Top 160 Adam M. Grant Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

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

— Adam M. Grant

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

— Adam M. Grant

105. “The least favorite students were the non-conformists who made up their own rules. Teachers tend to discriminate against highly creative students, labeling them as troublemakers. In.”

— Adam M. Grant

106. “There’s a lot a vacation can do: help you unwind, see some different-looking squirrels, but it cannot fix deeper issues, like how you behave in group settings. We can take you on a hike. We cannot turn you into someone who likes hiking. Remember, you’re still gonna be you on vacation. If you are sad where you are, and then you get on a plane to Italy, the you in Italy will be the same sad you from before, just in a new place.”

— Adam M. Grant

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

— Adam M. Grant

108. “In these pages, I learned that great creators don’t necessarily have the deepest expertise but rather seek out the broadest perspectives.”

— Adam M. Grant

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

— Adam M. Grant

110. “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

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

— Adam M. Grant

112. “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

113. “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

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

— Adam M. Grant

115. “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

116. “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

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

— Adam M. Grant

118. “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

119. “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

120. “When you’re wrong, it’s not something to be depressed about. Say, ‘Hey, I discovered something!”

— Adam M. Grant

121. “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

122. “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

123. “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

124. “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

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

— Adam M. Grant

126. “Research shows that takers harbor doubts about others’ intentions, so they monitor vigilantly for information that others might harm them, treating others with suspicion and distrust. These low expectations trigger a vicious cycle, constraining the development and motivation of others. Even when takers are impressed by another person’s capabilities or motivation, they’re more likely to see this person as a threat, which means they’re less willing to support and develop him or her.”

— Adam M. Grant

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

— Adam M. Grant

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

— Adam M. Grant

129. “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

130. “When we become curious about the dissatisfying defaults in our world, we begin to recognize that most of them have social origins: Rules and systems were created by people. And that awareness gives us the courage to contemplate how we can change them. Before women gained the right to vote in America, many “had never before considered their degraded status as anything but natural,” historian.”

— Adam M. Grant

131. “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

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

— Adam M. Grant

133. “If you’re gonna make connections which are innovative,” Steve Jobs said back in 1982, “you have to not have the same bag of experience as everyone else does.” Working.”

— Adam M. Grant

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

— Adam M. Grant

135. “Today, we have compelling evidence that interest precedes the development of talent. It turns out that motivation is the reason that people develop talent in the first place.”

— Adam M. Grant

136. “The greatest communicators of all time,” says communication expert Nancy Duarte – who has spent her career studying the shape of superb presentations – start by establishing “what is: here’s the status quo.” Then, they “compare that to what could be,” making “that gap as big as possible.”

— Adam M. Grant

137. “When our audiences are skeptical, the more we try to dominate them, the more they resist. Even with a receptive audience, dominance is a zero-sum game: the more power and authority I have, the less you have.”

— Adam M. Grant

138. “Unbridled optimism comes across as salesmanship; it seems dishonest somehow, and as a consequence it’s met with skepticism. Everyone is allergic to the feeling, or suspicious of being sold.”

— Adam M. Grant

139. “An informed audience is going to spot the holes in our case anyway. We might as well get credit for having the humility to look for them, the foresight to spot them, and the integrity to acknowledge them.”

— Adam M. Grant

140. “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

141. “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

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

— Adam M. Grant

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

— Adam M. Grant

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

— Adam M. Grant

145. “In one study, parents of ordinary children had an average of six rules, like specific schedules for homework and bedtime. Parents of highly creative children had an average of less than one rule and tended to “place emphasis on moral values, rather than on specific rules,” psychologist Teresa Amabile reports.”

— Adam M. Grant

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

— Adam M. Grant

147. “Kathryn Schulz observes, “Although small amounts of evidence are sufficient to make us draw conclusions, they are seldom sufficient to make us revise them.”

— Adam M. Grant

148. “Good explanations enable children to develop a code of ethics that often coincides with societal expectations; when they don’t square up, children rely on the internal compass of values rather than the external compass of rules.”

— Adam M. Grant

149. “Originality is not a fixed trait. It is a free choice. Lincoln wasn’t born with an original personality. Taking on controversy wasn’t programmed into his DNA; it was an act of conscious will. As the great thinker W. E. B. DuBois wrote, “He was one of you and yet he became Abraham Lincoln.”

— Adam M. Grant

150. “Timing accounted for forty-two percent of the difference between success and failure.”

— Adam M. Grant