Top 200 Adam M. Grant Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “Lectures aren’t designed to accommodate dialogue or disagreement; they turn students into passive receivers of information rather than active thinkers.”

— Adam M. Grant

152. “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

153. “We prefer the regular photos of our friends, because that’s how we’re used to seeing them, but we like the inverted photos of ourselves, because that’s how we see ourselves when we look in the mirror. “Familiarity doesn’t breed contempt,” says serial entrepreneur Howard Tullman. “It breeds comfort.”

— Adam M. Grant

154. “When we select leaders, we don’t usually pick the person with the strongest leadership skills. We frequently choose the person who talks the most. It’s called the babble effect. Research shows that groups promote the people who command the most airtime – regardless of their aptitude and expertise. We mistake confidence for competence, certainty for credibility, and quantity for quality. We get stuck following people who dominate the discussion instead of those who elevate it.”

— Adam M. Grant

155. “Procrastination may be the enemy of productivity, but it can be a resource for creativity.”

— Adam M. Grant

156. “Although listening is often more fun, reading improves comprehension and recall. Whereas listening promotes intuitive thinking, reading activates more analytical processing. It’s true in English and Chinese – people display better logical reasoning when the same trivia questions, riddles, and puzzles are written rather than spoken. With print, you naturally slow down at the start of a paragraph to process the core idea and use paragraph breaks and headers to chunk information.”

— Adam M. Grant

157. “If you want a child to share a toy, instead of asking, “Will you share?” ask, “Will you be a sharer?”

— Adam M. Grant

158. “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

159. “When the average candidate was clumsy, audiences liked him even less. But when the expert was clumsy, audiences liked him even more.”

— Adam M. Grant

160. “But learning is not always about finding the right method for you. It’s often about finding the right method for the task.”

— Adam M. Grant

161. “Originals are people who take the initiative to make their visions a reality.”

— Adam M. Grant

162. “New research shows that advice seeking is a surprisingly effective strategy for exercising influence when we lack authority. In.”

— Adam M. Grant

163. “The way you like to learn is what makes you comfortable, but it isn’t necessarily how you learn best.”

— Adam M. Grant

164. “As Samuel Johnson purportedly wrote, “The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.”

— Adam M. Grant

165. “Passionate people don’t wear their passion on their sleeves; they have it in their hearts.” The.”

— Adam M. Grant

166. “When our audiences are skeptical, the more we try to dominate them, the more they resist.”

— Adam M. Grant

167. “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

168. “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

169. “A coach sees your potential and helps you become a better version of yourself.”

— Adam M. Grant

170. “Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.”1 Scott Adams.”

— Adam M. Grant

171. “In the words of Google executives Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg, “Passionate people don’t wear their passion on their sleeves; they have it in their hearts.”

— Adam M. Grant

172. “Redefine success. The most meaningful form of performance is progress. The ultimate mark of potential is not the height of the peak you’ve reached, but the distance you’ve traveled – and helped others travel.”

— Adam M. Grant

173. “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

174. “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

175. “People who suffer the most from a given state of affairs are paradoxically the least likely to question, challenge, reject, or change it.”

— Adam M. Grant

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

— Adam M. Grant

177. “One of the initiatives that we introduced was an entry interview. Instead of waiting to ask employees for ideas on their way out, managers hold meetings to learn about new hires’ ideas when they first join the organization. It’s easier to start a relationship with the door open than to pry open a door that’s already been slammed shut.”

— Adam M. Grant

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

— Adam M. Grant

179. “Intelligence is traditionally viewed as the ability to think and learn. 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

180. “One of the keys to cultivating grit is making the task at hand more interesting and motivating.”

— Adam M. Grant

181. “Thinking like a scientist involves more than just reacting with an open mind. It means being actively open-minded. It requires searching for reasons why we might be wrong – not for reasons why we must be right – and revising our views based on what we learn.”

— Adam M. Grant

182. “Edison’s “1,093 patents notwithstanding, the number of truly superlative creative achievements can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand.” It’s widely assumed that there’s a tradeoff between quantity and quality – if you want to do better work, you have to do less of it – but this turns out to be false. In fact, when it comes to idea generation, quantity is the most predictable path to quality.”

— Adam M. Grant

183. “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

184. “A hallmark of wisdom is knowing when it’s time to abandon some of your most treasured tools – and some of the most cherished parts of your identity.”

— Adam M. Grant

185. “Argue like you’re right and listen like you’re wrong.”

— Adam M. Grant

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

— Adam M. Grant

187. “This chapter is about when to speak up and how to do it effectively without jeopardizing our careers and relationships. What.”

— Adam M. Grant

188. “Character is more than just having principles. It’s a learned capacity to live by your principles. Character skills equip a chronic procrastinator to meet a deadline for someone who matters deeply to them, a shy introvert to find the courage to speak out against an injustice, and the class bully to circumvent a fistfight with his teammates before a big game. Those are the skills that great kindergarten teachers nurture – and great coaches cultivate.”

— Adam M. Grant

189. “This explains why we often undercommunicate our ideas. They’re already so familiar to us that we underestimate how much exposure an audience needs to comprehend and buy into them. When.”

— Adam M. Grant

190. “Teaching others can build our competence. But it’s coaching others that elevates our confidence. When we encourage others to overcome obstacles, it can help us find our own motivation.”

— Adam M. Grant

191. “Regardless of their reciprocity styles, people love to be asked for advice.”

— Adam M. Grant

192. “My favorite bias is the “I’m not biased” bias, in which people believe they’re more objective than others. It turns out that smart people are more likely to fall into this trap. The brighter you are, the harder it can be to see your own limitations. Being good at thinking can make you worse at rethinking.”

— Adam M. Grant

193. “When we find out we might be wrong, a standard defense is “I’m entitled to my opinion.” I’d like to modify that: yes, we’re entitled to hold opinions inside our own heads. If we choose to express them out loud, though, I think it’s our responsibility to ground them in logic and facts, share our reasoning with others, and change our minds when better evidence emerges.”

— Adam M. Grant

194. “And in the long run, research shows that the mistakes we regret are not errors of commission, but errors of omission. If we could do things over, most of us would censor ourselves less and express our ideas more. That’s.”

— Adam M. Grant

195. “Being polite is withholding feedback to make someone feel good today. Being kind is being candid about how they can get better tomorrow.”

— Adam M. Grant

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

— Adam M. Grant

197. “Character is often confused with personality, but they’re not the same. Personality is your predisposition – your basic instincts for how to think, feel, and act. Character is your capacity to prioritize your values over your instincts.”

— Adam M. Grant

198. “In a classic study of highly accomplished architects, the most creative ones graduated with a B average. Their straight-A counterparts were so determined to be right that they often failed to take the risk of rethinking the orthodoxy. A similar pattern emerged in a study of students who graduated at the top of their class. “Valedictorians aren’t likely to be the future’s visionaries,” education researcher Karen Arnold explains. “They typically settle into the system instead of shaking it up.”

— Adam M. Grant

199. “If you want to be original, “the most important possible thing you could do,” says Ira Glass, the producer of This American Life and the podcast Serial, “is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work.”

— Adam M. Grant

200. “We mistake confidence for competence, certainty for credibility, and quantity for quality. We get stuck following people who dominate the discussion instead of those who elevate it.”

— Adam M. Grant