning significantly more money than their peers.”

— Adam M. Grant

104. “At its core, comedy is an act of rebellion. Evidence shows that compared to the norms in the population, comedians tend to be more original and rebellious – and the higher they score on these dimensions, the more professional success they attain. After.”

— Adam M. Grant

105. “Many communicators try to make themselves look smart. Great listeners are more interested in making their audiences feel smart.”

— Adam M. Grant

106. “How do you know? It’s a question we need to ask more often, both of ourselves and of others.”

— Adam M. Grant

107. “To generate a handful of masterworks, Mozart composed more than 600 pieces before his death at thirty-five, Beethoven produced 650 in his lifetime, and Bach wrote over a thousand.”

— Adam M. Grant

108. “On matters of style, swim with the current,” Thomas Jefferson allegedly advised, but “on matters of principle, stand like a rock.” The pressure to achieve leads us to do the opposite. We find surface ways of appearing original – donning a bow tie, wearing bright red shoes – without taking the risk of actually being original. When it comes to the powerful ideas in our heads and the core values in our hearts, we censor ourselves.”

— Adam M. Grant

109. “But there’s something distinctive that happens when givers succeed: it spreads and cascades.”

— Adam M. Grant

110. “Prof acts all down with pop culture, but secretly thinks Ariana Grande is a font in Microsoft Word.”

— Adam M. Grant

111. “Entrepreneurs who kept their day jobs had 33 percent lower odds of failure than those who quit. If you’re risk averse and have some doubts about the feasibility of your ideas, it’s likely that your business will be built to last. If you’re a freewheeling gambler, your startup is far more fragile.”

— Adam M. Grant

112. “We listen to views that make us feel good, instead of ideas that make us think hard.”

— Adam M. Grant

113. “To get Firefox or Chrome, you have to demonstrate some resourcefulness and download a different browser. Instead of accepting the default, you take a bit of initiative to seek out an option that might be better. And that act of initiative, however tiny, is a window into what you do at work.”

— Adam M. Grant

114. “What look like differences in natural ability are often differences in opportunity and motivation.”

— Adam M. Grant

115. “The more successful people have been in the past, the worse they perform when they enter a new environment.”

— Adam M. Grant

116. “When our commitment is wavering, the best way to stay on track is to consider the progress we’ve already made. As we recognize what we’ve invested and attained, it seems like a waste to give up, and our confidence and commitment surge.”

— Adam M. Grant

117. “But when I looked at the evidence, I was dismayed to discover that even today, speaking while female remains notoriously difficult. Across.”

— Adam M. Grant

118. “Her confidence wasn’t in her existing knowledge – it was in her capacity to learn.”

— Adam M. Grant

119. “Those only are happy,” philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote, “who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way.”

— Adam M. Grant

120. “All it took was having them spend their initial six minutes a little differently: instead of adopting a managerial mindset for evaluating ideas, they got into a creative mindset by generating ideas themselves. Just.”

— Adam M. Grant

121. “But our best allies aren’t the people who have supported us all along. They’re the ones who started out against us and then came around to our side.”

— Adam M. Grant

122. “When I put up a slide that says ‘Here’s why you shouldn’t buy this company,’ the first response was laughter. Then you could see them physically relax. It’s sincere; it doesn’t smell, feel, or look anything like sales. They’re no longer being sold.”

— Adam M. Grant

123. “The less intelligent we are in a particular domain, the more we seem to overestimate our actual intelligence in that domain.”

— Adam M. Grant

124. “Confident humility doesn’t just open our minds to rethinking – it improves the quality of our rethinking.”

— Adam M. Grant

125. “To punish me for my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority myself,” Einstein lamented.”

— Adam M. Grant

126. “Ultimately, the people who choose to champion originality are the ones who propel us forward. After spending years studying them and interacting with them, I am struck that their inner experiences are not any different from our own. They feel the same fear, the same doubt, as the rest of us. What sets them apart is that they take action anyway. They know in their hearts that failing would yield less regret than failing to try.”

— Adam M. Grant

127. “Takers tend to worry that revealing weaknesses will compromise their dominance and authority. Givers are much more comfortable expressing vulnerability: they’re interested in helping others, not gaining power over them, so they’re not afraid of exposing chinks in their armor. By making themselves vulnerable, givers can actually build prestige. But there’s a twist: expressing vulnerability is only effective if the audience receives other signals establishing the speaker’s competence.”

— Adam M. Grant

128. “It shows that we care more about improving ourselves than proving ourselves.”

— Adam M. Grant

129. “The more experiments you run, the less constrained you become by your ideas from the past. You.”

— Adam M. Grant

130. “Along with providing time to generate novel ideas, procrastination has another benefit: it keeps us open to improvisation. When we plan well in advance, we often stick to the structure we’ve created, closing the door to creative possibilities that might spring into our fields of vision. Years.”

— Adam M. Grant

131. “Lectures aren’t designed to accommodate dialogue or disagreement; they turn students into passive receivers of information rather than active thinkers.”

— Adam M. Grant

132. “What stands in the way of rethinking isn’t the expression of emotion; it’s a restricted range of emotion.”

— Adam M. Grant

133. “Becoming a creature of discomfort can unlock hidden potential in many different types of learning. Summoning the nerve to face discomfort is a character skill – an especially important form of determination. It takes three kinds of courage: to abandon your tried-and-true methods, to put yourself in the ring before you feel ready, and to make more mistakes than others make attempts. The best way to accelerate growth is to embrace, seek, and amplify discomfort.”

— Adam M. Grant

134. “When we treat man as he is, we make him worse than he is; when we treat him as if he already were what he potentially could be, we make him what he should be. – attributed to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German writer, physicist, biologist, and artist.”

— Adam M. Grant

135. “As economist Joseph Schumpeter famously observed, originality is an act of creative destruction. Advocating for new systems often requires demolishing the old way of doing things, and we hold back for fear of rocking the boat.”

— Adam M. Grant

136. “There’s a fourth technique of motivational interviewing, which is often recommended for the end of a conversation and for transition points: summarizing. The idea is to explain your understanding of other people’s reasons for change, to check on whether you’ve missed or misrepresented anything, and to inquire about their plans and possible next steps.”

— Adam M. Grant

137. “To become original, you have to try something new, which means accepting some measure of risk.”

— Adam M. Grant

138. “Requiring proof is an enemy of progress.”

— Adam M. Grant

139. “Great spirits have always encountered opposition from mediocre minds.” Albert Einstein.”

— Adam M. Grant

140. “Confidence is a measure of how much you believe in yourself. Evidence shows that’s distinct from how much you believe in your methods. You can be confident in your ability to achieve a goal in the future while maintaining the humility to question whether you have the right tools in the present. That’s the sweet spot of confidence.”

— Adam M. Grant

141. “Practice makes perfect, but it doesn’t make new.”

— Adam M. Grant

142. “It’s more important to be good ancestors than dutiful descendants. Too many people spend their lives being custodians of the past instead of stewards of the future. We worry about making our parents proud when we should be focused on making our children proud. The responsibility of each generation is not to please our predecessors – it’s to improve conditions for our successors.”

— Adam M. Grant

143. “Exhausting someone in argument is not the same as convincing him. – Tim Kreider.”

— Adam M. Grant

144. “In the deepest sense of the word, a friend is someone who sees more potential in you than you see in yourself, someone who helps you become the best version of yourself.”

— Adam M. Grant

145. “To master a new concept in math, science, or a foreign language, it typically takes seven or eight practice sessions.”

— Adam M. Grant

146. “Character is more than just having principles. It’s a learned capacity to live by your principles.”

— Adam M. Grant

147. “A growing body of evidence suggests that entrepreneurs don’t like risk any more than the rest of us – and it’s the rare conclusion on which many economists, sociologists, and psychologists have actually come to agree.”

— Adam M. Grant

148. “It’s often said that where there’s a will, there’s a way. What we overlook is that when people can’t see a path, they stop dreaming of the destination.”

— Adam M. Grant

149. “Progress is impossible without change; and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. – George Bernard Shaw.”

— Adam M. Grant

150. “Polarization is reinforced by conformity: peripheral members fit in and gain status by following the lead of the most prototypical member of the group, who often holds the most intense views.”

— Adam M. Grant